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tikkunolamresistance · 4 months

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Zionism has taught Jews that we are ontologically different from the rest of humanity and collective community. Instilled within us that our only claim to safety, the only true way we can be undoubtedly safe, was through the existence of a quasi-Religious, ethno-nationalist state strictly dictated by the Zionist project. That the self-determination of Jews can only, exclusively, be achieved through the establishment of this colony of forced-assimilation. The equation of Zionism equals Judaism, no matter the disastrous consequences of which, has raised millions of Jewish people around the world.

And trust, it has not only been by the hands of Jewish Zionism. For Christian Zionism plays a major, glaring role in this indoctrination. With there being more Christian Zionists than there are Jews in the world (with much of the Republican and Democratic parties being Christian Zionists) the ideology of The Rapture, second coming of Jesus, with establishment of Jerusalem as the World’s new Capital following; Jews and Palestinians are just canon-fodder; pawns to summon Jesus. We implore that you do further reading on this matter and it’s instrumental role in Zionist ideology.

And one can only wonder, one can only assume, that has this not since opened an irrefutable Pandora’s Box of a new kind of capitalist nationalism onto the global Jewish community? To appoint a group as above another is a complexity of supremacy that we’ve seen through history. If we look at Imperialist history, we see what ideology has forced its way through epochs to excuse brutal expansionist policy.

What’s worst, and what’s most enraging, is that Shoah has been weaponised not only from the Holocaust industry— the billions made from displaying Jewish generational trauma and the cinematic brutalisation of our people— to ensure the West can constantly remind us that their role in the war was for Jewish liberation, and certainly not due to fearing Nazi imperial domination as a threat to Western imperial interests… but to merit the Israeli States’ “right to self determination” and “self-defence” against inevitable Native Palestinian uprising.

Zionism is a right-wing, ethnonationalist idology that has been used to control and influence Jewish communities for decades, to justify imperialist expansion. It’s an insult, a disgrace, to Jewish history, identity and peoplehood.

Anti-Zionism is the radical rejection and desire to dismantle the very systems that harm not only us, Jews, but our brothers and sisters in this fight against capitalist regime. We seek unity, liberation, equity, justice. We seek love where there has been unprecedented hatred. We seek grace where there has been insolence. Anti-Zionism is integral in the fight for true global liberation.

There is pain upon the Holy Land, Palestine, and we must admit that we can do something about it.

#free palestine #palestine #anti capitalism #anti imperialism #jumblr #judaism #israel #jewish thought #jewish #antizionism #jewish antizionists #antizionists unite #christian hegemony #christian zionism

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dostoyevsky-official · 5 months

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Что думаешь о навальном

navalny has politics i don't endorse (right-liberal / libertarianism) and made bedfellows with groups i would never march with (from quasi-fascists to communist party splinters), with a personality that has long been brusque, crude, boorish, and standoffish. his vision of reform is stale, outdated, and at the moment, quixotic. the work he has done in exposing corruption, however myopic it may be to the scale of problems in russia, was important, and, counter to what some say, he has marched in anti-war, anti-imperialist demonstrations since 2014. he's chosen to become a political martyr in a useless strategy that will never work. quite frankly i believe he may well die in prison, and i suppose that absolves him of much current criticism: he's both admirable and foolish. neither he nor his staff are at all popular in russia. in fact, i find his staff grating, dull, and completely incompetent at reading the room. every time they post it piles on evidence pointing to them as narcissists, especially volkov and pevchikh, who are tremendous idiots

#navalny

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fuckyeahgoodomens · 11 months

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(CROWLEY LIVING IN THE CAR CONFIRMED! 🐍🚗:D❤)

Although the trailer for "Good Omens" season 2 shows the life-long frenemies living in quasi-domestic bliss (until Jon Hamm's memory-wiped Gabriel shows up), their living arrangement apparently isn't quite so simple. The latest issue of SFX magazine includes an interview with Sheen and Tennant, and although the pair say their characters end up closer than ever, SFX also reveals that season 2 will pick up with Crowley living out of his car (plants and all) while Aziraphale is thriving hanging among humans at his Soho bookshop. It's at the shop that Crowley often finds himself, according to Tennant.

