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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2018-69
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
One of the two companies who wrote the Senate reports was caught running a fake "Russian influence" campaign:
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.
The U.S. military will retreat from the al-Tanf border area in the southeast of Syria where it was blocking the crossing between Syria and Iraq. The reopening of the border will help the economies of both countries.
As expected the Russians are taking the initiative to put the northeastern area back under Syrian government control over. A delegation of the Kurdish YPG and the SDF forces will shortly visit Moscow where they will receive new orders.
This Daily Beast piece confirms our take that Trump torpedoed the neocons' plans for Syria. He took the offer Erdogan made as a chance to escape the trap: Bolton’s Hawkish Syria Plan Backfired, Pushing Trump to Get Out – The national security adviser expanded U.S. goals in Syria to challenge Iran. But Trump wasn’t on board, senior officials say, and Turkey took an opportunity to push the U.S. out.
How long until Bolton gets fired?
A good read from Matt Taibbi on the lunacy of the domestic U.S. discussion: We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends – Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war
Unlike Taibbi I expect the discussion to die down over the coming holidays. If it does not do so, Trump will create some new outrage to divert from the issue.
Service announcement: Over the next five days your blog host will be visiting family and do a lot of cooking. Posting will be light.
Use as open thread …
@ Posted by: Pft | Dec 23, 2018 6:48:38 PM | 85
Yes, slaves in the USA had a better life quality than the so-called “white trash” during the post-colonial times. Artisans in the late Middle Ages in Europe also had a much better life quality than the proletariat in the first Industrial Revolution (Marx picks the numbers for the Prussian Army: the minimum height required for serving was 1,78m, and, during the Industrial Revolution, begun to diminish steadily, which indicates the dismal situation of nutrition of the Purssian workers; he also picks up the numbers of infant mortality in England, which also steadily rose during the Industrial Revolution).
But liberal (i.e. capitalist) ideology was never about life quality, but about liberty (freedom): if you take the first articles of the French Constitution (upon which the American Bill of Rights is heavily based), you can clearly read that liberty is the capacity of an individual to fully enjoy his private property (l’industrie). This concept is important, because it is the juridical basis for the rights to life (because dead men cannot enjoy their private property) and freedom of movement (with his possessions). By logic, you can infer that, for the liberals, you are more free the more private property you have: therefore the right of the capitalist (the owner of the means of production) to freely exploit the labor power he bought in the free market with his money (money-capital).
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@ Posted by: somebody | Dec 23, 2018 7:48:24 PM | 92
It depends on what type of slavery you’re talking about. Yes, in capitalism, slavery was (and could only be) used for very simple tasks: mainly agriculture and other extrativist activities (mining, silviculture etc.). That’s because, in capitalism, a slave is fixed capital: he’s paid in kind, not in money, so he doesn’t engage the market. In accountancy terms, a slave would be equal to a beast of burden (e.g. a horse): a machine you use until it wears off. In Brazil, where capitalist slavery happened in its most pure form (because most of it happened when it was still legal), the average life expectancy of a slave that arrived the shores alive was 7 years: more than 90% were men, so they obviously didn’t reproduce, and they worked till the death. Hence the golden age of slave trade.
The Southern USA practiced slavery much beyond the times when the British Empire outlawed slave trade, so they engaged in slave breeding. But that was a desperate, exceptional circumstance: that was not how it should work.
In the Ancient times (the Greek and Roman era), a slave was everything but a politician and a soldier: teacher, philosopher, nanny (for the aristocratic children), accountant, secretary, farmer (the majority), miner, etc. etc. Most of the Greek culture that came to Rome came through the enslaving of the Greek population. Such sophisticated slaves were possible because the Ancient world was very fragmented and violent: each conquest came with a box of (cultural and technologic) surprises. Most of the Roman technological advances came through assimilation of conquered “tribes” (including the famous “gladius” — the AK-47 of the Ancient World).
The Roman citizens were either Aristocracy or simply common citizens (mostly, inhabitants of Rome itself or at least Italy, Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania). The Aristocracy’s job was simply to be politicians; the citizens were soldiers or did nothing (after the absortion of Aegyptus and the foundation of the Empire, the inhabitants of Rome didn’t need to work for food), with occasional working in constructions projects within the city in exchange of coin. Only after the Vandals conquered North Africa some 400 years later the free food was interrupted.
Posted by: vk | Dec 24 2018 13:15 utc | 108
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