[Photos © Bryan Sansivaro]
Blog
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Abandoned America
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Palestinianism
as tomorrow, this remains the Palestinian vision—what I call Palestinianism. They will always produce organisations to realise it. Nothing in the recognition or in UN declarations put a stop to Palestinianism. No one said, “Enough. You can live next to a Jewish state, but not on its ruins.” They continued to fuel the vision that the Jewish state can one day be gone. -
The end of broadcasting hope
South Korea presidents seem to alternate between hard and soft in their attitude towards the North. Currently, with Lee Jae-myung, we’re very much on the soft side. Here’s Kang Dong Wan at the Daily NK on the latest idiocy:
After 52 years of broadcasting hope into the darkness of North Korea, the silence is deafening. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) has pulled the plug on these vital transmissions—a decision that left me stunned and dismayed. What makes this even more shocking is the timing: NIS Director Lee Jong-seok made this choice less than a month into his tenure. This isn’t just a policy shift; it’s an abandonment of the state’s most fundamental duty and a clear violation of law.
North Koreans live in almost complete isolation, cut off from the outside world. These broadcasts represent their only window to see beyond their borders. No previous administration has ever had the NIS suspend radio broadcasts to North Korea, making this truly unprecedented. The flow of information into North Korea remains our most effective and strategic weapon for bringing about change within North Korean society. Civilian organizations have long wrestled with this same challenge: how to effectively deliver information to North Koreans.
The Lee Jae-myung administration declared upon taking office that peace means winning without fighting. Given North Korea’s advanced nuclear capabilities, the real path to victory without fighting lies in psychological and information warfare. North Korean authorities teach through political indoctrination that “South Korea is a rotten, diseased capitalist society full of homeless beggars.” But when North Koreans secretly encounter Korean movies or dramas, they discover a different reality. They express shock at South Korea’s economic prosperity and, above all, its guarantee of freedom and human rights. External information opens their eyes to another world entirely. Such information ultimately becomes a Trojan horse that can crack the foundations of dictatorship.
Yet since taking office, the Lee Jae-myung administration has banned leaflets to North Korea, stopped loudspeaker broadcasts, and now suspended NIS broadcasts. When you consider who benefits most from these measures, the answer becomes clear….
North Korean young people now think differently from their parents. They aren’t the “human bullets and bombs” generation willing to sacrifice their lives for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Instead, they question: “Why should I sacrifice my life for Kim Jong Un?” This ideological shift stems directly from exposure to external information.
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The shift to ideology-based medicine
“stigma, societal pressure, and fear of dishonour often prevent victims from seeking help”.Cousin marriage exacerbates the situation. If your father-in-law is also your mother’s brother, the pressure to keep quiet and avoid bringing shame on the family is stronger. It’s a big factor in the isolation of women and girls, raising questions about whether they can refuse when their families insist on cousin marriage.
Forced marriage is a term we hear a lot of in relation to these communities. With good reason.
One of its purposes is to keep wealth within the family. The independent MP Iqbal Mohamed acknowledged as much when he said in the House of Commons that cousin marriage “helps put families on a more secure financial foothold”. These are presumably the “economic advantages” referred to in the new NHS guidance, exposing the naïveté of taking such statements at face value.
Cousin marriage is practised in patriarchal cultures where men hold the power. It’s a way of maintaining the status quo and that may mean persuading teenage girls to marry instead of finishing their education, for example. It perpetuates existing inequalities, and it’s mothers who shoulder most of the responsibility of caring for disabled children.
There was a time when institutions like the NHS would have prioritised health over everything else. Now, though, it seems to be run on a principle of not causing offence to anyone, even if that means abandoning evidence. Anyone except women, that is, given that they are the big losers in this shift to ideology-based medicine.
[Indenting is a problem here for the moment – don’t ask – so I’ve italicised the paragraphs from the article, with my comments not italicised.]
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Babyn Yar
Full text:
On this day in 1941, 33,771 Jews were murdered over two days in Nazi occupied Ukraine. The Babyn Yar massacre was the largest killing of Jews outside of concentration camps and destroyed most of Kyiv’s Jewish population.
Using newly uncovered data, researchers pieced together the identities of 1,761 previously unknown victims.
The last time these victims’ names were spoken was likely moments before their deaths. Today, their names were read aloud and honored at a memorial marking the massacre’s anniversary.
Aka Babi Yar.
Exercising her right to speak out
in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public – but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.
Blind obedience to trans dogma
hem’ treasurer of LGBT+ Liberal Democrats. He proceeded to dismiss the LV4W motion as a ‘sham’ and demanded members ‘reject the idea that trans identities are up for debate’. Unsurprisingly, Lib Dem MPs slunk out of the room before the vote, apparently because they had another meeting to attend. Hollowood’s final plea to ‘vote against this suppression’ was met with jeers when she dared to mention the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the fevered, dogmatic opposition faced by Hollowood and LV4W. After all, blind obedience to trans dogma is one of the Lib Dems’ few consistent policies…
The Patsy Calton Award should have been a moment to celebrate women’s contribution to politics, and to honour activists like Hollowood. Instead, it became a monument to the party’s contempt for its own female members. When it comes to sex and gender, the party’s pratfalls aren’t clumsy accidents – they’re deliberate. The joke, however, is clearly on women.
The “benefits” of first-cousin marriage
insular communities held together by “inward” marriage, perhaps because these have a tendency to become ever more detached from the moral trajectory of wider civilisation. Just look at walled-off Christian sects and millenarian cults.
And the role this all plays in keeping women hidden and sequestered in their traditional subservient roles should surely be clear enough.
This is also worth a read:
For British Pakistanis, moving away from their hometown and leaving behind family is not easy. Many start a fresh life in the UK but eventually become fearful that they will lose their cultural values and, as a way to stay connected, they encourage or even force their children to marry back home within the family. This is an attempt to keep family ties strong and maintain family relationships.
Others will frown upon the British culture i.e. clubbing, dating, pre-marital sexual relationships and as a way to prevent their children from engaging, consanguineous marriages will take place.
Flames of the revolution
Russia. The state is pressuring young people to become the “flames of the revolution” through increased organizational and ideological control, with these history sessions designed to stamp out any signs of disloyalty before they can develop.