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  • Mohamed ElBaradei

    via https://diasp.eu/p/17688837

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_ElBaradeii

    https://x.com/ElBaradei/status/1933590704661447089

    Did anyone tell you sir that “ targeted strikes against nuclear facilities” are prohibited under article 56 of the additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions to which Germany is a party, and that the use of force in international relations is generally prohibited in article 2(4) of the @UN Charter with the exception of the right of self defense in the case of armed attack or upon authorization by the Security Council in the case of collective security action.

    You might want to familiarize yourself with the basic tenets of international law…

    #Israel #Iran

  • La résolution 487, adoptée à l’unanimité par le Conseil de sécurité en juin 1981, condamne le bombardement israélien du réacteur Osirak en Irak, et précise également :
    https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/22225?ln=fr&v=pdf

    5. Demande a Israël de placer d’urgence ses installations nucléaires sous les garanties de I’Agence internationale de l’énergie atomique

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_487

    This resolution was passed following 10 Security Council meetings about the incident and Israel’s nuclear weapons policy,[1] and specifically called for Israel to put its own facilities under the safeguards of the IAEA.

  • “Les pilotes de drones voient très bien la personne qu’ils vont tuer, jusqu’au dernier moment”
    https://www.nouvelobs.com/monde/20250409.OBS102519/les-pilotes-de-drones-voient-tres-bien-la-personne-qu-ils-vont-tuer-jusqu

    Série Après avoir raconté le conflit en Ukraine du point de vue des drones, Isabelle Dufour, directrice des études stratégiques à Eurocrise, explique, dans cette deuxième partie du grand entretien qu’elle a accordé au « Nouvel Obs », comment ces appareils volant sans pilote changent la mécanique de la guerre.

    Pour aller plus loin
    La une du 29 mai 2025

    Edition de la semaine Ukraine : la guerre des drones

    Ils ont changé la face des combats entre Kiev et Moscou. Depuis le début de l’invasion russe à grande échelle de l’Ukraine en février 2022, les drones, jusqu’alors marginaux dans les conflits, se sont imposés comme une arme majeure. Au point de constituer une « révolution », comme l’observe Isabelle Dufour, directrice des études stratégiques à Eurocrise, dans la première partie du grand entretien qu’elle a accordé au « Nouvel Obs ». Une révolution dont on peine encore à imaginer l’ampleur et les conséquences sur la conduite de la guerre, sur les soldats eux-mêmes et sur l’avenir de l’armement. Dans ce deuxième volet de « Drones de guerre », l’experte raconte comment ces appareils volant sans pilote bouleversent l’art de la guerre.
    Que changent les drones à la manière de faire la guerre ?

    Isabelle Dufour Enormément de choses, parce qu’ils ont investi tous les secteurs du combat, ce qui n’était jamais arrivé auparavant. Usage par usage, on peut certes trouver des filiations : en Syrie en 2014, l’organisation Etat islamique utilisait de petits drones pour larguer des grenades, dans le Haut-Karabakh en 2023, lors de la guerre opposant l’Arménie à l’Azerbaïdjan, on voyait des [Bayraktar] TB2 turcs effectuer des missions semblables à celles pour lesquelles les Ukrainiens les utilisaient au début de l’invasion russe. Et, si on remonte plus loin, on se souvient des drones américains pilotés depuis les Etats-Unis et effectuant des frappes en Afghanistan. Mais, pour la première fois en Ukraine, non seulement les drones sont utilisés de façon massive et systématique, mais tous les usages sont explorés en même temps et dans une évolution constante. C’est donc la guerre dans son ensemble qui est affectée.

    Publicité
    Commençons alors par le combat terrestre.

    Les fantassins sont aujourd’hui sous la menace constante des petits drones FPV (First Person View) qui les traquent jusqu’à une vingtaine de kilomètres derrière la ligne de front. Même si beaucoup de ces missions sont kamikazes, un drone à 400 dollars contre un soldat russe, ça reste une bonne affaire… La conséquence est l’obligation faite aux fantassins de s’enterrer. Bien sûr, l’artillerie obligeait déjà à se cacher, mais on pouvait espérer, sous un couvert ou dans une zone rocailleuse, passer inaperçu. Aujourd’hui, c’est impossible. Il faut donc creuser des abris et en protéger les ouvertures pour éviter que les drones entrent dans le tunnel. Même chose dans les bâtiments : comme on l’a vu aussi avec les Israéliens à Gaza, un petit FPV entre facilement dans un hangar ou une maison. Cela complique énormément la vie des fantassins, même entre deux offensives.

    A lire aussi
    Présentation du drone Bayraktar TB2, lors de célébration de l’indépendance de l’Ukraine, le 24 août 2021, à Kiev.

    Récit Le drone de combat turc Bayraktar : les ailes militaires d’Erdogan

    Abonné
    Et qu’en est-il de l’artillerie ?

    Là, l’apport des drones est surtout la reconnaissance. L’artillerie n’a pas toujours une vision très précise de ce qu’elle peut viser comme cible. Je rappelle juste qu’un Caesar français par exemple – un camion équipé d’un canon de 155 mm – peut tirer jusqu’à 40 kilomètres, ce qui n’est pas tout près, et doit souvent le faire sur la base de renseignements qui peuvent être flous et rarement en temps réel. Les drones Orlan, côté russe, font très bien ce travail de reconnaissance : ils ne sont pas très grands, volent à une hauteur qui les rend accessibles seulement à des systèmes de défense à longue portée très coûteux (alors que l’appareil vaut autour de 100 000 dollars). Ils permettent d’identifier des cibles, mais aussi, ce qui est très utile pour l’artillerie, de voir si le tir a tapé là où il fallait, s’il y a les dégâts voulus ou s’il faut rectifier le tir ou changer les munitions. Tout cela est très précieux et renforce l’efficacité.
    Qu’en est-il du combat mécanisé, des chars, etc. ?

    Les chars sont devenus très vulnérables. Et d’ailleurs, cela a donné lieu à des spectacles assez cocasses, si j’ose dire. On a vu les Russes recouvrir leurs véhicules de plaques de métal blindé. Outre que cela les faisait ressembler à des tortues, les chars étaient alourdis, parfois gênés dans leur liberté de tir à cause d’une tourelle limitée dans ses mouvements. On a aussi vu des filets de pêche montés sur le char grâce à des tiges en métal pour éviter la projection de drones kamikazes. Inutile de dire que ces parades ne fonctionnent qu’un temps…
    Et l’aviation ? Parce qu’à vous entendre, on se dit qu’il n’y a plus besoin d’avions pilotés. Ne serait-ce que parce qu’ils coûtent extraordinairement cher, même par rapport au drone le plus coûteux…

    Un avion coûte très cher, en effet, et on peut le perdre. Les pilotes coûtent très cher aussi à former. Et il est vrai que certains secteurs du combat aérien risquent d’être remplacés un jour par les drones. Par exemple, ce qu’on appelle le Close Air Support, le soutien aérien rapproché, où les aéronefs interviennent juste au-dessus des troupes au sol. Ce sont des missions très risquées car se déroulant dans des zones couvertes par de nombreux systèmes de surveillance. Dans ces situations, les drones pourraient être très intéressants.

    Néanmoins, les avions pilotés ont encore des avantages : la vitesse et la capacité à délivrer de grosses quantités d’explosifs. Lâcher une bombe de 800 kilos avec effet de blast fait plus de dégâts que des FPV qui portent une charge de 15 kilos, et qui, même si plusieurs interviennent en même temps, laissent le temps aux soldats de se disperser. Les Russes préfèrent encore les avions pilotés qui tirent des missiles à longue distance pour viser les villes et infrastructures ukrainiennes. Les drones ne peuvent pas encore lancer les missiles au design spécial qui permettent par exemple de pénétrer un bunker grâce à une double charge – la première qui explose pour percer le mur et la deuxième à l’intérieur.
    Photo, extraite d’une vidéo diffusée par le service de presse du ministère russe de la Défense le 2 avril 2025, montrant des soldats russes avant le lancement d’un drone vers des positions ukrainiennes.

    Photo, extraite d’une vidéo diffusée par le service de presse du ministère russe de la Défense le 2 avril 2025, montrant des soldats russes avant le lancement d’un drone vers des positions ukrainiennes. RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY PRESS SERVICE VIA AP/SIPA
    Mais pourquoi y a-t-il encore besoin de pilotes dans ces avions ? Pourquoi ne pas les manier à distance ou ne pas laisser faire une intelligence artificielle (IA) qui travaille en autonomie ?

    Pour ce qui est du pilotage à distance, se pose le problème du temps de latence. Si vous utilisez une liaison satellitaire, ce qui est nécessaire au-delà d’une centaine de kilomètres, il faut compter 1 à 2 secondes de latence, le temps que le signal monte jusqu’au satellite et redescende. C’est énorme car quand on pilote un avion de combat, il faut réagir très vite : la cible peut apparaître au dernier moment, il est nécessaire de pouvoir effectuer une manœuvre évasive en un dixième de seconde.

    Pour ce qui est d’un pilotage par l’IA, se pose un autre problème : la complexité de l’environnement. Même si, dans le Rafale chargé de la dissuasion nucléaire par exemple, il existe un radar de suivi de terrain qui peut vous faire voler à moins de 100 mètres de hauteur, en suivant le relief, sans que vous n’ayez à faire quoi que ce soit, il y a tout le reste à prendre en compte : le surgissement d’une menace impromptue et la nécessité d’adapter la mission au dernier moment. Là, le pilote demeure le meilleur recours : il est une sorte de multi-capteurs, capable de prendre en compte un nombre de paramètres encore inaccessible à l’informatique. Face à de l’imprévu – une forêt défeuillée par exemple –, le pilote va se poser des questions que la machine ne peut pas se poser : est-ce normal ? Pourquoi ces traces d’incendie au sol ? Cela suggère-t-il un départ fréquent de tir d’artillerie ? Aujourd’hui, plus qu’à l’IA à proprement parler – c’est-à-dire de modèles auto-apprenants et capables de décisions autonomes –, les systèmes existants ont recours à des algorithmes très complexes qui permettent déjà plein de choses : identifier une cible, aller seuls vers une cible programmée (donc ne plus émettre ni recevoir de données, ce qui les rend beaucoup moins détectables)…
    Dans la marine, il semble aussi que l’usage des drones soit de plus en fréquent…

    Oui, ce sont vraiment tous les secteurs de la guerre qui sont affectés, c’est pourquoi je parle de « révolution ». Dans le domaine maritime – un milieu complexe à maîtriser –, il existe deux types de drones : des drones sous-marins (qu’on appelle des UUV : Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) et des drones de surface (USV : Unmanned Surface Vehicles). Dans ce conflit, ce sont surtout les seconds qui sont utilisés. Ils servent essentiellement, pour les Ukrainiens, à harceler la flotte russe : un tiers de la flotte russe en mer Noire aurait été touchée par un de ces engins. Dans cette zone, la Russie a dû réarticuler son dispositif pour s’adapter à cette menace, et ce, dès l’automne 2022.
    Si toutes les armées sont concernées par les drones, que cela change-t-il à la guerre globalement ?

    J’aimerais bien le savoir… Trop de changements se produisent à des niveaux tactiques pour savoir ce qui changera vraiment aux niveaux opératif et stratégique. Mais il s’agit d’un changement majeur, qui impactera la façon dont on conçoit les opérations. Plusieurs armées ont déjà créé, à différents niveaux, des branches dédiées spécifiquement aux drones.

    A lire aussi
    Pavlo Matyusha à Kiev, en juin 2023.

    Archives Lettre du front ukrainien : « Avec les drones, nous sommes en permanence observés du ciel par des yeux mécaniques qui peuvent fondre sur nous à tout moment »

    Abonné
    Alors, sérions les questions. Pour commencer, diriez-vous que les drones permettent de faire plus de victimes ?

    C’est très difficile à dire. Les tapis de bombes de la Première Guerre mondiale et de la Seconde Guerre mondiale étaient une boucherie : les drones permettent-ils de les éviter ? Peut-être… Mais on pourrait tout aussi bien soutenir que ce qu’on voit en Ukraine, en termes de morts et de blessés, est inédit depuis 1945 et que les drones y sont pour quelque chose. Disons simplement qu’il est dans la nature de la guerre de faire beaucoup de victimes. Si vous n’infligez pas beaucoup de pertes à votre ennemi, c’est que vous échouez.
    Autre manière d’aborder la question : voit-on apparaître avec les drones de nouveaux traumas, tant pour ceux qui en sont les victimes que pour ceux qui les pilotent (on se souvient des soldats américains qui supportaient très mal de tuer depuis le Nouveau-Mexique, et par écran et joystick interposés, des combattants en Afghanistan) ?

    Encore une fois, c’est difficile à dire tant les syndromes de stress post-traumatique sont répandus parmi les soldats ukrainiens, comme la plupart du temps dans les guerres d’ailleurs. Néanmoins, on observe des troubles particuliers chez les pilotes de drones qui n’utilisent plus des écrans mais des casques immersifs et se projettent presque littéralement sur l’ennemi. Ils voient très bien la personne qu’ils vont tuer, jusqu’au dernier moment, et elle-même regarde souvent la caméra. Dans le cas d’explosif lâché, il arrive souvent que, une fois la charge lancée, quand il n’est plus possible de rien faire, le soldat visé crie, lève ou joigne les mains. Il a beau être un ennemi, quand vous voyez cela vingt fois, cela produit des effets. Là où le tireur d’élite – et encore moins l’opérateur d’artillerie – ne voit rien et où le fantassin qui tire au fusil de plus près peut décider au dernier moment d’épargner sa cible, ce qui arrive assez souvent.

    Il faut ajouter à cela que les opérateurs de drones FPV sont eux-mêmes particulièrement ciblés par l’adversaire. Les Russes se sont fait une spécialité de détecter les émissions d’ondes électromagnétiques émises par la liaison entre l’opérateur et son drone, ce qui leur permet de le localiser et de le cibler par l’artillerie ou en envoyant un drone ou des snipers.