"He spends a lot of time in the book shop," Tennent tells SFX magazine. "He only has one friend. He can only have one friend." As Sheen notes elsewhere in the interview, the pair aren't exactly on the run, but aren't off the radar of the powers that be in heaven and hell either. When Tennant notes that the pair are "kind of free agents" these days, Sheen says they're also semi-fugitives. "They are sort of in-between. But this amazing life they have created over a millennia, they are now able to enjoy in a slightly different way," he explains.

The pair might be retired from their jobs working for the big men upstairs (and downstairs), but that freedom leads to a dependence on one another that perhaps feels different than what they've known in all their previous centuries of coexistence. "That is the great liberation, and also the great prison, that they find themselves in," Tennant says after noting that Aziraphale is Crowley's only friend. "They have no one else. They have come to rely on each other more than they ever did. And more than they care to admit."

Fans have already caught a glimpse of that denial in the "Good Omens" season 2 trailer, when Gabriel asks Aziraphale whether the presence of one person in his life has ever given him an inexplicable sense of comfort, and the angel responds with a stuttering "No, certainly not." Meanwhile, the trailer edits in a shot of Sheen's character looking quietly delighted while sharing a drink with Crowley, making it pretty clear the angel's caught feelings. The actors don't address Aziraphale's heart eyes in the interview, but do talk about how the sense that the pair are, as Tennant puts it, "strangers in a strange land" will impact their relationship.

"That kind of connects them in a slightly different way," Sheen says. "They have always been the only two beings who could understand each other's position. Now they are pushed even closer together."

Luckily for the two co-stars (and for fans), the show is never better than when it's exploring the closeness of the pair, as Crowley and Aziraphale possess a dynamic chemistry that gives their companionship an undercurrent of romance. How much season 2 of "Good Omens" may or may not explore that aspect of their relationship remains to be seen, but it sounds like series creator and showrunner Gaiman is well aware that the dynamic duo is at their best when it's them against the world.

#good omens #gos2 #season 2 #interview #david interview #michael interview #sfx magazine 2023 #sfx magazine #magazines #david tennant #michael sheen #aziraphale #crowley #ac

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qqueenofhades · 2 months

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I'm not sure if you can answer this, but what is it that (in general, not just based on the current state of affairs) seems to cause people in more left leaning circles to constantly underestimate the danger that the far right poses?

Like, this seems to be a consistent pattern, given what I've read up on men like Ernst Thalmann and the like, who keep on treating the right wing as being less of a threat than the center or not as left as the left. For that matter, why do they keep insisting that the center is worse than the right, even when it's pretty evidently not the case?

My quasi-educated guess would be that it's because of something called "the psychology of small differences." See where people who live next door to each other, in the same neighborhood, or in the same country (or in countries right next to each other) hate each other far more than unknown people far away, because these people are almost like them but then aren't, and that's a threat to their identity and their sense of themselves. Hence we have leftists insisting that liberals or even centrists are somehow Much Worse!!! than literal far-right fascists, even if it makes no sense, because it doesn't have to do with logic, reality, or an objective appraisal of the situation, but a threat to their personal sense of themselves and/or selfish view of themselves as clearly the best and most moral ever. As such, something something people who almost agree with them, but not quite, are actually worse than their open enemies.

Also, I'm glad you mentioned Ernst Thalmann. People should read up on him. He was the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925-33, and played an explicit part in aligning them with Stalinist Russia and vigorously demonizing the liberal/left-wing establishment German political party, the Social Democrats, as "social fascists" who were obviously worse than the boorish failed artist Austrian populist guy running for the National Socialist Workers' Party:

....except the National Socialist Workers' Party was, you know, the Nazis, the guy running for them was Adolf Hitler, Thalmann spent so much time attacking the Social Democrats as "just as bad" that it was impossible for the German leftist and liberal/socialist/communist factions to work together, and Hitler was elected in 1933. Good thing nothing bad happened after that, right?

