comradeocean

[comradeocean]

well, yes, exactly! imperialism exists as a world system. international relations is precisely one of the constitutive methods ordering and enforcing the economic, political, and military violence of imperialism. a bit confused what that account would even define as imperialism if this is seen as some kind of absurdity. whatever that makes white Christians guilty or something? judging by the tone of follow ups and the crowd uncritically recirculating similar arguments. something about tankies being hypocritical and virtue signaling? idgi but bad vibes all around

There is no “anti imperialist” case for defunding USAID if you actually understand imperialism, which is what is primarily at fault for the dire poverty and lack of health infrastructure in many former colonies around the world. USAID and similar programs (in the U.S. and other imperial powers) are essentially a form of reparations.

I am guessing some of this is rooted in reasonable critiques of like, other kinds of Western charity "voluntourism" that sweep in and help people for a few weeks or months and then leave nothing behind to keep those programs going. But that stuff is fundamentally different from what USAID and similar government aid programs do, much of which involves not just handing out vaccines and medicine but also building lasting health infrastructure in those countries. The fact that organizations like Partners in Health that are specifically devoted to building things like medical schools, state-of-the-art hospitals, and other institutions devoted to ensuring poorer countries will one day no longer require foreign aid, are strong supporters of those countries giving that aid now and opponents of the DOGE cuts, should prove that to you.

Also, how is it not "imposing your Western values" on another country if you say "you may want vaccines, but we're not going to give it to you because it looks bad and imperialist for us to do that? because it flatters my belief that America is evil?" How is that not rooted in a worldview that sees poor and sick people in other countries as not fellow human beings who want to live, but as political symbols? How is the mentality behind that not the very essence of imperialist ideology?

[comradeocean]

I cannot get over how intellectually dishonest this post and the ensuing conversation was. beyond the cavalier genocide denial it opens with, this was published June 11 and I assume about the shooting in DC. it was beyond a doubt at that point that it was not an act of terror that targeted random Jewish Americans or this nebulously defined "Jewish community." The targets were two Israeli state officials, both either having served as propaganda corps in the IDF, or was currently in the position of working for the Israeli government in a PR capacity. Neither of them were Jewish Americans! They were both Christian Zionists! All the Nazi analogies about US wartime internment that people are trying to make in the reblogs are completely spurious! The equivalent is not random German Americans during World War II but non-German apparatchiks of the NSDAP somehow able to live, work and organize events promoting the goals of the Third Reich in the United States!! Does that not sound absolutely ridiculous and despicable!?!?

That such people are welcomed in, and in fact often hold leadership positions within American Jewish communal organizations, is of course another essential point that needs to be considered. That would be the actual 'nuanced' conversation we should be having, and not this thought-terminating zionist bullshit designed to make any kind of discourse approaching that completely illegitimate.

Not to be nuanced on tumblr but I think it’s possible to believe that there are severe human rights abuses happening in Palestine right now and also believe that it’s wrong to try and rectify this by instilling fear in Jewish communities via violence.

[comradeocean]

Last week, a friend sent me an episode of a progressive Jewish podcast where one of my essays was discussed. At some point, the host and her guests began talking about the "ostracization of Zionists," and they agreed that it was a complex and controversial matter—almost as though it were unreasonable for us to demand that proponents of this racist, genocidal ideology face social consequences. One guest even called it "litmus testing Jews on Israel." As the episode continued, I went to check the news: Zionists were burning Palestinians alive. I saw 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou, connected to an IV drip on a makeshift hospital bed, being engulfed in flames. I couldn't think of a starker juxtaposition to illustrate the chasms that separate us from some of our allies—between their priorities, their concerns, and ours. I could not come up with a better metaphor for this level of detachment from reality. We know that, rightfully, "progressives" would never extend the same grace or nuance to Nazis, but somehow, miraculously, when the conversation is about Zionists, demanding moral and political consistency becomes much more intricate—hesitation masquerades as intellectual complexity. I don't know whether it's incredulity, cognitive dissonance, or willful ignorance, but we are on two completely different planets and only the Palestinians are expected to bridge the gap. It’s depressing to think that, after a year of nonstop televised massacres, the irredeemable, indefensible rot that is Zionism remains "debatable" in public life.

