Kashmiri activists broke the international news blackout on their struggle by campaigning on social media. That changed everything because once we learned of the character & criminality of the Indian occupation, international solidarity began to develop. Their tireless work has made all the difference in the world. There’s no turning back on justice now.

Just because India locked out Kashmiris from internet & cell phone communication to silence their voices & FB censored supporters to reimpose a news blackout, that does not mean it’s all over & we have to run for cover to protect ourselves. Kashmiri activists have come too far, have fought too hard for us to fail them when most of them are being silenced or “virtually forced disappeared” as one activist put it.

We need to think out how we can defend freedom of speech on FB & social media because as Kashmiri activists have shown, there can be no political education & organizing, no international solidarity without freedom of speech, without the right to tell the truth about our struggles against brutal oppression.

Social media is how that’s done these days & we have a right to insist FB not function as an agency of the secret police. It’s not just an elementary duty to defend Kashmiris but elementary good sense to defend civil liberties. We don’t live under fascism yet & we won’t if we stand with freedom of speech now.

Photo (from Twitter) is women protesting in Srinagar on July 31st, day 22 of the current murderous siege. If they are not daunted by pellet guns & live ammunition, we cannot be daunted by FB censors.

Facebook has reinstated my account. Thank you to those who were so supportive while I was out in the cold. It has introduced me to the use of Twitter which is like the early version of FB & not endearing in any way.

I used the opportunity to reorganize my household so have a backlog of posts to catch up on–most importantly what is going on in Kashmir.

You won’t be sorry you missed my commentary on the Democratic convention. Acerbic, snide, contemptuous would sum it up. But never mind, I’ll catch up with all the nonsense & alarmism brewing in lesser evil land.

In a public statement explaining their censoring of posts about Kashmir, FB said ““There is no place on Facebook for content that praises or supports terrorists, terrorists organisations or terrorism. We welcome discussion on these subjects but any terrorist content has to be clearly put in context which condemns these organisations & or their violent activities.”

We who were censored & locked out could not agree more. Let us make clear in a Greek chorus of condemnations that we oppose terrorism in every one of its aspects. That’s exactly why we denounce the Indian occupation of Kashmir which involves indiscriminate shooting of unarmed protesters, pellet munitions which disable & blind hundreds, including children, mass disappearances, mass graves, mass rapes, torture, summary executions.

In this monstrous terrorist siege now going into its fourth week, it appears the Indian army is targeting children in Kashmir as Israeli bombers did in Gaza 2014 to disable & demoralize young people & incapacitate the future of their freedom struggle.

In keeping with FB’s policy opposing terrorism or any glorification of it, we would like to know why in the hell we who are speaking out against such monstrous terrorism are being censored & not the rabid nationalists spewing social hatred against Kashmiris & support for Indian terrorism.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

Have you ever seen anything quite like this in politics? One person started a caption contest for mockery but speechless is most people’s reaction–& a certain amount of embarrassment at witnessing such bad theater.

Many progressives are more disturbed that Jill Stein might be anti-vaccinations than by her utterly compromised views on US militarism & her left Zionism. It’s a case of the MMR shot versus ethnic cleansing. We need a new definition of progressive.

There’s an article circulating from Counterpunch by Margot Kidder titled “My Fellow Americans: We Are Fools.” Kidder is the actress best known as Lois Lane in “Superman” opposite Christopher Reeve.

The very emotional article was written after watching the DNC convention & reflects the disgust most progressives felt watching war mongering, rightwing political figures like Leon Panetta & Michael Bloomberg cheered by thousands of delegates. Kidder regrettably conflates that stadium of political hacks with all of the American people so her article is a sustained reproach to the rest of us, as if most of us shared a damn thing with the trained seals clapping their asses off like fools.

In fact, polls continually show the overwhelming lack of trust most of us have in Clinton & in the DNC. For decades, the majority of eligible voters in the US haven’t even bothered to register. Polls also show a majority of Americans oppose US wars even though they are not mobilizing against them. Partly that reflects the disunity of the antiwar movement & not just lethargy on the part of Americans.

We live in tough times. Screw that Chinese proverb about crises being opportunities. They’re hell to endure. But giving up on the human race is not an option. Historically, we in the US have proven to be slow on the uptake, conservative in acting. But our history also shows decisiveness once we get off our political asses.

Misanthropy doesn’t serve political action or social transformation. Kidder can say she’s Canadian & wants no part in all this but those of us who believe social change is necessary & possible don’t indulge defeatism or contempt for our fellows. That isn’t how things get changed.

There is an onslaught against feminism & against women coming from both the right & the left. Everyone rightly goes up in arms when Drumpf spews his vulgar misogyny but when some woman-hating bozo with progressive politics produces crap like this, we are supposed to rise up in horror at any abridgments of his civil liberties & defend this trash as satiric evisceration of Clinton’s patriarchal & imperialist politics.

If you don’t viscerally & intellectually get what is hateful toward women in these images of Clinton, if you actually believe these are satiric takedowns of the patriarchy rather than debased attempts to diminish women in positions of power, you only illustrate how imperative the need for women’s political power.

By women’s political power I do not mean the election of Clinton or other contemptible or compromised female politicians. I mean the massive growth of feminism, the struggle for women’s rights, & that scary specter of identity politics which will not have feminism mansplained to us by so-called progressive women haters.

I post these detestable images only to illustrate, not to have them spread all over FB to titillate the haters. The vile thing on the left titled “Hillary Clinton has big hands” by Anthony Freda, was considered a mockery of Drumpf’s small hands which led him to publicly discuss the size of his penis. But why was Clinton parodied rather than Drumpf? The vile thing on the right portraying Clinton as a stripper is a photo of a mural in Melbourne, Australia posted to Instagram by the lowbrow artist named Lushsux which caused his account to be shut down. He needs his ass kicked too.

Don’t try to pawn this crap off as progressive critique & don’t even consider calling feminists blue-nosed for taking objection to this. It is what it is: suitable to porn but an outrage in progressive politics.

Notice how none of the leading Sandernistas, most of whom pretentiously call themselves Marxists, have done a postmortem on their failed strategy? A political misstep of such import requires not mea culpas but at least analyses of what went wrong. Otherwise, they’ll get away with repeating it next election.

On Facebook censorship: “If you’re Kashmiri or Palestinian or Rohingya, social media has been a primary way of breaking the news blackouts and media distortions of what is going on. Without that resource for getting out the truth, there would not be the exponential growth of understanding and solidarity. India, Israel and Myanmar would continue their horrors with impunity. So censorship on FB is a very serious problem.”

Concealed carry policy goes into effect next Monday at the local University of Texas. What kind of insane society allows students & university personnel to pack a weapon in the context of so many mass shootings?