Anyway. Don't be Ernst Thalmann. The end.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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mariacallous · 8 months

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“Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre?” That was the question posed by the headline of a Vanity Fair exposé published in October 2014. The investigative report laid out a sophisticated plot by the Islamist terror group to kill and kidnap Israelis on the Gaza border. The plan: to use underground tunnels to infiltrate nearby civilian enclaves on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, when the communities would be at their most vulnerable. As one intelligence source put it, the operation had two goals: “First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip.” The Israel Defense Forces subsequently confirmed this reporting to other media outlets, but not the specific date.

The tunnels were real. But at the time the massacre-that-wasn’t received little additional media coverage. It seemed too cinematic and convenient. Maybe it was a Hamas pipe dream that was never operational. Or maybe it was a worst-case scenario concocted by the Israeli security services and leaked to the media to justify their own ever-expanding countermeasures. Years passed without a mass border incursion, the tunnels were gradually detected and blocked, and I came to the conclusion that the skeptics were right about the plot being too lurid even for Hamas.

I was wrong. Last week, Hamas executed something quite like the attack on the Gaza border that it had planned all those years ago. Instead of tunneling underground on Rosh Hashanah, it invaded aboveground on another Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah. Some 1,500 terrorists stormed nearby civilian communities by land, air, and sea. They murdered babies in their cribs, parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents. They burned entire families alive. They decapitated and mutilated their victims. They wore body cameras and documented their destruction as though it were a video game. They executed a grandmother in her home and uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page. They deliberately targeted elementary schools. They kidnapped toddlers and a Holocaust survivor. They paraded a battered, naked woman through the streets of Gaza like a trophy. All told, they murdered more than 1,300 Israelis, almost all civilians, and abducted some 150 others, including babies and the elderly. The death toll continues to rise as rescue workers recover more remains and reassemble mangled corpses for identification.

Somehow, few saw this eruption of inhumanity coming. Several months ago, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, then the European Union ambassador to the Palestinians, performed what he called Gaza’s first paragliding flight to advocate for a future where “anything is possible in Gaza.” Hamas terrorists would later use paragliders to massacre more than 250 civilians at an Israeli music festival, which is presumably not what the envoy had in mind. And he wasn’t the only one naive about the Hamas regime’s intentions.

The consensus was that Hamas was a mostly rational actor that could be reasoned with. To hawks, although the group was an anti-Semitic Iran proxy, it could be deterred through political and economic incentives, because it felt responsible for the welfare of the Gazan people. To doves, Hamas was a quasi-legitimate national resistance movement whose occasional bouts of violence were simply intended to draw attention to that struggle.

Successive Netanyahu governments and security officials, far less sympathetic to the Gazan plight, nonetheless spent recent years lifting economic restrictions on the enclave, granting thousands of work permits for Gazans, and transferring hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars to Hamas in exchange—they thought—for relative quiet.

But it turned out that Hamas wasn’t being pacified; it was preparing. The group was less committed to national liberation than to Jewish elimination. Its violence was rooted not in strategy, but in sadism. And in retrospect, well before the Rosh Hashanah plot, the signs of Hamas’s atrocious ambitions were all there—many observers just did not want to believe them. What Hamas did was not out of character, but rather the explicit fulfillment of its long-stated objectives. The shocking thing was not just the atrocity itself, but that so many people were shocked by it, because they’d failed to reckon with the reality that had been staring them in the face.

First, there is Hamas’s notorious charter, a Frankensteinian amalgam of the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the modern era—the very same that have motivated numerous white-supremacist attacks in the United States. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” the document opens. “It needs all sincere efforts … until the enemy is vanquished.” The charter goes on to claim that the Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” According to Hamas, the Jews were “behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about,” as well as World War I and World War II. The charter accuses Israel of seeking to take over the entire world, and cites as proof the most influential modern anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian fabrication that purports to expose a global Jewish cabal.

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” Hamas declares in its credo. “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews.” In case anyone missed the point, the document adds that “so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” In 2017, Hamas published a new charter, but pointedly refused to disavow the original one, in a transparent ruse that some respectable observers nonetheless took at face value.

In any case, Hamas communicated its genocidal intentions not just in words, but in deeds. Before it took control of Gaza, the group deliberately targeted Jewish civilians for mass murder, executing scores of suicide bombings against shopping malls, night clubs, restaurants, buses, Passover seders, and many other nonmilitary targets. Today, this killing spree is widely blamed for destroying the credibility of the Israeli peace movement and helping derail the Oslo Accords, precisely as Hamas intended. And it did not stop there. Since the group took power in Gaza, it has launched thousands of rockets indiscriminately at nearby civilian towns—attacks that continue at this very moment and that have boosted the Israeli right in election after election.

