Apple’s Wrapped.

Finally, an easy way to go full glasshole.

The sight of the Palestinian flag in Western geography—specifically in areas that do not even recognise Palestine’s right to exist—becomes a kind of optical illusion. This sight may spark a form of childlike excitement or curiosity, but, ultimately, it’s just a patching over of an erasure that is still taking place, a patching over that’s presented as solidarity in the imperial capitals. I do not mean to imply that this solidarity [the act of raising the flag] is inherently meaningless or a kind of “conspiracy”, but rather I’m trying to frame it within the context of the movement’s action of raising the flag and the conditions attached to it. These conditions often lead us into contracts of conditional solidarity that we may not even have realised we signed up for in the first place.

The discourse surrounding Palestine in the Global North varies widely, with academic, media, and social-political movements framing Palestine as a central moral issue, a point of shared concern, or an opportunity to strip the label of “colonialism” from their works. These entities, often indirectly, state: “We may be the beneficiaries of wealth derived from colonial enterprises, but we are trying, as part of that effort, to stand with Palestine.” The act of solidarity itself becomes a simulation—perhaps even a simulation of a simulation—that bears no connection to reality. Solidarity becomes disconnected not with the intent to distort reality but rather to avoid confronting reality altogether. This act aligns with the assumption that the Palestinian, at their core, is a victim, and, at times, a resister.

This situation is not the result of a deliberate plan or malice but is, instead, the culmination of unaddressed contradictions. Questions about the nature of “Western” solidarity with Palestine have rarely gone beyond enquiries about intentions. Contrary to all expectations, the dynamics of solidarity have been shaped around receiving and accepting all forms of compassionate solidarity, even when these forms are inherently harmful. In this essay, however, I want to explore whether it is possible for us, not only to reverse this relationship, but to place conditions on those who wish to stand in solidarity, rather than positioning ourselves according to their terms.

Reconstructing Palestinian Identity within the Context of “Solidarity Movements”

“Representation” remains the central characteristic of conditional solidarity, regardless of the Western capital where it is held. There is a persistent need to “hear the Palestinian voice”; this voice is brought in as a backdrop, placed as a decoration to enhance the credibility of the person standing in solidarity and is used during any attack on their right to do so. Perhaps the Palestinian voice is the least metaphorical in this representation, and so the content of solidarity becomes nothing more than: “What so-and-so says is …” or “What so-and-so is striving to say is …” Here, “so-and-so” could be any one of us—people, not ideas. Of course, the legitimacy of the individual and the ability of the Western ally to quote them is directly tied to how easily their words align with anti-colonial literature. It’s also tied to what extent the ally can “reinterpret” these words to fit within the limits of their own solidarity, which, in turn, is constrained by the laws of their own country.

It becomes easy to use the language of victimhood—not necessarily the language of grievance but sometimes one that insists we are not victims without ever truly telling us who we are. In other words, this is a language that strips away everything practical and real; the Palestinian becomes just a passive recipient whose words have no meaning unless they are framed within anger or other uncontrollable emotions. For example, resistance is reduced to a term to be used during moments of anger—always in a defensive context, never in the context of offense or aggression. As such, the Palestinian cause, in its entirety, becomes defined only in moments of death and so continues to be erased. Palestinian existence can only be framed through the position of the victim, either through the erasure of life (i.e., stripping resistance of its meaning) or by denying their existence altogether (i.e., the Palestinian is merely a victim).

The distortion of identity runs rampant within Western solidarity movements, and one might momentarily think this is solely linked to the discourse of victimhood. But sometimes, out of sheer fear of failing in their solidarity, they inject their discourse with elements of legend-making. In this sense, Palestinians are portrayed as symbols of what resistance means to them. Western solidarity movements often lean on various metaphors, such as the image of the “lone resister” with no support or the resister who passes all their strange moral tests—like being an environmentalist and simultaneously fighting occupation and climate change. As a result, we ourselves become appropriated by those attempting to “explain” our existence. Our cause becomes nothing more than a social metaphor for their issues, a life that exists far from the frustrations of their bureaucratic “political organisations”. Through this framing, resistance—which they have stripped of its essence through the language of victimhood—becomes chaos, and they, in their total incapacity to support the resistance, see it as an incomprehensible complexity that no one can truly understand. We are then left with nothing but its abstraction: either as a victim or as a legend.

