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I'm starting a collection

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And to think that it takes very little to make a child happy....

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Should you be more worried about China siphoning off your personal data and manipulating your thoughts via TikTok, or American billionaires siphoning off your personal data and manipulating your thoughts via TikTok? I don't trust either. http://dlvr.it/T46pLJ

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Your Friday reminder that trickle-down economics is a cruel hoax. Cruel because it's used by the super-rich to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. A hoax because nothing has ever trickled down. http://dlvr.it/T47TqX

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The Times Quotes Israeli and American Sources More than Three Times as Often as Palestinians - The New York War Crimes (published March 2024)

best read in combination with:

Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows - The Intercept (published January 2024)

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The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat

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disney is pledging 2 million in aid for israel. FUCK disney. boycott that bitch. dont put bullets in israeli machine guns because you wanna watch loki 2 or your niece really likes rapunzel and her birthday is soon. watch another show. buy another gift.

dont feed the machine.

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Been saying much of this for ages.

Sad when the victim becomes the monster they faced

The concept of Israel being corrupt or the aggressor is a new concept for many people. Especially those people who grew up in the west/other states that benefit from their colonial past. I don't blame people who have a lot of unlearning to do about Israel but let's talk about some of the stuff you might not know. Israel's occupation of Palestine isn't the only human rights violation under its belt.

Israel had extremely close ties with South African apartheid leaders (surprise surprise) like John Vorster and Percy Yutar. Israel provided arms/anti-riot vehicles to the South African Apartheid Regime through the Zionist Federation. (Wiki)

Israel, despite a weapons embargo by UN Security Council, sent substantial weapons to the Hutu militants who massacred over 1 million Tutsi. The Israeli Supreme Court has also sealed documents detailing these exports despite numerous appeals by activists. (Source).

It has also funded/supplied weapons to the following atrocities: Mayan Genocide 1960-1996, Srebrenica genocide (Israel supreme court also refuses to release documents on this), Occupation of Kashmir and a bunch more (other involvements include Pinochet Coup, Ethnic cleansing of Armenians

Palestinians are not the only people facing racism/discriminations at the hands of Israel. Israel has a running history of discrimination against its Ethiopian Jew population. From questioning their Jewish origins, to giving Ethopian women depo-provera without their consent/knowledge, to the brutal beating of Damas Pakedeh, to secretly disposing of blood donations by Ethiopian Jews (list goes on). (Wiki)

Also did you know that the US, every year, will send thousands of law enforcement personnel to train with the IDF on tactics such as crowd control, use of force and surveillance (Source). Here is an amazing article that talks about how Israeli occupation helps fuel America's problem with police brutality.

Again, for a lot of people, the idea that Israel is evil is very new but the world is more connected than ever before and we can share information to combat all of this. Israel, and its allies (other settler colonial states like US/France/UK) have an incentive to block this information. In fact, when you go through these sources, you'll notice that Israel gets a lot of support/arms/funding from these states so it can carry out these atrocities. Also keep your "whataboutism" to yourself. Any country that does this is in the wrong. Nationalism has no place when discussing human rights violations and its time you changed your stance on Israel and see them for what they are: evil.

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Doja Cat Vs. Fandom

I find the blow up about Doja Cat’s response that she can’t consider her fans her friends because she doesn’t know them fascinating. Obviously, people are accustomed to creating these strange parasocial relationships with celebrities but they shouldn’t, it isn’t healthy. So, getting outraged when a celebrity refuses to feed into that by saying what is blatantly true bewilders me.

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Editor’s note: The War on Sharing is an informal journal about my life as an anti-capitalist dissident in a burgeoning Pig Empire police state, during a time of normalized fascist reaction. Given the deeply personal nature of this writing, please consider citations to be arbitrary, profanity to be praxis, and slang to be artisanal.

TWoS: Hell Comes to Frogtown

To tell you the truth, I was settling in for a spot of breakfast when I heard that the fascists had announced their intention to genocide me. 

Oh, to be clear, I wasn’t exactly surprised by the news. I’ve been writing about, and warning about the rise of American fascism for more than seven years now, and if a society spends long enough dancing with the devil, eventually it gets burned. Furthermore, it had certainly not escaped my attention that fascists were organizing around repressing trans people and LBGTQ folks who work in public life; although, given the minuscule size of the trans minority in Amerikkka, I have been a little surprised at how effective that organizing has been.

