Latest public library borrow. Been watching Paine's YouTube talks lately, came across this book. Curious about her Japanese Empire analysis compared to Akira Iriye, who is one source for Paine. Initial quibble from TOC: The Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1941).
#histbookchat#booksky
Every now and then, I see people who are disappointed that Gaza is out of the headlines. However, I want them to know that the likes of @annonemo.bsky.social, @fdov21.bsky.social, @easybakeovensz.bsky.social, and myself, continue to do open-source reporting in Gaza, as well as in Lebanon.
#cdnpoli You'd think a decade of failure would spur a #CPC leadership change; it didn't. Why? Can't compromise the oligarchy's #neoliberal platform, so ramp up the #MAGA dis/misinformation play to divide Canadians, undermine our democratic institutions. Stand on guard.
thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026...
In this 4th Debunk of the Day, we’ll refute an absolute classic of vatnik BS, the crown jewel of peak dishonesty: whataboutism.
Now, not everything that looks like whataboutism is wrong. Seeking consistency or comparing actions or responses is normal.
1/5
Sanctions, of limited effect as they may be, are only as good as their enforcement. European action against Russia's shadow tanker fleet has been weak. In this instance, they have a straightforward case. Will they act?
Shadow tanker PEACE lacks safety management, insurance.
She is flying a false flag of Timor-Leste where Timor-Leste demands of other states to stop her.
She is lawless. Sanctioned by EU and UK. She is on her fifth delivery of Russian crude to India last 12m.
She is leaving Baltic Sea laden now.
"There is one message that we should take away from the current round of talks to end the war in Ukraine: Putin does not want the war to end right now." My latest update on war and strategic competition.
mickryan.substack.com/p/putin-cann...
"The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global #warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius...And #climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the #emissions that are causing the warming."
”There is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points — thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.“ e360.yale.edu/features/1.5...
Alberta is the front line in the fight for democracy.
Canadians need to step up to help.
Contact your MP and demand a parliamentary investigation into foreign interference to help the quislings threatening Canada.
charlieangus.substack.com/p/if-alberta...
Traitors used to meet in secret. Now they get their pictures taken. Check out Pete Hoekstra and Danielle Smith.
We know all we need to know about Measles Queen Danielle. Pete needs to come clean on the details on the $500 million slush fund to destroy our nation.
This is foreign interference.
"...there is a growing fear that #climatechange in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points — thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again."
e360.yale.edu/features/1.5...
"Even a hundred million would probably yield a good return in reducing #crime ...deterring professional money launderers from setting up shop, and maybe slowly unravelling some of the market-distorting effects that might have happened in #Canada."
newsletter.insightthreatintel.com/p/the-real-h...
#cdnpoli "Right now, political parties have almost no incentive to address the situation. They’re enjoying the benefits of illicit finance being invested in our economy and hoping someone else will be in power when our chickens come home to roost."
newsletter.insightthreatintel.com/p/the-real-h...
Whisky War
'...replacing the flags was accompanied by a note saying “welcome to the Danish island” or “Welcome to Canada” and a bottle of national liquor (Gammel Dansk bitter or Canadian Club Rye). It became known as the Whisky War, and a cheeky model for calm, cool conflict.'
"It became known as a cheeky model for calm, cool conflict."
@policy_mag Specials
@mcgillu's @danielbeland
&
@UniSouthDenmark's Klaus Petersen:
"As Canada Sides with Greenland and Denmark, a Reminder of the ‘Whisky War’"
bit.ly/45EQPwP#cdnpoli#Greenland#Trump
#cdnpoli "I will explain why everyone should care about money laundering...Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll be raging mad that anti-money laundering isn’t at the top of the political agenda in your country." That includes #Canada.
newsletter.insightthreatintel.com/p/the-real-h...
#cdnpoli With such far-reaching ramifications across so many spheres of our lives, communities, and society, it is unacceptable that the federal government appeared committed to an “AI strategy” weighted towards industry. Join the People’s Consultation on #AI at www.peoplesaiconsultation.ca.
"Trump’s governing style is marked by transactional diplomacy, hostility toward multilateral institutions, tariff-driven economic statecraft, and a willingness to...berate allies...Together, they create a narrative environment that China is learning how to exploit."
warontherocks.com/2026/01/trum...
Note how in Abu Dhabi, Russia again rejected the ceasefire Ukraine agreed to almost a year ago. Ru doesn’t want peace. Journalists need to always front load this main point instead of talking about how the sides are still far apart as if they are equidistant and peace is in the middle.
