Two protesters the first to be arrested over phrases banned in Queensland

Two protesters the first to be arrested over phrases banned in Queensland. By Catherine Strohfeldt in The SMH.

Two people have been arrested at a protest outside Parliament House just hours after Queensland’s new hate speech laws came into effect.

Shortly after 12.30pm on Wednesday, officers arrested a 33-year-old man at Speakers’ Corner for allegedly uttering a banned phrase [apparently “from the river to the sea”] during what police confirmed was an unauthorised pro-Palestine protest. …

Officers later arrested an 18-year-old woman, Bonnie Carter, at King George Square for allegedly wearing a shirt displaying a banned phrase. …

 

 

New laws passed through parliament last week outlawed two phrases commonly used by pro-Palestinian protesters – “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” – when used to incite hostility towards a group or when reasonably expected to offend the public. [The offence carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail.]

Craig Kelly:

I totally DISAGREE with what she says, but she should have the right to say it (or wear it on a T-shirt)

It’s borderline, but it doesn’t crosses the threshold of incitement.

Arresting people for their opinion, doesn’t change attitudes, it only hardens them.

And if you can be arrested for this, what other “slogans” could you be arrested for in the future. …

To those that understand the context, and find it highly offensive, the worst thing you could do is arrest her.

All you have done is turbo-charge the message, and created sympathy for it.

Censorship is not the answer, even to the most objectionable ideas.

And the irony. If she dressed in a top like that in Gaza or Iran, she’d be arrested — maybe even stoned.

Yes, it’s true. Multiculturalism really is incompatible with freedom of speech. Not offending assertive ethnic groups like the Muslims and Jews will drastically limit discussion eventually. Then there’s the gays and the trans people, where the issue is not even multiculturalism.

Disapproval, or perhaps even ostracism in nasty cases, is more appropriate than censorship. Ideas need to be aired, and bad ideas need to be argued with.

Why must we give up our freedoms, just because some activists are too precious and pushy? Censorship is just another form of propaganda and thought control, and we don’t want it.

China passes new ethnic minority law, prioritises use of Mandarin language

China passes new ethnic minority law, prioritises use of Mandarin language. By Reuters.

China passed a law on a “shared” national identity among the country’s 55 ethnic ‌minority groups on Thursday, a move critics say will further erode the identity of people who are not majority Han Chinese and risk making anyone challenging that “unity” a separatist punishable by law. …

Officially, China has 56 ​officially recognised ethnic groups, dominated by the Han Chinese, who account for more than 91% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.

China’s ethnic minority ​populations — including Tibetans, Mongols, Hui, Manchus, and Uyghurs — are concentrated in regions that together cover roughly half of the country’s land area, much of it rich in natural resources. …

The law … mandates ​that Mandarin is the basic language of instruction in schools, and for government and official business.
In public settings, where Mandarin and minority languages ​are used together, Mandarin must be given “prominence in placement, order, and similar respects.”

Is Taiwan part of China? David Archibald reports:

 

 

Taboo truths: The Arab Response to the War on Iran

Taboo truths: The Arab Response to the War on Iran. By Avi Abelow at Front Page.

Western democracies are in serious trouble — not because they are weak, but because they still refuse to understand the nature of the war being waged against them.

For decades, Western elites have insisted that conflicts involving the Muslim world are primarily about politics, economics, colonial grievances, poverty, or social injustice. They have explained away jihad as a reaction to circumstance rather than an expression of belief. But much of the Muslim world does not see the conflict that way at all. It sees it as religious, civilizational, and existential.

Until the West understands that reality, it will continue to misread the Middle East, misread jihadist movements, misread the radicalization spreading inside its own societies, and endanger its own future. …

The latest war:

If Iran is attacking Arab Muslim countries too, why are those countries not joining the war to bring down the regime in Tehran?

Iran’s aggression is not directed only at Israel. Arab states have watched for years as Tehran threatened the region through missiles, proxies, sabotage, and terror. And today, the Iranian regime is shooting rockets at their oil infrastructure, airports, cities, shipping lanes, and internal stability. And yet, despite all that, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others are not publicly lining up beside Israel and the United States in a campaign to topple the Islamic regime.

To Western observers, this seems irrational.