    Quant aux fantassins, le fait de vivre sous la menace permanente des drones, même loin derrière la ligne de front, même dans un milieu censément protecteur, produit un stress nouveau et extrême. D’autant que le fait d’être poursuivi par un drone est une situation cauchemardesque. Par ailleurs, il faut noter que l’explosion n’est pas la seule menace : depuis un an, des drones dits « Dragon » dispersent par exemple de la thermite qui brûle les positions, notamment sous couvert forestier. Et puis les soldats ne sont pas les seuls visés : depuis l’automne 2024, les Russes « chassent », comme ils disent, les civils, notamment du côté de Kherson.
    Autre changement : la multiplication des drones nécessite-t-elle de nouvelles compétences dans les armées ?

    Bien sûr. Il faut former des pilotes. Aux Etats-Unis, le premier réflexe a été de recruter des gamers. S’ils avaient les aptitudes, on s’est vite aperçu qu’on ne pouvait pas se passer d’une formation militaire plus globale : faire la guerre, ce n’est pas jouer. Beaucoup de programmes ont donc été développés en Ukraine, et de nombreux centres de formation créés. Quant aux Russes, on sait qu’ils ont recruté une ancienne championne de tir pour former les fantassins et leur apprendre à tirer sur les drones au fusil.
    Isabelle Dufour, directrice des études stratégiques à Eurocrise, sur le plateau de Public Sénat, le 18 mars 2025.

    Isabelle Dufour, directrice des études stratégiques à Eurocrise, sur le plateau de Public Sénat, le 18 mars 2025. CAPTURE ÉCRAN PUBLIC SÉNAT
    Et pour la fabrication de ces drones. Hormis ceux qui sont importés, est-ce qu’il a fallu créer une filière industrielle ?

    Dès le début de la guerre, la société civile ukrainienne s’est organisée, par des systèmes de collecte et de sponsoring, pour fournir ses forces armées en nourriture, matériel etc. C’est valable aussi pour les drones : des levées de fonds sont régulièrement organisées pour acheter des pièces ou des appareils.

    Pour ce qui est de la fabrication, l’Ukraine avait les compétences industrielles nécessaires, notamment dans les secteurs aéronautique et mécanique ; il ne faut jamais oublier que les chars soviétiques étaient fabriqués à Kharkiv. Il y a en Ukraine des ingénieurs qui savent concevoir et fabriquer, des ouvriers qui savent souder, qui peuvent bidouiller un réservoir à partir d’une bouteille en plastique ou profiter d’une imprimante 3D pour produire des composants. Cette qualité humaine de base – qui nous manque terriblement en France, soit dit en passant – leur a permis de produire des drones en quantité. Cette continuité entre le civil et le militaire explique aussi l’extraordinaire rapidité avec laquelle évoluent les drones et les systèmes qui permettent de s’en protéger. On a vu des gens fabriquer des brouilleurs en récupérant des systèmes électroniques à droite à gauche. Cette guerre est une guerre de l’adaptation permanente, les armées innovent et s’adaptent en continu, parfois à l’échelle de quelques semaines et très localement, eu égard à l’autonomie dont bénéficient les régiments ukrainiens qui ont souvent leur propre réseau d’entreprises qui les alimentent en matériel.

    Cela a une conséquence inédite : si les différents modèles de drones ont un design commun, les variations sont innombrables. On peut y voir un avantage : l’innovation est constante, adaptée au terrain et aux usages. Mais cela rend compliquée la mise à l’échelle et, plus embêtant, une planification globale à la fois matérielle et stratégique.
    On pourrait parler, du côté ukrainien, de « start-upisation » de la guerre ?

    On peut le dire comme ça. Mais demeure la question de savoir si c’est efficace. On peut se contenter de constater que, jusqu’à maintenant, ils ont tenu avec cette organisation très décentralisée et agile, et peut-être grâce à elle. Mais c’était face à une armée russe qui, pendant longtemps, a été très mauvaise. Aujourd’hui que l’armée russe s’est beaucoup améliorée, je me demande où en est l’armée ukrainienne. Elle a perdu beaucoup de cadres intermédiaires très bien formés, et, de ce fait, les états-majors ne se sont pas renouvelés. Ce qui a sans doute affaibli leur capacité à planifier des campagnes opératives, contrairement aux Russes.

    L’autonomie des unités empêche parfois les Ukrainiens d’avancer ensemble, de manière coordonnée. On a vu des unités quitter des positions de leur propre chef, contre l’avis de leur commandement, parce qu’un officier estimait que c’était la bonne à chose à faire. Quant aux drones, ils aident les Ukrainiens à tenir, c’est manifeste, mais ils participent aussi à cette fragmentation : à peu de frais, une unité peut trouver le moyen de faire quelque chose, alors pourquoi ne le ferait-elle pas ? Si on peut faire reculer l’ennemi de 2 kilomètres, pourquoi ne pas le faire ? Du point de vue de l’efficacité tactique, le système ukrainien fonctionne, mais sur plan stratégique, c’est plus contestable.
    Dernier changement apporté par le drone à l’art de la guerre : ils permettent de produire des images qui, semble-t-il, sont très utiles à la propagande…

    Là encore, cet usage n’est pas réellement nouveau : certaines wilayas (« provinces ») de l’organisation Etat Islamique, par exemple, avaient déjà des équipes dédiées au recueil d’images par drones. Le conflit russo-ukrainien a repris cet usage, à une échelle bien plus vaste, mais il n’y a pas là de rupture à proprement parler. Les vidéos, souvent captées par les combattants eux-mêmes et diffusées via des canaux spécialisés (en général sur Telegram), sont innombrables, des deux côtés.

    #Guerre #Drones #Ukraine

    • Dans ma jenuesse je les ai encore rencontré, les tueurs allemands du front de l’Est et les GIs de Vietnam en mission de repos à Berlin, tous des hommes fort déagréables qui ont exercé une influence négative sur leur environnement, leurs familles et toute la société.

      Thomas Harlan a tourné à Paris le portrait d’un tueur nazi, Alfred FIlbert de qui émanait le même stream of consciouness ou plutôt l’inconscient omniprésent dans les familles.

      Wundkanal / Notre nazi
      http://www.thomasharlan.com/filme/wundkanal-notre-nazi

      L’Ukraine et la Russie souffriront encore pendant plusieurs générations de cet héritage obscure qui pourrit la vie de gens. Cela est vrai pour toutes les sociétés dont la politique se sert des guerres pour atteindre ses objectifs. Ainsi l’État d’Israel ne ressemblera plus jamais à l’image du refuge paisible pour les juifs du monde que ses propagandistes on réussi à communiquer pendant longtemps.

      Le problème est connu chez les assassins professionnels mais personne n’y a encore trouvé de solution.

      On trouve ces observation dans le manuel du tueur officiel de Dave Grossmann qui en a fait une belle affaire.

      On Killing
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Grossman_(author)

      Grossman’s first book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society , is an analysis of the psychological processes involved with killing another human being. In it, he claims that most people have a phobia-level response to violence, and that soldiers have to be specifically trained to kill. He details some of the physical effects that violent stresses produce on humans, ranging from tunnel vision, changes in sonic perception, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Robert Engen, in a paper for the Canadian Military Journal critiquing On Killing, criticized Grossman’s works, saying that “although On Killing and On Combat form an excellent starting point, there are too many problems with their interpretation for them to be considered the final word on the subject.” Grossman’s response to Engen, printed in the same journal, attempted to address the criticisms by arguing that SLA Marshall’s findings that man is not by nature a killer, even after having doubt cast on their methodology, have borne out in further scientific studies and real world experience, and furthermore, “have been the cornerstone of military and police training for over a half century.” "On Killing" has been cited over 3300 times, noted by Google Scholar.

      In Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill : A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence, Grossman argues that the techniques used by armies to train soldiers to kill are mirrored in certain types of video games. He claims that playing violent video games, particularly light gun shooters of the first-person shooter-variety (where the player holds a weapon-like game controller), train children in the use of weapons and, more importantly, harden them emotionally to the task of murder by simulating the killing of hundreds or thousands of opponents in a single typical video game. He has repeatedly used the term “murder simulator” to describe first-person shooter games.

      His third non-fiction book, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace , is an extension of his first, listing coping strategies for dealing with the physiological and psychological effects of violence for people who kill people in their line of work (soldiers and police officers).

      #assassins #génocide #pédagogie #forces_armées

  • L’édition du Playboy qui a servi de modèle pour les scènes dans Apocalypse Now de Coppola
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now

    L’agression des États Unis contre le Vietnam prend la forme de la guerre qu’on connaît le 7 ou 8 mais 1965 lors ce que la 173e brigade aéroportée américaine arrive à Da Nang.
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_in_the_Vietnam_War#1960s

    Au mois de janvier 1966 après avoir subi les premières défaites le Pentagone se sert des filles du magazine Playboy pour remonter la morale de ses soldats. Cinq ans plus tard la 173e brigade rentre aux États Unis après avoir souffert 1.602 morts et 8.435 blessés.


    (page 145)

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    Le reportage raconte une visite à partir du 10 janvier 1966.

    La réalité fut différente de l’image optimiste dessinée dans l’article du Playboy.
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/173rd_Airborne_Brigade_Combat_Team#Vietnamkrieg

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/173rd_Airborne_Brigade#Vietnam_War

    The brigade arrived in South Vietnam on 7 May 1965, the first major ground combat unit of the United States Army to serve in the country. Williamson boldly predicted on arrival that his men would defeat the Viet Cong (VC) quickly and that they “would be back in Okinawa by Christmas”.

    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/173rd_Airborne_Brigade_Combat_Team#Vietnamkrieg

    Im Mai 1965 wurde die Brigade als erste größere Einheit der US Army während des Vietnamkriegs nach Südvietnam verlegt. Das Haupteinsatzgebiet der Skysoldiers war das Gebiet nördlich von Saigon, das die militärische Bezeichnung „War Zone D“ trug. Am 8. November 1965 geriet die Brigade während der Operation Hump in einen Hinterhalt von 1.200 Vietcongkämpfern und verlor 48 Mann bei den darauffolgenden schweren Gefechten.
    ...
    Nach ihrer Rückkehr in die Staaten 1971 wurde die Brigade am 14. Januar 1972 in Fort Campbell, Kentucky deaktiviert und aus der aktiven Armee ausgegliedert. Während des Krieges wurden 1.602 Soldaten des Verbands getötet, 8.435 wurden verwundet.

    Voici le texte de cet article remarquable. C’est un exemple de propagande de guerre d’une grande qualité, à te déchirer le coeur il donne l’impression d’avoir participé au voyage de la playmate Playboy de l’an 1964. En 2025 la propagande est pplus directe et plus subtile à la fois. Les textes longs n’intéressent plus guère les jeunes gens alors que dans les années 1960 le Playboy approcha le zénith à cause de la qualité de ses textes toujours dans l’esprit du temps machiste et bien sûr pour les photos de jeunes femmes dénudées.

    PLAYMATE FIRST CLASS : JO COLLINS IN VIETNAM

    (p 145)
    Playboy’s GI Jo Delivers a Lifetime Subscription to the Front

    (Photo begin PHOTOGRAPHY BY LARRY GORDON)
    Above: Jo mokes a few last-minute logistic chonges of her own prior to deploning in Soigon. “Any girl would reoch for a mirror,” she soys, “with 400 men outside her door (Phot end)

    MOST MILITARY strategists agree that, aside from actual firepower, nothin means more to an army than the morale of its men. And since thc days of GI Joe, the American fighting man has seldom appeared on the frontiers of freedom without an abundant supply of that most time-honored of spiritlifting staples: the pinup. From the shores of Iwo Jima 10 the jungles of Vietnam, the pinup queen has remained a constant companion to our men at arms; but the longlegged likenesses of such World War Two lovelies as Grable and Наworth haye given way to a whole new breed of photogenic females better known as the pLavnoy Playmates. It was only a mauer of time, therefore, until centerfolddom’s contemporary beauties would be asked to do their bit for our boys in uniform. That time came last November, when Second Lieutenant John Price— a young airborne officer on duty in Vietna Editor-Publisher Hugh Hefner the following letter:

    “This is writen from the depths of the hearts of 180 officers and men of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade (Seperate) stationed at Bien Hoa, Republic of Vietnam. We were the first American Army troop unit committed to action here in Vietnam, and we have gone many miles—some in sorrow and some in joy, but mostly in hard, bone-weary inches. . . . We аге proud to be here and have found the answer to the question, “Ask what you cin do for your country." And yet we cannot stand alone—which brings me to the reason for sending you this request.

    “The loneliness here is a terrible thing — and we long to see a real, living, breathing American girl. Therefore, we have enclosed with this letter a money order for a Lifetime Subscription to PLAYBOY magazine for B Company.
    It is our understanding that, with the purchase

    (p 146) of а Lifetime Subscription in the U.S, the first issuc is personally delivered by a Playmate. It is our most fervent hope that this policy can be extended to include us. . . . Any опе of the current Playmates of the Month would be welcomed with open arms, but if we have any choice in the matter, we have unanimously decided that we would prefer the 1965 Playmate of the Year— Miss Jo Collins.

    (p 146)
    (Photo begin)
    Above: Roses ore the order of the day os two members of Compony B welcome Jo to Vietnam on beholf of their wounded Project Ploymate officer, Lieutenont John Price, hospitalized back at battolion headquorters in Bien Hoo. Below: Jo delivers company’s Lifetime Subscription certificcte at Lieutenant Price’s bedside {left} ond odds bonus buss (right) of her own to go with it.