We [Palestinians] drown in their emotions towards our existence, in their anxieties and feelings of impotence, and in their daydreams of a “free” world. We freeze in this frame, as if time is suspended for us based on the Western left’s decisions. If they decide that our liberation is coming tomorrow, we become more active, we are placed in their discussion panels, and our interviews—conducted by those of us who speak progressive English—are circulated. We become the central cause for them all. However, when they tire of their impotence or shift focus to local concerns, we are sidelined, reduced to just another item on an endless “checklist” of issues the world should care about.

This leads to the inevitable comparison of the Palestinian cause with other issues, such as Black Lives Matter versus Palestinian Lives Matter—a comparison that inevitably overlooks the material contexts of each but might appear as a nice aesthetic for the white guilt-ridden self. Notably, critiques of such comparisons—often by Western voices, too—tend to echo purely academic arguments that lack real substance, like: “Did you know that much of Palestinian society is also racist? So, these causes can’t be compared!” These critiques are often framed as acts of “self-criticism” [even when this “self-criticism” is not necessarily coming from Palestinians themselves]. It seems that we are only allowed to engage in such critique or self-critique when it aligns with Western frameworks of solidarity. In this sense, what appears as self-criticism is actually just another example of reshaping Palestinian identity to fit the limits of the solidarity they are willing to extend.

Some solidarity movements do not explicitly state their political stance on the Zionist occupation—or even name it at all—and lack any historical or everyday understanding of what resistance to occupation and settlement entails. They lack an understanding of the wider region [the Middle East] within which the occupation has chosen its centre and also lack any link to the Arab region’s struggles with colonialism. In such solidarity movements, the Palestinian struggle—and identity, by extension—becomes a “melodrama” that is subject to interpretation according to the “granter of solidarity”. Our struggle is reduced to nothing more than what appears to be an attempt to engage with their “frustrations” with Western social movements and an expression of transient political dissatisfaction. Here, we become a commodity for use, consumption, and observation without us engaging in any actual politically productive cross-border action.

The Terms of Conditional Solidarity In this context, we are presented with conditions to our solidarity. These conditions begin with the simple rule that we must not violate any of the laws of European constitutions: do not support “terrorist groups” and commit to nonviolence, even in cases of self-defence. The very existence of these two conditions is enough to show that the acts of solidarity mentioned earlier are nothing more than theatrics and are completely meaningless. None of us can genuinely reflect the reality we speak or write about, nor can we remain loyal to our people and to what Palestinians who have chosen to believe in resistance movements hold dear.

To be Palestinian within the framework of solidarity means to be Palestinian culturally, and at times politically, but only under the condition that we quote Frantz Fanon, for example, and claim to support boycotting Israeli products. Yet we are not allowed to reject being in shared spaces with “leftist” settlers who have decided to oppose the occupation on the basis that they are against the “Israeli Government”. We are also not allowed to say that our realities as Palestinians are fundamentally different, and so, in that one moment, we must represent all Palestinians. But this representation comes with a pre-written script: We are Palestinians who oppose the occupation, We wish to return to our land, No more violence, Let’s build cross-border movements, Let’s liberate each other tomorrow. The problem is this script omits the obvious questions: Which land are we talking about? What occupation? Who is the criminal? And do these cross-border movements inherently believe in our right to bear arms, for instance?

This script—that reproduces conditional solidarity—misleads people. They are enchanted by words that might seem, for a moment, akin to liberation movements of the 1970s, along with the material support those movements received and the solidarity that existed then. However, the difference now seems to lie mainly in how these movements define themselves. There is a vast difference between the terms “solidarity movements” and “liberation movements”. The latter ties its future and existence to you, requires you to sacrifice and risk what you have, and sometimes even enlists you to resist together. Whereas solidarity is confined to those who have the privilege of thinking about you in their universities, wishing to grant you some of their “consciousness”, perhaps writing about you later to benefit while you struggle for the right to exist under the very systems that fund their thinking. The distinction between solidarity and liberation movements is not one that can be easily settled, especially since it is often analysed through the lenses of identity (i.e., who the solidarity participants are and with whom they stand in solidarity), of their radicalism, or of their proximity to radical ideologies (which are not necessarily left wing). Even so, this does not lessen the necessity and importance of understanding the difference between the two.

Solidarity movements often focus on shared identities, common experiences, or common values in the context of liberal identity, but these movements often operate within the current systems and models that originally created these identities. Therefore, in the context of Palestine, solidarity becomes complicated by the fact that the Zionist entity is based on the idea of erasure.