It is not irrational. It is Islamic. …

Muslim governments are deeply reluctant to publicly align with non-Muslims against another Muslim power. Western strategists tend to believe that states act only according to interests, but in the Middle East, religion is not a decorative detail. It is often the central organizing force. Sunni and Shiite regimes may slaughter each other, as we have seen in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, but even when Muslim states are bitter enemies, there remains enormous resistance to being seen siding openly with Jews or with the Christian West against a Muslim state. …

It’s not about borders, economics, or grievance, it’s about submission. Islam literally means submission.

But the deeper issue goes beyond Iran. The West still refuses to grasp that much of the jihadist war against it is not fundamentally about borders, economics, or grievance narratives. Those are the packaging. The core is religious and civilizational.

Both Sunni and Shiite jihadists understand this perfectly well. They speak the language of human rights when it helps them. They invoke victimhood when it is useful. They exploit democratic freedoms, multicultural guilt, legal protections, media cowardice, and elite confusion.

But their long-term goal is not coexistence. It is submission.

Uh oh:

While Western elites keep arguing over terminology, jihadist ideology continues to spread across Europe and North America — city by city, institution by institution, school by school, and increasingly, office by office — exploiting open societies that still lack the moral clarity to recognize the threat.

The free world cannot afford to remain this naïve. This war cannot be stopped halfway. Stopping before the Islamic regime collapses would produce the worst possible outcome: a wounded but surviving Iranian regime, terrified Arab states forced back into submission, renewed Iranian expansion across the region, a stronger China in its strategic contest with the United States, and a global jihadist movement emboldened by yet another display of Western weakness.

That is not de-escalation. It is surrender by installments.

 

 

The war should end only when the Islamic regime is toppled and replaced. Anything less guarantees that the same threat will return, bloodier, bolder, and better positioned. Until that happens, much of the Arab and Muslim world will keep doing exactly what it is doing now: taking the hits, staying quiet, and watching to see whether America finally has the will to finish the job.

You may think you’re not a target of Jihad because you don’t consider yourself a Christian. But it’s not what you think that matters. If you’re a white westerner, they think you’re Christian.

AIs and “stealing” knowledge — the collective is destroying the motivation for generating new knowledge

AIs and “stealing” knowledge — the collective is destroying the motivation for generating new knowledge. By Peter Girnus., who works for for Google’s Threat Intelligence Group.

Don’t steal from Google:

I published a report this month about “distillation attacks” — when outside actors query our models thousands of times to extract the underlying logic and replicate it.

We identified over 100,000 prompts from a single campaign. We called it “intellectual property theft.” We called it a “violation of our Terms of Service.” We said it “represents a form of IP theft” that we would disrupt, mitigate, and potentially pursue legal action against.

What Google stole from the world:

I need to tell you how we built the model they are trying to steal.

We scraped the internet. The entire internet. We crawled every website, every forum, every blog, every book we could digitize, every academic paper, every Reddit comment, every news article, every piece of creative writing that anyone ever posted anywhere.

We did not ask. We did not compensate. We did not attribute. We ingested the collective output of human civilization and called it a training dataset. …

We built Gemini on the commons. Every blog post, every open-source project, every Stack Overflow answer, every personal essay someone wrote at 2 AM — we ingested it, we processed it, we monetized it. The people who wrote those things did not receive an email. They did not receive a check. They received a subscription offer. …

Researchers found over 200 million copyright symbols in our training data. Publishers discovered that Gemini can reproduce entire chapters of their books verbatim. There are active lawsuits. Disney sent cease-and-desist letters. The European Publishers Council filed an antitrust complaint. A class action is expanding. A hearing is scheduled for May.

Double standard:

We called what we did “research.”

We called what they are doing to us “theft.”

I want to explain the difference.

  • When we scrape the entirety of human knowledge without permission and use it to build a commercial product we sell for $20 a month, that is innovation.
  • When someone queries our model 100,000 times through the API we provide to extract the reasoning we built from their data, that is a distillation attack.

The distinction is that we did it first. And we wrote the Terms of Service.

I should explain what “distillation” means. It is when someone takes the output of a mature model and uses it to train a smaller, cheaper model. The knowledge flows from the teacher to the student. We call this theft when it happens to us. We call it “knowledge distillation” when we do it to the open web. We even have a product page for it. You can distill Gemini, with our permission, using our tools, for a fee. You cannot distill Gemini without our permission. The underlying technique is identical. The difference is the invoice.

Legal both ways??

In December 2025, we sued a company called SerpApi for scraping our search results. In the same quarter, publishers sued us for scraping their books. We are simultaneously the plaintiff and the defendant in the same crime. The crime is copying. We have filed it under two different categories depending on the direction.

