Drone On

 An interesting, but ultimately hagiographic (and bordering on outright propaganda at times) piece here in the New Yorker. [1] I mean, most of our MSM is filled with courtiers, and even when Trump hit them on the nose, you could see them still begging for scraps of compliments from him and chomping at the bit to call him presidential [2].
But that someone can write something like this, which has a few good views,tbf, like the fact that the results after Raqqa and after Aleppo (the latter ostensibly fought with no laws being followed) were much the same, seems to say something about our way of warring, but that it doesn't even bother to take apart official statements, sees things that have just happened wrongly, is a huge disappointment. It also takes officials' statements as facts as well as their intentions. Lol. Forever courtiers and no analysis. [4]
Many are happy trump is gone, and sure it's one less thing to worry about, but given how the GOP is now trying their hardest not to give $ to poor people who need it, and climate change (nvm the drone reaction to people in the path of CC) etc, we truly are facing a crisis.

[1] OT: been thinking about the centrists like Matty Yglesias who think anyone who brings up war drones etc now but were quite so loud in the Trump years, are being mendacious. First: no. Many of us did bring it up (the Trump years were certainly more brutal to many), but given Trump's (evil-genius) of denial of services attack on the left by having so many fronts to fight one couldn't actually fight them all effectively (or you had to pick one and go with it). But, even putting that aside, plenty pointed out that the drones were killing way more civilians than Obama ever did but there were no takers to pump that out into the ether (why the media was willing to listen to the left on this during Obama's term but not this time is probably because Trump did play them like trained dogs and knew how to make a scandal every hour so that they couldn't concentrate, unfortunately.Which brings me to another point: signal boosting. Was talking to my BIL about BLM and other movements (like the color revolutions in Eastern Europe or fake riots in Bolivia etc) about fake movements and real movements, about who backs them and who doesn't [3]. Of course, my easy answer is not to trust anything with a right wing touch and to trust the left wings ones, but that's me (and the evidence, tbf). But when it comes to the anti-war movement, I've seen many, too many,
 

[2] And that, like Trump's ability to mock people who once worked for him, is his one thing I liked: he knew what the media (especially the WH press wing) was, a borderline entertainment wing filled with sycophants and he treated them with the contempt they deserve. See also this piece, whereby in only March some people pined wistfully for Rudy's 9/11 touch (see also how they now treat Biden's slights versus Trump's yelling in their faces and one can only think that they truly deserve this). 
[3] This also gets into the matter of proxies and what's a group that simply gets funding from someone and a group that is created almost whole cloth from outside funding. I sense here the answer is a complexity of human nature. One must ultimately look at what it is that the group is aiming for, how real their grievances are. Outside funding can definitely keep alive a group that would otherwise wither away (and also to sow chaos, one merely needs to fund gangsters and the like, right?) and it's why insurgencies on islands are usually easier to squelch, but that means we have to talk about origins of real reasons to fight for one's rights. IMO BLM has that, the opponents of Chavez and Morales do not. They are the right and the right is morally equivalent to a virus. 
[4] This goes for almost every news site I know. Even AlJazeera, which I like, covering the plight of the Palestinians, in a doc, hardly covered what the people on the street think and plied some bs Hamas propaganda. Yeah, I'm no fan of Israel and think Gaza has every right to fight back, but even for me some of that was tripe. No analysis unfortunately. And this is why demagogues like Trump will keep winning in the future.
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