As it turns out however, there is a rather significant difference between logically processing that eventually nazis are going to come and kill you, and watching them successfully generate a movement to start conducting pogroms. I discovered this difference in full force on the morning of October 20th when I learned that The Federalist had published a pile of fascist screeching that appropriated Nazi eliminationist language to discuss “the transgender question.” Purely for the purposes of demonstrating that I’m being quite literal here, I’ll quote the relevant paragraph:

“On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.”

There is of course a little subtext here, you have to realize that what the author means by sexually explicit material is simply discussing queer identities, or living them openly; a position confirmed by the GOP’s current attempts to pass a national persecution law against LGBTQ people that makes Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida look like a Sunday picnic. 

There is however not much subtext involved in echoing Nazi propaganda about “the Jewish question” when discussing driving LGBTQ people, especially trans women, out of public life and likely worse. After all what “is the transgender question” so mysteriously being referred to here? Why of course the question is “what is to be done about trans people” and simply asking it implies “leave them alone to live their lives in peace” isn’t on the table.

Naturally, and even despite this clear evocation of the reactionary language of genocide, there will still be some, invariably comfortable people reading this who are certain that I’m overreacting. They will note that street nazis have been talking about murdering trans folks for a very long time, and a pogrom has not occurred yet. They will state that the right’s current attempts to conflate being trans or even just gay with pedophilia, is somehow unrelated to their broader social organization against “the pedophile elites” ruining our society. This is all hogwash, and the type of thing you can only say when you’re not on the firing lines, and powerful nazis largely immune to prosecution are not organizing to exterminate you.

I will however entertain this idea long enough to simply point out that the author of this piece is not some random Proud Boy or Youtuber; John Daniel Davidson is the Politics Editor at The Federalist. The Federalist in turn, is a mainstream far right publication co-founded by disgraced former-Washington Post opinion blogger Ben Domenech. Ben is literally married to Meghan McCain; the “center-right” media personality and surviving daughter of one of the most powerful Senators in U.S. history. The Federalist is certainly fascist trash, but it is by no means fringe - and simply watching how the Republican Party is currently weaponizing attacks on trans people, there’s no reasonable way you can tell me that Davidson’s positions aren’t overwhelming supported in the broader American right these days.

Look folks, when mainstream right wing influencers and politicians are arguing that simply living or talking about LGBTQ lifestyles is child abuse because it sexualizes children, and fascist street gangs are shouting “kill your local pedophile” at rallies, it doesn’t take a genius to see where this all ends; it’s a program in progress, and I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.

And what pray tell is the liberal establishment, or even the so-called independent left media doing right now? More or less either screaming about a war in Eastern Europe or shouting “it’s the economy stupid” back and forth at each other like anyone else is even listening. Is it all right to laugh at your own funeral? I ask because I’m pretty much running out of other options here myself; presumably I’m supposed to just hide in my house and wait for the nazis to come get me while y’all sort this “political” situation out? 

Buckle up buttercup; the cavalry is not coming and the ride doesn’t get smoother from here.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook.

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

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Fun, sparkly, casual gender nonconformity is awesome and wonderful, but it's also not the only type. Gender nonconformity can be serious, and it should have a respected place in society.

It's not inappropriate for a man to wear a dress to a business meeting. It's not inappropriate for a woman to wear a three-piece suit to a funeral. It's not inappropriate for someone to dress androgynous for an interview. Gender nonconformity is, for many people, just a part of expression. It's not just a performance or a fun weekend thing (although, again, that's good too)!

If gender nonconformity is only viewed as "casual", and is still punished in professional spaces for being "inappropriate", trans, genderqueer and gender nonconforming people will never be free. If you only treat gender nonconformity with respect in drag bars and pride festivals, you don't actually respect gender nonconformity.

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Assholes: "The LGBT community are trying to recruit children to join them."

LGBT People: "We constantly talk about people like us being discriminated against, bullied, assaulted, driven to suicide, and murdered. On what planet is that recruiting anyone to join us? If that's recruiting, then maybe the military should start using it. Maybe the military should start telling kids about every single possible traumatic event they could experience during their service and about all the permanently disabled veterans who are left to die on the street when the people who used them discard them like trash."

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im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids