P. Sainath at Counterpunch describes the massive victory India's long-beleaguered farmers have recently won -- and how Indian media barely covered it. If this happened in the U.S., you'd just assume our media simply weren't interested in non-white, non-right wing protestors, but in India, you'd have to chalk it up to a general avoidance of discussing anything that would upset the rich and powerful. Indian farmers managed to get their Prime Minister to agree to repeal three onerous agricultural laws, this after surviving first-we-ignore-you-then-we-ridicule-you-then-we-bust-out-the-water-cannons, and they deserve our admiration and our support.
James Somers at The New Yorker describes scientific advances in mind-reading. Right now they're not "reading thoughts" so much as inferring them from brain patterns, and color me skeptical that it'll ever be particularly good, because the the brain is a far more magnificent thing than even neurologists know, not to mention that people will plug mind-reading tech with their own prejudices just like they did with facial recognition technology. But if the technology does get good, I'm sure Congress will be there with laws that protect good Americans from having their privacy invaded! I kid, of course; we'll have to prod them to do that, and the big data lobby could be even bigger by then.
I'm always pleased to see someone make the pragmatic case against our use of drones in foreign lands -- the moral arguments don't persuade certain people, for whatever reason, and the pragmatic case gives us an additional weapon to shame them (and prompt more moral behavior from the undecided). I'm even more pleased that former Navy officer James Durso takes the case farther than I thought to do -- by taking us past the errant drone strike (and the subsequent lack of punishment for anyone) as ISIS recruiting tool, which is where we are now, to the day when the other side have their own drones, and start taking out American embassies and other "soft" targets. Lesson: accountability is always the best policy, no matter how painful it might be.
When I hear that "QNuts" are "Falling Out of Love With Kyle Rittenhouse" -- over an apparently legit beef Mr. Rittenhouse has with former lawyer/QAnon darling Lin Wood -- I am reminded that this is how rage addicts try to convince us (and themselves) that they're not really rage addicts. Although when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself a Q adherent, is siding with Mr. Rittenhouse against Mr. Wood, I don't just wonder if this is just more right-wing drama to distract the folks -- I also wonder if folks like Rep. Greene abandon folks like Mr. Wood because, well, they think of Lin Wood as a loser, and you know how their real Personal Lord and Savior, Donald Trump, feels about losers.
When I hear that Donald Trump actually said that the House January 6 panel trying to get his records "will result in permanent damage to the institution of the presidency," my first impulse is to say he's got some cojones saying that, after taking a massive dump all over the office for four years. But let's grapple with the point about "preserving the confidentiality of Presidential communications," shall we? The American people deserve to know exactly what their President did and said in the time leading up to the attempted coup he instigated. There! Done grappling.
Finally, Jim Swift at The Bulwark takes us through the "anatomy of a viral lie," in this case the utter absurdity that Nancy Pelosi was about to buy a $25 million mansion in Florida, which would, somehow, justify everything Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have done. Read the whole thing, and then keep in mind that when journalists started reporting on rumors and justifying it by telling themselves they weren't doing "serious" work, they opened up a box that'd make Pandora blush. As a famous philosopher once said, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world.
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