#uspoli "...Trump’s January rampage highlights the collective failure of every institution, safeguard, check, and balance that the United States thought it had in place to limit executive power gone berserk...Putin and Xi must be astounded at their good fortune..."
www.wired.com/story/donald...
I still remember vividly reading this NYT headline in October 2024, sitting in a coffee shop in Boston, a fortnight before the presidential election
#Minneapolis
#cdnpoli Pay closer attention to acts (especially budget allocations) than words. And if it is to be #austerity for us, are the rich also going to pay their fair share for a change?
"Don't you find it interesting that the #US, the country that came into existence in a revolt against the arbitrary exercise of [ #British ] power is, in our day, the most powerful exponent of arbitrary #power?"
www.bbc.com/news/article...
#cdnpoli With such far-reaching ramifications across so many spheres of our lives, communities, and society, it is unacceptable that the federal government appeared committed to an “AI strategy” weighted towards industry. Join the People’s Consultation on #AI at www.peoplesaiconsultation.ca.
Today’s event in Minnesota and the killing of Renee Nicole Good should serve as a stark reminder that this is not abstract theory.
These dynamics are present here and now, inside real institutions, where obedience, moral disengagement, and routine enable state violence on American streets. /end
None of these theories excuse perpetrators. They show how state murder is produced through ordinary motives, belonging, obedience, fear, humiliation, and bureaucratic routine. What matters is the mechanism: obedience, moral disengagement, diffusion of responsibility, and escalation. 13/
Waller integrates multiple layers of perpetration. Ordinary people become capable of extraordinary harm through identity and group belonging, obedience and authority, moral disengagement, and social rewards. His emphasis is interaction, not one cause, but pressures that produce perpetrators. 9/
Staub treats political violence as a process, not a switch. Crisis generates frustration, leaders scapegoats, small harms become acceptable, then escalate. Bystanders adapt, perpetrators learn, and institutions reward aggression. Violence grows through normalization and shrinking moral concern. 8/
Kelman & Hamilton argue that atrocities are often produced by normal administrative processes. Authority legitimizes violence, routines make it ordinary, and responsibility is diffused across a chain of command. People comply because the system defines the act as appropriate, dissent as disloyal. 7/
Bandura argues that perpetrators preserve a “good person” self image while doing harm. They use euphemisms, displace responsibility, minimize consequences, and blame victims. Violence becomes easier when language sanitizes it, and when targets are framed as dangerous or undeserving of empathy. 6/
Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows how average men became mass shooters through peer pressure, conformity, and step by step escalation. Many were not ideological fanatics. The key dynamic was social belonging, fear of standing apart, and adapting to a violent new norm. 5/
Zimbardo argued that roles and environments can reshape behaviour. Uniforms, hierarchy, surveillance, and humiliation produced escalating abuse, even among “normal” volunteers. The lesson is situational power, institutions manufacture cruelty through permission and control. 4/
www.prisonexp.org
Milgram in the showed how far ordinary people will go when an authority figure defines harm as legitimate work. Many subjects obeyed all the way, despite visible distress. His point was not sadism, but compliance, and how responsibility shifts upward when “I was told to” feels sufficient. 3/
Arendt’s “banality of evil” is not a claim that evil is small. It is a claim that mass violence can be carried out by people who look ordinary, speak in bureaucratic clichés, and treat murder as procedure. The danger is thoughtlessness, routinization, and careerism. 2/
🧵“How do seemingly ordinary people become agents of state murder?” This is one of the guiding questions I ask students in my graduate class on genocide/state violence. With recent events, it is a question many Americans are asking.
I do not have a definitive answer, but here is a reading list: 1/
#cdnpoli "Canada’s biggest grocery giants — including #Loblaws, #Sobeys and #Metro — are using property law to control how other #grocery stores, dollar stores, pharmacies and gas stations can compete with them, an investigation by CBC’s Marketplace has found."
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
"China’s rise forces us to confront the limits of Western mastery over modernity: the potent conceit that only liberal democratic capitalism could deliver sustained prosperity and innovation... Both reveal how... dangerous denial can be."
www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-gr...
"The quiet crisis #Canada faces is bounded...by the collapse of middle-class progress and the hyper-concentration of wealth, and...by the accelerating power of...algorithmically amplified #disinformation. Both forces are structural, cumulative, and worsening."
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/20...
"Wage stagnation, rising housing costs, declining intergenerational mobility, and the hyper-concentration of wealth have produced heightened insecurity...These conditions generate grievance...toward the institutions perceived to have failed in preventing them."
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/20...
