The Digger

I'm sure most if not all of you have read t he recent satirical article on Truthdig by Lee Camp about "Election Guard."   If not, I'd recommend it. And I'd also recommend the more serious Whitney Webb article on Mintpress News that was the basis for Camp's piece and his Redacted Tonight monologue on the topic. The Camp article seems to have struck quite a few nerves as it started attracting comments from some  Disqus users who hadn't posted in quite a while, never posted on TD before, etc. Some of the other apparent sock puppet accounts who have lately become usual suspects on the TD comment threads also threw in their two cents as well, but it was some of the "new faces" who first really made me raise an eyebrow. When I've gone too deeply into the topic of Disqus users on TD who make it too apparent that they're sock puppets before, the posts have gotten zapped pretty quickly. So, I figured I'd initiate a discussion here on The Di...

June 11, 2019 The Trump administration wants to reassert hegemony over Latin America. Cuba is one of its main targets. Through right wing allies and by its own means it targets Cuba's most successful export program - the provision of Cuban doctors to countries in need of them. In 2002 the Bush administration created a program to train Latin American legal personal to wage a "war on corruption" in their home countries. Back in their countries the U.S. trained people would be fed U.S. intelligence on left wing politicians. It would allow them to launch which hunts on those the U.S. wanted out of the way. Sérgio Moro, a Brazilian judge, took part in U.S. program. Fed with (dis-)information from the U.S. he  launched lawfare  against then President Lula of Brasil and his Worker Party. The campaign was successful. In 2018 Lula was put into jail solely based on dubious claims made by one criminal witness. Protocols of leaked chats  between Judge Moro, the prosecu...

Every time you think the corporatocracy’s manufactured anti-Semitism hysteria cannot possibly get more absurd, they somehow manage to outdo themselves. OK, stay with me now, because this is a weird one. Apparently, American Hitler and his cronies are conspiring with some secret group of “Jewish leaders” to stop British Hitler from becoming prime minister and wiping out all the Jews in Great Britain. Weird, right? But that’s not the weird part, because maybe American Hitler wants to wipe out all the Jews in Great Britain himself, rather than leaving it to British Hitler … Hitlers being notoriously jealous regarding their genocidal accomplishments. No, the weird part is that everyone knows that American Hitler does not make a move without the approval of Russian Hitler, who is also obsessed with wiping out the Jews, and with destroying the fabric of Western democracy. So why would Russian Hitler want to let American Hitler and his goons thwart the ascendancy of British Hitler...

The other day I looked through a very long thread on Truthdig, comments to Chris Hedges’ “The Thought Police Are Coming,” which is about Assange’s tragic situation and its implications. I saw this comment by dmorista that read “Of course, both of the women who accused him of having unprotected sex (not rape in any standard definition of the word, the only place on Earth where unprotected consensual sex can be defined as Rape is Sweden) had a history of being CIA assets.” I was surprised, and answered, “I thought it was just one, and the other got roped in. Do you have a link?” What dmorista did was extremely cool. She dug up an extensive answer, which I think deserves its own place for discussion. Here it is: One of the women, Anna Ardin, had long-term connections to various right-wing Cuban Exile groups; including the notorious terrorist and murderer Luis Posada Carriles, whose bombing of a Cuban Airliner in 1976 killed the 73 people on board. She also published Anti-Castro ...

This is an explanation of what The Digger is and why you might want to get involved in its construction, or just to comment here. The Digger is a blog set up by @novychelovek:disqus when Truthdig’s comment section went out for a while in late 2018. It works just like a channel, but Disqus is no longer giving out channels. The URL is https://disqus.com/home/forum/the-digger/ Originally The Digger was to be a place to discuss TD articles until the comment section returned, if it ever did. Then the idea came to be that there’s no reason it would have to be a place for discussing TD articles, which even most posters at TD feel to be generally pretty crappy, so why not have people contribute articles from whatever site for discussion? After all, some sites don’t have comment sections, or they do but they’re not on Disqus, or they moderate comments heavily and mysteriously. And why can’t topics for discussion include posters’ own writing, or whatever they want put up (fiction, poems...

The death of freelance journalist Arnaud Dubus symbolizes the demise of his beloved profession.    Le Club de Mediapart O ur colleague and brother Arnaud Dubus is dead. On Monday, 29th of April, the former journalist, recently turned spokesperson for the French embassy in Bangkok, stepped out of his office, leaving his bag and phone behind. He rode a motorbike-taxi to the nearest sky-train station. Then, after taking the escalator to the platforms, he jumped onto the street below. A few minutes later, he was dead. We, his friends, a small community of French journalists in Bangkok, are devastated by his suicide. We lost a precious friend, a true fountain of knowledge on the culture and mysteries of Southeast Asia, and a sensitive and kind man. We are also shocked because his death is symptomatic of the struggles thousands of foreign correspondents are facing around the world. Of course, nothing can ever fully explain Arnaud’s pain and the personal re...

June 10, 2019 Our leaders know how to bang the war drums and, by and large, we go along with them. The US threatens  Iran  with war – so will Iran close the Strait of Hormuz and attack American warships in the Gulf? Israel strikes Iranian targets in  Syria  after rockets fall on Golan – so does an Arab-Israeli conflict loom closer than at any time since the 1973 conflict?  Jared Kushner  plans to reveal Trump’s “deal of the century” for peace in the  Middle East  – but is it dead in the water? Meanwhile the real stories get pushed down the page – or “to the back of the book”, as we journalists used to say. Take  Donald Trump ’s desire to furnish  Saudi Arabia  and the United Arab Emirates with billions of dollars of extra weapons so that they can increase the ferocity of their war in  Yemen  against the  Houthis  – whose support from Iran, such as it is, prompts much of th...