    “If we are not important enough . . . to send a Playmate for, please just forget about us and we will quietly fade back into the jungle.” (Photo end)

    Deciding that only old soldiers should fade away, und deeply touched by the paratroopers plea, Hefner immediately began drawing up plans for the successful completion of Project Playmate. “When we first received the request,” Hef recalls, € weren’t at all sure how the Defense Department would feel about PLAYBOX sending a beautiful American girl into Vietnam at a time like this, but. Licutenant Price’s letter was too moving to just put aside and forget. The lieutenant had obviously been a PLAYBOY reader for quite a while, since he remembered а special Christmas gift offer the magazine published several years ago, which stated that a lifetime subscriber from any city with a Playboy Club would have his first issue delivered in person by a Playmate. Оf course we don’t have a Playboy Club in Vietnam at the moment, but we figured we could overlook that little technicality under the circumstances." Along with the usual complications and military restrictions any average civilian encounters when attempting to travel to Vietnam these days, many more technicalities had to be ironed out

    (Photo begin)
    Left: PLAYBOY’S pretty Vietnom volunteer visits Lieutenont Price’s wordmotes at the Evocuofion Hospitcl. "Most af them hod been bodly hurt,” soys Jo, “but no one ever camploined.”(Photo end)

    (p 147)

    (Photo begin)
    Above: Aboard Bien Hoa’s newly decorated Bunny bus (left), Jo takes a guided tour of Company В’s base-camp orea, stopping off to admire the imaginative floor-to-ceiling Playmate motif (right) adorning the PX ("lt was the closest the fellows could come to o real Playboy Club") (Photo end)

    (Photo begin)
    Center: A bit foot-weary during her first day ot the front, Playmate First Class Collins hitches a ride with some armored admirers (left) back to the company mess hall; seems pleaased that an autographing gal can always find a strong back (right) in Bien Hoa when she needs one. Above: Jo lunches with Company B enlisted men (left), who show more interest in signatures than sustenance; after chow (right), she hoists their Bunny flog. (Photo end)

    (p 148)
    (Photo begin)
    Below: Before leaving Bien Ноa, Jo makes a tour of other companies’ “Playboy Clubs” ("We ran across these ‘clubs’ at every GI base”). (Photo end)

    through the proper channels before Jo received the necessary Government ance for а late-February flight to the front lines. “The fellows in Company В said it would be a privilege if I could visit them,” remarked the Playmate of the Year when asked how she felt about her upcoming tour of delivery duty in the war-torn Far East, “but the way I see it—J’m the one who’s privileged.

    Her call to arms came much sooner than expected, however, when word was received that Lieutenant Price had been wounded in action on January 3, and that her morale-boosting mission might have to be canceled unless Jo could reach the injured officer’s bedside at a Bien Hoa combat-zone hospital before his scheduled evacuation from Vietnam on January 13. All additional red tape still pending prior to Jo’s departure quickly bypassed: afternoon (January 9), Playmate First Class Collins and her party—which included PLAYBOS’s Playmate and Bunny Promotion Coordinator Joyce Chalecki as acting chaperone and staff photographer Lаrrу Gordon departed departed from Francisco on a Pan Am jetliner bound for Saigon. Commenting on some of her own last-minute logistic problems before take-off, Jo later told us: “Things were so hectic those last few days before we left that I was sure we’d never make it.

    (Photo begin)
    Top: Trooper Collins ond her MP escorts prepare to board their “Playboy Special" chopper for the second doy’s agenda of battle-zone visits in Vietnom. “Toke it from me," Jo smiles, “those bulletproof vests they moke you wear do nothing for a girl’s figure." Center: With her own whirlybird safely flanked by two gun ships (left), Jo listens in on conversation between chopper jockeys. Above: She arrives ot Special Forces comp atop Black Virgin Mountoin. (Photo end)

    just pictures on page

    (Photo begin)
    Below: At Loy Ninth, Jo Collins in Vietnam puts in yeamon service with the busines: end of her outograph pen (left) at the request of still another group of green-bereted fans; then she’s shown oround nearby Coe Dai Temple (right), which she found “so peaceful to be so close to war.” (Photo ende)

    (p 149)
    (Photo begin)
    Above: Visiting Playmote queen is crowned with a green beret (left) by Special Forces mon assigned to this criticol mountain outpost, signifying she bears this famed guerrillo-fighting group’s very special seal of approval; our Gl Jo gets on-the-job instruction (right) in mortar firing. (Photo end)

    For openers, I was avay visiting friends in Oregon when the news came in about Lieutenant Price being wounded. The plans called for my flying to Chicago in mid February, where I would team up with Larry and Joyce, get my travel shots and dear up all the final details for the trip. Hef phoned me about the sudden switch in Project Playmate, and I spent the next five days flying back and forth—first to Seattle for my passport when I found out Oregon doesn’t issue them; then to Los Angeles, where I got my smallpox vaccination, checked out some lastminute details with my agent at American International Studios and raided my apartment for the clothes I figured I’d be needing. As it was I managed to meet Larry and Joyce at the Francisco airport and board our jet to Vietnam all of spare.” (In typical above-and-beyond-the-call fashion, trooper Collins—an aspiring actress whose recent film credits include minor roles in Lord Love а Duck and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? —neglected to mention that, in reporting for duty on such short notice, she’d had to bypass an important audition for a principal part on TV’s Peyton Place.)

    Some 8000 miles and 18 hours after their Stateside rendezvous, Jo and her PLAYMATE staffers landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where 400 American troops and a regiment of newsmen and photographers had turned out to greet them. After a brief review of her assembled admirers, Jo was introduced to Lieutenant Clancy Johnson and Private First Class Marvin Hudson, two of Lieutenant Price’s friends in the 173rd Airborne Brigade who had ever-so-willingly voluntcered to serve as а stand-in reception committee for their wounded buddy back at Bien Hoa. Mindful of his guerrilla training, Private First Class Hudson put on a one-man camouflage display when, after handing Jo her Com pany В (for Bravo) tribute of red roses, he subsequently blushed a deep crimson and succeeded in concealing the telltale lipstick print she had just planted on each of his checks.

    (p 150)
    (Photo begin)
    Left: Arriving at Bu Dор, a strategic supply base near the Cambodian border, Jo poses with fellow Green Berets (top) while Special Forces shutterbug їп the foreground snaps away for post’s scrapbook. Before calling it a day in the field, Jo passes muster (center right) under mister’s keen-eyed surveillonce. (Photo end)

    Following the deplaning festivities, the three PLAYBOY recruits were taken to a nearby “chopper” pad and given a whirlwind aerial tour of Saigon and the outlying districts aboard the “Playboy Special”—a Brigade helicopter especially renamed in honor of their visit. “That first chopper ride really started things off with excitement,” reports GI Jo. "It seemed as though we’d hardly even arrived, and there we were over hostile country being given our first taste of what they call ‘contour flying.’ That’s where you skim the treetops to prevent possible enemy snipers from getting a clear shot at you and then, suddenly, shoot straight up at about 100 miles per hour to 3500 feet so you can check the area for Viet Cong troop movements from outside their firing range. After our stomachs got used to it, we figured we were ready for just about anything.” Back on terra firma, the PLAYBOY troupe was joined by Jack Edwards, who took time out from his regular duties as Special Services Director for the Saigon based press and military officials to act as the trio’s liaison man during its forthcoming three-day tour of the surrounding combat areas. As Jo later told us: "Jack was so concerned about our running into a V.C. ambush after we left Saigon that he wound up worrying enough for all of us. He managed to get us rooms at the Embassy Hotel in Saigon after our original reservations at the Caravelle somehow went astray; he kept press conferences down to a minimum so we could spend most of our time with the men at the front, arranged a firstnight sightseeing trip to some of the Saigon night clubs in case our own morale needed bolstering and, in general, watched over us like a mother hen. By the end of the first evening in Vietnam, we were all so pleased we’d come that, when one reporter reminded me I could end up getting shot during the next three days, I told him that the only shot I was still worried about was the one for cholera I was scheduled to get the next morning. (continued on page 198)

    (Poto begin)
    Left: Jo spends part of her lost day in the Far Eost visiling with veteran South Vietпamesе regulars at advanced combat area near Airborne Brigade headquarters; then meets General Williamson (center left), who proclaims her the first female Sky Soldier. (Photo end)

    (p 198)
    VIETNAM (continued from page 150)

    "The following day (Tuesday, January 11), Jo and her colleagues got a chance to test their calmness under fire. Arriving at Tan Son Nhut at 0830 hours, dressed in combat fatigues, they were issued bulletproof vests before boarding the “Playboy Special” with their MP escorts for an initial frontline foray. "I is a question of safety before says Jo, “but I couldn’t help feeling a little insecure. After seeing some of Saigon’s Vietnamese beauties Lieutenant Price referred to in his letter and catching a glimpse of myself in combat gear, I was afraid the guys wouldn’t be nearly as homesick for an American girl once they had а basis for compari” Flying low over cnemy-infiltrated territory and encircled by three fully manned gun ships fying escort, the “Playboy Special” made its first stop at the 173rd Airborne Brigade Headqu: ters in Bien Hoa. Here, any fears our pretty Playmate might have harbored about her uniform appeal were summarily dispatched by the parade of smiling paratroopers waiting on the airstrip to greet her.

    Most of the men of Company B were on jungle patrols during Jo’s first visit to Bien Hoa, but the one man most responsible for her being in Vietnam — Lieutenant John Price — was present and accounted for at his unit’s surgical ward. In spite of a severely wounded arm that will require several additional operations before it сап be restored to full use, Lieutenant Price managed to muster

    up enough energy to give his favorite Playmate a healthy hug or two when she showed up to deliver his company’s Lifetime Subscription certificate and the latest issue of rrAvpov. The lieutenant’s al reaction to seeing the Company B sweetheart standing there in the flesh was “Gosh, уоште even prettier than your pictures.” Flattered, Jo sealed her PLAYBOY delivery with а well-timed kiss, and consequently convinced the company medics that Price was well along the road to recovery by evoking his immediate request for a repeat engagement. In fact, his condition seemed so improved that the doctors waived hospital regulations for the day to allow him to accompany Jo to lunch at Camp Zenn—the Company B base camp on the outskirts of Bien Hoa.

    After lunch, Jo put her best bedside manner to use as she paid a brief call on cach of the men in Lieutenant Price’s ward, “A few of the fellows asked me to help them finish а letter home, others. ight for their cigarette; but most of them just wanted to talk awhile with a from their own native land. A couple of times I was sure I would break down and bawl like a baby, but 1 managed to control myself they brought in a badly wounded buddy who. ked if he could see me before going into surgery. When I got to his side, he was bleeding heavily from both legs and І didn’t know what to do or say to comlort him. Then he looked up at me with his best tough-guy grin and simply said, "Hi, gorgeous” After that, I lost all conuol and the old tears really flowed.”

    Belore leaving Bien Hoa, Jo made additional bedside tours at the 93rd Medical Evacuation Hospital and the 3rd Surgical Hospital, where the doctors on duty decided to add some Playmate therapy to their own daily diet by piling into the nearest empty beds during her rounds, Not until their day’s tour 1 ended and their chopper was warming up for the flight back to Saigon did Jo and her companions suddenly realize how close to actual combat they’d been for the past several hours, “We were all ready to go and standing outside the Brigade Oflicers Club when I first heard the sound of shots coming explains Jo. “Then a few mortar shells went off, but it still didn’t sink how near the action we really wei І guess we’d all been too busy meeting wounded soldiers and talking to dic men on the base to notice anything before. Then, right before our chopper lifted off, a series of flares went off and lit up everything for miles. I kept thinking how great it would have been if all those boys had been back home watching a Fourth of July celebration instead of out there in the jungle fighting for their very lives.”

    (p 199)

    Wednesday, the group headed out toward some of the more crucial combat zones in the Saigon military theater. First on the day’s itinerary was a stopover at Nu Ba Den, a strategic communications outpost under the command of Forces troops who had long since renamed their precarious hilltop position “Black Virgin Mountain.” Rising some 3200 feet above the surrounding countryside and under continuous as assault from Viet Cong guerrillas hidden in the densely wooded areas below Black Virgin Mountain is defended by a small detachment of Special Forces personnel and the South Vietnamese regulars placed in their charge. But despite the precariousness of their position, these wearers of the famed Green Berets greeted the PLAYBOY group with a typical show of Special Forces readiness: crowning Jo upon arrival with her own green beret‚ escorting һеr to various lookout points around the installation and serving as interpreters when Viemamese soldiers asked to meet her.

    From Black Virgin Mountain the “Playboy Special" flew its charges to а Special Forces encampment at Lay Ninth whose boundaries encompass the majestic Cao Dai Temple - seat of the Cao Dai religion, which combines teh teachings of Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism. “The temple itself. was right оut of a fairy tale,” remembers Jo. “But its presence right in the middle of a combat theater made everything about it that much more strikingly unusual. We entered barefooted and were met by a different world, full of ornate columns, uncaged white birds and young headshaven priests, while just outside me uniform walked about with their guns always ready at their sides.”

    Another 85 miles over enemy lines brought the passengers of the “Playboy Special” to the village of Bu Dop, one of the most strategically critical military outposts in the entire Vietnam war zone. Located on the Cambodian border and protected by the 5th Special Forces Group, this vital base had, only three months earlier, been the scene of an ambush that cost the lives of all the men then assigned to its defense. “The Green Berets at Bu Dop went out of their way to try and maintain a relaxed air around us,” Jo later said, “but you could still cut the tension with а Knife. We were introduced to just about everyone there was to meet — from the group commander to most of his American and South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters — but it seemed as though none of them ever left his field position or took his eyes off the surrounding jungle. Some of the edge was taken off our nerves when the village chief and his two wives came by to welcome us, since they all projected the

    (p 200)

    feeling of complete calm by nonchalantly walking about the community with nothing on from the waist up.”

    Whatever tranquilizing effect the sight of a Vietnamese vukkĺlage chief and his two topless ladies fair might had on the threesome was short-lived, however, for the next stopover on their tour took them well outside the barbed-wired gates of Bu Dop and across the same jungle trail they had just been told was often swarming with Cong. “Like red blooded female cowards,” jokes the 20-year-old Playmate of the Year, “ and I hit the раnic button the minute caught sight of the bullet-holes in the side of our truck. And we both swear we saw Larry’s shutter finger shake through an entire roll of film, but he refuses to admit it.” As it turned out, the purpose of th junket into the unknown was to let some of Jo’s South Vietnamese fans — stationed minutes away in a small Montangnard hamlet — get a glimpse of their green-bereted glamor girl before she left.

