The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

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That Time The CIA and Pentagon Went To War

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Against Each Other

William Rivers Pitt writes at Truthout about foolishness of “raw and ponderous weight” in Syria.

The Knights of Righteousness (yeah, that really is what they call themselves) have been armed and funded by — wait for it — the Central Intelligence Agency. Their opponents, the Syrian Democratic Forces, have been armed and funded by the Pentagon. Ergo, based upon the most recent battle in Marea, the Defense Department went to war with the CIA half a world away.

Read the full piece: The CIA and the Pentagon Are Shooting at Each Other | Truthout

Vox Goes Inside Jacobin

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Dylan Matthews spent some time with Bhaskar Sunkara and Neal Meyer of Jacobin Magazine recently, and produced a marvelous profile piece for Vox. He points out that although the magazine is currently riding a wave of interest sparked by the Sanders campaign, it’s relevance will continue beyond the elections of 2016.

Jacobin has in the past five years become the leading intellectual voice of the American left, the most vibrant and relevant socialist publication in a very long time.

Sunkara started publishing copies of the magazine in his George Washington University dorm room back in 2011, when he was all of 21. The financial crisis appeared to have given socialism and Marxism another inning, and Sunkara wanted an outlet that took socialist theory more seriously than existing outlets like the Nation. Jacobin took off; it now boasts a print circulation of about 20,000 and has gained about 400 more subscribers a week since Bernie started his ascent in November. Jacobin’s success is a sign that even if Bernie fades, there’s still a constituency for socialist ideas — a fact that could turn out to be much more important than the Sanders campaign itself.

I think of Jacobin as a way to feed my mind each day, via their website as well as the print issues, and it’s a great pleasure to be involved with the magazine via our Southland Reading Group.

Read the entire profile: Inside Jacobin: how a socialist magazine is winning the left’s war of ideas – Vox

Einstein: Why Socialism?

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einstein-socialism

In May of 1949, one of the greatest minds on the planet, renowned physicist Albert Einstein, wrote an essay for the inaugural issue of The Monthly Review. In it, he outlines the crisis facing human society and enumerates some of the evils that are part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. He then turns to discuss the solution.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Read the full essay: Why Socialism?

Renewed Interest in Socialism

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What does it mean to socialists?

Alan Maass of the ISO and Bhaskar Sunkara of the DSA discuss what the renewed interest in socialism in the United States surrounding the Sanders campaign means for socialists who are already organized, both in terms of the opportunities and of the challenges.

Sunkara spoke about the importance of ongoing struggle beyond an election campaign.

I think you can find those little incubators of, if not what socialism looks like, then the power of collective action. And I think the memory of those moments — of strikes and other extra-parliamentary activity — is more durable and longer lasting than something like a presidential campaign.

There’s a lot to be said about that and what it would take to transform society. It’s not just a battle of ideas and convincing people that we need more social democracy, but figuring out how to organize people to exert disruptive power, be it through a strike, or disrupting the day-to-day functioning of political parties like the Democratic Party, or shaking up the regular functioning of the trade union movement by sparking rank-and-file activity and militancy.

There’s a lot that needs to be said about that vision. Just because I focus at this moment heavily on the Sanders campaign doesn’t mean that I think that’s the only arena of struggle.

Read the entire discussion: Can America go socialist? | SocialistWorker.org

Trumpism and Democracy

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Boston University Professor of History Andrew J. Bacevich writes about what Trumpism means for Democracy.

If Trump secures the Republican nomination, now an increasingly imaginable prospect, the party is likely to implode. Whatever rump organization survives will have forfeited any remaining claim to represent principled conservatism.

None of this will matter to Trump, however. He is no conservative and Trumpism requires no party. Even if some new institutional alternative to conventional liberalism eventually emerges, the two-party system that has long defined the landscape of American politics will be gone for good.

Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name, the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.

Read the entire essay: Don’t Cry for Me, America | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

DuBois on the Election of 1956

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On October 20, 1956, W. E. B. DuBois wrote for The Nation on the upcoming Presidential election.

I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.

Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No, it is dogged hope. It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord and not because of a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Read the Entire Essay: W.E.B. Dubois, I Won’t Vote

On The Front Lines Against ISIS

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Luke Mogelson reports from the border of ISIS territory, where Iraqi civilians fight for their survival.

When I visited the main junction in the center of town, however, three P.K.K. flags were mounted atop an empty billboard frame in the middle of a traffic circle. The highest one bore a portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader and founder of the P.K.K., who is serving a life sentence in a Turkish prison. A pillar of Öcalan’s ideology is strict gender equality, both in society and on the battlefield, and about half of the P.K.K. fighters posted around the junction were women. Many of them—cigarettes in their mouths, Kalashnikovs on their backs, and grenades fastened to the sashes around their waists—looked no older than sixteen or seventeen. Shortly after we arrived, I heard one young woman yelling furiously. She was standing in the rotary, beneath the flag of Öcalan, facing several peshmerga soldiers.

“You don’t talk to me!” she told them.

A moment later, a swarm of P.K.K. fighters, Yazidi militiamen, and peshmerga troops were shouting at and jostling one another. It seemed to be about the flags. The peshmerga troops appeared to want to raise theirs.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” someone yelled.

Many of the P.K.K. fighters had unslung their rifles and were holding them at the low ready. Others were propping machine guns on bipods behind vehicles and rubble piles. A man I had just been interviewing was stretched out on his stomach, aiming into the crowd.

“Hold on!” a peshmerga soldier shouted. “Don’t do this!”

“I’m going to raise our flag!” another said. “I want to raise our flag!”

“No, no, come back. Don’t do it.”

“Our home is destroyed, and now we’re going to destroy it again?” one of the Yazidi militiamen asked. “We should be fighting ISIS, not each other!”

Read the Full Report: The Front Lines – The New Yorker

Metadata Can Be Murder

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From Ars Technica UK:

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.” Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA’s SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person’s likelihood of being a terrorist.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA’s methods as “ridiculously optimistic” and “completely bullshit.” A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET’s machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

Read More: The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people | Ars Technica UK