Cable companies are trying to create an unequal playing field for internet speeds, but they’re doing it so boringly that most news outlets aren’t covering it.
John Oliver explains the controversy and lets viewers know how they can voice their displeasure to the FCC.
Having covered conflicts in distant lands, we now turn our attention to our own native homeland, the Internet; where the battle for the hypersphere has reached new heights, as netizens take up arms against Telcoms and the FCC, to preserve the fundamental ethos that made the Internet what it is today: Net Neutrality. What is Net Neutrality, and why is it so important to the future of the Internet? Find out by joining Robert Foster as he takes a whimsical trip into the World Wide Web, with its founder Tim Berners-Lee. Let’s just hope no shady mega-corporatist, elite oligarchic malefactors pop up to mess with us on the way…
Written & created by Giordano Nanni & Hugo Farrant in a suburban backyard home studio in Melbourne, Australia, on Wurundjeri Land.
A dozen members of the group “Anarchists Against the Wall” were arrested after blocking the entrance to a base of the Israeli Air Force in northern Tel Aviv. Activists tried to prevent the ships comply with a new operation on the area of the Gaza Strip.
At least 21 members of the group “Anarchists Against the Wall” were arrested today after blocking the entrance of a base of the Israeli Air Force in northern Tel Aviv to protest the bombing that the Zionist military have carried out since seven days ago in the Gaza Strip, which has left more than 400 Palestinians dead.
“From thousands of feet up…a pilot pushes a button and can ignore or forget that at the same time, is killing innocent people. We came to remind him, “said Ayala, a member of AAW. Según Haaretz reported, protesters covered their faces with white masks and fake blood, and lay down in the street pretending to be dead. EN-GB
anarchist against the wall, during a previous event.
‘Anarchists’ block entrance to IAF base in protest of Gaza strikes
Protestors say they only wanted to show pilots that their actions result in the killing of innocents.
Twenty-one members of the “Anarchists Against the Wall” group were arrested Friday morning after they blocked the entrance to the Sde Dov Israel Air Force base in North Tel Aviv.
The protestors, wearing white masks and covered in fake blood, laid on the street and played dead.
They said they were arrested after they left the road and were on the sidewalk.
Ayala, one of the protestors, said that the protest was meant to “show IAF pilots the results of their actions in Gaza. From thousands of feet in the air, a pilot who aims and presses a button can ignore, forget, or be unable to fathom that at that moment he killed innocent people. We came here to remind them of this.”
Also on Friday, clashes broke out between police and Israeli Arabs rock-throwers protesting the IAF raids in Gaza. In Tiberias on Thursday, some 15 youths burned tires and a Palestinian flag, in support of the operation in Gaza.
We claim as different groups of anarchists, a series of actions aimed at attacking capital and the State and everything they represent. During the night hours of the 19-21 of July the following solidarity actions were carried out:
-An attack in Hendaia (Basque country in France) on a Loomis truck (security company which gains great economic benefits from their monopoly on the transportation of commissary and cafeteria money in various prisons) and the expropriation of 22,000€.
-Attacks on various bank branches for being responsible for human exploitation.
-The sabotage of security vehicles belonging to the Martutente (Guipuzkoa) prison.
-Attack on the facade of the juvenile prison in Tarragona.
-Electronic attack on different web pages of the UGT, CGT, and CCOO syndicates for affiliation with jailers and for defending repressive bodies.
The objective of all of these actions was to attack whichever focal point of power. The money collected during the expropriation will allow us for once to recover the costs which accompany these actions, we will continue to attack power.
Nor·mal·i·za·tion: a “colonization of the mind” whereby the oppressed subject comes to believe that the oppressor’s reality is the only “normal” reality…and that the oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with.
Those who engage in normalization either ignore this oppression, or accept it as the status quo that can be lived with.
In an attempt to whitewash its violations of international law and human rights, Israel attempts to re-brand itself or present itself as “normal” — even “enlightened” — through an intricate array of relations and activities encompassing hi-tech, cultural, legal, LGBT and other realms.
Normalization applies to relationships that convey a misleading or deceptive image of normalcy, symmetry, or parity despite a patently abnormal and asymmetric relationship of colonial oppression and apartheid.
