Bulletins and News Discussion from July 15th to July 21st, 2024 - It's Joever

Image is of Joseph Robinette Biden, who has stepped down and will not run against Trump in the 2024 election.

In the aftermath of Trump surviving an assassination attempt, many professional opinion-havers are now talking about the scourge of "political violence" that has overtaken, or will soon overtake America, and how we must not let chaos rule. This is, of course, patently absurd. The American government and its allies have been the greatest force of political violence on the planet since the beginning of colonialism, and the foundations of the country are made of corpses. Today, America commits political violence by forcing Ukrainians into the maw of Russian artillery instead of trying to reach a peaceful settlement, which Russia has repeatedly expressed interest in and offered Ukraine relatively favourable terms. They supply Israel with endless weaponry to destroy entire cities and populations, while Biden supporters insist that somehow things could be worse than daily massacres and mass starvation.

In May 1945, French police fired on protestors, causing retaliatory attacks on French settlers, killing about a hundred. In response, the French murdered 45,000 Algerians in a little under two months, in a frenzy of political violence called the Sétif and Guelma massacre. As the massacre was being completed, the International Court of Justice was established. It goes without saying that Algeria never benefited from the ICJ, and the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 was made inevitable. Over a million Algerians were killed before France could bear the fighting no longer and gave up, and Algeria won itself a state. Comparisons to the ongoing war of independence and genocide in Palestine are obvious.

While the means of colonial violence have evolved over the centuries, the basic structure of it has not. As in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, resistance groups in and around Palestine are fighting for a world with less political violence. The American government would drown every city in the developing world in blood to prevent peace.

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The Country of the Week is Algeria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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2.2K comments

am I correct to surmise that the modern world can be brought to its knees when actual cyberwarfare comes into play?
- perhaps, but I think the more pertinent lesson here is that anti-western countries need to redouble their efforts to create a separate IT ecosystem from the West, to protect from either incompetence (in this case) or intentional attacks. I'm sure there will soon be various theories about how this was an intentional attack by the US to test vulnerabilities in the event of future wars, but regardless of whether it was or wasn't, the lesson is the same. and hopefully this is another kick up the ass of the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, etc governments to shift away from Microsoft and similar systems ASAP.
- Politicians and bureaucrats loves putting everything on the computer because it significantly reduces the cost to them for doing bureaucracy either by paper or by face to face interactions. Since putting everything on the computer has always been about doing more bureaucracy for less money and not about creating a more resilient or better society nobody has been too eager to pay for stuff like redundancies.
  I don't know what the situation is like in other golf course countries but I have a suspicion that Denmark is not unique in having underfunded and neglected IT security. When authorities reviewed 25 out of 90 public IT systems designated as being of critical importance to society, auditors found "very severe" security flaws in 20. These flaws included lacking plans for how to avoid data loss and restore services after a major breakdown. Only seven of the 25 had plans in place for major emergencies. Stating "security through obscurity" reasons, the regime has denied to tell the public any further details, including what systems were found to be faulty, what specific 25 systems were reviewed or even to make the list of the 90 critically important IT systems public.
  The situation is aggravated by government bodies having fewer and fewer qualified IT professionals employed, instead relying on external consultants on a project by project base.
  Bottom line: We're fucked. Everything depends on the computer and if the Russians, the Chinese or the perfidious Swede made a serious attempt to strike at these systems the whole house of cards might come tumbling down.
  
  Lol. “Golf course countries.” How succinct.
- As someone dealing with problems related to CrowdStrike right now- yes absolutely.
- Yes, the modern world is hilariously fragile and we are like 1 emp strike, or a bad hack away from grinding the economy to a halt.

2197 comments