[Marxism] The YPG as ground troops for the Russian Blitzkrieg in northern Aleppo

[Michael Karadjis via Marxism]

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As the US-backed and armed YPG continues its murderous attacks and 
conquests of rebel-held, Arab-majority towns in northern Aleppo 
province, in direct alliance and coordination with the Russian 
Blitzkrieg bombings, a number of Rojava-Firsters, unsure how to react, 
have been muttering about the need for "evidence". I admit to being 
confused about this demand, to show that the Russian mad bombers and 
their YPG ground troops, which are attacking the same towns at the same 
times, are actually working together. I was unsure whether this meant 
some simply hadn't been reading the news, or whether it was a demand to 
find secret documents proving coordination; because, for example, maybe 
their attacking the same towns at the same time was just coincidence, 
just a strange accident of history. Since I don't have these documents, 
and consider the idea that it is all purely accidental to be unlikely, I 
have just put together some "evidence" for those who simply haven't been 
watching:


In the article 
http://www.voanews.com/content/moderate-syrian-rebel-factions-face-wipe-out/3180474.html, 
we read:


“YPG and rebel factions have been protecting civilians as they travel 
from Azaz. But at the same time the YPG has launched attacks on Islamist 
and moderate rebel factions around Afrin, seeking to expand the Kurdish 
enclave. Russian airstrikes on Saturday helped Kurdish fighters 
alongside militiamen from Jaysh al-Thwar, a YPG Sunni Arab ally, to 
capture the strategic Tal Zinkah hill north of Aleppo,” and in the same 
article, PYD leader Salih Muslim is quoted as saying that “the Russian 
airstrikes are targeting terrorists, Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra” 
(these are the names Muslim always uses to describe all rebels).


Likewise, in the article 
http://syriadirect.org/news/side-campaign-in-north-aleppo-raises-fears-of-sdf-linking-kobani-to-afrin/, 
reporting on the SDF capture of the Minagh airbase, we read that in the 
lead-up to this capture:


“Russian warplanes, which have been essential to the Syrian regime's 
progress in the north, bombed rebel positions around the Minagh airport 
Wednesday as battles raged between the SDF and rebels, reported 
pro-opposition Aleppo News Network Wednesday. A war journalist present 
at the airport front confirmed to Syria Direct that Russian planes had 
carried out 16 airstrikes Wednesday on rebel positions there. On 
Tuesday, the SDF took control of two villages and a military base on the 
outskirts of the Minagh military airport” (and captured the base on 
Wednesday).


The same article, also reports on the eminently just and sensible truce 
negotiated at the end of the December skirmishes between the FSA and the 
YPG/SDF, stipulating that “the FSA would not move towards 
Kurdish-controlled areas and vice-versa.” It is fairly obvious who broke 
that truce, as the article continues:


“This week’s incursion into rebel-held areas in northern Aleppo is the 
fourth truce violation between them and the Marea Operations Room, 
Mohammed Najem a-Din, correspondent with pro-opposition Smart News, told 
Syria Direct Wednesday. “The SDF and Jaish al-Thuwwar have taken 
advantage of rebels being busy fighting the regime on Nubl and Zahraa” 
in order to make gains into their territory, said Najem a-Din.”


Syrian Observer 
(http://www.syrianobserver.com/EN/News/30560/Syrian_Democratic_Forces_Advance_Towards_Tel_Rifaat_Under_Russian_Air_Support) 
reported that:


“The Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces achieved a significant 
military victory in the area of Tel Rifaat in the northern Aleppo 
countryside, seizing control of the village of Kafrnaya to its south … 
one day after they captured Ayn Daqnah, in an effort to blockade the 
town from three sides. The sources said that Russian warplanes had been 
providing covering fire for the SDF during its attempt to enter the town 
and attacked opposition positions with dozens of rockets and bombs.”


