#death to the west

[yourtongzhihazel]

"late stage capitalism"?

You mean imperialism?

[anarchotahdigism]

do y'all remember in 2020 how people would see crowds of unmasked people at protests and deride them for being dangerous, for not listening to the disabled, for endangering others, for being insincere in their commitment to their espoused beliefs, if not outright suspected of being fascists? Remember how we fought anti-maskers? The ethics of masking never changed Y'all just dropped your own masks and chose the side of eugenics I'm so disgusted at all these unmasked crowds claiming to care about other lives when they're actually disabling and killing people right now to feel better about themselves In the US alone, COVID kills 1,000 to 3,000 people a week-- mostly poor disabled people of color. The CDC director and other prominent US figures have repeatedly praised the fact that COVID, which disables people with sufficient infections or severity and damages you with every infection, is killing the disabled. The rich demanded COVID spread because it profited them and outright Nazis praised this, then those fascist capitalist positions were adopted by "mainstream society," a titanic fascist victory. The people you claim to support, like Palestinians, Sudanese, West Papuans, Ethiopians--for them, masking is a luxury because genocidal extractive nations have made it difficult if not impossible to get a hold of masks & other COVID-mitigating supplies as COVID has been avowedly used as a weapon of eugenics. They desperately want medical supplies, including masks, because they know COVID is killing them but there's little they can do when they don't have materials to spare to churn out locally produced options and certainly nothing generally affordable. You have that choice and you choose instead to continue to spread COVID, ensuring more suffering and death, while telling yourself that because you're against bombs, bullets, and famines, you're still a good person. You're killing your own friends, family, neighbors, communities for personal pleasure yet believe you're to be trusted and to be considered good.

If your idea of supporting liberation requires leaving behind others and refusing to admit culpability when your actions harm others, you're just another oppressor! Wear a mask the entire time and every time you're in public if you actually believe genocide must be opposed.

[27-moons]

Gustavo Petro is courageously correct

[hussyknee]

Today, in The USA and Israel are Miserable Pieces of Filth and The United Nations is The Rag it Uses to Wipe its Ass:

I just. Have no words.

Make no mistake that the UN is facilitating this genocide in concert with the rest of the West. If this doesn't break the UN then nothing will. If this isn't the last straw for Arabs then nothing will be.

[briteredoctober]

I don’t understand how folks are just going about life as normal during a fucking genocide. While our government funds and arms the slaughter of 35,000+ people, over 15,000 of which were children. How can they just casually pretend that nothing is wrong? That drone striking an embassy is normal? That slaughtering children to get at their parents is okay? That bombing hospitals is just business as usual?

How are people capable of dissociating so much from such a horrific catastrophe? Especially when they are paying for it? They should be yelling about it. They should be pissed. They should be unable to live life-as-normal until this has ended.

How the fuck is the world still turning? Are folks so individualist that they can overlook genocide as long as it doesn’t personally inconvenience them? Are they so racist that deaths of people who aren’t white don’t matter to them?

Had these people been alive in Nazi Germany, they have proven through their response here that they would have said and done absolutely nothing to stop the slaughter.

[babblingblackwhale]

We are still trying to find and arrange words for a longer post but we just watched a 15 min video of the Palestinian photojournalist Mohamed Obeid of who was illegally detained by the IOF recounting the horrifying ordeal of his kidnapping, torture and release and we were struck by the crucial role of Israeli doctors in sustaining, abetting his prolonged torture and that of other prisoners especially those with existing chronic conditions. When you put his testimony into perspective for how colonial doctors were crucial in participating in torture in the colonies (Frantz Fanon dedicates chapters of a whole book to addressing his experience of colonial doctors in French Algeria); the crucial role of doctors in regulating and maintaining the torturous conditions of incarcerated folks in prison in the US as they did during convict leasing as they did during slavery; the petition hundreds of doctors in the US signed against a ceasefire even when news was coming to us about the IOF bombing hospitals and killing Palestinians doctors, patients even new born babies in the NICU wards. We simply do not believe there is anything colonial medicine and its practitioners hold sacred. Their Hippocratic oath is a lie, they have no loyalty to their patients nor even their colleagues and they are just as responsible for the deaths of Palestinians as the soldiers in our eyes.

We don't know how they have managed to sanitize their legacy that people in the west specifically the US and now think of them as these righteous, long suffering healers who are trying to do right by their patients but even the state of care that disabled people experience should be enough to disprove this fantastic image. We are bitter because people in the US (including disabled people) are not connecting a lot of these dots because they seem to be pacified that this is "best" medical care they can get and we just need to continually nudge them into useless reforms. We do not know how we have come to such docile acceptance when we see how these doctors are complicit and perpetrators of so much violence. We will not be consoled by these cheap platitudes people give because these doctors who inherit their job manifestos, oaths, practices and licenses from the colonial physicians and regulatory boards of the 19th century are a source of danger to everyone because they lack the ability to assess their role within the eugenicist system they practice medicine within. Do not come into this post talking about good colonial doctors because good colonial doctors matter as little to us as good cops or imperial soldiers do. We can all see the world of difference between the Palestinian doctors, medical personnel whose loyalties and intentions are clearly to their people and their Israeli and western counterparts. We are not interested in manufacturing empathy for people whose job function gives them an immense amount of power to cause harm while they twiddle their thumbs and act as if they have no power to revolt against their hospital and insurance overseers.