    The final item on Wednesday’s agenda was a flight to Vung Tau, a scenic coastal village on the Mekong Peninsula where American and South Viemamese troops can enjoy a few days of much-needed rest and rehabilitation before their next tour of duty in the interior. “At first,” says Jo, “I was afraid to ask any of the fellows how they felt about going back into combat after having a chance to get away from it all. I figured they’d all like to forget about war and just lie on the beach there until everything got settled. It didn’t take me long to find out otherwise. Many of our boys in Vietnam may only be 17- and 18 year-olds who don’t know much about world politics, but I came away from places like Vung Tau convinced that they know why they’re there. Nobody’s going to make them throw in the towel.”

    Jo’s last day in Vietnam wound up being the busiest of all. With a gallant assist from Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson — Airborne Commander in Vietnam — she got a second chance to complete her mission as planned when the frontline troops from Company B were called back to Bien Hoa for a 24-hour lifetime subscriber’s leave and a long-awaited look at the Playmate of their choice. One by one, the combat weary paratroopers filed off their choppers and hurried over for a hard-carned hello from Jo — a few even produced crumpled-up copies of her December 1964 Playmate photo they’d been carrying in their helmet liners in hope of someday having them autographed. “When I saw all those happy faces running toward me from every direction, I knew we’d finally gotten our job done,” she said.

    One more trір to the front was on the agenda before Jo would be ready to head back to Saigon and a Hawaii bound jet. Landing in War Zone D, Jo was escorted to combat headquarters, where a grateful general was waiting to hand her a farewell memento of her short stay in Vietnam — a plaque upon which had been inscribed the words: “Know ye all men that, in recognition of the that thar Playmate Jo Collins traveled to the Republic of Vietnam to deliver subscription to PLAYBOY magazine to sky soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and demonstrated exceptional courage by volunteering to travel into hostile area and in doing so exhibited the all-the-way spirit typical of true airborne troopers - I, Brigadier General Ellis W. Wilmson, do appoint her an honorary Sky Soldier, done this 13th day of Januту, 1966.”

    "The day after her Saigon departure, Jo recived further praise from high places for the job she had done. Between visits in Honolulu to Triper Army Hospipital and Pearl Harbor, she was called on the phone by Ambassador Averill Harman, who wished to express his and Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s congratulations on all the good reports they’d heard concerning her morale-lifting mission. Needless to say, Jo was highly honored by the tributes of so dignified a brace of statesmen, but, as she put it, “The finest compliments I could ever receive have already been sent in the letters of over 200 fellows I was lucky enough to meet somewhere near Saigon.

    It remained for the men of Company B to pay their Playmate postmistress the highest honor, however, by renaming their outfit “Playboy Company” and thus assuring Jo that her presence south of the 17th Parallel would not be soon forgotten. When asked how she felt becoming the official mascot for this troop of front-line sky soldiers, a jubilant Jo replied, “I’ve never been prouder.“ As the company’s new namesake, PLAYBOY seconds that statement.

    Contenu de l’édition 13/1966

    https://archive.org/details/playboy-magazines-1953-2013/PlayBoy/Playboy%201966/5%20-%20May%201966/page/145/mode/1up?view=theater

    Coppola argues that many episodes in the film—the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example—respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress. Other episodes adapted by Coppola— the Playboy Playmates’ (Sirens) exit , the lost souls ("take me home") attempting to reach the boat, and Kurtz’s tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp—are likened to Virgil and “The Inferno” (Divine Comedy) by Dante. While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad’s book is still clear.

    ...

    Colleen Camp, Cynthia Wood and Linda Beatty as Playboy Playmates. Wood was the 1974 Playmate of the Year, and Beatty was the August 1976 Playmate of the Month.

    ...

    Typhoon Olga wrecked 40–80% of the sets at Iba and on May 26, 1976, production was closed down. Dean Tavoularis remembers that it “started raining harder and harder until finally it was literally white outside, and all the trees were bent at forty-five degrees”. Some of the crew were stranded in a hotel and the others were in small houses that were immobilized by the storm. The Playboy Playmate set was destroyed, ruining a month’s scheduled shooting. Most of the cast and crew returned to the United States for six to eight weeks. Tavoularis and his team stayed on to scout new locations and rebuild the Playmate set in a different place.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now

    #cinéma #presse #Vietnam #guerre #USA

  • Capitalism Is Changing, but Not Into “Neofeudalism”
    https://jacobin.com/2025/05/capitalism-neofeudalism-tech-medieval-history

    Le "néoféodalisme" n’est qu’une idée á la mode résultat et amplificateur de la confusion intellectuelle ambiante. En l’utilisant nous risquons de perdre de vue les véritables méchanismes du pouvoir.

    21.5.2025 by David Addison , Merle Eisenberg - Some left writers have argued that contemporary capitalism is mutating into a form of “neofeudalism” as tech barons run amok. But what we’re actually witnessing is an important shift within rather than a transition from capitalism

    The tech barons strategically placed around Donald Trump at his inauguration on January 20 this year were a who’s who of the oligarchic class. From Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg and everyone in between, the leaders of the US tech industry came to pay homage to their new ruler.

    Court intrigue was palpable. Journalists speculated about the choreography of the ceremony, examining how the placement of the barons offered insight into their status and favor to shape the new regime. The pyramid structure of American society had never appeared so stark.

    Trump’s inauguration was surely the most vivid manifestation of the growing political centrality of billionaire tech leaders. The last few years have seen commentators reach for ideas of “technofeudalism” or “neofeudalism” to explain what has been going on. However, those concepts ultimately bring more confusion than clarity to the debate about where capitalism is headed.

    Looking Backward

    Yanis Varoufakis’s 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism was perhaps the most widely discussed foray into this field. But it has been joined this year by Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Both works suggest that the world has left behind capitalism for an emergent feudal order.

    These theorizations of supposed new feudalisms look to the past to envisage the future. They do so, however, in contradictory ways, drawing on divergent medieval pasts. For some proponents of the idea of “neofeudalism,” such as Katherine V. W. Stone and Robert Kuttner, the central transformation is a legal one. Stone and Kuttner hark back to the moment when the Roman Empire’s structures of public justice gave way to more fragmented, privatized juridical orders.

    In contemporary society, they argue, we are witnessing a corruption of public justice by the interests of private capital, exemplified in forced private legal arbitration and the corporate capture of regulatory bodies. According to this perspective, we should see the ongoing privatization of today as the perversion of a legitimate and beneficial model of capitalism, which should be fortified by a strong public sphere. Their argument focuses on the changes to the legal sphere and the control of justice.

    By contrast, Dean’s understanding of “neofeudalism” is fundamentally economic. It argues for a shift in the mode of production in contemporary society. Like Varoufakis, Dean traces a move away from competition and profit-maximization on the part of corporate leaders like Zuckerberg and Bezos, and she argues that they are now more preoccupied with establishing monopolies and extracting rent.

    This, the analogy implies, mirrors the fate of the medieval rural peasantry, bound to pay rent to monopolistic lords above them. While Dean approvingly cites Stone and Kuttner, they actually diverge in both their notion of historic feudalism and their diagnosis for the present.

    Definitions of Feudalism

    As these examples make clear, the meaning and use of “feudalism” is ambiguous in this discourse. There are three main ways in which historians have defined feudalism that are incompatible for purposes of analysis with each other. Contemporary writers all too often merge these definitions.

    The first feudalism exists especially in the popular historical imagination. It is the world of rigid hierarchies encapsulated in the image of the “feudal pyramid.” This idea is the staple of school classrooms, a quick search on Google, or the slop that poses as information via artificial intelligence.

    The pyramidal view of feudalism describes a coherent social system in which kings granted land to nobility in exchange for loyalty and military service. Peasants at the bottom of the pyramid grew food and received “protection” in return.

    This definition has a certain timelessness, since it supposedly existed for more than a thousand years, and a sense of rigidity, since almost no one could escape its fixed, pyramidal order. It is the social system that most non-medievalists seem to have in mind when they are contrasting present and past.

    Medieval scholars generally hate this version of feudalism. For the last fifty years, academic historians have criticized this idea as overly broad and unreflective of a dynamic period in human history. Whatever else Game of Thrones and its prequel House of the Dragon might suggest, society does not stand still for centuries with few changes to class structure — unless we count dragons as a class.

    Moreover, the term feudalism itself was only coined after the end of the Middle Ages. In fact, since the 1970s, historians in the English-speaking world have even tended to move away from using the word “feudalism” or speaking of a “feudal system.” They sometimes jokingly refer to it as the “F word.”

    This leads to the second, much more specific, concept of feudalism. This is a legal idea expressing the mutual bonds between a ruler and their subordinate elites (sometimes called vassals). A ruler would provide land from which a subordinate could appropriate revenues. The ruler, in turn, received a legal pledge from the subordinate, which had to be renewed with each new generation.

    The pledge tended to entail military service, fees, or various other rights for the ruler. It was the glue that held elite society together. It was not about peasants. This version can be glimpsed in the medieval images of seated rulers with knights kneeling before them pledging such an exchange.

    This feudalism was restricted to a certain time (ca. 1100–1400 CE), a certain place (France and England, mostly), and certain specific individuals (elites only). Medieval historians still usefully employ this legal concept, but this is not the feudalism of today’s debates. It is too narrow, precise, and, well, medieval. Though its symbolic power remains in the metaphors of “vassal states” or “paying homage,” such phrases are figurative, not literal.

    The Feudal Mode

    A third understanding of feudalism is the feudal mode of production that, in its classic Marxist formulation, characterizes the economic framework of a society. Karl Marx laid out various modes of production, and more contemporary theorists have expanded on Marx’s ideas in useful ways.

    Marxist scholars held the feudal mode of production to have developed from the ancient slave mode of production. Instead of requiring enslaved labor, owned and directly dominated by a lord, feudal lords dominated a large mass of peasants in various states of semi-freedom and unfreedom. These peasants produced food from lands they leased on tenure from elites, who appropriated a certain amount of the surplus and, in some cases, demanded labor services.

    Under this regime, elite power was rooted in the ownership of land and the use of coercive force to seize goods and enforce the conditions of tenure. The specifics of how goods were appropriated could vary, deriving from taxes or rents, as could the legal ways in which the goods were taken. To differentiate the feudal mode of production from the two non-Marxist forms of feudalism, historians like John Haldon have relabeled the last type as the tributary mode of production.

    The problem here is apparent: while there are similarities between the three varieties of feudalism, unless we engage in careful delineation, it is easy to pick and choose a characteristic from any or all of the three to form a catch-all feudalism of an idealized medieval past.

    Dean, for example, quotes analysis from all three groups to define her idea: Marc Bloch and Joseph Strayer appear to discuss a feudal society (form 1), Susan Reynolds shows up to note that medievalists have debated whether to use the term (form 2), while Perry Anderson (among others) is used to discuss the feudal mode of production (form 3).

    If we combine all three understandings of the original feudalism to create a picture of neofeudalism, the idea becomes unmoored from such conceptual definitions. It ends up as a transhistorical (and indeed ahistorical) idea, fit for a new purpose in the present.

    Feudalism in Present Debates

    This generic concept of feudalism suggests a lack of progress and a return to a less advanced society with more inequality, fewer freedoms, less property ownership for non-elites, and less mobility into the elite class. These transformations appear both in Marxist ideologies — as a move backward from capitalism to feudalism — and in liberal critiques — as the failure of a progressive narrative that has stalled and gone into reverse. Our aspirational future, whether consisting of socialism or a looser form of progress, has receded from view.

    Yet few of these changes are necessarily linked to feudalism. Tech barons can offer fealty to President Trump or other rulers to advance their eminently capitalist goals, which may well involve privatization, but of a capitalist form. They aim to insert themselves and their businesses into state arenas to control lower classes and bend them to their will.

    Nowhere is this more obvious than with the case of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as proponents of state control through a capitalist ideology: efficiency, market power, and privatization are their mantra, whatever outcomes they produce. Neither Musk’s ideological justifications nor his material goals resemble the feudalism of the modern imagination, with its rigid class structures, ceremonial expressions of order, and equivocal sense of private property.

    Trump himself is evidently less attached to market forces, as his single-minded pursuit of tariffs shows. Yet in this, he is at remarkable variance with much of the donor class whose members brought him to power.

    Elite figures such as Musk have long dominated political power by creating their own private jurisdictions. We could be speaking about Count Robert of Artois terrorizing peasants with a pet wolf in late thirteenth-century France, a robber baron of the 1890s, or the Disney Corporation today. However, the legal and economic framework for Count Robert was entirely different than for the other two cases.

    The way in which private jurisdictions function in the twenty-first century is specific to our current capitalist system, which has chosen to center economic efficiencies and profits over human flourishing and the enjoyment of life. Such choices and structures would appear grossly out of place in most regions of medieval Europe, including Count Robert’s.

    Part of the problem also rests in applying a singular notion of historical feudalism, whether we equate it with disordered private justice or a world in which plunder or monopoly power is the only avenue for the extraction of wealth. Even in the Middle Ages, we cannot speak of a single “feudalism.” Although the capitalist mode of production did not structure medieval Europe and the Middle East before modernity, capital, wage labor, and markets could nonetheless dominate in specific places and times.

    As Chris Wickham recently argued, capitalist relations of production played an important role in parts of the Eastern Mediterranean from ca. 950–1150 CE, even while the overarching economic system remained feudal. Orientalist-inflected perspectives on the Islamic world have resulted in its capitalist elements being downplayed. The Middle Ages have served as a blank slate for many possible ideas of feudalism, with supposedly “well-known” aspects, such as private justice and predation, combined as seems useful to serve present needs.

    2020s Capitalism

    Getting to grips with today’s version of capitalism does not require us to fall back on a caricature of medieval feudalism, even if certain elements do appear similar. Private jurisdictional power has certainly exploded over the last several decades as massive corporations have expanded their reach into new spheres of life. At the same time, we should remember that even the most neoliberal state remains vastly more powerful and far-reaching in its influence than its pre-modern forebears.

    Countries today may appear weak in comparison to the stronger states and public realms of the mid-twentieth century. Yet those cases represented a high point in public power, trade union mobilization, and redistributive policy, not the norm against which we should measure today’s capitalism.