According to Scott Lucas 
(http://eaworldview.com/2016/02/syria-daily-kurdish-pyd-we-will-not-pull-back-v-turkey-and-rebels/):


“With rebels under pressure from a regime-Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah 
offensive north of Aleppo city, Kurdish forces began advancing earlier 
this month into rebel areas, taking a series of villages and the town of 
Deir Jawad on the Turkish border. … Despite the Turkish intervention, 
the Kurdish forces are still advancing. They captured Ayn Daqna, east of 
Azaz, on Sunday. They also are continuing assaults on the important town 
of Tal Rifaat, having been repelled on Friday and Saturday. Russia is 
now openly supporting the Kurdish attacks with airstrikes — at least 15 
were reported 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Assad's UN envoy reveals regime support for PYD | TRT World

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Your rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding Louis I was quite clear I don't
think alliances with Assad advance the cause of consistent and radical
democratic solutions to the crisis of Syria and the region. I don't at all
think the PKK-led current are incapable of doing the wrong things in
terrible situations in each of the four states in which they're fighting
brutal and complex struggles. But their recent record is in context of the
region is remarkable, and deserves a bit of solidarity and the benefit of
some doubt when their most vicious enemies (e.g. an Assad crony and the
Turkish state media) slander them.

I was particularly objecting to your turning a self-interested and unproven
*claim* - via a lackey media source beholden to the authoritarian Turkish
government with its own obvious interests in spreading this story,  which
is in any case belied by recent clashes between the SAA and YPG/J and SDF -
into a "reveal", in the subject heading. Which you seemed to have backed
down from to your credit. Other claims of an overall alliance and a
Faustian deal for autonomy have abounded if not necessarily made by you,
and are even more unlikely, given the clear public position of the Syrian
regime not to mention its long-term chauvinistic practice.

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 2/19/16 5:18 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
>
>> I do know the PYD and
>> allies have the only thing like a consistent radical democratic program
>> and
>> practice in Syria, and the PKK-led current is the only thing in the region
>> like a leftist radical-democratic force with a mass base, i.e. hegemonic
>> among millions of people. That warrants some solidarity and should mean
>> some care being taken in criticisms rather than blithe denunciations from
>> armchair guerilla commanders.
>>
>
> You don't seem to get the Turkish media report. It does not make any claim
> that the Baathists are okay with a future Kurdistan in Syria. It only
> claims that Assad and the Russians have combined with the Kurds (and the
> Afghan Shi'ites, the Iraqi militias, Hizbollah and perhaps men from Mars)
> to annihilate Syrian rebels. If that is your idea of radical democracy, I'm
> having none of it.
>
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[Marxism] Fwd: Love Me | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Reviews of "Love Me", a narrative film about a Turkish man who meets a 
Ukrainian kept woman on a sex tour of her country and "Love Me", a 
documentary made a year later about "mail order bride" tours once again 
in Ukraine.


https://louisproyect.org/2016/02/19/love-me/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Assad's UN envoy reveals regime support for PYD | TRT World

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 2/19/16 5:18 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:

I do know the PYD and
allies have the only thing like a consistent radical democratic program and
practice in Syria, and the PKK-led current is the only thing in the region
like a leftist radical-democratic force with a mass base, i.e. hegemonic
among millions of people. That warrants some solidarity and should mean
some care being taken in criticisms rather than blithe denunciations from
armchair guerilla commanders.


You don't seem to get the Turkish media report. It does not make any 
claim that the Baathists are okay with a future Kurdistan in Syria. It 
only claims that Assad and the Russians have combined with the Kurds 
(and the Afghan Shi'ites, the Iraqi militias, Hizbollah and perhaps men 
from Mars) to annihilate Syrian rebels. If that is your idea of radical 
democracy, I'm having none of it.

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Assad's UN envoy reveals regime support for PYD | TRT World

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Yeah right. This report doesn't reveal anything but makes a claim that's
been made before, and rejected before by the PYD. It's directly from the
Turkish state's Ministry of Truth via it's TV arm, as part of its PR aimed
whitewashing in front of its western senior partners of its current
anti-Kurd and anti-left pogrom at home and closely related meddling in
Syria. The Turkish state has a direct interest in vilifying the Kurdish
movement and has been doing so in spades for years, as sectarian,
pro-Assad, "ethnic cleaning" etc.