[archaeocommunologist]

As is written in the scriptures, "don't threaten me with a good time."

This is the second or third instance I've seen this argument being made explicitly in recent days, and I suspect it has to do with the increasing war-weariness in the West and the threat of ending Western arms shipments. Early on, propagandists had the luxury of portraying support for Ukraine as a simple matter of principle: ANYONE who believes in freedom and democracy should fall in line, because Ukraine is good and Russia is evil.

That obviously didn't work (particularly outside the West) so now the propagandists are making these cruder, self-interested arguments. Support Ukraine, because it is in the security interests of the US and the EU.

Unfortunately, this argument is likely to also fail, because it reveals that the first argument, the one about universal principles, was a sham all along. Further, there are huge numbers of people for whom "supporting the security interests of the US and the EU" is actively a downside. And finally, it also validates all the communists who have been arguing that the real motivator for Western support of Ukraine was rude self-interest all along.

Anyway, looks like Mearsheimer was right in the end! Oops!

[prokopetz]

Though the proverbial "showdown at high noon" is largely a media invention, many famous gunslingers of the American Old West did engage in formal duels at least occasionally. The main differences from the popular media version are twofold:

Formal duels were rare; most famous gunslingers duelled only once or twice in their entire careers, and a gunslinger with three or more duels under their belt would have been considered extraordinarily prolific (and also extraordinarily stupid – see below);

Those gunslingers who did duel typically made a point of accepting challenges only from opponents of demonstrably inferior skill; there was something of an unspoken agreement among prolific duellists to avoid duelling each other by any means necessary, as they knew the surest way to cut short one's career was to duel someone who actually knew what they were doing!

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because some day I want to write a semi-competitive tabletop RPG where the player characters are all rival gunslingers living the high life on manufactured drama and exaggerated tales of their legendary prowess while going to elaborate lengths to avoid having to actually fight each other.

[yourtongzhihazel]

The united states is the largest exporter of genocide on the planet. Death to the USA and its imperialist walking dogs.

[anarchotahdigism]

So interesting how Canada has provided arms, training, military intelligence, and funding to the IOF for decades and during this latest wave of occupation atrocities and genocide, but people still are believing that Canada is somehow better than the US. Canadian military intelligence was key in developing the census data used to target as many Palestinans in Gaza as possible per strike. It was used to train their murderous "assassination factory" algorithm which is used to maximize kills per bomb. Canada's literally doing the same things and it's even doing the same propaganda of materially contributing to genocide while claiming to be working "behind the scenes" to stop it SO many of the so-called western governments are doing literally the exact same thing yet y'all think begging genociders to please stop by sending letters and calls is working if you think asking mass murderers to stop their actions can or will work, it's because you are willing to buy genocidal propaganda instead of rejecting it in favor of supporting militant action against genocide. It's telling that those voices most loudly and consistently urging & organizing all these petitions are white & unmasked in public. They're genociders who believe they're better because they don't like (some) war but they still like genocidal governments and committing genocide for personal pleasure.

Wear a mask and riot for Palestine.

[hussyknee]

I can't disengage from Gaza. I can't DO this. I need a break. I'm afraid how many more people will be dead when I come back. How do you walk away from a massacre. How is this happening. I just want to stop seeing dead children when I close my eyes. I want to stop seeing men stripped to their underwear in the freezing winter and women tortured and the elderly barely able to move.

I can't think of any point before October without thinking of how many people there were alive and whole then. Hundreds of entire bloodlines wiped out, maybe thousands by now, erased off the earth, their stories and memories all just gone. Thousands and thousands of people's parents, children, newborns, siblings, friends, co-workers, neighbours, pets all gone gone gone crushed and buried and rotting under rubble, mosques, schools, hospitals, shops, parks, universities, libraries, farms, groves, gardens all gone gone gone. Things that were alive and standing and solid and teeming and laughing and hoping and dreaming two months ago. Worlds and universes annihilated.

Meanwhile people on here whose governments are the ones doing this using their votes and their money are just...going on with their lives with some fleeting guilt. Like its nothing to do with them. Not haunted, not following the news or seeing the photos and videos and crying and pleading the way we are.

What the fuck is this insane horrible world. How do you live in without hating everyone and everything around you to dust.

Just make it stop. Please just make it stop.

[kaapstadgirly]

middleeasteye "Jamila al-Hissi, a Palestinian woman who managed to leave Shifa hospital in Gaza told Al Jazeera Arabic that women at the hospital have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces."

But they're the victims? They're the ones we should sympathize with?

I can not wrap my head around this it's so insane to me how people still sympathize with these things. Fuck Israel.

[couldtheycatchkira]

[archaeocommunologist]

These are the same people who excoriate lefties for being insufficiently opposed to Russian imperialism. Turns out, their actual objection to Russian imperialism is that it gets in the way of US imperialism! Mariacallous, you are a fucking idiot.