As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.

Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.

Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13

Late find

By Michelle Ellner

Elliott Abrams has reappeared with his usual instructions on how to “fix” Venezuela, a country he neither understands nor respects, yet still feels entitled to redesign as if it were a piece of furniture in a Washington living room. His new proposal is steeped in the same Cold War delusions and colonial mentality that characterized his work in the 1980s, when US foreign policy turned Central America into a graveyard.

My childhood in Venezuela was shaped by stories from our region that the world almost never sees: stories of displacement, death squads, villages wiped off the map, and governments overthrown for daring to act outside Washington's sphere of influence. And I know exactly who Elliott Abrams is, not from think tank biographies, but from the pain embedded in the Central American landscape.

Abrams writes with the confidence of someone who has never lived in the countries his policies destabilized. His most recent argument rests on the most dangerous assumption of all: that the United States has the authority—as if its power were reason enough—to decide who governs Venezuela. This is the original sin of U.S. policy in the Americas, the one that justifies everything else: the sanctions, the blockades, the covert operations, the warships in the Caribbean. The assumption that the continent remains an extension of U.S. strategic space, and not a region with its own political will.

In this narrative, Venezuela becomes a “narco-state,” a convenient villain. But anyone who takes the time to study the architecture of the global drug trade knows that the world’s largest illegal market is the United States, not Venezuela. Money laundering happens in New York and London, not Caracas. The weapons that fuel drug trafficking routes, used to threaten, extort, and kill, overwhelmingly come from American manufacturers. And the very history of the “war on drugs,” from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary arms, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.

Even the US government's own data contradicts Abrams's narrative. Reports from the DEA and UNODC have shown for years that the vast majority of cocaine destined for US consumers originates in Colombia and travels through the Pacific, not through Venezuela. Washington knows this. But the fiction of a "Venezuelan drug route" is politically useful: it transforms a geopolitical disagreement into a criminal case and prepares the public for escalation.

What's striking is that Abrams never looks at the true front line of the drug trade: U.S. cities, U.S. banks, U.S. gun shows, U.S. demand. The crisis he describes originates in his own country, yet he seeks a solution in foreign intervention. For decades, the United States has armed, financed, and politically protected its own "narco-allies" when it suited its larger strategic purposes. The Contras in Nicaragua, the paramilitary blocs in Colombia, the death squads in Honduras—all were tools of foreign policy, and many operated with Abrams's direct diplomatic support.

I grew up hearing stories of what that machine did to our neighbors. You don't need to visit Central America to understand its scars; you just need to listen. In Guatemala, Mayan communities still mourn a genocide that U.S. officials refused to acknowledge, even as entire villages were wiped out and survivors fled to the mountains. In El Salvador, families still light candles for hundreds of children and mothers killed in massacres that Abrams dismissed as “leftist propaganda.” In Nicaragua, the wounds inflicted by the Contras, an armed paramilitary force funded and politically blessed by Washington, remain vivid in the accounts of burned-down cooperatives and murdered teachers. In Honduras, the word “disappeared” is not a distant echo; it is living memory, a reminder of the death squads empowered under the banner of U.S. anti-communism.

That's why, when Abrams warns about "criminal regimes," I don't think of Venezuela. I think of mass graves, burned villages, secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he promoted. And those graves aren't metaphors. They are the map of an entire era of US intervention, the very one Abrams insists on resurrecting.

Today, Abrams adds new threats to the old script: warnings about “narco-terrorism,” alarms about “Iranian operations,” and anxieties about “Chinese influence.” These are issues taken out of context, inflated, or conveniently selected to fabricate a security crisis where none exists. Venezuela is not being attacked by drugs, nor by Iran, nor by China. It is being attacked because it has built relationships and paths to development that are not subordinate to Washington. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats, not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they erode U.S. dominance.

Abrams's fantasy for Venezuela rests on another imperial illusion: the idea that the United States can bomb military installations , sabotage infrastructure, deploy special forces in a sovereign country, tighten sanctions until society submits, and then "install" a compliant government as if Venezuela were an uninhabited outpost. Venezuela is a nation of 28 million people, with an identity marked by resistance to foreign control, especially control of its oil. Abrams presents a militarily assisted overthrow as if it were a mere administrative procedure, erasing its human cost, its regional impact, and the absolute certainty of popular resistance. It is the same imperial fantasy that has haunted Latin America for generations: the belief that our countries can be redesigned by force and that our people will obediently accept it.

