Panchayat

Development economist, based in London, unhealthily obssessed with politics, poverty, classic films and bad television. Has been accused of having the musical taste of a 16 year-old girl. Is not one.

[murheissaan]

Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian for Esquire, 1968

[saywhat-politics]

It's the Corruption, Stupid

Donald Trump's corruption is unprecedented as he establishes a $1.8 billion slush fund to give taxpayer money to his cronies. It may be his

[anexperimentallife]

[collapsedsquid]

Sort of torn by this in that Elon is especially insane but I still do agree with the general point and do feel the urge to hang this over tech fetishists and people who say things like this.

[theconcealedweapon]

"Why do you blame Trump for high gas prices and not Biden?"

Because the high gas prices under Biden were caused by a war between Russia and Ukraine, which Biden had nothing to do with. The high gas prices under Trump were caused by a war that Trump actively contributed to.

[ceevee5]

[deadpresidents]

But by far the most interesting person was undoubtedly [Henry] Kissinger. He is showing signs of strain from the Watergate scandal. He drank very little but talked somewhat indiscreetly in front of our French guests who are bound to repeat much of what he said... ...Henry talked at the table in front of everyone about Watergate. He said the people now being exposed (like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, etc.) were small-town, middle-class politicians who were used to fixing municipal elections and thought they could do the same thing in the White House. He failed to mention that Nixon had, after all, brought them in and let them run wild. He also said it was all right to lie for "a great cause" but not for a small one.

Longtime New York Times foreign correspondent C.L. Sulzberger, on a dinner party he hosted in Paris during the Watergate scandal where Nixon Administration's National Security Advisor, top diplomat, and soon-to-be Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a guest, June 7, 1973.

As recounted in Sulzberger's 1974 book, Postscript With a Chinese Accent: Memoirs and Diaries, 1972-1973, the fourth volume of Sulzberger's fascinating collection of journal entries, autobiographical vignettes, and reporting notes from his remarkable career and close personal and professional interactions with virtually every significant international figure of the 20th Century following World War II.

[filmantidote]

Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali/Tobacco Embers (Yugantar, 1982)

The documentary documents, re-enacts, and takes forward one of the largest movements of unorganized labor of its time and context, which sparked unionizing processes across India throughout the 1980s. In the spirit of mobilizing for the leftist labor and the women’s movements the Yugantar collective spent four months with female tobacco factory workers in Nipani, Karnataka in India, listening to their accounts of exploitative working conditions, discussing strategies for unionizing and steps to broaden solidarities for strike actions, and filming previously unseen circumstances inside the factories. The team followed the workers’ leads as to what, where, and how their actions should be recorded, and developed a loose script through the workers’ narratives. Yugantar’s commitment to the complexity of political friendships and how to ‘stand with’ provoked a then pioneering collaborative filmmaking practice embodied in large scale reenactments, a voice-over as pluriverse testimony, and the production of the first screen presence of working-class women ‘speaking to power’. A powerful example of a feminist third cinema. (Nicole Wolf)

Watch here until May 15th

[collapsedsquid]

From what i understand the Iranian's official position is that they are refusing to meet until the blockade is lifted.

[afloweroutofstone]

It’s always fun to be reminded how recent European national identities are. Peasants in 1860’s Sicily had never heard the term “Italy” before, the majority of people in France didn’t speak French at the time of the French Revolution, etc.

[dostoyevsky-official]

[pyjnda]

from the observations of a british diplomat in the ukraine in 1912, quoted in Bini Adamczacks Beziehungsweise Revolution

[when one asks the avarage peasant farmer in the ukraine about his nationality, he will answer, he is "greek-orthodox"; when one pushes him to say whether he is a russian, a pole, or a ukranian, he will answer, he is a farmer; and when one demands demands to find out which language he speeks, he will say that he speaks "the language from around here". ... i.e. when one wants to find out which state he would like to belong to – whether he would rather be governed by an pan-russian or a specifically ukranian government – one will find out, that in his opinion, all governments are a plague on the land, and it would be best, if the "christian peasantfolk" were left to themselves.]

[dailybollywoodqueens]

I’d never go under the knife. It’s an individual choice and I’m not judgmental about it. But personally, I’d never go under the knife. I keep away even from medicines. I’m happy the way I am. I’d rather avoid anything artificial. I’d prefer aging gracefully. I am pretty content with my looks.

[collapsedsquid]

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal. That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).

Declaring Bret Devereaux a Problematic Neocon. Also interested that when discussing what America might have to give up to get peace he does in include some concessions that would be quite painful for the US elite but not "no more military bases in the persian gulf" which sure is an ambitious ask but one they have reason to hold out for

[saywhat-politics]

Trump told you he’d run America like a business.

He is.

It’s called asset stripping. You sell the profitable pieces, gut the workforce, load it with debt, and walk away rich while everyone else holds the bag.

USPS? For sale. The military? Subcontracted to the Saudis/Israelis. The debt? Yours.

Congratulations. You didn’t elect a president. You hired a liquidator.

[hagiomoto]

Don't be alarmed if Muslims resist then. Don't complain about Hezbollah. Don't complain about Islamic resistance. Because this has been the policy of the US regime in Lebanon since the 1980s.

[allsonargent]

I didn’t go missing, David. The FBI knew where I was the entire time.

[shoezuki]

obsessed with the canadian ghoulmaxxing acecel

[femmenietzsche]

In 1950, American swimsuit mogul Fred Cole, owner of Cole of California, told Time that bikinis were designed for "diminutive Gallic women", as because "French girls have short legs... swimsuits have to be hiked up at the sides to make their legs look longer."[38]