I will be giving a talk later in the month on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the 20th March, on a variety of topics around the War on Terror and the #AntiWarMovement of the '00s in #NewZealand.

Given how heavily the #Ukraine conflict is being marketed to the #gay population in legacy social platforms, it would likely help the #AntiwarMovement if #Russia were to be more relaxed about #homosexuality.

We understand that the gay population have been a strong part of the #antiwar movements in the past. We wonder if gay people are left siding with extremists because Ukraine are finding ways to appease the gay population.

#homoerotism #marketing #storytelling #engineeringConsent

The War on Drugs: Race & Politics

Nixon advisor and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman on why that administration escalated the War on (Some) Drugs:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” [John Ehrlichman] asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

-- Dan Baum, "Legalize It All", Harper's Magazine, April 2016.

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

#JohnEhrlichman #RichardNixon #WarOnDrugs #Racism #AntiWarMovement #Politics #BLM