Remi Kanazi: 2 days after Normalize This! is released, a university who had called me “controversial” & “politically polarizing” strips funding from my event. Calling for equal rights in the face of oppression will always be “controversial”, but luckily activists around the world are redoubling their efforts against Israeli apartheid, occupation, & ethnic cleansing!
THANK YOU to all who have watched, liked & shared my debut video! Please keep hitting that “SHARE” button if you enjoy the piece! #NormalizeJustice
The international medical community has long maintained an ethical line against force-feeding. As infectious disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz has written, “Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients… The procedure is, in a word, barbaric.”
Yet in Guantanamo Bay, it is daily procedure for a reported 18 hunger striking detainees. Every day medical professionals watch strapped-down inmates gasp, gag, and choke with streaming eyes as rubber tubes are snaked through sensitive nasal passages into empty stomachs. Despite urging from institutions including the American Medical Association and theNew England Journal of Medicine, Gitmo prison medical staff continue to participate, all of them just following orders. All but one.
Comment: Remember that these men have never been found guilty of any crime whatsoever, yet they have been imprisoned and tortured for years, against all international and human rights laws. This force feeding sounds like one more torture technique they suffer for no reason at all.
One nurse, it was revealed this week via human rights group Reprieve, has refused to participate in the force-feedings. The nurse, who has not been named, has been assigned other duties at the prison camp. As the first and only medical professional to refuse to force-feed, specifically citing ethical grounds, he is to be commended.
As Reprieve attorney Cori Crider told the Guardian, “This guy is basically a hero, and he should be permitted to give care to detainees that is ethically appropriate.”
Crider is right to praise the nurse as a “hero.” There’s a reason that institutional lines don’t get crossed more often — there is a risk in crossing them. If rules were truly made to be broken, they wouldn’t be rules. Rules and orders can be resisted, but they persist with the assumption that they are there to be followed.
Herein lies the power and the problem of the hero. A hero is necessarily an exception — it’s inherent in the concept. So while the Gitmo nurse deserves praise as a hero, for the brutalized hunger strikers, this is no time for heroes. Or it is no time, at least, for heroes forced to stand alone. All the medical professionals at the camp should follow suit. It’s the least that should be done in a prison camp that shouldn’t exist at all.
Kent Sepkowitz, MD Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Quality and Safety
“All that is necessary for a triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” goes the phrase attributed to Edmund Burke, though it’s not proven he ever said those precise words. The 18th century statesman and political philosopher did, however, write something along similar lines: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle,” he noted in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.
The two phrases — the popular and the precise — transmit the same general proposition. But the latter emphasizes something crucially lacking in the former. “The good must associate,” it stresses, “in a struggle.” The more famous saying, meanwhile, seems to put the onus on good men as individuals to resist inaction.
The resisting nurse cannot be faulted for inaction. But one good man here is not enough. As a spokesperson for the military southern command that oversees Gitmo said, the nurse’s protest is “being handled administratively.” This one ethical act of refusal can be absorbed by military management, and the torturous practices at Gitmo can continue unabated, even while legal challenges mount and international censure has been issued.
It is not enough, after all, that people act for good. In the struggle against the horrors of Gitmo, ethical actors must, as Burke urged, “associate” such that there’s no room nor need for heroes at all.
Over the course of events, the Ukrainian and Russian anarchist movements have split into three different sides. A first group concentrated on producing internet-statements against both sides of the conflict. For them, keeping out of any social processes is a matter of principle, and they only want to monitor and assess. Participation in the social protest is not a goal for them, as they prefer to keep their hands clean. Since every process has input from either disgusting liberals, hated nationalists, awful stalinists, all three at the same time, or other undesirables, one can never fully participate in anything and the only alternative is to stay home and publish statements on the internet about how everything is going from bad to worse. However, most of the time these statements are just self-evident, banalities.
A second group, was made up of those who got excited about all the riot-porn and anti-police violence in Kiev, without considering who was carrying out this violence and in whose interests. Certain antifascists drifted as far as to defend the «national unity» in Maidan, and threatened particular Kiev anarchists due to their criticism of Maidan and refusal to participate. Most of the people in this camp are just fans of anti-police violence without any theoretical frame, but some want to give Maidan an imagined anti-authoritarian flavor, by equating the general meeting of Maidan («Veche») with the revolutionary councils established during 20th century revolutions. They base this claim on the social demands occasionally presented at Maidan, but these demands were always at the periphery of the Maidan agenda.
