MLK on Violence, Home or Abroad

Martin Luther King:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967.

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Word of the Day: Kayfabe

Word of the day: Kayfabe

In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ (also called work or worked), as a noun, is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.

Kayfabe, in the USA, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Also, since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. In general, everything in a professional wrestling show is to some extent scripted, or "kayfabe", even though at times it is portrayed as real-life.

[Source: Wikipedia]

I often wonder how transgender activists talking about themselves when they are by themselves, out of public view.

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NYT Forced to Acknowledge U.S. Spy Efforts due to Third Party Release of Leaked Documents

In Daniel Ellsberg's day, the NYT was seen as a place friendly to whistle-blowers and those who have documents exposing secret government activities. No longer. Further, the NYT refuses to post a link to the leaked documents, only linking to its own hand-wringing articles. Nowadays, secret documents are leaked elsewhere and the NYT needs to play catch-up, coupling its reluctant acknowledgement with a warning about the damage that could be caused by leaks about secret U.S. activity:

The leak has the potential to do real damage to Ukraine’s war effort by exposing which Russian agencies the United States knows the most about, giving Moscow a potential opportunity to cut off the sources of information. Current and former officials say it is too soon to know the extent of the damage, but if Russia is able to determine how the United States collects its information and cuts off that flow, it may have an effect on the battlefield in Ukraine.

The leak has already complicated relations with allied countries and raised doubts about America’s ability to keep its secrets. After reviewing the documents, a senior Western intelligence official said the release of the material was painful and suggested that it could curb intelligence sharing. For various agencies to provide material to each other, the official said, requires trust and assurances that certain sensitive information will be kept secret.

On the other hand, if you are part of the U.S. security state, the NYT is more than happy to post your propaganda, as it did in the case of the Nord Stream Pipeline. Unbelievably, knowing that it's "explanation" of the pipeline destruction is bullshit, the NYT suggests it's not a good idea to dig further into who destroyed the pipeline:

It's a good day to celebrate the immense good fortune of NYT reporters who get to draw big salaries while not having to do the difficult work of actually practicing journalism.

Proposed new Mission Statement for the New York Times: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.

Joe Biden promised to disable the pipeline prior to its destruction:

Biden's neocon crony, Victoria Nuland, helped to lead the post-destruction cheerleading, as Aaron Maté reminds us, but, again, Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.

No wonder the corporate media and their U.S. government partners hate Twitter 2.0...

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