I know these words will be hard to read for some, and for others, they’ll be easy to dismiss. Some will cast me as overly critical and their worldly Palestinian friends will agree. Others will say: “No matter what we do, we’ll be called either Hamas supporters or Zionist apologists,” a refrain I often hear, reminiscent of clichéd biracial slam poetry. Others are waiting for some kind of BDS fatwa to command them to spit in the face of their Zionist uncles, knowing that fatwa will never come. So can we be honest? What will it take? What is it, if not the systemic rape of political prisoners, that will propel you to have the difficult dinner conversation, to dispel and disown Zionism materially, not only discursively? What is it, if not the carving of the Star of David into the cheeks of our young men, that will propel you to protest the Israeli flags present in every facet of Jewish American life? I ask sincerely—is there a threshold?

-- Mohammed El-Kurd

[comradeocean]

"I am often asked if Israel makes Jewish people unsafe. The answer is clearly yes. However, first and foremost, no one is as endangered by Israel as Palestinians.

It is possible that close to a million Palestinian people have been murdered by Israel over the past 20 months. They have been bombed, sniped, burned alive, crushed under buildings, raped, beaten, attacked by dogs. Left to die in incubators. Frozen to death. Denied water and healthcare.

Over 2 million people are being starved to death while I type these words, and this doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered and displaced from their land over the past 77 years. Regardless of one’s awareness of the Nakba and the ongoing violence perpetuated by the State of Israel since 1948, we are now all watching the most horrific things imaginable being done to the Palestinian people every day. No one can say they didn’t know.

And yet, somehow, cries of antisemitism have the power to flip reality on its head. People on the Jewish left — including the organisations Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now — have tripped over themselves to condemn violent resistance and mourn all lives.

In doing so, these organizations and individuals once again center Jewish feelings and Jewish safety when the real story is Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, when the real problem is Zionism, when the real danger is Israel, when the real crisis is Jewish people consenting or supporting the Jewish State’s crimes against humanity.

Don’t be distracted by this manoeuvre. This is simply a way to deflect attention away from what is most likely the most horrific and widespread human-led atrocity in history.

Israel, the United States, Canada, and many European states have weaponised false accusations of antisemitism to justify their crimes against humanity. When we enter into disingenuous antisemitism debates, we are allowing the story to shift away from what really matters and what really matters is genocide and the global indifference to Palestinian death.

Once this genocide is over and Palestine is free, we can spend all the time we want reflecting on how Israel has been bad for all of us, including Jewish people. Once the genocide is over and Palestine is free, we can talk about how Israel really did make Jewish people more unsafe.

Right now, those conversations are not only a distraction, they are a form of narrative violence when Israel is still granted impunity and financial support to continue with its project of genocide and ethnic cleansing by and in the name of the Jewish people.

To quote Mohammed El-Kurd, it's not the Palestinians' fault that these people are Jewish.

As Israel’s interception of the Madleen and abduction of 12 activists in International waters has recently revealed, non-violent resistance cannot and will not end state violence.

In fact, it never has, and, as we have seen from Palestine to Los Angeles, condemnation of violent resistance merely legitimises and supports state violence. As the United States government continues its support for Israel’s crimes against humanity, we will likely see an escalation of events like those in Washington DC and Boulder, Colorado.

As these events unfold, we mustn't be distracted by antisemitism dog whistles and instead acknowledge these acts as political reactions to political violence. The people experiencing real and material identity-based violence right now are Palestinians, who are being exterminated en masse because they are Palestinian.

Resistance to the Jewish supremacist project of Zionism, which is an inherently settler colonial project of genocide, is not antisemitic. It is instead an anti-colonial form of resistance. Anyone condemning the recent waves of political assassinations and spectacles of violence clearly and specifically orchestrated as a form of political resistance should instead redirect their outrage to this: almost one million Palestinians, murdered in the most extreme and horrific ways.

Two million people are being actively starved to death by Israel. This is the violence we should be condemning. Any violence against Israel, the US, or individuals supporting Israel and the US’s ongoing genocide is resistance and should be framed as such. To draw on antisemitism in this moment is both a form of genocide denial and an incitement to more violence against Palestinians."

-- Maura Finkelstein, "Israel uses antisemitism as cover for Gaza genocide. It's a trap."

Not to be nuanced on tumblr but I think it’s possible to believe that there are severe human rights abuses happening in Palestine right now and also believe that it’s wrong to try and rectify this by instilling fear in Jewish communities via violence.

[comradeocean]

ah "severe human rights abuses" ok I see where this is going, genocide apologist

Not to be nuanced on tumblr but I think it’s possible to believe that there are severe human rights abuses happening in Palestine right now and also believe that it’s wrong to try and rectify this by instilling fear in Jewish communities via violence.

[comradeocean]

Alasdair MacIntyre, RIP. In making Aristotelian virtue ethics threatening again, his contribution to Scottish intellectual history is rivalled only by Tom Nairn and Trainspotting.