Still, AIs are great tools. But if compensating the generators of knowledge is not done fairly, generation of knowledge will wither. If someone can’t benefit from the effort and risk of research or origination, why bother?

I am reminded of pop music. Up until the Internet, rock stars made megabucks from record sales. But now that everyone copies music, the originators don’t make nearly as much. And hasn’t music become poorer for it, with few new or original tunes anymore. Where as in the five decades prior to 2000, there was a veritable torrent of new and interesting music, and there were rock/pop stars. Now: no reward, no motivation. Welcome to the collective, welcome to the longhouse.

UPDATE:

‘Death to America’ chants echo across US campuses

‘Death to America’ chants echo across US campuses. By Emily Sturge at Campus Reform.

For nearly five decades, Iran has chanted “Death to America.”

Now that same message is echoing across American college campuses.

Students are marching in support of Iran, chanting anti-American slogans, and celebrating violence against the United States. This disturbing trend is fueled by radical campus activism and the ideological environment inside America’s universities.

After the United States and Israel carried out targeted strikes against Iranian leadership on Feb. 28, an anti-Israel student group linked to Columbia University posted the phrase “Marg bar Amrika,” which is Farsi for “Death to America.” Photos circulating on social media show protesters at Yale University marching on campus with signs displaying the same slogan. The violent phrase calling for the death and destruction of the U.S. has been chanted by Iran’s regime for decades.. …

Students across the country at schools like San Jose State University in California, Louisiana State University, and the University of Illinois Chicago marched in support of Iran and cheered for retaliation against America.

Meanwhile, at British universities (and prisons):

NY bombers yelling “Allahu akbar” narrowly avoid mass casualties; media looks the other way

NY bombers yelling “Allahu akbar” narrowly avoid mass casualties; media looks the other way. By National Review.

On Saturday, an internet troll named Jake Lang staged an anti-Muslim protest in front of Gracie Mansion — currently the residence of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Both its title (“Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City”) and scheduled main event (a “pig roast”) made its nature as an attention-getting provocation clear enough. Lang expected angry counterprotesters and received them in due course.

What neither he nor any of the peaceful counterprotesters in attendance expected was for two young men — identified in reports as Emir Balat (age 18) and Ibrahim Kayumi (age 19) — to rush forward, shout “Allahu akbar,” and hurl improvised explosive devices into the crowd. The bombs, filled with bolts and screws, thankfully failed to detonate, and the two men were immediately apprehended by a fast-moving NYPD.

There is no doubt as to their motivations: Both men spoke freely and unrepentantly to police at the scene, proudly claiming inspiration from ISIS and stating they had intended their terrorist atrocity to be “bigger than Boston” — a reference to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that took the lives of three and injured scores more. Only the incompetence of the bombers prevented Saturday from turning into one of the darkest days in recent New York history.

 

 

Media lies to protect Islam:

Yet one would know none of this were one to go only by the headlines and framing devices the mainstream media have consistently used to explain this story to American readers …

It is impossible not to notice that all of these headlines — or countless others from similarly situated media outlets — are carefully crafted to avoid stating a politically inconvenient truth: Islamic terrorists came horrifyingly close to detonating bombs in a crowd of protesters.

Instead, our attention is directed toward the “hateful” nature of the rally, and readers are asked to fill in the missing narrative gaps with their own imaginations instead.

By Tuesday, the sugarcoating of the obvious — that homegrown, self-radicalized jihadis had targeted a protest and nearly murdered who-knows-how-many people outside Gracie Mansion — had moved well into parody. CNN led the morning with a widely mocked (and subsequently deleted) tweet framing the acts of Balat and Kayumi as a soft-focus human interest story: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather . . .” the piece begins. (You’ll never believe what happened next!)

Jenny Holland at Spiked:

The first reaction from the media was about as confused as a dementia patient lost in a busy garden centre. Screen grabs widely shared on X showed the New York Times headline: ‘Smoking jars of metal and fuses thrown at protest near mayor’s house’ – which it seems was later changed. The New York Times also ran a story with a subheading referring to the bomb as a ‘device that emitted smoke’. Local broadcaster NBC New York wrote: ‘Two people in custody after “suspicious devices” ignited outside NYC mayor’s official residence.’

A device that generates smoke… a container with metal and fuses? Was it a toaster? A lamp? The media left it open to interpretation. To paraphrase JK Rowling, I’m sure there used to be a word for these objects: Lombs? Jombs? Pombs?