The PYD bombed a government check-point a couple of weeks ago, so it did
happen to be true maybe Ja'afari will want his money back.

This is the same guy who recently showed what BFFs Assad and the PYD have
become by bluntly stating:

The representative of the Syrian regime at peace talks in Geneva told Rudaw
that Damascus would show zero tolerance for any claim of federation or
autonomy by the country’s Kurdish minority.

Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s UN envoy and its top man at the Geneva peace talks,
ruled out the idea of federalism as an option for governing post-war Syria.

“Take the idea of separating Syrian land out of your mind,” he said, adding
that “anyone thinking of departing Syria” should be cured of the illusion.


http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/310120162

In the current messy and confused situation I don't know if the PYG is
using the best tactics currently to carry out its mandate of "securing
Rojava in a democratic Syria", and I wouldn't exclude major errors, like
other liberation movements under massive pressure. I do know the PYD and
allies have the only thing like a consistent radical democratic program and
practice in Syria, and the PKK-led current is the only thing in the region
like a leftist radical-democratic force with a mass base, i.e. hegemonic
among millions of people. That warrants some solidarity and should mean
some care being taken in criticisms rather than blithe denunciations from
armchair guerilla commanders.

There's too much cherry-picking of convenient report and facts and ignoring
or disbelieving of the inconvenient from Syria, from different sides I'm
sure but definitely from those who are rusted on to a narrative of a united
and unproblematically progressive opposition to the Assad dictatorship. A
unified opposition - which needs to include support for Kurdish
self-determination  - has been wrecked, perhaps sadly irretrievably, by the
meddling of the venal regimes in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states
as well as the imperialist powers.


On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:05 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> The Syrian ambassador to the UN indicated that PYD-allied forces in the
> country have been supported not only by the US but also by Bashar al
> Assad's regime.
>
> "These Syrian Kurds [PYD-allied groups] supported by the American
> administration are also supported by the Syrian government, just for your
> kind information", the ambassador Bashar Ja'afari told reporters on Tuesday
> following a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on Turkey's recent
> shelling of PYD targets in northern Syria.
>
> full:
> http://www.trtworld.com/mea/assads-un-envoy-reveals-regime-support-for-pyd-49189
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[Marxism] scientists are floored by what's happening in the Arctic right now

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/18/scientists-are-floored-by-whats-happening-in-the-arctic-right-now/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Sandy Boyer, R.I.P. | The Broken Elbow

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Sandy Boyer, socialist fighter, died this week. His death is a loss to 
all the working class struggles, the social justice movements in the US, 
Ireland, and indeed, the world that he was involved in.


Whether it was teamsters or teachers in the US, political prisoners in 
Ireland, Puerto Rican activists, Palestinian solidarity campaigners, or 
the Black Lives Matter movement, Sandy was tirelessly exercising his 
brilliant organizing skills on their behalf.


Descended from what we might call American royalty, his mother Sophia 
Ripley Ames, came from a family who participated in the American 
Revolution. She was born in The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., now a 
National Historic Landmark, in whose backyard in April 1775, the first 
shot in the American Revolutionary War was fired, a shot described 
famously by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also lived for a time in ‘The Old 
Manse’, as ‘the shot heard around the world’.


full: http://thebrokenelbow.com/2016/02/13/sandy-boyer-r-i-p/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Israel's Favorite Arab Dictator of All Is Assad - Haaretz - Israeli News Source Haaretz.com

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.haaretz.com/israel-s-favorite-arab-dictator-of-all-is-assad-1.352468
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[Marxism] Fire and Blood, Socialism or Barbarism

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2016/02/fire-and-blood-socialism-or-barbarism.html


-- 
Check out my newest books , Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
 and Can We Escape the Eternal Flame?

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[Marxism] Denmark's democratic socialism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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"I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and 
Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people."