[comradeocean]

it just feels so important to me, more important than almost anything, to honor people who sacrifice for this one thing, even if in their sacrifice we gain nothing, because we have one horizon, and to know how many people there are with us walking toward this one horizon, while many others deny it’s there at all, is the thing that makes it bearable to keep going towards it, because the tradition of the dead generations weighs like this too, it means that too, if it matters at all whether people live or die then it matters when our comrades sacrifice their lives on the road to this one thing, nothing is over everything ends etc

[comradeocean]

x1000000 for Elias Rodriguez because just look at his goodreads reviews, his twitter, his spotify playlists

in the same way Refaat Alareer's death was v difficult to bear bc it felt like I personally knew him, having followed his leftist shitposting, the dumb memes, Aaron Bushnell's reddit comment history reads like it could be any one of ours. r/linuxmemes, r/radicalchristianity...

a year ago - "Two MLs just asked me for an Anarchist book rec. What should I choose?"

"We have power, we just don’t hold it. In order to hold it, we have to organize to grasp it collectively." /r/anarchy4everyone 8 days ago

it's kind of killing me the only ppl going through his posting history are like literal nazis, and then they'll go to the post and reply w something vile

英雄烈士永垂不朽 glory to the martyrs

[comradeocean]

Explication May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here's an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those "ten thousand" under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in "Protective Edge" and "Cast Lead" put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians' forgiveness. They've let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they'll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they're doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can't let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who'd been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha's Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry's lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara's "very posture, telling you, 'My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you'll have to lump it.'" The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying "Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn't so fine, was it?"

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O* Free Palestine -Elias Rodriguez

[comradeocean]

My thoughts on the Andor TIE Avenger having so many more weapon hardpoints than the X-Wing game series version (and most other Star Wars fighter types) is that the one Cassian steals is an experimental testbed.

They just stuck everything on there to see which system would work best, and the production version would probably have either the wingtip mounted lasers OR the gatling ones; either the torpedo launcher OR the missile rails. Maybe those extra two seats in the back were for observers during test flights, or engineers to make sure the ship didn't melt itself.

[comradeocean]

Instead, family, for Andor, turns out to be the people you’ll come back for: his sister, Maarva, and Bix. It is made, not inherited. And if Andor is a star war “for adults,” I think this is what it means to say that. Growing up means putting sex in perspective, understanding it not as a narcissistic apotheosis devoutly to be wished (by a teenaged virgin masturbating to the idea of rebellion), but as just one of the glues that binds families together, forever. What, after all, is Bix to Andor? Their relationship is something permanent, something transcendent, even though the sex that began it is long over. Family will do, as a term; even sister, if we want (since there is nothing more Star Wars than being a little messy about sex with your sister). But family is the loyalty that makes people your family: you make it, and only then does it make you. It is, in that way, a lot like a revolution.

-- Aaron Bady, Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor”

[comradeocean]

favourite movie list lets go!!

mercilessly ordered bc I'm that sorta freak. also I feel like once I start straying out of the IMDb 250 or letterbox 100 or tumblr 101 or whatever, the choices are like extremely and uncomfortably revealing. like, if you've watched more than idk 40 of these movies I'm way worried abt Being Known yknow? ANYWAY

[comradeocean]

whoa!! I'm very curious about the last few lines (last stanza in general) and I'd love to join this relay and try a translation as well, but I've got some stuff going on and won't have much free time until late next week. very coooool

Re-Reading Karl Marx's Das Kapital

Chen Xianfa, translated by Tammy Ho

Better to discuss bodies squeezed dry than waste words on old clothing. He said, writings that speak of violence often mask themselves with sophisticated language. When I first read the book, I was a child, accompanying my father fishing at the creek. The old Party member rubbed his hands and threw dirty bait into the pond. I, in the canoe, or amidst a bed of collapsing canola flowers slept till my heart seemed to stop beating. Under the sunlight, I was momentarily revived and remembered a bunch of angry phrases.

To my family, this is an unspeakable legacy. My grandmother believed in Buddhism, while my father, a reckless tractor driver, would have wanted to burn all nineteen provinces. He believed that something new could be born from ashes. The two of them fought. They begged, they wrestled, and deep in the evening, they cried in the corridor. Grandma wrapped the statues of temple gods and goddesses in a white cloth and hid them under her bed. In the end, she starved herself to death to fulfill the bodhisattvas' teachings. My father, now, also sleeps among the mountains. Over there, "exploitation" is still a word. "universal economic equality" is still a dream. The tomb's hardwood, battered by mocking rain, is evergreen.

