Julian Assange

The Israeli government sealed off the occupied West Bank on Friday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was preparing a military operation there of a kind “not carried out since” Israel’s conquest of the territory in 1967.

The Israeli government, in alliance with the Trump administration, is extending the Gaza genocide to the West Bank in step with the preparations for a renewed offensive against Iran. Both are part of one continuous operation to create a “new Middle East,” launched in October 2023 under Democratic President Joe Biden and continued under US President Donald Trump. The total subjugation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a corollary of the war plans of the Trump and Netanyahu governments.

Netanyahu ordered the lockdown four days before Israel’s national election on October 27, 11 days before the US midterm elections on November 3 and four days after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met him in Israel. The New York Times wrote Wednesday that US officials said Hegseth and Netanyahu discussed new strikes on Iran, to be launched after the US elections.

Just as the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas were seized upon by Netanyahu as the pretext to occupy Gaza and displace and exterminate its inhabitants, the Netanyahu government has seized on an attack on Israeli soldiers as its pretext for the offensive to annex the West Bank.

Two soldiers, Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were killed at a checkpoint outside Hebron, in the southern West Bank, on Friday morning. The Israeli army claimed that two Palestinians from Hebron opened fire on the checkpoint and that troops shot both men dead after a gunfight of about 20 minutes.

Netanyahu pledged to destroy the neighborhood the alleged gunmen came from. “First of all, we will act to destroy this place, to change it completely,” he said at the checkpoint, the Times of Israel reported Friday. The army would “implement the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps” and go “house to house,” Netanyahu said.

The government was “considering a very extensive IDF [Israeli army] operation in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], such as has not been carried out since” the 1967 war, Netanyahu said Friday.

Defense Minister Israel Katz said Friday: “Every clan neighborhood in Hebron from which the terrorists emerged today will be evacuated of its residents.” Katz added: “Just like in Gaza ...”

...

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the US and Israeli militaries “have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections.” The Times wrote that the American buildup would be complete by early November.

Trump told a reporter at Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington, on Wednesday night: “We are not negotiating with” Iran. “Something one way or another will happen, fairly soon,” he said. “Most people seem to think it’s after the election.”

Netanyahu has made regime change in Iran a centerpiece of his election campaign. “We are committed to completing the elimination of the Iranian regime,” he said Tuesday, Al Jazeera reported that day.

Israeli troops killed four Palestinians in Gaza on Thursday. By Tuesday the Gaza Health Ministry had counted at least 1,500 people killed since the announcement of the “ceasefire” in October 2025 and more than 74,450 since October 2023.

...

Democratic senators spent months attacking the administration for failing to win the war. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan told Hegseth at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on July 21: “You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.” Peters told Hegseth: “Win the war.”

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said on ABC’s This Week on September 27: “We can’t leave the Strait in the hands of the Iranians.” Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, attacking Hegseth’s creation of a religious affairs office at the Pentagon, told CNN on September 30 that any new Pentagon office should be devoted to “figuring out how to win this war in Iran.”

So it begins; looks like entry-level white-collar jobs are going the same way as the entry-level blue-collar jobs of yesteryear. Time for socialists to get ahead of the game this time and ensure that artificial intelligence is a benefit to the public, rather than to the capitalist class.

>Ukraine liberated over 627 square kilometers in the Oleksandrivka direction and cleared over 300 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators between January 29 and August 12, 2026, driving the Russians largely out of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and securing part of its southern flank.[5] Ukrainian forces liberated 26 settlements during the Oleksandrivka counteroffensive

927 sq.km. liberated/cleared, yet the last body exchange ratio was 10:1 in favor of Russia.

26 settlements liberated, yet still no Bucha 2.

I'm tired of the propaganda, boss...

I never thought it was even a coincidence that 10 years ago a lot of stoicism propaganda was being propped up everywhere right around the 2016 election campaign, lots and lots of alt righters were hyping up stoicism and the whole “just stop complaining” saying around this time.

The sad part is I do feel like the greater masses AKA the normies also had a greater sense of justice that’s been extinguished by years and years of social engineering and memetic warfare

And it worked, but why should we be surprised?

Look at the difference in collective justice during the Obama years versus that post-2016. You had occupy Wall Street, the War on Terror, the fight for LGBT rights, anti bullying awareness programs were at their peak in schools and workplaces around this time and the fight for environmental justice was also much stronger.

Then the “toxification” of politics churns the whole psyche of the everyday commoner into oblivion, thus contributing to the political nihilism we’re seeing in the major populace continue to gas out

I feel like stoicism is also a perfect social tool for creating useful idiots that are easy to exploit: If everyone feels the need to “earn their worth” thru sheer endurance then the anti union and anti fair wage propaganda continue to perpetuate like crazy!

The stoicism act only seemed to get worse after 2020 as well, which makes sense as 2020 was how the masses got desensitized to their struggles. Just one giant psychological experiment.