    We are dealing with a transformation within capitalism rather than a transition from capitalism. As tech platforms have created ever more precise data, they have simultaneously required larger capital injections to become viable and, eventually, turn a profit. Some have become rent-seeking, like Google, while others have purchased vast swathes of real estate.

    Instead of creating new products, they destroy their competitors and existing markets to gain ever greater returns, encouraging investors to prop up loss-making ventures on the promise of supposedly secure future income. While Dean is correct about these changes in her work, none of this constitutes a new mode of production. It is, rather, a change in how capital works.

    If it was the norm half a century ago for people to go in person to a community hall where they could buy and sell used clothing once a month, Facebook’s Marketplace fulfills a similar role every day by capturing the used clothing market through efficiency. But Facebook simultaneously uses the collected data to sell new products, rendering the consumer and their attention a secondary product to be sold to advertisers and content producers.

    This practice owes much to modern psychological models developed by advertisers and tech companies and has nothing to do with feudal relations. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has conceptualized this extractive, data-driven business model as representing ever greater capitalist colonization of the domain of private life and the private self. This is a much more stimulating idea than that of techno- or neofeudalism.

    We do not need the concept of feudalism, in any of its variants or forms, to explain the ongoing problems of our respective states and systems. The appeal to archaic models to explain contemporary changes is a morbid symptom of an age in which visions of a better future have been replaced with oppressive fears of backsliding and regression. Things do get worse as well as better, but it gives too much credit to capitalism, in its various forms, to imagine it as the antithesis of monopoly power, the private corruption of justice, and the political rule of corporate elites.

    Capitalists have often defined capitalism’s own ideal form against an image of “old world” feudalism, not least in the post-independence United States. We must not take these deeply ideological perspectives at face value. We are not regressing into the system from which capitalism once emerged: we are witnessing a new and dangerous transformation that is internal to capitalism itself.

    #capitalisme #idéologie #théorie_politique #GAFAM #trumpisme #impérialisme

  • The Pulse #134: #Stack_overflow is almost dead
    https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134

    Four months ago, we asked Are #LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”

    Since then, things at Stack Overflow went from bad to worse. The volume of questions asked has nearly dried up, new data shows

    #IA #AI #ChatGPT

    • les données sont là…
      https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9f0b132?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com#file-st

      SELECT YEAR(CreationDate) AS Year, MONTH(CreationDate) AS Month, COUNT(*) AS NumQuestions
      FROM Posts
      WHERE PostTypeId = 1 -- Questions only
      GROUP BY YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate)
      ORDER BY Year DESC, Month DESC;

      … avec quelques commentaires – dont le tout premier :

      The decline is definitely not just ChatGPT, look at 2018, aside from December it’s 150k-ish by 2022 it’s below 120k more like 110k, it was already in decline. This is mostly because people are hostile to questions — as you pointed out. ChatGPT merely made it unnecessary to interact with these people. The founders saw the writing on the wall, they brought in a corporate butcher in 2019 for a CEO, completely blundered relations with the community shortly after as they tried to become more enterprise friendly (Monica Cellio), then fired the community managers in 2020, sold the site in 2021. It’s like the Soviet Union which ended in 1986 it was just so big it took the giant five years to topple to the ground. For SO, it seems it died in 2019 and will close in 2026 (at best).

      Stack Overflow - Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow

      On 3 May 2010, it was announced that Stack Overflow had raised $6 million in venture capital from a group of investors led by Union Square Ventures.

      In [September] 2019, Stack Overflow named Prashanth Chandrasekar as its chief executive officer and Teresa Dietrich as its chief product officer.

      In June 2021, Prosus, a Netherlands-based subsidiary of South African media company Naspers, announced a deal to acquire Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

    • Mon experience personnelle ne peut que confirmer les nombreux commentaires du lien ci dessus. Depuis pas mal d’années la plupart des questions sont celles de débutants qui viennent faire faire leur devoir ou incapable de chercher 30s des réponses existantes, et les réponses, quand il y en a, ne répondent pas au problème mais expliquent avec mépris que la question n’aurait pas du être posée.

      Mais même si poser des questions n’a plus d’intérêt, consulter les réponses précédentes reste très instructif. En fait, il faudrait geler le site pour éviter que les échanges pertinents de l’époque se retrouvent noyés par tout ce bruit inutile.

    • J’ai exactement le même ressenti que @inadvertance
      Et encore, aujourd’hui il n’y a même plus les questions d’étudiants venant faire leurs devoirs puisque ceux-ci passent par chatGPT, et là pareil je suis en train à l’instant d’en faire les frais : 64 devoirs corrigés, une dizaine de convocations pour qu’ils m’expliquent leur code parce que ça pue le chatGPT. Iels connaissent le fonctionnement : tu n’arrives pas à m’expliquer ce que fait ce code ? c’est zéro. Mon boulot c’est pas de corriger chatGPT, c’est d’évaluer si tu as assimilé des connaissances.

    • merci, de la confiance :- )

      non, beaucoup de choses sur X dont de nombreuses vidéos, mais pas encore d’intervention du NTSB - ou du moins, j’ai pas vu… – donc on en est plutôt aux supputations.

      un commentaire, à chaud, d’un marin

      Loïc Guermeur / X
      18/05/2025 12:38
      https://x.com/CapHornier_/status/1924052032085704751

      #Cuauhtemoc Court fil.
      Pour faire simple, le voilier école mexicain appareillait de Manhattan vers le large.
      En bleu la manœuvre théorique. Bâbord a quai, on cule puis on remet en avant, barre à gauche et hop.

      Mais les machines sont restées bloquées en arrière lors de la manœuvre

      Il y avait un remorqueur présent, non croché (pas de cable), disponible en pousseur (c’est à dire qu’il touche la coque sur le travers milieu en gros et pousse en mettant ses machines en avant.

      Mais dans un cas comme celui ci, le remorqueur ne pouvait rien faire car pour retenir le voilier, il n’a pas de surface plane à l’arrière pour exercer une pression.

      Restait la possibilité de mouiller les ancres, au moins pour tenter de freiner. Ce qui n’a pas été fait. Je n’ai pas de renseignement sur ce point particulier.

      Donc, non, l’equipage n’a pas mal calculé la hauteur.
      Le Brooklyn Bridge n’est pas un ouvrage mobile comme certains ponts à Brest ou Rouen.

      S’agissant d’une manœuvre portuaire, la tradition veut que les élèves soient placés dans les vergues pour l’esthétique, et pour être prêt à sortir les voiles par la suite. C’est parmi eux que l’on déplore deux morts à priori, dans la chute.
      Voilà. En gros.

    • NTSB – Mexican Navy Tall Ship Cuauhtemoc strike with the Brooklyn Bridge
      (non daté)
      status : Ongoing
      DCA25MM039.aspx
      https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA25MM039.aspx

      What Happened
      ​This information is preliminary and subject to change.​​​

      ​We are investigating the May 17, 2025, Mexican Navy Tall Ship Cuauhtemoc stike with the Brooklyn Bridge on the East River in New York, NY.

      Updates to follow.

      faut croire qu’on déplace pas les télés un week-end pour deux morts et une vingtaine de blessés, mexicains de surcroît.

    • l’état des informations (AP), dimanche à 18h (française)
      Brooklyn Bridge strike: NTSB sends ’go-team’ to probe Mexican navy ship crash | Fox News
      https://www.foxnews.com/us/ntsb-launches-go-team-specialized-investigators-brooklyn-bridge-struck-mexi

      A view of the Mexican navy tall ship being tended by the authorities after it crashes into the Brooklyn Bridge on May 18, 2025.
      _Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images

    • tjs rien sur le site du NTSB, mais ils ont communiqué.
      Apparemment, hier, leurs enquêteurs n’avaient toujours pas eu accès à bord du bateau.

      a priori, le pilote devrait être états-unien et n’est sans doute pas resté à bord du bateau…

      NTSB Investigates Fatal Mexican Tall Ship Allision with Brooklyn Bridge
      https://gcaptain.com/ntsb-investigates-fatal-mexican-tall-ship-allision-with-brooklyn-bridge


      The Mexican Navy training vessel Cuauhtemoc is seen with broken masts while docked at a pier, after striking the Brooklyn Bridge overnight in New York City, U.S., May 18, 2025.
      REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

      The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has initiated an investigation into the Mexican Navy training vessel Cuauhtémoc’s allision with the Brooklyn Bridge that resulted in two fatalities.

      The 297-foot vessel, carrying 277 people, was departing South Street Seaport’s Pier 17 on Saturday, May 17, when the incident occurred.

      According to NTSB’s initial findings, the vessel’s speed increased from 2 to 6 knots while moving astern. The allision occurred at approximately 8:24 p.m., about five minutes after setting off from the pier with tug assistance. The Cuauhtémoc came to a complete stop three minutes later up river from the bridge.

      Conditions at the time were west wind at 10 knots and only 0.3 knots of flood current (upriver).

      The Cuauhtémoc sustained damage to all three masts in the incident.

      NTSB Investigator in Charge Brian Young confirmed that investigators are focusing on nautical operations, marine engineering, bridge engineering, survival factors, and recorders. The NTSB will also be looking into policies and procedures for assisting tugboats.

      The investigation team is currently working with the Mexican government to gain access to the ship. So far, no interviews have taken place, including with the captain and pilot.

      The U.S. Coast Guard established a safety zone between the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge following the incident.

      The vessel is now moored at Pier 36 on the East River, surrounded by a 50-yard safety zone, as authorities assess the damage and determine salvage plans.

      The NTSB confirmed no significant structural damage to the Brooklyn Bridge.

      McAllister Towing, which operated the assisting tug (Charles D McAllister) provided the following statement to gCaptain: “One of our vessels assisted the Cuauhtémoc as it departed Pier 17 en route to anchorage, where the vessel was scheduled to take on bunkers. Following the allision, our crew provided additional assistance and promptly notified the appropriate authorities.

      “While the cause of the incident is still under investigation, McAllister Towing is fully cooperating with the relevant authorities and will continue to support the review process as needed,” the statement said. 

      The investigation is being coordinated between Mexican and U.S. authorities. The NTSB expects to release its preliminary report within 30 days.

    • L’association des pilotes de Sandy Hook est bien en situation de monopole et, comme partout dans le monde, l’accès à cette profession est particulièrement fermé. Outre une longue ancienneté en navigation, népotisme et piston sont les deux mamelles du pilotage.

      Sandy Hook Pilots - Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Pilots


      Group of Sandy Hook Pilots
      Melcher’s original oil painting is in the collection of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Melcher painted it between 1887-1888. It was exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1888.
      WP

  • Une commission d’enquête à l’Assemblée sur LFI
    https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/une-commission-denquete-a-lassemblee-sur-lfi-16-05-2025-NV37BQJHBNHFPASFQ

    « Démasquer LFI », qu’il considère comme « Le premier danger politique pour la France ». Laurent Wauquiez n’y est pas allé avec le dos de la cuillère sur Europe 1 ce vendredi matin. Le patron des députés Droite Républicaine (DR, le nom des LR à l’assemblée) a annoncé qu’il avait « obtenu la création d’une commission d’enquête de la droite parlementaire contre LFI ». Une démarche pour le moins inhabituelle.

    Dans les faits, l’intitulé de ladite commission - qui s’est fixée pour mission d’enquêter sur « les liens existants entre les représentants des mouvements politiques et des organisations soutenant l’action terroriste ou propageant l’idéologie islamiste » - ne vise pas nommément la France Insoumise, mais c’est clairement le parti de Jean-Luc Mélenchon qui est ciblé. « On se serait fait retoquer par LFI à juste titre. C’est plus générique, mais ça ne change rien sur le fond », souligne-t-on chez LR.

    #on_n’a_pas_attendu_trump

    • L’article du Parisien me semble minimiser l’aspect délirant des raisons données par Wauquiez. Donc, malheureusement, ce lien vers une radio qui propage les bonnes valeurs qu’elles sont bonnes :
      https://www.europe1.fr/politique/nous-avons-obtenu-la-creation-de-la-commission-denquete-parlementaire-contre

      Évoquant un « privilège rouge » qui permettrait au mouvement créé par Jean-Luc Mélenchon de bénéficier d’une « tolérance » dans « une partie de la classe politique et médiatique », le député de Haute-Loire cite pêle-mêle « leur complicité avec les réseaux des Frères musulmans, leur tolérance inacceptable sur le Hamas, la façon dont ils minimisent l’antisémitisme » ou encore « leur travail de sape des forces de l’ordre ».

      Concrètement, des députés, eurodéputés ou encore collaborateurs parlementaires de la France insoumise seront auditionnés et invités à s’exprimer sur des sujets précis dont certains ont été soulevés ce vendredi par Laurent Wauquiez : « Que faisait Rima Hassan en Jordanie, à une manifestation de soutien au Hamas ? Que faisait Raphaël Arnault, fiché S, quand il a reçu à l’Assemblée nationale des membres du CCIE, émanation du CCIF, dissout en France après l’assassinat de Samuel Paty ? », interroge notamment l’ancien patron de la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

      Dénoncer le génocide palestinien, l’islamophobie d’État et les violences policières sont les motifs principaux reprochées à LFI.

    • Apuka attendre la réponse du berger à la bergère : une commission pour enquêter sur « les liens existants entre les représentants des mouvements politiques et des organisations soutenant l’action fachiste ou propageant l’idéologie nazie ». Comme personne n’a de majorité, zont du mal à justifier leur salaire alors ils font des grosses commissions d’enquête.