TMZ called them ‘smoke bombs’. At least it used the B-word. These weren’t harmless pyrotechnics, however – they were homemade explosives filled with shrapnel and TATP, ‘a dangerous and highly volatile homemade explosive that has been used in IED attacks around the world’ (according to Time magazine). …

The mayor’s immediate reaction was to condemn the ‘vile protest rooted in white supremacy’.

New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed ‘both’ sides. Never mind that one side came armed only with a goat and a bad attitude, the other with multiple bombs and gave a statement to police that read in part: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. Die in your rage you kufar.’ (sic) …

The lesson the media are teaching you:

Coming to New York to chuck bombs at non-Muslims is just part of life in an open, tolerant city. If anything, it should be celebrated!

However, coming to New York to loudly complain about Muslims wanting to bomb non-Muslims is an outrage of the highest order and will not be tolerated.

Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media: It’s Not a Phobia If They Keep Showing up With Bombs.

a phobia is an irrational fear. Given that Islam’s most ardent practitioners have tended towards murderous rampage for well over a thousand years, I would posit that any fear of them is quite rational indeed. In fact, not being a little leery of the “Allahu Akbar!” crowd is an affirmation of insanity.

The Religion of Peace has a real affinity for things that explode and make a lot of noise.

That juxtaposition isn’t going unnoticed by those of us who are constantly accused of being Islamophobes. Those who insist that the bad seeds in Islam are a mere fraction of the whole have a case that gets weaker every year. They’re also getting quieter.

Because they know that none of this is a phobia.

China is still the coal furnace of the world

China is still the coal furnace of the world. By Joanne Nova.

This is the latest graph of coal plants in operation in the world today.

Luckily there is one place on Earth where carbon emissions are irrelevant.

While most CO2 emissions cause wars, droughts, and kill eagles, there are some CO2 emissions that just create refrigerators, so nobody minds. …

The UN has met every year for twenty-eight years to badger everyone to stop using coal to appease the Goddess of Trace Gases and Weird Weather — all while China became the coal furnace of the world.

Or perhaps The UN met every year, so China could do exactly that? Lord above, imagine if the bureaucratic diplomats of the West could be bought off so easily by trophies, trinkets and photo-opportunities? Or perhaps they were naively trapped in cheap honeypot schemes? As a trade strategy, it would be a bargain. And it surely was.

Somehow life on Earth depends on Extinction Rebellion protestors, but they can’t seem to find the Chinese Embassy.

Michael Arouet:

While the US understands that energy independence means prosperity and geopolitical security, Europe continues to sacrifice its economy, security and relevance on the altar of the green Net Zero religion.

 

 

But Germany was tricked into going backwards:

 

Meanwhile, evidence of actual global warming beyond a continuation of the warming trend since 1650 remains mighty scarce.

Average of 125 years of mostly rural USA weather stations
(with unadjusted data, as measured )

Harvey Weinstein Says #MeToo Was Just Greedy Women Chasing Payouts: ‘March to the Money Pile’

Harvey Weinstein Says #MeToo Was Greedy Women Chasing Payouts: ‘March to the Money Pile’. By Maer Roshan at The Hollywood Reporter.

From an interview with Harvey Weinstein in jail at Rikers.

At the apex of his career, Harvey mostly got a pass for appalling behavior. He was an A-list Hollywood producer with his mitts on magazines, theater, publishing and politics. He palled around with prime ministers and presidents. Then, in 2017, a set of blockbuster stories — in The New York Times and The New Yorker — revealed his history of sexual harassment and abuse, precipitating his dizzying fall from grace. …

His six years of incarceration had failed to inspire any genuine contrition. The world may have branded him a monster, but Harvey still considers himself a victim — crucified for a bygone era of Hollywood sins. When pressed, he concedes that his behavior may have been loutish, pathetic and even abusive. But he insists he’s no rapist — just an oversexed schmuck who made some stupid moves and accidentally launched a global social movement.

Unfortunately for him, three successive juries have disagreed. Since the first news stories appeared, close to 100 women have come forward to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct …

Q: There are dozens and dozens of women who tell a variation of the same basic story. You followed them to their hotel rooms or trapped them in yours. You forced them to have sex with you. You got furious or retaliated when they turned you down. You claim that none of this is true. But what accounts for the uniformity of all these reports? Why do you think all these people are so willing to lie about you?