Very rare W from an increasingly authoritarian and corporate-owned Indian government, even if for no other reason than to take the heat off of themselves in the wake of recent protests against their purging of voter rolls.

American cancer patients are advised under new regulations from the FDA that just came into effect on Oct 22, 2026, it will now be strictly forbidden to import prescription medications from outside the country (https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/missouri/kansas-city/new-federal-rules-will-block-americans-from-importing-cheaper-medications-from-canada), and that they should follow these rules scrupulously in order to protect the venerable American institution that is its pharmaceutical industry. How else are they supposed to pay for the immense costs of C-suite private jets and MBA bonuses research and development?

Evanston, one of the most lib suburbs in Chicagoland, and the local paper runs a guest essay from a mom asking "where are the dads?"
Her thesis: moms run the world here with unpaid labor, and dads need to step up for "this moment." Not participating in evil acts isn't enough anymore. Good to know.

But look at what counts. Coaching your kid's team or chess club gets a quick pat on the head, then it's back to "do MORE." More of what? Community fridges, mutual aid, school board campaigns. The full resistance-lib starter pack. Civic virtue is measured by which committees you sit on and which yard signs you have. Nobody's asking dads to organize their workplace or join a union. That's not the kind of engagement that gets you a guest essay.

Her (their) model dads are a group focused on Black boys in school. Fine, but it's telling that race is the frame and class never comes up once,
in a town with Evanston's income gap.

Flip the genders and run this same essay telling moms their contributions don't count.

Slay!

Not toxic accountability in the cancel culture sense, although overlap can cross threads onto there.

I mean moreso toxic accountability in the sense that it trains people to lower the bar for human fallibility

I get having a culture of high expectations in certain cases. In medical work, for instance, the bar for errors has to be low, or else people would be dying in droves of medical malpractice. Though to be fair, this is already happening in droves anyways. But the point being that it would happen in even bigger droves if the culture of rigid accountability disappeared away. That's one example of where I guess it could work.

Where I think that toxic accountability could be used against people is in an environment where artificial urgency is kind of fabricated for the sake of meeting quotas. I'll use an example. Let's say somebody by the name of Jerry wants to work at a tire production plant, and Jerry meets the person who hired him over the phone in person. We'll call him Tyke. And Jerry has to get through the onboarding culture of two weeks of training.

However, Tyke is already cutting up some of the training process because they're getting desperate for the surplus of labor to already come in from the new hire, and so Tyke is already throwing the book at him and expecting him to be all efficient and already facilitated into the work environment. You know, he's being expected to thread the tire, vulcanize it with rubberizing compound, how to dye it, etc. The book is being thrown at him, and the job is being made artificially harder than what it is because training unfortunately costs resources, and businesses want to save every little penny they can on training resources. Because training people, probably not only takes time, but it takes away from the penny-pinching budgets of HR and employment resources.

But wait, that's not it. There's another example that I can think of, and this one's less work-related. But imagine someone being behind on conventional milestones. Maybe they haven't moved out. Maybe they don't have a driver's license. Maybe they haven't bought a house yet. Maybe they haven't gotten married. Where I think capitalism can leverage a culture of toxic accountability is throwing the fallacy of survivorship bias into the mix. So if one person succeeds through all of these endeavors, if another person is constantly failing to meet said expectations and deadlines on the behalf of modern society, all for the sake of adhering to arbitrary bullshit, then the former party is gonna use their survivorship bias against the other party and really insist that they're not trying hard enough and use that person to engage in moral harassment about they're not powering through their endeavors enough. They're not powering through them, and they're not trying to take initiative. In other words, the weaponized assumption of other people waiting to come rescue them. But that is a projection from other people, because they realize not everybody is gonna have the same bandwidth to push through their circumstances, and not everybody is really afforded the same starting resources and capital. That's why I wonder if capitalism is making us create a more punitive culture amongst ourselves without realizing it.

And it makes society raise its expectations of success on everybody while lowering its tolerance for failure and honest mistakes SMH.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking a more active role in supporting Governor Kathy Hochul for re-election. Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), endorsed Hochul, a right-wing Democrat, on February 5, in the midst of the New York City nurses’ strike.

Last week, Mamdani released a campaign video on social media in which he called Hochul “the real deal for New Yorkers.” He said he was “looking forward to being out there with her on the trail in the weeks to come” before the November 3 election. The two are expected to appear together in the final weeks of the campaign.

Republican Bruce Blakeman is Hochul’s opponent in the gubernatorial race. Blakeman, a loyal follower of Trump, has been campaigning on a program of tax cuts, stricter policing and support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On the fundamental questions—the police, the defense of business interests and the attacks on workers—there is little to distinguish the two. The election, like many others that will be held across the country in November, presents a choice between two right-wing candidates of the ruling class.