Members of self defence units march to the parliament building in Kiev February 25, 2014. REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili
One of these peripheral demands was the proposal that oligarchs should pay a tenth of their income in taxes and was generally in tune with nationalistic populism. However, the demands of the Kiev Maidan were still far from returning the billions stolen by oligarchs back to society. In Vinnytsa and Zhitomir, there was an attempt to expropriate factories owned by German capital , but this was the only case going beyond the national-liberal context that I am familiar with.
In any case, the main problem at Maidan wasn’t the lack of a social agenda and direct democracy, but the fact that people did not even demand them. Even if everyone kept repeating that they did not want another «orange revolution» like in 2004, nor for Yulia Timoshenko to return, at the end of the day chocolate industrialist Poroshenko and Vitaly Klitchko are leading the polls. This was the choice the people made as they grew weary of the revolutionary path as proposed by the radical nationalists of the Right sector. As of now, people want to return to «life as usual,» to life before Yanukovich, and are not prepared to make the sacrifices that further revolutionary developments would demand. Representative democracy is indeed like a hydra, if you cut one head, two will grow in its place.
However, none of the fears of «fascist takeover» have materialized. Fascists gained very little real power, and in Ukraine their historical role will now be that of stormtroopers for liberal reforms demanded by the IMF and the European Union — that is, pension cuts, an up to five times increase in consumer gas prices, and others. Fascism in Ukraine has a powerful tradition, but it has been incapable of proceeding with its own agenda in the revolutionary wave. It is highly likely, that the Svoboda-party will completely discredit itself in front of its voters.
anarchists in the ukraine have a history of resisting fascists and other ultra-nationalists.
But anyone attempting to intervene, anarchists included, could have encountered the same fate — that is, to be sidelined after all the effort. During the protests, anarchists and the «left» were looking towards the Right sector with envy, but in the end all the visibility and notoriety, for which they paid dearly, was not enough to help the Right sector gain any real influence.
If Kiev anarchists would have picked the position of «neutral observers» after Yanukovich had shot demonstrators, it would have completely discredited them. If after being shot, the working class, or more exactly «the people,» that is, the working class along with the lower strata of the bourgeoisie, would have failed to overthrow Yanukovich, Ukrainian society would have fallen into a lethargic sleep such as the one Russian and Belarusian societies are experiencing. Obviously, after the massacre there was no choice left except to overthrow the power, no matter what would come in its place. Anarchists in Kiev were in no position to significantly influence the situation, but standing aside was no longer an option.
And thus, we come to the third, «centrist,» position taken by anarchists — between the brainless actionism and the «neutral» internet statements. The camp of realist anarchists understood, that even if the Maidan protests pretty much lacked a meaningful positive program, something had to be done or the future would be dire.
The limits of intervention
In Kiev, anarchists took part in a number of important initiatives during the revolutionary wave — first of all the occupation of the ministry of education, and the raid against the immigration bureau by the local No Border group, which was looking for proof of illegal cooperation with security services of foreign countries. But the most successful anarchist intervention was the one in Kharkiv, where Maidan was relatively weak but also freer of nationalistic influence.
Still, such centrism has its own problems. For one, you might unintentionally help the wrong forces gain power, also discrediting radical protest. A second problem would be that you might end up fighting a fight which is not your own. When AntiMaidan attacked the Maidan in the city of Kharkiv, its imagined enemy were not the anarchists, but NATO, EU or Western-Ukrainian fascists. Since anarchists had joined Maidan, it would have been cowardly to desert once the fight started. Thus anarchists ended up fighting side by side with liberals and fascists. I do not want to criticize the Kharkiv anarchists, after all they made, perhaps, the most serious attempt among Ukrainian anarchists to influence the course of events, but this was hardly the fight, and these were hardly the allies they wanted.