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Esther

      Project Esther is a project of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank, that aims to suppress pro-Palestinian protests and what it classifies as antisemitism. The effort has received support from several evangelical Christian organizations but no major Jewish ones. It has been criticized for incorporating antisemitic tropes into its rhetoric.[1][2] According to The New York Times, Slate, Haaretz, The Forward, and Jewish Insider, Project Esther does not address right-wing antisemitism.[3][4][2][5][6] Project Esther broadly labels criticism of Israel as terrorism and calls for targeting universities, students, and American progressive politics and politicians.[6] The New York Times found more than half of its proposals had been called for or acted upon by the second Trump administration.[6]

      A propos de #Project2025 :

      Reflections on Authoritarian Times Trump’s win surprised few political realists. What has taken nearly everyone by surprise is the rapid rollout of chaotic authoritarian governing facilitated by a detailed planning and strategy document (Project 2025), plutotechnocratic sycophants like Zuckerberg and Bezos, a docile Republican Party, a hapless Democratic one, a radical right Supreme Court majority, a limp mainstream media, a highly siloed social media, and a dis-educated popular base.

      Référencé ici :
      https://seenthis.net/messages/1115399

  • Des additifs de pneus retrouvés sur les fruits et légumes consommés en Suisse - rts.ch - Santé
    https://www.rts.ch/info/sante/2025/article/des-additifs-de-pneus-retrouves-sur-les-fruits-et-legumes-consommes-en-suisse-28

    Des traces d’additifs typiquement utilisés dans la fabrication de pneus ont été détectées dans toutes les catégories de fruits et légumes les plus couramment consommés en Suisse, selon l’étude de l’EPFL et de l’OSAV parue dans le Journal of Hazardous Materials.

    Et ce, peu importe la provenance des fruits et légumes et qu’ils soient bio ou pas : « Le régime alimentaire étant globalement le même dans toute l’Europe de l’Ouest, on peut imaginer que ces chiffres sont représentatifs de l’exposition à ces particules dans les pays voisins », indique Florian Breider.

    (...)

    Seules des études sur des rongeurs ont permis d’établir à ce jour la toxicité des additifs de pneus sur les mammifères, en particulier la DPG, la 6PPD et la 6PPD-quinone. Avec comme résultats une baisse de la fertilité des mâles et la survenue d’effets neurotoxiques et neuro-inflammatoires. Le seuil critique pour l’être humain n’est lui pas encore connu.

    Selon une étude de 2017, environ 6 millions de tonnes de ces additifs sont relâchés dans l’environnement chaque année. Une autre analyse effectuée en 2023 relève que l’exposition n’épargne pas les zones rurales, car la fréquence du trafic routier n’est pas significative (lire encadré).

    Une étude en cours de l’EPFL a même montré qu’on retrouvait ces composants dans les lacs alpins. L’exposition peut donc être comparée à celles d’autres micropolluants.

    #microplastiques #pneus #alimentation

    • Les pneus de voiture empoisonnent les saumons et peut-être aussi les humains | National Geographic -
      https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/animaux/environnement-pollution-toxine-les-pneus-de-voiture-empoisonnent-

      Durant des décennies, les chercheurs suspectaient qu’un étrange produit chimique présent dans les fleuves de l’État de Washington, dans le nord-ouest des États-Unis, était à l’origine de la mort d’un nombre invraisemblable de saumons argentés, que l’on retrouvait échoués sur les berges après de fortes pluies, leur ventre encore plein d’œufs. En 2020, après des années d’une obsession digne de Marie Curie, une équipe de scientifiques a finalement été en mesure d’identifier l’agent chimique mortel dans des échantillons d’eau de pluie : la #6PPD-quinone. Son parent chimique, ont-ils confirmé, est virtuellement présent dans tous les #pneus du monde.

      (...)

      Aujourd’hui, une personne sème chaque année derrière elle au moins 2,5 kilogrammes de minuscules particules de pneu aux États-Unis, selon des chiffres publiés par l’Agence de protection environnementale de Californie. Ces particules transportent le #6PPD dans l’air pollué proche du sol, où il s’accroche à deux atomes d’hydrogène et un atome d’oxygène pour se transformer en quinone.

    • 6PPD - Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6PPD

      6PPD is an organic chemical widely used as stabilising additive (or antidegradant) in rubbers (...) It is mobile within the rubber and slowly migrates to the surface via blooming. On the surface it forms a “scavenger-protective film” that reacts with the ozone more quickly than the ozone can react with the rubber. (...) Despite 6PPD being used in tires since the mid 1970s, its transformation to quinones was first recognized in 2020.

  • Alexandra Elbakyan
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

    Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan (Russian: Алекса́ндра Аса́новна Элбакя́н, Armenian: Ալեքսանդրա Էլբակյան,[1][2] born 6 November 1988) is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright.[3][4][5][6] According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.[7]

    Elbakyan has been described as “Science’s Pirate Queen”.[8] In 2016, Nature included her in their list of the top ten “people who mattered” in science.[9] Since 2011, she has been living in Russia.

    #modele_feminin
    #Sci-Hub

  • Stanley Kubrick - Aryan Papers
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick's_unrealized_projects#Aryan_Papers

    In 1976, Kubrick sought out a film idea that concerned the Holocaust and tried to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to contribute an original screenplay. Kubrick requested a “dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell.” However, Singer declined, explaining to Kubrick, “I don’t know the first thing about the Holocaust.”

    In the early 1990s, Kubrick nearly entered the production stage of a film adaptation of Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his aunt as they are in hiding from the Nazi regime during the Holocaust—the first-draft screenplay, entitled Aryan Papers, was penned by Kubrick himself. Full Metal Jacket co-screenwriter Michael Herr reports that Kubrick had considered casting Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman as the aunt; eventually, Johanna ter Steege was cast as the aunt and Joseph Mazzello as the young boy. Kubrick traveled to the Czech city of Brno, as it was envisaged as a possible filming location for the scenes of Warsaw during wartime, and cinematographer Elemér Ragályi was selected by Kubrick to be the director of photography.

    Kubrick’s work on Aryan Papers eventually ceased in 1995, as the director was influenced by the 1993 release of Spielberg’s Holocaust-themed film Schindler’s List. According to Kubrick’s wife Christiane, an additional factor in Kubrick’s decision was the increasingly depressing nature of the subject as experienced by the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate Holocaust film was beyond the capacity of cinema and returned his attention to the A.I. Artificial Intelligence film project.

    In 2005, William Monahan was hired to adapt Wartime Lies for Warner Independent Pictures in co-operation with John Wells Productions.

    In 2009, Kubrick’s brother-in-law Jan Harlan announced his desire to produce the film and hire Ang Lee or Roman Polanski to direct.
    In 2020, it was reported that Luca Guadagnino hoped to direct the film, and that he had examined Kubrick’s papers on the project, held at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at University of the Arts London.

    #cinéma #holocauste #shoa

  • La fin d’un gourmand
    https://totallyhistory.com/vitellius

    Reign

    Vitellius’ administration reflected his intention to govern effectively but his lifestyle was centered on luxury and unjustness.

    The events that marked his rule were that he ended the use of centurions that sold exemptions and furloughs. He also brought Equites into the fold of Imperial civil service and banished astrologers from Italy and Rome on 1 October 69. Vitellius kept Otho’s commemoration of Nero in the palace and policies. Lower classes had positive regard for Vitellius due to his honoring of Nero.
    ...
    Downfall
    Vitellius instructed Fabius Valens to gather supporters in Gaul, but they remained faithful to Vespasian, and Valens was executed. Vitellius, weak and without resources, was ready to abdicate his position as emperor.
    Death

    The agreement on the abdication was supposed to be handled by Marcus Antonius Primus, one of Vespasian’s highly ranked supporters, the commander of Pannonia’s sixth legion. On his journey to the Temple of Concord to provide the empire’s insignia, he was forced to return to the palace by the Praetorian Guard.

    Many civilians who were loyal to Vitellius and other supporters engaged in a bloody battle when Vespasian’s armies entered Italy. They did not want Vitellius to abdicate the throne fearing their fates if Vespasian rose to the throne. Numerous areas of Rome were destroyed by the fight.

    In the chaos, Vitellius was brought to a secret location to be killed by Vespasian’s soldiers and he was dragged onto the streets of Rome and tortured. The retelling of Cassius Dio reveals he was beheaded and his head was shown off in a procession throughout Rome. He died on 20 December 69, ending his reign after 8 months.

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitellius

    Vitellius (en latin : Aulus Vitellius Germanicus Imperator Augustus), né le 24 septembre 15 et mort le 22 décembre 69 à Rome, est le huitième empereur romain du 19 avril au 22 décembre de l’année 69, appelée année des quatre empereurs.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitellius#Abdication_and_death

    Tacitus’ Histories state that Vitellius awaited Vespasian’s army at Mevania. The terms of abdication had actually been agreed upon with Marcus Antonius Primus, the commander of the sixth legion serving in Pannonia and one of Vespasian’s chief supporters. However, as he was on his way to deposit the insignia of empire in the Temple of Concord, the Praetorian Guard refused to allow him to carry out the agreement, and forced him to return to the palace.[7]

    On the entrance of Vespasian’s troops into Rome, Vitellius’ supporters (mostly civilians) organized heavy resistance, resulting in a brutal battle. Entrenched on the city’s buildings, they threw stones, javelins, and tiles on Vespasian’s soldiers who consequently suffered heavy casualties in the urban fighting. Cassius Dio claims that 50,000 people died in the battle for Rome.[22] Large parts of the city were destroyed, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.[23] Vitellius was eventually dragged out of a hiding-place (according to Tacitus a door-keeper’s lodge), driven to the fatal Gemonian stairs, and there struck down by Vespasian’s supporters. “Yet I was once your emperor,” were his last words. His body was thrown into the Tiber according to Suetonius; Cassius Dio’s account is that Vitellius was beheaded and his head paraded around Rome, and his wife attended to his burial. His brother and son were also killed.

    ... parce que ...

    https://www.canalacademies.com/emissions/les-chroniques/histoire-et-gastronomie/limpecunieux-balzac-et-ses-experiences-gastronomiques

    La vie de Balzac était passablement déréglée : quand il écrivait, il passait quinze heures à sa table de travail, jusqu’à ce que son ouvrage fût achevé. Il mangeait alors des fruits en grande quantité, surtout des poires, dont il était particulièrement friand et du raisin, parfois des œufs et du jambon, et restait alors parfaitement sobre. Il ne buvait alors pas de vin, mais consommait de grandes quantités de café qui lui éveillait l’esprit. Tout changeait après ces périodes d’écriture. Son éditeur Werdet l’a décrit sobre quand il travaillait, et comme un véritable Vittelius quand il mangeait. Balzac a toujours été impécunieux durant sa vie, dépensant plus qu’il ne gagnait. Il avait une peur panique de la prison pour dettes, mais il alla un jour en prison, non par pour dettes, mais parce qu’il refusait de s’acquitter des obligations de la garde nationale. En prison, il se fit donner deux cent francs par son éditeur, et organisa un véritable festin avec celui-ci et des invités choisis. Son éditeur raconte qu’un jour il ingurgita un cent d’huîtres d’Ostende (c’était la mode à l’époque, depuis que Louis XVIII l’avait fait à Gand pendant les Cent-jours), douze côtelettes de pré-salé, un canard aux navets, un couple de perdreaux rôtis et une sole normande. Et Werdet de conclure : « Tout est englouti sans miséricorde ! Il ne resta que les os et les arêtes ».

    #histoire #empire_romain

  • https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-04-28/ty-article-opinion/.premium/invoking-never-again-as-more-children-die/00000196-7bb2-d41c-a7ff-fff765000000

    Daniel Blatman a écrit un livre important sur les marches de la mort (publié en français chez Fayard, je crois).

    I have been engaged in researching the Holocaust for about 40 years. I have read countless testimonies about the worst genocide against the Jewish people and other victims. I had never imagined in my most horrific nightmares the reality in which I would read testimonies about mass murder carried out by the Jewish state, which in their chilling resemblance remind me of testimonies in the Yad Vashem archives.

    #Gaza #mémoire #génocide #Shoah #témoignages

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Blatman

      Daniel Blatman (Hebrew: דניאל בלטמן) is an Israeli historian, specializing in history of the Holocaust. Blatman is the head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Vashem

      Yad Vashem (Hebrew: יָד וַשֵׁם; lit. ’a memorial and a name’) is Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; echoing the stories of the survivors; honoring Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors and gentiles who selflessly aided Jews in need; and researching the phenomenon of the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general, with the aim of avoiding such events in the future. Yad Vashem’s vision, as stated on its website, is: “To lead the documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, and to convey the chronicles of this singular Jewish and human event to every person in Israel, to the Jewish people, and to every significant and relevant audience worldwide.”
      [...]
      The Archive is the oldest department of Yad Vashem. Before presenting an exhibition, Yad Vashem collects items. The best known of these are the historical photographs, as well as the Pages of Testimonies collected from survivors. The latter is a database of personal information about those who survived and those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem has also acquired access to the database of the International Tracing Service of Bad Arolsen of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and these two databases complement each other for research purposes.

  • Tesla speeds up odometers to avoid warranty repairs, US lawsuit claims | Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-speeds-up-odometers-avoid-warranty-repairs-us-lawsuit-claims-2025-04-

    April 17 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O)
    , opens new tab faces a proposed class action claiming it speeds up odometers on its electric vehicles so they fall out of warranty faster, saving Elon Musk’s company from having to pay for repairs.
    The plaintiff Nyree Hinton alleged that Tesla odometer readings reflect energy consumption, driver behavior and “predictive algorithms” rather than actual mileage driven.

    • Tesla est suspecté de trafiquer le kilométrage de ses voitures électriques - Numerama
      https://www.numerama.com/vroom/1950735-tesla-est-suspecte-de-trafiquer-le-kilometrage-de-ses-voitures-ele

      Un recours collectif accuse Tesla d’avoir manipulé l’odomètre de ses véhicules via un algorithme interne. À la clé : des milliers de kilomètres « fantômes » qui écourteraient artificiellement la période de garantie.
      […]
      On peut trouver sur les groupes d’utilisateurs et les forums des propriétaires de Tesla francophones qui se sont déjà posés la question de l’exactitude des données de kilométrage. Si les compteurs sont effectivement influencés par des calculs logiciels et non par la distance réelle parcourue, cela pose un sérieux problème pour les consommateurs européens, notamment en matière de revente, de contrats de leasing, ou de garanties kilométriques.

