Authorities in Marseille have launched an investigation to determine the cause of Vlahovic's death.

French journalist and renowned Middle East expert Marine Vlahovic was found dead at her home in Marseille on Monday, November 27.

According to reports by La Provence, her body was discovered on the roof terrace of her residence by friends who had grown concerned after she failed to respond to calls or messages. She was 39 years old.

According to ARTE Radio, Marine Vlahovic had dedicated part of her short life to the Palestinian cause.

In Gaza Calling, she compiled video and voice messages from her colleagues and friends in Gaza, trapped under the bombs.

  • ubergeek@lemmy.todayEnglish
    23·
    26 days ago

    An oligarchy is not a democracy… Not even a “liberal western democracy”, aka “Constitutional Democratic Republic”…

    Now, if you wanna get all pedantic and all, we certainly can.

    • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.net
      53·
      26 days ago

      I will pedant your debatefetishist asshole in half, fuck face:

      Let’s get up a definition of oligarchy, shall we? You’re gonna run to Wikipedia or dictionary.com so I’ll just go for Wikipedia:

      Oligarchy (from Ancient Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía) ‘rule by few’; from ὀλίγος (olígos) ‘few’ and ἄρχω (árkhō) ‘to rule, command’)[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people may or may not be distinguished by one or several characteristics, such as nobility, fame, wealth, education, or corporate, religious, political, or military control.

      Now, in the UK, there’s a population of around 70 million people, with 650 elected members of government and 805 unelected members, making up a rounding error of the total population.

      In America, over 300 million people are represented by 535 members of its senate, plus a handful of unelected judges and executive legislators. Again, they make up a rounding error of the population.

      France - 66 million, 925. Germany - 85 million, 733. Norway - 5 and a half million, 169. By all means, include the family members and hangers-on who aren’t actively in power but still weild it, and you could quadruple or quintuple those numbers. Doesn’t really matter, still comes out to a rounding error.

      Maybe instead of jacking yourself off over liberalism you should take a moment to actually step back and look at the situation a little more objectively. Being able to vote for which people the power rests with does not increase the number of people welding it.

      • ubergeek@lemmy.todayEnglish
        23·
        26 days ago

        Literally voting for your reps is not what the government of Russia is, though… So, yes, representative democracies are sub-optimal, but they are better than a straight up oligarchy, which means “People with money and power have all the say”.

        • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          61·
          26 days ago

          “People with money and power have all the say”.

          Thank god we don’t have that in the capitalist west, can you imagine? Why, they could just carry out a genocide and send the police to bludgeon and teargas protestors, they could dissappear activists into blacksites and torture them for days, they could install fascist governments everywhere and poison the world, and just wave nukes at anyone who tried to stop them.

          What an unimaginable nightmare that would be, I’m so glad I don’t live under the kind of irredeemable oligarcical government that would be defined by doing those things.

          Also your understanding of power is a tautology. The people with power have the power? Interesting, much to considerthonk

          • ubergeek@lemmy.todayEnglish
            22·
            26 days ago

            For all the failures of the US, or other liberal democracies… Yes, they can vote fascism right into power, and we have, in the US, and in Germany in the 1930’s too.

            However, let’s not pretend this is exclusive to liberal democracies… Lest we forget how quickly the oligarchs captured the socialist movement in Russia in the 1910’s. Not even two years post-revolution, the Soviets were also murdering the working class for high crimes such as “Doing a labor strike” or “Daring to use a system other than Leninism”…

            • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              26 days ago

              For all the failures of the US

              Failures? What on earth are you talking about, failures? All of these ventures have been massively successful, they generated untold billions in profits for our oligarchs. You only view them as failures because you still believe for some reason that they were ever supposed to help you at all. The US hasn’t failed it’s people, we’re just not it’s people. It’s you who’s failed to understand this situation.

              As usual, the latent American exceptionalist propaganda that’s programmed into all of us from birth keeps you from viewing America as you would view any other nation-state, or one of it’s rivals. We’re told we have the biggest, bestest American moral aspirations and that justifies our actions, but we’re also trained to carve out constant exceptions and excuses for why America has never, ever come close to meeting them. We learn to endlessly justify the atrocities of our own society while collapsing the actions of every other society down to some innate cartoonish quality, usually winkingly implied to be racial. Your worldview can only make sense for more than five seconds if you exclusively grant America some complexity and capacity for “redemption” that you deny to everyone else who America wantonly destroys, as if they aren’t real enough to warrant anything but smug dismissal.

              It’s a cartoon view of the world that has led you to cartoon conclusions, its no wonder you’re giving me the Flawed City on a Hill cliche. It’s West Wing shit, not reality. In reality, America has never not been fascist. The fascism just wasn’t evenly distributed, same as everything else.

              But as usual, when faced with the most abbreviated possible list of their own crimes, any one of which would make another country irredeemably autocratic in their eyes, the liberal response is to retreat into “it’s complicated.” The final mask of moral cowardice in the face of incontrovertible evil. Colonialism was “complicated”. Chattel slavery was “complicated”. Blair Mountain was “complicated”. Fucking MKULTRA, Tuskegee, Paperclip, leveling Asia with bombs, Iraq and Afghanistan were all “complicated” according to the legions of carefully cultivated, amoral yes-men who’s only role at every historical juncture has been to solemnly shake their heads at the carnage while giving it the thumbs up to continue. Our current pet genocide in Palestine was “complicated” right up until that facade became too hard to maintain, and they just stopped talking about it. Now the US seems intent on starting WW3, and you can bet any amount of money that it will initially be sold as “complicated”, right up until they throw a switch from “it’s complicated” to “exterminate the brutes”, and by that point all the liberals will be fully on board. Just look how quickly, how gleefully so many of them took to calling russian people “orcs”. I want to give you a genuine warning, just from one person to another: you are being sleepwalked into fascism, and its actually not that complicated at all; it’s the worldview that is taught to us which is overly simple.