And so, comes the point when desertion becomes imperative, and that is when civil war begins. As of now, it’s still too early to make any final assessment of the anarchist attempts to influence Maidan, but after the beginning of a civil war, Maidan will no longer play a role. From now on, assembly will gradually turn to the army, and assault rifles will replace Molotov cocktails. Military discipline will replace spontaneous organisation.
Some supporters of the Ukrainian organisation, Borotba (meaning Struggle) and the Russian Left Front claim that they are attempting to do the same things as the anarchists did at Maidan, that is, direct protest towards social demands. But AntiMaidan has no structures of direct democracy, not even distorted ones. It quickly adopted the model of hierarchical, militaristic organisations. The AntiMaidan leadership consists of former police and reserve officers. It does not attempt to exert influence through the masses, but with military power and weapons. This makes perfect sense, considering that according to a recent opinion poll, even in the most pro-«federalist» area of Lugansk, a mere 24% of the population is in favor of armed takeovers of government structures. That is, AntiMaidan cannot count on a victory through mass demonstrations.
Whereas at its essence Maidan was a middle-class liberal and nationalistic protest, supported by part of the bourgeoisie, AntiMaidan is purely counter-revolutionary in tendency. Of course, AntiMaidan has its own grassroots level. One could attempt to intervene, but an intervention by joining would mean supporting a Soviet, imperialist approach. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Borotba, the Russian Left Front and Boris Kagarlitsky have all joined this Soviet chauvinist camp. Intervening in Maidan made sense only as long as the enemy were Berkut police forces and paid thugs. When the opponents are mislead AntiMaidan participants, it no longer makes sense to fight in the streets.
When looking at either side of the conflict one can see a dangerous tendency, which every anarchist and anti-authoritarian will face in the future: the recuperation of anti-authoritarian rhetoric and terminology for the purposes of hierarchical ideologies. On the one side, «autonomous nationalists» who have found sympathy amongst many anarchists, and on the other, intellectuals such as Boris Kagarlitsky. Both characterising warring factions with attributes such as «direct democracy» and «self organisation.» In reality, these characteristics are either present in a distorted form or not at all. When two different flavors of nationalism are «self-organising» in order to maim and murder each other, there is nothing to celebrate. Subsequent to the events in Ukraine, it is clear that anarchists must explain the essential difference between «self-organisation» and self-organisation to the world.
According to the opinion poll referenced above, in Eastern Ukraine as a whole, only 12% of the population supports the «federalists’» armed actions, whereas the Kiev government is supported by some 30%. The remaining 58% supports neither, and in conditions of civil war, this is the majority on which we should count. We should encourage desertion and conflict avoidance. Under any other conditions, and if anarchists had more influence, we could form independent units against both warring factions.
Unarmed civilians have stopped bloodbaths in several places by moving in between the troops as human shields. If not for this kind of civil disobedience, a full-scale war would have been launched much earlier. We should support this movement, and attempt to direct it against both «federalist» and government troops simultaneously.
In case Russia reacts either by occupying parts of Eastern Ukraine or the country as a whole, we could take the example of anarchist partisans in World War II era France and Italy. Under such conditions, the main enemy is the occupying army, as it will antagonise the whole population very quickly. But it is also necessary to keep the maximum distance from the nationalistic elements of the resistance, as any alliance with them would hinder anarchists from realising their own program in the framework of the resistance.
The events in Odessa are a tragedy, and it is possible, that among those who died in the House of the Trade Unions were also people who played no part in flaring up the violence. People who threw molotov cocktails at the House should have understood the consequences. Even if the fire igniting was not solely due to them, it is not for lack of trying.
In case civil war spreads, these deaths are just the beginning. No doubt that on both sides the majority only wants a better life for their close ones and their motherland, and many hate governments and oligarchs to an equal extent. The more sincerely naïve people die, the greater the pressure to support one of the factions in the war, and we must struggle against this pressure.
Whereas it may occasionally be worth it to swallow tear gas or to feel the police baton for a bourgeois revolution, it makes no sense at all to die in a civil war between two equally bourgeois and nationalist sides. It would not be another Maidan but something completely ifferent. No blood, anarchist or otherwise, should spill due to this stupidity.
Antti Rautiainen
- there’s much more to read from this report, see autonomous action,
