news

The Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalizes abortion at the federal level.

So Borrell called for the EU to expand to 10 new countries. Being extremely generous and counting Balkans + Norway + Ukraine + Moldavia thats 9.

All bets are open. Which comes first, BREXIN or TURKIYIN?

War mad libs vs Elong

Combating recidivism and promoting reintegration: Brazil’s experiment with prisons without guards

At the Association for the Protection and Assistance of the Convicted (APAC) of São João del Rei in the eastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, there are no guards and no weapons. Only a handful of employees take care of administrative duties and assist the inmates in charge of security. This private prison, subsidised to a large extent by public funds, relies heavily on the trust placed in its male and female inmates – imprisoned for drug trafficking, assault, theft, homicide and rape – and prepares them for their reintegration into working life.

“All I knew about life before was that I wanted to commit crimes, I wanted to beat up other people, I wanted to run away,” recalls Dos Passos, who wears a yellow flower print t-shirt. Today, she no longer thinks of running away. “I have the key, they trust me. I could leave, but I won’t. Because here I’m treated with love,” she says, adding:

“I’m here to make amends. If I run away, I’ll be sent back to another prison, and who will suffer? I will. I committed a crime in society and I have to pay for that crime. I’ll walk away with my head held high.”

The concept behind this seemingly utopian approach, developed by a group of Catholics in 1972, is to humanise prisoners. “When prisoners are treated with violence, they respond to society with violence. By humanising them, we give them the opportunity to make a change in their lives,” explains Denio Marx of the APAC International Study Centre. Members of the association employ the term recuperandos, which can be translated as “recoverers” or “people on the road to recovery”.

Recuperandos wear their own clothes, walk freely in their areas, grow and cook their own food, receive their families on Sundays, clean the premises, inspect their own cells and mediate their own conflicts.

The monthly cost for recuperandos is also lower than for other prisoners: 1,390 reals a month (around €260), according to the APAC International Study Centre, compared with 1,819 reals (around €340) for inmates in the traditional system, according to a 2023 study by the National Secretariat for Penal Policies. APAC also has a lower re-offending rate than the traditional system. In the entrance hall of the São João del Rei prison, the statistics are proudly displayed. Around 14 per cent of recuperandos reoffend, compared with almost 40 per cent of those in the traditional system (2020 figures from the National Justice Council). Based on these results, 68 such detention centres have opened throughout the country. The system is even being exported abroad.

Some interesting analysis by a big Russian twitter account (Armchair Warlord) about the current state of the Russian Army:

Anyone have anything good to read on the RICO indictment handed down to like 60 stop cop city protestors? It looks like they are trying to hit them with money laundering charges too. It all seems so fucked.

You have nothing to lose but your steel beams

COTW Libya:

Okay, I've finished Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - About 180 pages of actual writing and not in small font so I was able to get through it pretty quickly even while making notes. It's an interesting and approachable book on Libya under Qaddafi, and basically the premise of the book is how the experiences of everyday people matched the wider national and geopolitical circumstances, which isn't a terribly surprising observation but it might dispel lib ideas that Libyans were living in some big isolated time chamber for 40 years, unknowing of what was going on around them due to Qaddafi's propaganda. Not explicitly leftist, but it does explicitly and repeatedly warn against analyzing and interpreting the country as "Socialist Totalitarian Literally 1984 Poverty-ridden No iPhone No Food Hellscape #42942." Mentions the real gains made by the Libyan working class but also the country's gradual decline in the 1990s and 2000s and how the revolutionary old guard, and Qaddafi's large adult sons, did not really help things despite the blame being mostly on all the sanctions and war supported by the West. The book revolves around interviews that the author had with Libyans living abroad in Italy and the UK after 2011- of course, the fact that they are living abroad will mean they have some different opinions from the people still living there, but I can't exactly blame the author for not wanting to go to Libya as the country currently stands and start asking people questions about whether they liked Qaddafi or not. I give it a 7/10.

What was probably more important is that it gave me a basic understanding of the Jamahiriya, and the knowledge of where to start looking for more concrete material via the references.