Weinstein: For a lot of reasons. But mainly because there’s money involved. You know, one woman got half a million dollars. Another got paid $500,000. A third got $3 million. All anyone had to do to walk off with a check was fill out a form that said I sexually assaulted them. So they filled it out, and the insurance company eventually paid out tens of millions of dollars. And Disney, too — Disney didn’t want a public fight, so they just paid people to go away. It becomes a bandwagon effect. People can say anything they want about me, and it’s in the public record. But very few of these stories have been litigated in court. …

Did I make a pass at some of these women unsuccessfully? Did I overplay my hand? Yes. Was I pushy or overly seductive? Yes to all of that. Look, I should never have gone out with the people I went out with. I was married to a fantastic woman who had no idea what I was doing. I lied all the time. I improperly used my staff to hide these things. But did I ever sexually assault a woman? No. I never did that. …

The thing I was doing wrong was not sexual assault. It was cheating on my wife. I was desperate to keep that secret from her. I did not want Disney to find out. I did everything to protect myself from that kind of scandal. …

I didn’t push anybody. I didn’t physically move anybody. …

I’m just going to say Rosanna Arquette, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie — they just exaggerated. They wanted to be part of the club. And they destroyed me. …

When Alyssa Milano said “Me too,” she didn’t mean #MeToo about Harvey. She said “Me too,” and then everybody said #MeToo about me. Every woman I was with, every friend that I had. It was a march to the money pile.

So twentieth century. Now that society is largely feminized, looking funny at a woman can be a crime if she doesn’t like it, and regret rape is rape. Objectivity and proof? No, so last century.

Imagine the same me-too standard was applied to certain immigrants, in say Rotherham. But no, those women don’t get that level of protection.

Why the media now loves Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly — anti-MAGA

Why the media now loves Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly — anti-MAGA! By Scott Pinsker at PJ Media.

The most overrepresented, overhyped, and overexposed political bloc in today’s mainstream media is… any guesses?

I’ll give you a hint: They’re in the Republican Party (more or less). And the amount of media attention they’re receiving is nothing short of extraordinary. In all their years, they’ve never received better press!

And in a weird, inexplicable coincidence, their business model directly depends on being noticed.

Not liked or loved. Not supported, trusted, or believed. And certainly not “winning hearts and minds” — because so far, they’ve failed to influence almost anyone. …

But it’s a simple financial formula:

  1. Notice them.
  2. Click on them.
  3. Ca-ching!

I’m speaking of those MAGA-adjacent podcasters, “influencers,” and politicos — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon, and Thomas Massie — who’ve sided with the Democrats to oppose the Iran War, along with the MAGA members they represent. …

Would the media lie?

And in another weird, inexplicable coincidence, the mainstream media is trumpeting their Iran objections with gusto …

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Given this vast degree of media attention, you’d get the impression that the Republican Party has fractured — and the MAGA movement was embroiled in a bitter civil war. After all, virtually every major media outlet in our country has aired the grievances of Carlson, Fuentes, Owens, and Kelly — many more than once. Why, anti-war sentiment must be rising!

But the trouble is, it’s just not true.

Only 11% of Republicans oppose the Iran War. An overwhelming majority — 85% — support President Trump.

And Republicans who self-identify as MAGA support the Iran War by an even WIDER margin: 90% support it; just 5% oppose.

Which means, most of the Republicans who oppose the Iran War were “Never Trumpers” in the first place — and NOT part of the Make America Great Again movement.

Self-appointed grifters:

So how the heck did self-appointed MAGA spokesmen like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Marjorie Taylor Greene get this much media attention when they only represent 5% of the MAGA movement? (Not 5% of the American people or 5% of the Republican Party, mind you — just 5% of the MAGA movement!)

How does that make any sense?

It’s because they’re telling you a story that the media wants you to believe.

The mainstream media hates Donald Trump with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. …

Carlson and Company are simply a means to an end; a blunt weapon to hurt the president and shatter our movement. It’s why they’re receiving press so ridiculously disproportionate to the small size of their bloc. …

Anti-war “influencers” (and their 5% of MAGA) are the most overhyped, overrepresented, and overexposed bloc in America today. They’re everywhere. Which makes them seem far bigger and more influential than they actually are.

And that was the media’s goal all along.

Pam Bondi, US Attorney General, Moves to Military Housing Because of Threats.

Pam Bondi, US Attorney General, Moves to Military Housing Because of Threats. By Glenn Thrush at the NYT.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has quietly relocated to one of several military bases in the Washington area where other Trump administration officials also live, after facing threats from drug cartels and critics of her actions in handling the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to people familiar with the situation.