      Et, surtout : pourquoi un algorithme serait-il nécessaire pour mesurer une donnée aussi basique qu’un kilométrage ? Au lieu d’un outil de précision, serait-ce un levier pour écourter artificiellement la garantie ? Une fraude logicielle masquée sous des prétextes technologiques ? Les réponses apportées par Tesla pourront certainement faire la lumière sur ce phénomène. Sauf si, comme pour les procès relatifs à la conduite autonome, la marque arrive à se défausser sur les clients.

      Les intertitres…

      • L’odomètre de la Tesla ne compterait plus les kilomètres réels

      • Des pratiques accusées de « saper la valeur des véhicules Tesla »

      • Et l’Europe, dans tout ça ?

    • ah, les contrats de vente de Tesla aux É.-U. contiennent une clause de recours automatique à un arbitrage en cas de litige ; possibilité de dénonciation de ce recours à l’arbitrage (opt-out) dans un délai de 30 jours après signature du contrat

      Agreement to Arbitrate. Please carefully read this provision, which applies to any dispute between you and Tesla, Inc. and its affiliates, (together “Tesla”).

      If you have a concern or dispute, please send a written notice describing it and your desired resolution to resolutions@tesla.com.
      If not resolved within 60 days, you agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to any aspect of the relationship between you and Tesla will not be decided by a judge or jury but instead by a single arbitrator in an arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. This includes claims arising before this Agreement, such as claims related to statements about our products. You further agree that any disputes related to the arbitrability of your claims will be decided by the court rather than an arbitrator, notwithstanding AAA rules to the contrary.
      […]
      You may opt out of arbitration within 30 days after signing this Agreement by sending a letter to: Tesla, Inc. [adresse], stating your name, Vehicle Identification Number, and intent to opt out of the arbitration provision. If you do not opt out, this agreement to arbitrate overrides any different arbitration agreement between us, including any arbitration agreement in a lease or finance contract.

      c’est au titre de cette clause que les possesseurs états-uniens de Tesla n’ont pu entamer une class action sur l’estimation de l’autonomie restante du véhicule.

      Tesla drivers lose US class action bid in battery range cases | Reuters
      https://www.reuters.com/legal/tesla-drivers-lose-us-class-action-bid-battery-range-cases-2024-03-07

      March 7 [2024] (Reuters) - Tesla, opens new tab owners who accused it of falsely advertising estimated driving ranges for its electric vehicles must pursue their claims in individual arbitrations rather than banding together in proposed class action lawsuits, a federal judge ruled.

      U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California said, opens new tab on Thursday the drivers had agreed to an arbitration provision for resolving disputes with the automaker when they bought their vehicles.

    • ce type de clause n’est pas légal en France (et, je pense, dans l’Union européenne) d’où la rédaction du paragraphe correspondant dans la convention (fr_FR : ie en français, pour la France)
      version fr_FR

      https://www.tesla.com/fr_FR/order/download-order-agreement
      Contrat de commande d’un véhicule motorisé – Conditions générales de vente

      Droit applicable - Règlement des litiges - Compétence juridictionnelle.
      Le Contrat est régi par le droit français.

      Nous vous demandons de nous notifier, préalablement à tout recours judiciaire, tout défaut que vous pourriez relever pendant la période de garantie applicable à votre Véhicule et qui ne pourrait être résolu en consultant votre Manuel du Conducteur. Cette notification doit être faite dans un délai raisonnable après le constat du défaut pour nous permettre d’effectuer les réparations nécessaires sur votre Véhicule. Nous vous remercions de bien vouloir adresser votre notification à votre magasin Tesla et/ou au centre de service Tesla ou à l’adresse du Service clients indiquée ci-après. Nous vous demandons de bien vouloir renseigner les informations suivantes :
      • votre nom et vos coordonnées ;
      […]
      • la description du défaut que vous avez constaté ; et
      • l’historique des tentatives que vous avez faites avec nous pour résoudre le problème, ou de toute réparation ou service qui n’a pas été effectué par un centre de service Tesla ou un centre de réparation agréé par Tesla.

      En cas de litige, vous et nous nous engageons à explorer toutes les possibilités de règlement amiable. A défaut de règlement amiable, les stipulations ci-après relatives au règlement des litiges s’appliquent. Si vous êtes un Client consommateur, les stipulations ci-avant sont sans préjudice de vos droits et voies d’action, telles que précisées ci-après et ne constituent pas une condition préalable à l’exercice d’une action en justice, par vous.

      version fr_BE

      Règlement des litiges. Dans toute la mesure autorisée par la loi de votre juridiction, nous vous demandons de nous notifier tout défaut que vous pourriez relever pendant la période de garantie applicable à votre Véhicule et qui ne pourrait être résolu en consultant votre Manuel du Conducteur, avant que vous ne puissiez exercer un recours en vertu de ces lois. Cette notification doit être faite dans un délai raisonnable après que vous ayez constaté les défauts pour nous permettre d’effectuer les réparations nécessaires sur votre Véhicule. Cette notification doit être faite dans un délai raisonnable après que vous ayez constaté les défauts pour nous permettre d’effectuer les réparations nécessaires sur votre Véhicule. Nous vous remercions de bien vouloir adresser votre notification à votre magasin Tesla et/ou au centre de service Tesla ou à l’adresse indiquée en bas de page de la présente Convention. Nous vous demandons de bien vouloir renseigner les informa􏰁ons suivantes :
      • votre nom et vos coordonnées ;
      […]
      • la description du défaut que vous avez constaté ; et
      • l’historique des tentatives que vous avez faites avec nous pour résoudre le problème, ou de toute réparation ou service qui n’a pas été effectué(e) par un Centre de Service Tesla ou un centre de réparation agréé par Tesla.

      En cas de litige, de différend ou de controverse entre vous et nous, nous nous engageons à explorer toutes les possibilités de règlement à l’amiable. Si un règlement à l’amiable n’est pas atteint, vous et nous soumettrons ce litige, ce différend ou cette controverse à l’instance appropriée, telle que déterminée par les lois régissant la présente Convention.

    • Escape Tesla’s Binding Arbitration - Opt Out Within 30 Days
      https://lemoncarlawyer.com/tesla-arbitration-clause-the-opt-out-and-the-california-lemon-law
      /wp-content/uploads/2024/05/header-logos.png

      Tesla Arbitration Clause, the Opt-Out, and the California Lemon Law

      "If you want a Tesla, you are forced to sign a contract with an arbitration provision, but there is a way out."
      Tesla is not just another car manufacturer. They stand apart because they sell their vehicles – all their vehicles – directly to customers completely foregoing the dealership system. Direct sales means that Tesla and the buyer’s relationship is very much arm’s length. It’s guided by a series of agreements at every stage of the buying process.
      One clause requires all Tesla owners who experience problems to bring their claims to arbitration and not the court system.

      Lemon law — Wikipédia
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law

      Les lemon laws sont des lois en application aux États-Unis qui protègent les acheteurs de voitures neuves (et d’autres produits) contre les défauts impossibles à réparer en un nombre raisonnable de tentatives. Elles imposent au vendeur le remplacement du véhicule défectueux, surnommé un lemon (citron).

      Plusieurs lemon laws sont appliquées aux États-Unis, selon les États.

      Elles sont l’équivalent de la garantie des vices cachés au Canada et en France.

      Lemon (automobile) - Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)

      The concept of describing a highly flawed item as a “lemon” predates its use in describing cars and can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century as a British and American slang term. “To hand someone a lemon” in British slang dated 1906 was “to pass off a sub-standard article as a good one”; in 1909, American English slang use of “lemon” represented “worthless thing, disappointment, booby prize”.

    • China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’ | South China Morning Post

      Chinese scientists have achieved a milestone in clean energy technology by successfully adding fresh fuel to an operational thorium molten salt reactor, according to state media reports.

      It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.

      The development was announced by the project’s chief scientist, Xu Hongjie, during a closed-door meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences on April 8, the official Guangming Daily reported on Friday.

      The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.

      Some experts see the technology as the next energy revolution and claim that just one thorium-rich mine in Inner Mongolia could – theoretically – meet China’s energy needs for tens of thousands of years, while producing minimal radioactive waste.
      During the April 8 meeting, Xu said China “now leads the global frontier”, according to Guangming Daily.

    • TMSR-LF1 - Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
      il y a une version WP[fr] mais un peu moins à jour…

      https://www.google.fr/maps/place/38°57'36.7%22N+102°36'43.9%22E/@38.9602,102.4473997,42034m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d38.9601944!4d102.6121944

      MSR-LF1 (液态燃料钍基熔盐实验堆; “liquid fuel thorium-based molten salt experimental reactor”) is a 2 MWt molten salt reactor (MSR) pilot plant operating in northwest China.
      […]
      Criticality was first achieved on 11 October 2023. On 17 June 2024, full power (2MWt) operation was achieved, and on 8 October, it operated at full power for 10 days with thorium in the molten salt; Protactinium-233 was detected, indicating successful nuclear breeding.

    • La Chine a-t-elle vraiment découvert 60 000 ans d’énergie dans son sous-sol ?
      https://www.revolution-energetique.com/actus/la-chine-a-t-elle-vraiment-decouvert-60-000-ans-denergie-dan


      Le parc de Zhangjiajie en Chine et un minerai de Monazite, qui contient du Thorium
      Image : Sasaran Olteanu, Wikimedia, modifiée par RE.

      Les besoins énergétiques de la Chine sont énormes, et lorsqu’elle annonce des chiffres, ils sont souvent ébouriffants. Ainsi, cette annonce de la découverte d’énormes gisements de thorium, qui pourraient alimenter la Chine pendant plusieurs dizaines de milliers d’années. Les chiffres paraissent conséquents, que faut-il en penser ?

      La Chine avait impressionné en octobre 2023 quand elle avait démarré son réacteur à sels fondus au thorium, répondant au doux nom de TMSR-LF1 (« Thorium Molten Salt Reactor – Liquid Fuel 1 »). Un peu plus tard, le 17 juin 2024, le réacteur atteint sa pleine puissance, soit 2 mégawatts thermiques (MWth). C’est la première fois qu’un réacteur de ce type démarre, depuis les réacteurs MSRE à Oak Ridge aux États-Unis, qui ont fonctionné au cours des années 1960.

      Et ces développements ne vont pas s’arrêter là : un démonstrateur de 10 MWth est en construction depuis début 2025, des SMR commerciaux de 100 mégawatts électriques (MWe) sont prévus pour 2030, et un cargo géant équipé de tels réacteurs, baptisé KUN-24P, est en cours de conception. Cette cascade de projets prouve sans le moindre doute que la Chine est aujourd’hui en pointe dans cette technologie.

      La Chine va trouver le thorium sur son sol
      Mais qu’en est-il au sujet du thorium destiné à être utilisé dans ce type de réacteurs ? L’avenir semble d’une grande abondance, si l’on en croit les annonces récentes. C’est le journal chinois South China Morning Post qui, en effet, titre le 28 février 2025 : « Une étude chinoise trouve une énergie inépuisable juste sous nos pieds ».

      Le journal évoque la déclassification d’un rapport émis en 2020, à l’issue d’un grand inventaire des réserves en thorium de la Chine. Cette étude démontrerait la présence de ressources en thorium bien plus importantes que prévu, parmi 233 sites d’intérêt allant du Xinjiang à l’ouest au Guangdong sur la côte est. Un de ses aspects particulièrement intéressant est d’avoir évalué la ressource qui se trouve dans des déchets miniers.

      Des ressources gigantesques à partir de seuls déchets
      Deux exemples sont fournis par le journal : la production de déchets pendant cinq ans d’une unique mine de fer en Mongolie-Intérieure contiendrait assez de thorium pour alimenter l’ensemble des foyers étasuniens pendant plus de 1 000 ans. Bayan Obo, une autre complexe minier actuellement utilisée pour la production de terres rares, pourrait également permettre de produire jusqu’à un million de tonnes de thorium ; de quoi alimenter la Chine entière pendant plus de 60 000 ans, rien de moins, d’après les chercheurs.

      L’étude a été réalisée sous la direction de Fan Honghai, un chercheur d’un laboratoire spécialisé situé à Beijing (le National Key Laboratory of Uranium Resource Exploration-Mining and Nuclear Remote Sensing). Elle a conduit à une publication début 2025 dans la revue chinoise Geological Review.

      Notons toutefois que la communication sur les réserves stratégiques est un enjeu important pour l’État chinois. Ainsi, il est possible que les ressources évoquées ne soient pas aussi facilement exploitables, et ce, à un prix décent, que ce que ces annonces pourraient laisser penser. Restons donc prudents. Sans nier toutefois la grande avance prise par la Chine dans la filière thorium.

    • aaaah, la centrale au thorium qui déclenche tout dans Occupied !

      in The Landscapes of Eco-Noir
      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344388879_The_Landscapes_of_Eco-Noir

      This article examines the Norwegian climate fiction television series Okkupert [Occupied] (2015–), focusing on the ways in which it reveals the complicity of Nordic subjects in an ecological dystopia. I argue that in illuminating this complicity, the series reimagines the Norwegian national self-conception rooted in a discourse of Norway’s exceptionalist relation to nature. I show how Norway’s green (self-)image is expressed through what I call “white ecology” – an aesthetics of whiteness encoded in neoromantic mountainous winter landscapes widely associated with the North, but also in the figure of the Norwegian white male polar explorer. I argue in this article that Occupied challenges this white-ecological masculine discourse through “dark ecology” (Morton, 2007), embodied by Russia and expressed by the avoidance of spectacular landscape aesthetics as well as by the strategy of “enmeshment”, facilitated by the medium of televisual long-form storytelling and the eco-noir aesthetics.