In retrospect, I probably should have started at ProleWiki rather than diving into a random book, which has this page on the Jamahiriya, this page on Qaddafi, and this page on Libya as a country. The first one is the most developed and detailed of the three so it's the one most worth checking out. Going into the notable sources, there is this collection of information in the Libya 360 Archives, though several of the links they reference are now dead. Also of note is this post on marxists.org, written in 1984, about the Libyan economy and how it has developed.

As for the literature about Libya, as we try to construct a general geopolitical reading list. I haven't read any of these yet so these aren't recommendations - if anybody has read them then I would appreciate your thoughts, as well as recommendations for other books.

There are many, many other books written on Libya, looking back from 2011, as people switched from "this is an authoritarian regime and resistance is impossible" to "this was actually a weak regime and revolution was inevitable if you just saw all the signs" and attempted to understood the country. One such book is Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi by Allison Pargeter, but the description of the book gives me bad vibes.

• Published in 2020: Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, on the Italian colonial period.

• Published in 1987: Libya: Qadhafi's Revolution and the Modern State by Lillian Craig Harris. 240 pages.

• Published in 2013: Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution by Francis A. Boyle. 212 pages.

• Published in 2012: Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa, by Maximilian C. Forte. 352 pages.

Depending on how good the coverage is of 1990s and 2000s Libya in Boyle's and Forte's books, these resources might take us from the colonial period to 2011 without any major gaps (Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya does talk about those times, but not in sufficient detail for my liking - and a precise historical coverage of the era isn't really the point of the book anyway) The WW2 campaigns and the monarchy period are a notable gap, though.

What's possibly the most important thing to us on the news mega is the events of the last decade up to the present day, which I am struggling to find comprehensive resources for from basic google searches. One book that is apparent is Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi by Ulf Laessing, published in 2020, but I suspect brainworms are present here (better than nothing I suppose). Obviously the books covering the events of the last few years haven't been written yet so we're down to articles and essays. This time period is what I'll be focussing on for the rest of the week, alongside work on the weekly update.

Western media is reporting that Ukraine has breached the first and presumably hardest line of defense near Rabotino/Robotyne and that they are now "only 20 kilometres from Tokmak". It is being presented as a major victory.

Remember when Ukraine put Elon on their kill list because of a Starlink dispute?

https://twitter.com/EvaKBartlett/status/1580921221310341120?s=20

This has to be of the funniest political photo ops I've ever seen. Man looks properly miserable.

For context, municipal workers in the city of Tshwane/Pretoria in South Africa are on strike because they want wage increases. The city says that they can't afford wage increases, they'll go broke in a few months. So the mayor decides to do some photo op where he does garbage collection in Mamelodi (a township in Pretoria).

China dropped the mortgage down payment minimum (usually 40% to 30%) to 20% and caused a huge uptick in home sales in Shanghai and Beijing.

Home sales in two of China’s biggest cities soared in the past two days following mortgage relaxations, an early sign that government efforts to cushion a record housing slowdown is helping.

From here: https://archive.ph/3kCoZ

Not sure if this will be repeated in the Teir 2 and below cities, and it doesn't do anything to unwind much of the mess created by China's property market, where a significant amount of wealth is tied up in real estate rather than "real" sectors of the economy, but I guess it's a start.

another challenger down

any bets on how long will it take for british MoD to amend their website?

https://www.army.mod.uk/equipment/combat-vehicles/

The Challenger 2 is a main battle tank, designed to destroy other tanks. It has been used by the British Army on operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Iraq, and has never experienced a loss at the hands of the enemy.

can somebody fact-check this?

Libya: Gaddafi's Green Book was more coherent than most people like to give it credit for. Was it very well written and a revolutionary theory that added to communism? No. Was it the insane ramblings of a mad dictator? Also no. There is a bunch of orientalism which made all the scholars switch off their brains, but Gaddafi bases his Third Universal Theory on the assumption that there has been too much abstraction and mediation from a natural state of things, which he refers to consistently throughout his books. this is the ideational foundation for his approach to direct democracy, for example. He was still a believer in development etc, so it is pretty wrong to say he espouses a "primitivist" worldview or something orientalist like that.

There might be some arguments about a "naturalist" point of view he takes, but being an oil exporting and consuming country, it is obviously silly to think he was an environmentalist.