--Bernie Sanders

Liberal, Harsh Denmark
NY Review of Books, MARCH 10, 2016 ISSUE
by Hugh Eakin

1.

In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has 
put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters 
have brought to power a right-wing party whose leader, Jarosław 
Kaczyński, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and 
“various types of parasites” to Europe; in France, in December, only a 
last-minute alliance between the Socialists and the conservatives 
prevented the far-right National Front from triumphing in regional 
elections. Even Germany, which took in more than a million 
asylum-seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a 
growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent 
New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of 
North African origin.


And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of 
5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most 
open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income 
equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation. 
Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and 
university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like 
accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and 
its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has 
long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state 
has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have 
a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in 
Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost 
its entire Jewish population.


When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent 
in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that 
large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social 
democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from 
Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable. In last June’s Danish 
national election—months before the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe—the 
debate centered around whether the incumbent, center-left Social 
Democrats or their challengers, the center-right Liberal Party, were 
tougher on asylum-seekers. The main victor was the Danish People’s 
Party, a populist, openly anti-immigration party, which drew 21 percent 
of the vote, its best performance ever. Its founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, for 
years known for suggesting that Muslims “are at a lower stage of 
civilization,” is now speaker of the Danish parliament. With the backing 
of the Danish People’s Party, the center-right Liberals formed a 
minority government that has taken one of the hardest lines on refugees 
of any European nation.


When I arrived in Copenhagen last August, the new government, under 
Liberal Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, had just cut social 
benefits to refugees by 45 percent. There was talk among Danish 
politicians and in the Danish press of an “invasion” from the Middle 
East—though the influx at the time was occurring in the Greek islands, 
more than one thousand miles away. In early September, Denmark began 
taking out newspaper ads in Lebanon and Jordan warning would-be 
asylum-seekers not to come. And by November, the Danish government 
announced that it could no longer accept the modest share of one 
thousand refugees assigned to Denmark under an EU redistribution 
agreement, because Italy and Greece had lost control of their borders.


These developments culminated in late January of this year, when 
Rasmussen’s minister of integration, Inger Støjberg, a striking, 
red-headed forty-two-year-old who has come to represent the government’s 
aggressive anti-refugee policies, succeeded in pushing through 
parliament an “asylum austerity” law that has gained notoriety across 
Europe. The new law, which passed with support from the Social Democrats 
as well as the Danish People’s Party, permits police to strip-search 
asylum-seekers and confiscate their cash and most valuables above 10,000 
Danish kroner ($1,460) to pay for their accommodation; delays the 
opportunity to apply for family reunification by up to three years; 
forbids asylum-seekers from residing outside refugee centers, some of 
which are tent encampments; reduces the cash benefits they can receive; 
and makes it significantly harder to qualify for permanent residence. 
One aim, a Liberal MP 

[Marxism] The Universe: ‘The Important Stuff Is Invisible’

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Review of Books, MARCH 10, 2016 ISSUE
by Lawrence M. Krauss

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the 
Universe

by Lisa Randall
Ecco, 412 pp., $29.99

The notion that there is more to the world than we can see was probably 
hardwired into our ancestors’ consciousness by natural selection. Only 
those in the African savannah who suspected that behind the rustling 
branches might lie a predator likely survived long enough to pass on 
their genetic information. In any case, as our mental facilities evolved 
further the notion of hidden realities became more formalized when human 
tribal groups created religions to help them make sense of the world 
around them, provide solace for the inequities of nature, and ultimately 
deal with their own mortality.


Hidden realities continued to dominate thinking as early religious myth 
gave way to more refined philosophical speculation. Searching for the 
fundamental essence underlying all matter became a common quest in Greek 
and Roman philosophy, while air, earth, fire, and water were 
sequentially dispensed with as providing such an essence. Ultimately 
philosophers from Empedocles to Aristotle decided that this fundamental 
essence must be something distinct; and Plato, through his derivation of 
five perfect solids, focused on a “quinta essentia,” a fifth essence. 
This also became known as “aether” and was imagined to comprise the 
fundamental essence of all space, permeating both heaven and earth. By 
connecting the stars and planets with terrestrial matter, this aether 
also motivated the ancient Alexandrian practice of astrology, which, 
while the aether has disappeared, unfortunately remains prevalent even 
today.