To die because of an old book is exactly the way things should be. All these years, I've had a fetish for writing history through the camera's lens. But I cannot ascertain how the nooses on innocent ghosts can dissolve into the rhythmic pattern of empty mountains and new rain. Because the castle that hung a flag as bait is long gone. Death's ashes should remain undisturbed, but that doesn't stop me from re-reading Marx. Those two or three epiphanic birdcalls from my first reading are still there. It's as though the pond collects bubbles to finally depart. The level of danger tends towards the end of aesthetics.

[comradeocean]

Re-Reading Karl Marx's Das Kapital

Chen Xianfa, translated by Tammy Ho

Better to discuss bodies squeezed dry than waste words on old clothing. He said, writings that speak of violence often mask themselves with sophisticated language. When I first read the book, I was a child, accompanying my father fishing at the creek. The old Party member rubbed his hands and threw dirty bait into the pond. I, in the canoe, or amidst a bed of collapsing canola flowers slept till my heart seemed to stop beating. Under the sunlight, I was momentarily revived and remembered a bunch of angry phrases.

To my family, this is an unspeakable legacy. My grandmother believed in Buddhism, while my father, a reckless tractor driver, would have wanted to burn all nineteen provinces. He believed that something new could be born from ashes. The two of them fought. They begged, they wrestled, and deep in the evening, they cried in the corridor. Grandma wrapped the statues of temple gods and goddesses in a white cloth and hid them under her bed. In the end, she starved herself to death to fulfill the bodhisattvas' teachings. My father, now, also sleeps among the mountains. Over there, "exploitation" is still a word. "universal economic equality" is still a dream. The tomb's hardwood, battered by mocking rain, is evergreen.

To die because of an old book is exactly the way things should be. All these years, I've had a fetish for writing history through the camera's lens. But I cannot ascertain how the nooses on innocent ghosts can dissolve into the rhythmic pattern of empty mountains and new rain. Because the castle that hung a flag as bait is long gone. Death's ashes should remain undisturbed, but that doesn't stop me from re-reading Marx. Those two or three epiphanic birdcalls from my first reading are still there. It's as though the pond collects bubbles to finally depart. The level of danger tends towards the end of aesthetics.

[comradeocean]

also these accounts tend to portrayal the Asian Parents as Unknowable Mysteries whose internal lives are a complete black box when by the time we emigrated I already knew so many things abt my parents and other extended family that no six year old had any business knowing and this Knowing has formed the basis of the relationship I've had w my family since then

continuing to douse myself in as-am autofiction out of some kind of masochism and I am so secondary character coded it's unnerving. you know the dour stodgy judgmental anti conformist NERD AZN foil for the boy-crazy make-up loving self-hating cool kid ARTS AZN main character

I feel it's very much faildaughter stealing valour bc my archetype characters are always successful and rich and put together compared to the woe is me messed up rebel while I literally do not know a single AZN person I grew up w or anywhere remotely in my circle of acquaintance who has less educational attainment and stable work experience than me. like I have literally never managed to get a salaried job bc you usually need a bachelor for that lol

[comradeocean]

continuing to douse myself in as-am autofiction out of some kind of masochism and I am so secondary character coded it's unnerving. you know the dour stodgy judgmental anti conformist NERD AZN foil for the boy-crazy make-up loving self-hating cool kid ARTS AZN main character

I feel it's very much faildaughter stealing valour bc my archetype characters are always successful and rich and put together compared to the woe is me messed up rebel while I literally do not know a single AZN person I grew up w or anywhere remotely in my circle of acquaintance who has less educational attainment and stable work experience than me. like I have literally never managed to get a salaried job bc you usually need a bachelor for that lol

[comradeocean]

#the dreary heterosexualism of it all

the problem being I was told it was going to be surrealist near future science fiction horror and what I was met w were the agonies of the couple/pair form, usually with white men comprising the other half.

I know my whole thing was about not picking up autofiction again for a while but I read some excerpts of Xiaolu Guo's work today and I will probably hate it too if I were to actually read something in its entirety but I think the conceit she's going for is that her fiction is ostensibly about romantic love but is in fact almost about everything else BUT that. this inverse I find much more palatable and interesting. the other notable thing is the way she depicts the appearances of communism/socialism in post-high socialist (so 80s, 90s, 2000s) China not as cynical exercises of formalism, but as genuinely held beliefs and practices. I appreciate it so much bc it's one of my major projects.

Ling Ma's Peking Duck is v v funny. more than anything, I would describe it as humourous. and maybe as a result I've found most reviews of it also (unintentionally) hilarious. eg, the jacobin review. and every single one that uses the adjective "tender"