Mu3ammar al-Gaddafi, actually al-Qadhdhâfî ("softer" th, Q comes from the back of your throat, î is a long vowel) was very flexible, which he had to be. He took power 1969 by taking leadership of a group of officers that styled themselves in the image of Naser, calling themselves the Free Officer (ad-dubbat al-ahrar) and establishing similar bodies after throwing out the western proxy Idris as-Sanousi who was a far cry from his grandfather, the founder of the Sanousiyya, a sufi order that lead the fight.

Originally, he had no desire to rule Libya as its own state, which was divided between Tripoli in the West and Cyrenaica in the East as well as independ tribes in the South. Being a good Nasserite, he wanted it annexed to Egypt under Naser, whom he saw as his personal hero. Tragically, Naser died and al-Gaddafi did not like Sadat at all, so he decided to do his own thing. His position was very precarious. Libya was underdeveloped, had little national identity, neither pan-arab nor Libyan, both the USA and the USSR kind of liked and kind of didn't like him, there were internal power struggles in the ruling comitee as well, which Gaddafi won by virtue of his charisma and stubbornness. After a lot of experimentation and getting rid of rivals, he solidified his rule enough to be more or less the guy people turned to for questions. His politics put him closer to the USSR than to the US, even though he never cut ties with anybody or joined a camp during the cold war.

He was kind of a guy out of his time, having come to power after the Naksa (set-back) 1968 whose effects on the pan-arab movement are hard to convey in a few words, but basically, the hopes that the ba3th and Nasser would manage to turn the "backwards" arab states into socialist bastions of modernity were dashed, the PLO began to emerge as the hope for a lot of leftists for Arab independence and revolution in the Levante. al-Qaddafi was not impressed, holding on to the ideology for quite some time. Economic development was rocky at start, but his famously robust welfare program was probably not a bad call to hold onto power and achieve some form of national identity, considering the situation he was in. He also financed a lot of Palestinian groups. I am not knowledgeable enough to trace his involvement into the Lebanese Civil War starting 1975, but he did host the Abu Nidal group, which was just one of the worse palestinian groups, objectively speaking more busy killing Palestinians and random jews around the world than killing Israeli leadership, trying claim Arafat was a homosexual with AIDS and other gameresque shit.

He was pretty good at playing both the USSR and the USA for support for his country.

The Green Book is a reference to Mao's "Red Book". He published three parts, 1975, 1977, 1981, the first on Politics, the second on economics, the third on society at large. It's not long, go read it when bored. Most points you'll disagree with, but his point about sports was pretty agreeable to me. He famously received a visit from the German Greens 1982. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/gaddafi/index.htm

I can continue rambling on if you find this interessting, but I need to do irl stuff rn.

any corroboration for this claim that niger is now selling uranium at normal canadian rates of 200 euros/kg instead of the original 0.8 euros/kg? fucked up if true

I don't know what to think of this...

Australia is considering banning outdoor cats or at least giving them a curfew.
Kinda want to make this its own post but idk if I'm ready for the next round of that struggle sesh

pro-Azov flags seen during a football match between Ukraine and England in Poland for the EURO Qualifiers. But libs continue to tell us Ukraine has a insignificant nazi problem, yet they seem to pop out every now and then huh?

US spy agency eyes 'smart' clothing that spies on wearer, surroundings

The federal government has invested at least $22 million in developing "smart" clothing designed to keep the wearer and its own surroundings under surveillance. While the concept may draw inspiration from science fiction and superpowers, the primary applications align with the government's focus: surveillance and data collection.

Known as SMART ePANTS (Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems) program, it represents the most substantial single investment in developing Active Smart Textiles. The program's objective is to create clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, as announced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in an August 22 press release. The range of garments set for production includes shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all designed to be washable.

oh my god. not only are we ruled by failsons, we are ruled by Marvel dweebs

Oh boy this is so fucking pathetic, Javier Milei to invite both and if he wins the elections.

And yeah, he always does the same pose when a picture of him is being taken, either that or he does a pretty cringe "Kubrick Stare" that doesn't intimidate anyone.

Hmm, Elon wanted Bolivia's lithium, he didn't get any of it. Do you wanna know what South American country has huge untapped lithium reserves? You guessed it right: Argentina.