As religious myth and early philosophical speculation then gave way to 
scientific discovery and we developed machines to perceive what our eyes 
and ears could not, the fact that the world of our experience reflected 
merely a small part of a much greater whole became manifest. Light 
itself is just one small piece of a continuous spectrum of invisible 
electromagnetic waves that are filling the space around us and 
bombarding us at all times. When we look up at the night sky, we now 
realize that the seemingly dark emptiness between stars is not in fact 
empty. If one were to create a dime-sized hole between thumb and 
forefinger and hold it out at arm’s length, in that small region the 
largest telescopes today, like those in Chile or Hawaii, could discern 
literally hundreds of thousands of other galaxies like our own Milky Way.


Indeed, given the myriad recent developments in modern astronomy, it is 
sometimes hard to appreciate that less than one hundred years ago the 
entire universe, as conceived by astronomers, consisted of a single 
galaxy, the Milky Way, surrounded by a possibly eternal static void. We 
now know not only that there are at least 100 billion galaxies beyond 
our own in the observable universe, but also that our universe is 
expanding, and most recently we have discovered that the expansion is 
actually speeding up, for reasons we have yet to understand.


So perhaps it is not surprising to find that in the intervening century 
we have discovered a host of other previously invisible entities 
surrounding and in many cases permeating the space we occupy. Consider 
two cases:


1. Every cubic centimeter of space is teaming with three hundred 
microwave photons left over from the Big Bang explosion—particles that 
last interacted with matter when the universe was 300,000 years old. Yet 
while perhaps nothing is easier to detect than electromagnetic 
radiation, this background, now referred to as the cosmic microwave 
background radiation, remained unnoticed until 1964, when it was 
discovered by accident by two Bell Laboratory physicists who were using 
a radio telescope to search for other signals.


2. Every second over 600 billion particles called neutrinos penetrate 
every square centimeter of your body, traversing it, and the earth, 
without interaction. These neutrinos emanate from nuclear reactions deep 
inside the sun, the very reactions that power our star and make our 
lives possible. Only in the 1990s were we able to experimentally confirm 
that such a background of neutrinos existed and to ascertain its 
magnitude, through a set of observations that resulted in the awarding 
of one half of last year’s Nobel Prize in physics. A similar background 
of neutrinos, left over from the Big Bang, is predicted to exist, but to 
date no experiment has been sensitive enough to directly detect it.


In hindsight then, after these discoveries of invisible exotica it does 

[Marxism] Fwd: Russia: punishment psychiatry back in vogue | People and Nature

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/russia-punishment-psychiatry-back-in-vogue/
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[Marxism] Bloody Counterrevolution in Aleppo: on Russian Blitzkrieg and US “betrayal”

[Michael Karadjis via Marxism]

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Bloody Counterrevolution in Aleppo: on Russian Blitzkrieg and US 
“betrayal”


https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/bloody-counterrevolution-in-aleppo-on-russian-blitzkrieg-and-us-betrayal/

Today we are watching bloody counterrevolution, imperialist barbarism, 
in its most naked form, most visibly in the combined Blitzkrieg against 
the people of Aleppo and its northern countryside being carried out by 
the invading Russian air force, the fascistic regime of Bashar Assad 
with his barrel bombs, the invading Iranian Revolutionary Guards and 
their imports including Iraqi Shiite-sectarian death squads, Hezbollah 
and various manipulated, impoverished Shia troops from Afghanistan and 
Pakistan, with ISIS to some extent, and the US-backed Kurdish YPG on a 
huge scale, opportunistically joining in from either side like vultures.


