Rehashing the misery without saying a word about the root cause, this makes you worthless in helping us to organize a solution.  For when we are in agreement on the root cause, the solution becomes most self-evident.

Aaron Mate confronted Mr. Rhodes on that on Twitter.

didn't know that the US moved its embassy out of Sana'a a month before the start of the war in '15

I saw that light during the initial attack on Baghdad in 2003 - dark buildings were suddenly bathed in the light of exploding cruise missiles and fire.

They are stone-cold careerists, Rhodes and Power. Yesterday's humanitarian fiascos are the springboards to better jobs for them in the future. Either we shun them, or they will forever be hovering around in the background.

...it's victim-splaining, a really perverse acquisition of HR or therapeutic language.

In this News Brief, we detail how horrific population transfers, mass bombings, and collective punishment are spun as humanitarian gestures to protect civilians.

News Brief: 5 Ways US Media Helps Put a 'Humanitarian' Spin on Gaza Ethnic Cleansing

"Make sense of the day’s news and ideas," urges The Morning, a daily New York Times newsletter. "Get smarter, faster on news and information that matters to you," Axios assures its readership. "This is how the news should sound," The New York Times again declares, via its podcast The Daily.

Over the last ten years, roughly speaking, we’ve seen the proliferation of the daily digest-style newsletter and podcast at legacy and new media organizations. Inspired, at least loosely, by the so-called explanatory journalism of Vox and similar outlets that arose in the mid-2010s, publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns of the news that allegedly matters most, delivered to the inboxes of upwardly mobile, dinner-party-hosting, perennially on-the-go professionals - or at least those who want to think of themselves as such.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with accessibility in news media—quite the opposite, in fact. But, for corporate “explanatory” news models, it’s worth asking who makes the decisions about which news is the “most important,” and about how that news is framed. How do seemingly benign, even folksy promises to “make sense of the news” mask the ideology of corporate media institutions? And what are the dangers of herding audiences into a center-right political consensus that issues complaints like “campus speech is vexing” and “the left is less welcoming than the right”?

On this episode, we examine the rise and hegemony of centrist micro-news platforms–from Axios’s trademarked "Smart Brevity" to The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s newsletter The Morning and The Daily podcast–looking at how they package left-punching, pathologically incurious, glib news nuggets served up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning liberals.

Our guest is writer Jacob Bacharach.

Episode 195: David Leonhardt and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine

To hear the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/TrueAnonPod
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We welcome back to the show John Dolan aka Grey Brecher aka The War Nerd to talk through the state of conflict across the world in 2024. Are we headed into World War III? Will the war in Ukraine finally end? Does the US want war with Iran? Will anyone stop Israel? We cover all of this and more.

Check out John Dolan’s new book: Erdogan Pizza (amazon.com/Erdogan-Pizza-John-Carroll-Dolan/dp/B0CPC23531/)

Episode 349: State Of Play (trailer)

"Viet Cong Use Children as Human Shields," the Associated Press alleged in 1967. "'Civilian casualty?" That's a gray area," Alan Dershowitz argued in The Los Angeles Times in 2006. "We can’t ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields,”"Jason Willick wrote in The Washington Post in 2023.

For more than five decades, military forces with overwhelming firepower, including the U.S., Israel, and others have accused enemy combatants of using “human shields.” According to these allegations, militant resistance throughout the world, from the Vietnamese National Liberation Front to Palestinian militants, herd civilians in front of them, or hide in hospitals, religious institutions, and other public places, in order to evade attacks. In turn, they force the enemy to “risk” killing civilians, and they themselves bear responsibility for those who are killed.

But rarely, if ever, have these accusations been true. Indeed, the term “human shields,” despite having a clear legal definition, has become a catch-all for militias or insurgency groups that merely operate among a civilian population, functioning as a convenient pretext for invading, occupying and colonial forces to kill civilians, and reinforcing racist conceptions about besieged populations. So why, and how, do media provide cover for governments that lie about and instrumentalize supposed “human shielding”?

On this episode, we dissect the decades-old “human shields” accusation, examining how it dehumanizes and militarizes people living under occupation and invasions, demonizes resistance movements, and sanitizes civilian-killing aggressors as reluctant actors who "simply had no choice."

Our guests are Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini.

Episode 197: The "Human Shields" Canard as Catch-All Colonial Absolution

Writer and comedian James Colley joins us to talk about: An unintentional Swedish dog turd cannon, illegally disarming your teen, having meat middleman in your AI romance, and a stinky, stinky hole.
***
Buy The Next Big Thing Here: https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-next-big-thing-james-colley/book/9780645757910.html
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EPISODE 333: French Tuck Dick Print Landslide (with James Colley)

Bonus Episodes

Unlocked for non-members! Originally posted February19, 2024. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe at patreon.com/TrueAnonPod.
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We play some of the many, many, many messages we’ve received this past week. Gossip, conspiracy, blind items, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s idea for a breast-shaped mouse

The hotline is permanently open at ‪(646) 801-1129‬.

UNLOCKED: Episode 355: Tip Line

This week we cover a few stories that share some crucial common themes: Austin's SXSW Festival, Boeing's recent "troubles," and the U.S. government's attempts to clamp down on TikTok

Please support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 334: Midstopia

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After months of anti-Palestinian repression, raids, arrests, and pictures of crusty antifa types with Israeli flags, we attempt to figure out the roots and solutions to the philosemitic fever gripping Germany’s media and political class.

Episode 364: What's Up With Germany: Part 1 (preview)

Covering all the news and developments of a rather momentous week in early 2024.

Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 337: Expanding The Metaphor

We react to Iran's attack on Israel, Jake talks "Civil War" and Coachella, then Anders tries to re-cancel Jose Andres in the wake of the IDF's crazed bombing of World Central Kitchen.

Special Paid Protest for Eon Huntley:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/paidprotest4eon

As the Worm Turns

In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, two of the Obama administration's most consistently hawkish advisors, former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power have rebranded themselves as anti-war voices in a world turned upside down by Trump’s radical foreign policy and what we’ve been told is an global environment of rising "authoritarianism."

With a perfunctory “we could have done more” gesture towards accountability for their role in an administration that turned Libya into a broken state and assisted the destruction of Yemen before they move on to positioning themselves as truth-tellers on behalf of a kinder, gentler machine gun hand in the run up to a potential Warren, Sanders or Harris administration, Rhodes and Power have tested the limits of liberal amnesia.

On this episode, we take a closer look at their rebranding and what it says about the so-called “foreign policy” debate in the 2020 democratic primary and what actual accountability looks like beyond empty tweets and self-serving “I was trying to change things from the inside” revisionism.

Our guest is Dr. Shireen Al-Adeimi of Michigan State University.

Episode 76: The Anti-War Rebranding of Rhodes and Power and the Moral Hazard of Faux Mea Culpas

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Episode 76: The Anti-War Rebranding of Rhodes and Power and the Moral Hazard of Faux Mea Culpas

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