Ms. Bondi moved from an apartment in the city within the past month in response to an array of threats flagged to her staff by federal law enforcement, these people said, including an uptick in criticism of Ms. Bondi, and threats relayed by investigators. …

Several  Trump officials have had to move due to threats:

Ms. Bondi is the latest administration official to move into heavily guarded quarters at military facilities in or near the nation’s capital after citing danger from criminals, adversaries overseas and protesters.

Other officials who have relocated include Stephen Miller, the president’s top domestic policy adviser and the architect of his hard-line immigration policy; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Kristi Noem, the exiting homeland security secretary; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Lefties using jury nullification to subvert US immigration law

Lefties using jury nullification to subvert US immigration law. By Thomas Catenacci at The Washington Free Beacon.

A left-wing activist group is teaching liberals in Washington, D.C., and “across the United States” how to increase their chances of serving as jurors on cases brought by the Trump Department of Justice so they can undermine its chances of securing convictions, training materials reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

Freedom Trainers, whose fiscal sponsor is the George Soros-funded group Community Change, is working to make “jury nullification” — the practice of voting against a conviction even if the defendant broke the law — a go-to legal weapon for the Left. Its sessions and training materials, reviewed by the Free Beacon, show how the group teaches “committed people” to gum up federal prosecutions.

The group tells attendees to keep their addresses current to ensure they receive summons. Then, during the jury selection process, it advises them to “Never mention jury nullification,” “Don’t signal an agenda,” and “say you’ll listen to the evidence before forming conclusions.” Once selected, the group tells its trainees to vote “not guilty” for any reason. …

The trainings walk activists through how they can increase their odds of both receiving a jury summons and being selected for the jury.

The group emphasizes, for example, that activists should dress neutrally, give brief answers, and say they will listen to the evidence before forming conclusions during jury selection. They should also never mention jury nullification before or during selection.

Wow! Think of all the virtue points a leftie on the jury would score by getting a guilty immigrant off. Their friends would be so envious!

These trends always show up in Australia before long.

Iran Boasts It Has Destroyed Hundreds Of US Missiles With Its Buildings

Iran Boasts It Has Destroyed Hundreds Of US Missiles With Its Buildings. By The Babylon Bee.

Despite losing dozens of members of its leadership, the embattled Ayatollah’s regime remained defiant while taunting the world that it had successfully wiped out hundreds — if not thousands — of U.S. missiles, drones, and bombs by blocking them with buildings and military bases throughout the country.

“The wreckage of their bombs can be seen strewn throughout the rubble of our cities,” new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a recorded address. “They thought that their missiles were formidable, but they completely disintegrate when they engulf our buildings in great explosions. When the smoke clears, you can see that the bombs are no more. When you look out across our leveled cities, unobstructed by any buildings, you can clearly see that there are no missiles in sight. Checkmate, America.” …

At publishing time, the Iranian government had also released a statement boasting that its navy had gone to the bottom of the sea to avoid detection.

 

This however is real, propaganda being served up in Iran:

 

The West will turn into South Africa

The West will turn into South Africa. By Geiger Capital.

Curtis Yarvin [aka Moldbug] says the West has “no balls” now and will simply turn into South Africa…

“Americans and Europeans will not resist the mass immigration and population replacement. You know, the thought that they will grab their muskets or whatever. It won’t happen. Won’t happen at all. What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa.

They will just acknowledge that they’ve lost their power and their country forever. And then they will sit quietly in their houses and build more and more barbed wire and electric fences until finally they are exterminated in one big pogrom. That’s the future. That’s what will happen to your children.”

 

 

Speaking of thoughtful philosophers with a good track record:

 

Michel Houellebecq:

“That’s how a #civilization dies; without worries, without danger or drama and with very little carnage; a civilization just dies of weariness, of self-disgust.”

Erick:

Americans or Europeans didn’t suddenly “lose their balls.”

For at least the last 60 years people in these countries have been slowly trained to think a certain way. Movies, television, universities, and media constantly communicate what is normal, moral, and acceptable. Culture shapes the framework people use to interpret the world.

When the culture itself teaches people that certain reactions are wrong, immoral, or even unthinkable, most people won’t resist. Not because they’re weak, but because the framework in their heads tells them not to.

Some people can step outside that framework if they think about it deeply. But it’s obvious that cultural groupthink is real.