It also assumes that, once the government Washington desires is installed, the oil will flow as if by magic. Nothing reveals more ignorance about Venezuela. Oil in Venezuela is not simply an export or a source of income; it is the terrain where sovereignty has been fought for, lost, and regained. It was the linchpin of foreign concessions, the site of the 2002 sabotage, the backbone of the Bolivarian project. The refineries, pipelines, and oil fields are the archive of a century of struggle for self-determination. To believe that foreign troops would be welcomed as administrators of that intimate sovereignty is to be blinded by arrogance.

Then there are the sanctions. In Washington, they're treated as technical measures, policy levers, bargaining chips. In Venezuela, they mean shortages in hospitals, lines at pharmacies, collapsing incomes, a currency in freefall, and families forced to migrate. And here, Abrams's fingerprints are impossible to ignore: during Trump's first term, he was "Special Representative for Venezuela," helping to design and defend the very sanctions he now uses to blame the government for the crisis he helped create. Abrams says the sanctions "failed," as if they were designed to improve the lives of Venezuelans. But the sanctions didn't fail. They achieved their objective of destabilizing society, strangling public services, and manufacturing the humanitarian crisis now used as justification for further intervention. It's circular logic: create the conditions for collapse and then point to the collapse as evidence that the government should be removed.

Abrams now presents regime change as the solution to migration, but history tells a different story. US interventions don't stop migration; they create it. The largest waves of displacement in our region have followed US-backed coups, civil wars, counterinsurgency campaigns, and, more recently, the instrumentalization of sanctions. People fled not because their governments were left alone, but because Washington treated their countries as battlefields or, in the case of Venezuela, as a laboratory for economic collapse. Central Americans fled bullets and death squads; Venezuelans have been driven out by a siege designed to cripple the economy and fragment society. The result is the same: migration produced by US policy, then used as a pretext for further intervention.

As long as Washington clings to the notion that it owns the hemisphere, Latin America will never be safe. Not from Abrams, nor from coups, nor from CIA programs, nor from blockades, nor from the Monroe Doctrine.

And perhaps the clearest sign of this imperial hypocrisy is seeing Trump accuse his domestic opponents of “sedition” over a simple video in which lawmakers remind U.S. military personnel that they are legally obligated to refuse illegal orders. Meanwhile, those same political forces applaud the idea of ​​Venezuelan officials violating their own constitutional order to overthrow a government that Washington detests. Latin America has lived under this double standard for too long, and we are no longer willing to pay the price.

https://mander.xyz/post/42872387

I received insults

Someone even posted photos of dead bodies

These comments weren't reviewed, but I was permanently blocked because my political stance is to hope for the reunification of my country. They said I have nothing to offer, just spreading propaganda and negativity.

(Lighthearted joke no sectarianism meant!)

🙏 Please, my friends, help us; our support is very limited, and our lives depend on your assistance—any donation, no matter how small, plants hope in our hearts and restores our lives. https://gofund.me/1222af19

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42897886

Web archive link

Canada has joined a major European Union defense fund, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office said Monday, as the country looks to diversify its military spending away from the United States.

The plan allows Canadian defense companies access to a 150 billion euro ($170 billion) EU loan program, known as Security Action for Europe, or SAFE. That would allow Canadians firms to secure cheap, EU-backed loans to procure military equipment.

“Canada’s participation in SAFE will fill key capability gaps, expand markets for Canadian suppliers, and attract European defense investment into Canada,” Carney said in a statement.

Canada is the first non-EU country to gain access.

Carney has said he intends to diversify Canada’s procurement and enhance the country’s relationship with the EU. He has previously said that no more will over 70 cents of every dollar of Canadian military capital spending go to the U.S.

...

"If Europe suddenly wants to start a war with us and starts it," Putin said, then it would end so swiftly for Europe that there would be no one to negotiate with in Europe. Putin used the Russian word for "war". He also suggested that the war in Ukraine was not a full-blown war and that Russia was acting in a "surgical" manner which would not be repeated in a direct confrontation with European powers. "If Europe suddenly wants to fight with us and starts, we are ready right now," Putin said.

NOTE: imo there is a lot of saber-rattling going on lately. Its all part of the political game. Pls let's keep our heads cool with clickbait titles and speculations. I can sympathise with the worries and that these are trying times for us.