  • Pourquoi je n’applaudis pas le mouvement « pro-démocratie » d’Israël | Le Club
    https://blogs.mediapart.fr/neve-gordon/blog/140425/pourquoi-je-n-applaudis-pas-le-mouvement-pro-democratie-d-israel
    par Neve Gordon

    Finalement, le 27 mars, plus d’un an après que les organisations de défense des droits avaient déposé leur requête, la Cour a rendu son verdict. Le président de la Cour Yitzhak Amit et les juges Noam Sohlberg et David Mintz ont unanimement décidé que la requête n’était pas fondée. Le juge David Mintz a entrecoupé sa réponse de textes religieux juifs, caractérisant les attaques d’Israël comme une guerre de devoir divin, tout en concluant que : « [L’armée israélienne] et les répondants se sont surpassés pour permettre l’acheminement de l’aide humanitaire dans la Bande de Gaza, en prenant même le risque que l’aide transférée tombe dans les mains de l’organisation terroriste du Hamas et soit utilisée pour combattre Israël. »

    Cela, à un moment où les agences humanitaires avaient encore et encore souligné les niveaux aigus de malnutrition et de famine. La Cour suprême d’Israël —à la fois dans la manière dont elle a géré la procédure judiciaire et dans son jugement — a ignoré l’obligation légale qu’avait Israël de ne pas priver une population civile d’objects indispensable à sa survie, y compris en entravant volontairement la fourniture de secours. En fait, la Cour a légitimé l’utilisation de la famine comme arme de guerre.

    C’est cette Cour que des centaines de milliers d’Israéliens essaient de sauver. Son jugement du 27 mars — et presque tous les autres jugements impliquant des Palestiniens — révèle que la Cour suprême d’Israël est un tribunal colonial — un tribunal qui protège les droits de la population des colons, tout en légitimant la dépossession, le déplacement et la violence horrible perpétrés contre les Palestiniens autochtones. Et si la Cour suprême peut ne pas refléter les valeurs du gouvernement existant — particulièrement sur des questions relatives à la corruption politique — elle reflète sans aucun doute, et elle a toujours reflété, les valeurs du régime colonial.

    Donc, les sionistes libéraux qui remplissent les rues de Tel-Aviv chaque week-end ne manifestent pas contre une réforme judiciaire qui met en danger la démocratie, mais contre une réforme qui met en danger la démocratie juive. Peu de manifestants ont le moindre scrupule à propos de l’horrible décision de la Cour sur l’aide humanitaire ou, d’ailleurs, sur la manière dont la Cour a constamment défendu l’apartheid israélien et les piliers coloniaux. Le régime, en d’autres termes, peut continuer à éliminer des Palestiniens sans obstacle aussi longtemps que les droits des citoyens juifs d’Israël sont garantis.

    #Israël #génocide sanctionné par la Cour suprême israélienne

    • Omer Bartov fait le même genre de constat.

      il y a eu plus de gens pour se lamenter sur les quelques pertes militaires israéliennes qu’il n’y en a eu pour s’intéresser à l’anéantissement de la Bande.

      Et sur la cour suprême :

      Ayant défendu de nombreuses affaires de droits humains devant la Cour suprême d’Israël, [Michael] Sfard conclut aussi que, au fil des décennies, cette institution même a joué un rôle clé pour mettre en œuvre l’apartheid, non seulement « en évitant systématiquement de répondre à la question de la légalité des colonies selon le droit international », mais aussi en autorisant les colons à continuer de s’emparer de terres de la population palestinienne et en approuvant le « détournement » manifestement illégal « des ressources du territoire occupé au profit des colons ».

      https://seenthis.net/messages/1109327

    • Le gouvernement pourrait tomber, mais jusqu’à ce que nous transformions radicalement la nature du régime, il n’y aura pas de grands changements et particulièrement pas en ce qui concerne les droits humains fondamentaux des Palestiniens.

      (...)

      Donc, les sionistes libéraux qui remplissent les rues de Tel-Aviv chaque week-end ne manifestent pas contre une réforme judiciaire qui met en danger la démocratie, mais contre une réforme qui met en danger la démocratie juive.

      Je suis d’accord avec la radicalité du point de vue sur un changement de la nature du régime concernant les droits des Palestiniens. Cependant les manifestations pour défendre "la démocratie" - fut-elle donc "juive" - en temps de guerre face à un gouvernement dirigé par un fasciste me semblent dignes d’intérêt.

      Je vois difficilement comment un changement de régime qui respecte les droits humains des Palestiniens serait envisageable sans que les Israéliens puissent eux-mêmes exprimer leurs désaccords avec la politique menée par leur gouvernement, quand bien même les revendications seraient "libérales" et limitées à leurs propres droits.

      Faire tomber Netanyahou ce serait déjà pas si mal, non ? Sauf à le remplacer par pire ce qui, vu le contexte, est possible, j’admets.

      Manifester pour une « démocratie juive » pour aussi libéral et égocentré que cela puisse être inclurait, aussi, a priori, la possibilité pour les Juifs d’exprimer leurs soutiens aux Palestiniens et de dénoncer le génocide commis par l’État d’Israël.

      Des actions plus radicales existent. Des Israéliens, certes en très grande minorité et isolés, ont manifesté contre la guerre et si la dénonciation du génocide en cours n’était pas au cœur des revendications - d’après ce que je comprends - il y a eu aussi des essais de manifestations arabes-juifs.

      https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-03-11/ty-article-magazine/.premium/why-so-many-israelis-are-still-out-protesting-despite-a-dark-sense-of-failure/00000195-85ad-dc7b-adb7-c5edd3420000?v=1744720225324

      In late 2023 and early 2024, tiny groups were gathering in other central Tel Aviv spots, including Habima Square, to protest the Gaza war itself and demand a cease-fire. These never gained much traction, and anti-war demonstrations in Arab towns were effectively banned by the police (which heaped obstacles on Jewish-Arab protests too).

      Anti-war and anti-occupation activists held several distinct demonstrations in 2024, drawing hundreds, calling to “refuse the war.” For much of the year, dozens of young anti-war activists held drumming circles and anti-occupation chants on Kaplan as the marchers went by

      L’article rapporte les propos d’une manifestante :

      “You can’t separate the desire to have the hostages released with what’s happening on the other side of the fence,” she said, referring to the devastation in Gaza. She called the government’s policy one of “transfer and ethnic cleansing” in Gaza and the West Bank, and felt a measure of political solidarity at the Tel Aviv protests.

      https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-12/ty-article/.premium/israel-bars-protests-against-gaza-war-says-police-cant-protect-public-prevent-violence/0000018c-fa19-d1b3-a79e-fedbd1e40000

      The demonstration was planned by Partnership for Peace, a coalition of organizations that includes the communist party, Hadash, with the slogan “Stop the War” being the main message. Its participants planned on calling for the immediate signing of an agreement to stop the war and for the enactment of a deal to release the hostages, with a concomitant release of Palestinian prisoners – “all in exchange for all” – as well as calling for the advancement of a diplomatic solution that will lead to a stable peace, with civil and national equality.

      When the demonstration was announced to the public, the right-wing organization Betzalmo appealed to the police, asking for it to be banned. They warned that the event could lead to bloodshed. In response, the police announced that the permit for the demonstration would not be approved.

      On Wednesday, the police refused to approve a Jewish-Arab demonstration that was scheduled to take place at Habima Square in Tel Aviv on Thursday. It was organized by Standing Together and Women Wage Peace.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war_protests_in_Israel#Anti-war_protests

  • One Word Describes Trump
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption-trump-administration/681794

    Neopatrimonialismus
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopatrimonialismus

    Neopatrimoniale Regime sind zum Beispiel Eritrea, Kamerun, Kenia, Simbabwe, aber auch Indonesien, Kolumbien und die palästinensischen Autonomiegebiete. Auch Russland wird diesem Typ zugeordnet. In den Vereinigten Staaten zeichnet sich der Regierungsstil von Donald Trump während seiner zweiten Amtszeit durch eindeutig neopatrimoniale Tendenzen aus.

    Il n’est pas nécessaire d’être d’accord avec toute l’analyse de l’auteur pour identifier des éléments intéressants et utiles dans ce texte. Que faire contre Le Pen et Weidel ? On apprend y des choses.

    24.2.2025 Jonathan Rauch - A century ago, a German sociologist explained precisely how the president thinks about the world.

    What exactly is Donald Trump doing?

    Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

    In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

    Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

    There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

    Last year, two professors published a book that deserves wide attention. In The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, resurface a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

    Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

    The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

    In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

    Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

    In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

    Seeking to make the world safe for gangsterism, Putin used propaganda, subversion, and other forms of influence to spread the model abroad. Over time, the patrimonial model gained ground in states as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and India. Gradually (as my colleague Anne Applebaum has documented), those states coordinated in something like a syndicate of crime families—“working out problems,” write Hanson and Kopstein in their book, “divvying up the spoils, sometimes quarreling, but helping each other when needed. Putin in this scheme occupied the position of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses.”

    Until now. Move over, President Putin.

    To understand the source of Trump’s hold on power, and its main weakness, one needs to understand what patrimonialism is not. It is not the same as classic authoritarianism. And it is not necessarily antidemocratic.

    Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features.

    By contrast, patrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

    Also unlike classic authoritarianism, patrimonialism can coexist with democracy, at least for a while. As Hanson and Kopstein write, “A leader may be democratically elected but still seek to legitimate his or her rule patrimonially. Increasingly, elected leaders have sought to demolish bureaucratic administrative states (‘deep states,’ they sometimes call them) built up over decades in favor of rule by family and friends.” India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Trump himself are examples of elected patrimonial leaders—and ones who have achieved substantial popular support and democratic legitimacy. Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the “unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government” be “responsive to the people.”

    Nonetheless, as patrimonialism snips the government’s procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state. Over time, as it seeks to embed itself, many leaders attempt the transition to full-blown authoritarianism. “Electoral processes and constitutional norms cannot survive long when patrimonial legitimacy begins to dominate the political arena,” write Hanson and Kopstein.

    Even if authoritarianism is averted, the damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor.

    To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal. “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. As one prominent Republican politician recently told me, understanding Trump is simple: “If you’re his friend, he’s your friend. If you’re not his friend, he’s not your friend.” This official chose to be Trump’s friend. Otherwise, he said, his job would be nearly impossible for the next four years.

    Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.

    In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity.

    Yet when Max Weber saw patrimonialism as obsolete in the era of the modern state, he was not daydreaming. As Hanson and Kopstein note, “Patrimonial regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by expert bureaucracies.” They still can’t. Patrimonialism suffers from two inherent and in many cases fatal shortcomings.

    The first is incompetence. “The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies,” write Hanson and Kopstein. Patrimonial regimes are “simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance,” they write. “At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.” Already, the administration seems bent on debilitating as much of the government as it can. Some examples of incompetence, such as the reported firing of staffers who safeguard nuclear weapons and prevent bird flu, would be laughable if they were not so alarming.

    Eventually, incompetence makes itself evident to the voting public without needing too much help from the opposition. But helping the public understand patrimonialism’s other, even greater vulnerability—corruption—requires relentless messaging.

    Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)

    They weren’t wrong. “In the first three weeks of his administration,” reported the Associated Press, “President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.” The pace was eye-watering. Over the course of just a couple of days in February, for example, the Trump administration:

    – gutted enforcement of statutes against foreign influence, thus, according to the former White House counsel Bob Bauer, reducing “the legal risks faced by companies like the Trump Organization that interact with government officials to advance favorable conditions for business interests shared with foreign governments, and foreign-connected partners and counterparties”;

    – suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, further reducing, wrote Bauer, “legal risks and issues posed for the Trump Organization’s engagements with government officials both at home and abroad”;

    – fired, without cause, the head of the government’s ethics office, a supposedly independent agency overseeing anti-corruption rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch;

    – fired, also without cause, the inspector general of USAID after the official reported that outlay freezes and staff cuts had left oversight “largely nonoperational.”

    By that point, Trump had already eviscerated conflict-of-interest rules, creating, according to Bauer, “ample space for foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work directly with the Trump Organization or an affiliate within the framework of existing agreements in ways highly beneficial to its business interests.” He had fired inspectors general in 19 agencies, without cause and probably illegally. One could go on—and Trump will.

    Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative.

    In the United States, anyone seeking evidence of the power of anti-corruption need look no further than Republicans’ attacks against Jim Wright and Hillary Clinton. In Clinton’s case, Republicans and Trump bootstrapped a minor procedural violation (the use of a private server for classified emails) into a world-class scandal. Trump and his allies continually lambasted her as the most corrupt candidate ever. Sheer repetition convinced many voters that where there was smoke, there must be fire.

    Even more on point is Newt Gingrich’s successful campaign to bring down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright—a campaign that ended Wright’s career, launched Gingrich’s, and paved the way for the Republicans’ takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. In the late 1980s, Wright was a congressional titan and Gingrich an eccentric backbencher, but Gingrich had a plan. “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his [Wright’s] ethics,” he said in 1987. “There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies.” Gingrich used ethics complaints and relentless public messaging (not necessarily fact-based) to brand Wright and, by implication, the Democrats as corrupt. “In virtually every speech and every interview, he attacked Wright,” John M. Barry wrote in Politico. “He told his audiences to write letters to the editor of their local newspapers, to call in on talk shows, to demand answers from their local members of Congress in public meetings. In his travels, he also sought out local political and investigative reporters or editorial writers, and urged them to look into Wright. And Gingrich routinely repeated, ‘Jim Wright is the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century.’”

    Today, Gingrich’s campaign offers the Democrats a playbook. If they want to undermine Trump’s support, this model suggests that they should pursue a relentless, strategic, and thematic campaign branding Trump as America’s most corrupt president. Almost every development could provide fodder for such attacks, which would connect corruption not with generalities like the rule of law but with kitchen-table issues. Higher prices? Crony capitalism! Cuts to popular programs? Payoffs for Trump’s fat-cat clients! Tax cuts? A greedy raid on Social Security!

    The best objection to this approach (perhaps the only objection, at this point) is that the corruption charge won’t stick against Trump. After all, the public has been hearing about his corruption for years and has priced it in or just doesn’t care. Besides, the public believes that all politicians are corrupt anyway.

    But driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all.

    Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world.

    Do the Democrats need a positive message of their own? Sure, they should do that work. But right now, when they are out of power and Trump is the capo di tutti capi, the history of patrimonial rule suggests that their most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.

    About the Author

    Jonathan Rauch is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He most recently authored Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrimonialism

    #USA #politique #patrimonialisme #trumpisme #populisme