Meanwhile, much the same continues in the south, with people still 
starving to death, even as world attention has gone away, in the various 
towns surrounding Damascus that are being carpet-bombed  by Assad and 
Russia, besieged and starved by Assad and Hezbollah. This scene from 
some apocalypse 
(https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153676629524823=gm.495267943990549=3) 
is actually between Moadamiyeh and Daraya; this picture of Hiroshima is 
actually what the regime has done to to the once beautiful city of Homs: 
https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10153492613721939/?pnref=story. 
Further south, regime and Russian bombing continues day and night 
against the mighty, and starkly moderate, Southern Front of the FSA, 
which has had its already miserable level of “support” cut off by Jordan 
and the US; 150,000 people have been uprooted in the latest offensives.


Returning to Aleppo, the bombing has reached extraordinary levels 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/06/aleppo-under-bombardment-fears-siege-and-starvation?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail:
“The bombs are falling so fast in Aleppo now that often rescuers don’t 
have time to reach victims between blasts. If the deadly explosions that 
struck on just one day last week had been evenly spaced, they would have 
struck every other minute around the clock.
“Sometimes there are so many airstrikes, we are just waiting and waiting 
at our headquarters, and the jets don’t leave the skies,” says 
Abdulrahman Alhassan, a 29-year-old former bank engineer from the city 
who coordinates “white helmet” rescue teams in the city.
“When at last we can’t see any more, we have to rush to all the sites to 
rescue people and evacuate them at once,” he said. On Friday, the group 
counted 900 airstrikes by government forces and their Russian backers, 
apparently throwing every weapon they have at the already devastated 
city.”


That is, 900 airstrikes on the city in one day.

As is widely reported, the targets include countless hospitals, schools, 
markets, bakeries, mosques and so on. This video shows the results of 
the deliberate Russian bombing of the children’s and maternity hospital 
in Azaz: 
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/not-terrorists-or-fighters-just-babies-syrian-charity-video-shows-devastation-after-azaz-hospital-a6875496.html, 
on the same day in mid-February that three other hospitals and two 
schools were bombed 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/world/middleeast/syria-hospital-airstrike-doctors-without-borders.html).






It is high time, in my opinion, to call a spade a spade. This has 
nothing to do with the fact that there has been no “US intervention,” 
still less a call for it. In fact, those constantly warning against “US 
intervention” wilfully ignore that the US has been bombing Syria for 
some 17 months, just that it bombs Anyone But Assad (see my article on 
who the US bombs: . 
https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/who-has-the-us-bombed-for-in-syria/).


At this point, it doesn't even have that much to do with the many years 
of very active US intervention against the revolution, to ensure that no 
Syrian rebels, not even the most "moderate", could get their hands on 
any anti-aircraft weapons, the major defensive need of the rebels since 
mid-2012 when massive airpower became the main form of regime 
aggression; with the fact that sympathetic regional states were blocked 
from sending them, and that the FSA was even blocked when it tried to 
get them from the black market. No, this is all well-established; as one 
tweet put it concisely, “the only consistent, thorough, well-implemented 
US Syrian policy is tracking hunting and stopping MANPADS from reaching 
any opposition group since 2012” 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Why Apple Is Right to Challenge an Order to Help th e F.B.I. - The New York Times

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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Before the Snowden revelations, big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, 
Facebook,  and Apple, would usually quietly comply with court orders like that 
Apple received. Since Snowden, it's now a whole new ballgame. Being seen to 
comply with a court order like that could cost them big bucks, especially in 
international markets. 

In other words, I think Apple is not just taking a principled stand against 
government overreach but is also making a hardheaded business decision.

And in the past, these companies would often comply with the demands from other 
governments too. They all have a history of complying with demands from the 
Chinese government for instance. Nowadays, to be seen doing that could cost 
them big time as well..


Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math


-- Original Message --
From: Louis Proyect via Marxism 
To: Jim Farmelant 
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Why Apple Is Right to Challenge an Order to Help the 
F.B.I. - The New York Times
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2016 22:02:52 -0500

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Read this on the Times website since it has important embedded links.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/why-apple-is-right-to-challenge-an-order-to-help-the-fbi.html
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