China: executed all of the CIA spies in the country

USA: spends $5 million tracking down a random Chinese guy swimming or going to McDonald’s

https://archive.ph/jIhIP

How do Americans not wake up to the fact that 99% of these “Chinese espionage” cases are literally concluded by the authorities to be “a possibility” or “potential?” They can’t even prove concrete evidence. China is spying with satellites and other high tech equipment not with fucking balloons and guys wearing flip flops in legal, public areas

Inspired by @[email protected]'s comment here, I am starting two initiatives:

The first is recommendations for a geographically and geopolitically themed list of literature. Broad pieces on the nature of imperialism, capitalism, communism, etc are great, and recommend any if you have any ideas, but I want to focus in on the more specific works about regions, countries, ethnicities, movements, etc. Not just hand-wavey knowledge about colonialism but how it has actually affected the people of X country.

The second, to help facilitate the first, is a Country of the Week system where essentially I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with effortposts, books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. You don't have to reply to this comment, though you can if you want, you can post it anywhere in the thread.

As suggested by @[email protected], factors you might want to pay attention to are:

• Who are the main political actors? Are they compradors, nationalists, international socialists, something else?

• What are the most salient domestic political issues; those issues that repeatedly shape elections over the last 10, 20 years. Every country has its quirks that complicate analysis - for example, Brexit in the UK.

• What is the country's history? You don't have to go back a thousand years if that's not relevant, and I'm counting "history" as basically anything that has happened over a year ago.

• What factions exist, historically and currently? If there is an electoral system, what are the major parties and their demographic bases? Are there any minor parties with large amounts of influence? Independence movements? Religious groups?

• How socially progressive or conservative are they? Is there equality for different ethnic groups, or are some persecuted? Do they have LGBTQIA+ rights? Have they improved over time, or gotten worse?

• What role do foreign powers play in the country’s politics and economy? Is there a particular country nearby or far away that is nearly inseparable from them, for good or bad reasons? Is their trade dominated by exports/imports to one place? Are they exploited, exploiters, or something in between?

• If applicable, what is the influence of former colonial relationships on the modern economy and politics?

• Is the country generally stable? Do you think there will be a coup at some point in the future, and if so, what faction might replace them?

This week's country is Libya! On Sundays from now on, I will put a comment up asking if anybody has any pertinent suggestions for next week's country.

🦀🦀🦀 Apartheid collaborator Mangosuthu Buthelezi dead🦀🦀🦀

Today he’s known as a unifier by some, but those familiar with his history remember him as a war-monger whose hands, until the very end, dripped with the blood of the thousands killed across the country’s townships in the late 80s and the early 90s.

He had also accepted the oppressive regime’s homelands or bantustan arrangement as he argued that his participation in the Apartheid system was the ideal way to beat it.

This earned him titles such as sellout and an anti-revolutionary.

By the early 80’s, tensions, including with ANC and aligned UDF had spilled over into full on violence.

And when the dust had settled – with South Africa on the brink of democracy – it is believed that well over 20,000 people had died

His Inkatha trainees were found by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to have been responsible for the murders of ANC and United Democratic Front (UDF) activists. The trainees were men trained by the South African Defence Force.

This isn't even talking about Operation Marion , in which there was an alliance formed between the IFP, the NP and even some AWB elements, the Zulu - Boer alliance for their own security. IFP militants were flown in C-130 troop transports by the apartheid government from their training base in Caprivi, to a military base in Durban, to do classic colonial "divide and conquer" operations.

fucking azerbaijan

Chinese Vice Premier to lead delegation to N.Korea

China announced on Thursday that it will send a high-profile delegation led by Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the second time in less than two months, a rare move which experts believe demonstrates the traditional friendship and support for each other that will inject stability into regional security, at a time when tensions have risen to an unprecedented level.

Against the backdrop of the US-led West's increasingly tough sanctions and pressure on Pyongyang, China's support, which will not be confined to moral support, will help North Korea break its isolation in the international community, observers believe.

At the invitation of the Workers' Party of Korea and the government of the DPRK, Liu, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, will lead a party and government delegation to DPRK to attend the commemorative events for its 75th founding anniversary and visit the country, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning announced on Thursday.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall. I wonder what plans they have that require all these delegations.

okay recent meeting with Zyuganov has Putin considering pressing the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics button.

I know that its probably lip service but let me be a bit delusional for my own sanity