Hamas’s anti-Jewish aspirations were evident not only from its treatment of Israelis, but from its treatment of fellow Palestinians. Despite being the putative sovereign in Gaza and responsible for the well-being of its people, Hamas repeatedly cannibalized Gaza’s infrastructure and appropriated international aid to fuel its messianic war machine. The group boasted publicly about digging up Gaza’s pipes and turning them into rockets. It stored weapons in United Nations schools and dug attack tunnels underneath them. (Contrary to what you might have read on social media, Gaza does have underground shelters—they are just used for housing Hamas fighters, smuggling operations, and weapons caches, not protecting civilians.)

When dissenting Gazans attempted to protest this state of affairs and demanded a better future, they were brutally repressed. Hamas has not held elections since 2006. In 2020, when the Gazan peace activist Rami Aman held a two-hour Zoom call with Israeli leftists, Hamas threw him in prison for six months, tortured him, and forced him to divorce his wife. Why? Because his vision of a shared society for Arabs and Jews, however remote, was a threat to the group’s entire worldview. Jews were not to share the land; they were to be cleansed from it.

Simply put, what Hamas did two weekends ago was not a departure from its past, but the natural culmination of its commitments. The question is not why Hamas did what it did, but why so many people were surprised. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, quick to discern anti-Semitism in any effort to merely label Israeli products from West Bank settlements, somehow overlooked the severity of the genocidal threat growing next door. Journalists like me who cover anti-Semitism somehow failed to take Hamas’s overt anti-Jewish ethos as seriously as we should have. Many international leftists, ostensibly committed to equality and dignity for Palestinians and Israelis alike, somehow missed that Hamas did not share that vision, and in fact was actively working to obliterate it.

Today, in the ashes of the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, some analysts have admitted their error of sanitizing Hamas. “It’s a huge mistake that I did, believing that a terror organization can change its DNA,” the former Netanyahu national-security adviser Yaakov Amidror told The New York Times. Others on the left have clung to their tortured conception of Hamas as a rational resistance group, despite it having been falsified by events. Perhaps some fear that acknowledging the true nature of Hamas would undermine the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. But in actuality, it is the refusal to disentangle Hamas’s anti-Jewish sadism from the legitimate cause of Palestinian nationalism that threatens the project and saps its support.

In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus, but he wasn’t buying it. “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” Brown wrote, “and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.” Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: “Hitler Tamed by Prison.” The Austrian activist, the piece said, “looked a much sadder and wiser man,” and “his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.”

Many got Hamas wrong. But they shouldn’t have. Again and again, people say they intend to murder Jews. And yet, century after century, the world produces new, tortuous justifications for why anti-Jewish bigots don’t really mean what they say—even though they do.

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catsloverword · 5 months

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Christmas is coming

#libere associazioni #parola di amante dei gatti #quasi natale #tea e copertina #le letture #quelle belle

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loving-n0t-heyting · 4 months

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hi, I was re-reading some of your posts about anti-male sexism in the prison system (from jan 22nd), and was wondering if you could elaborate on your arguments some more? While I do understand how men tend to receive harsher sentencing, I don't think that they are treated worse than female prisoners necessarily? Both experience different forms of sexual and physical violence, but I'm not sure how this demonstrates anti-male sexism? I do really want to know what you think in good-faith; I didn't know how women were over-represented in prosecution which is kind of eye-opening

first off i should correct a confusion: women are not over-represented among cali prosecutors; prosecutors here are female at about the same rate as attorneys generally (~45%). the reason i brought this ratio up was not to suggest women play a particularly important role in this disproportionate incarceration of men, but that it is not the exclusive work of men, which is a common way of dismissing allegations of misandry: "its just men doing it to themselves!"

i think that gets to one difference between how i think we should understand misandry and the strawman that a lot of misandrists keen to denounce the concept bring up: its not an "axis of oppression" (which is not imo a particularly helpful lens by which to think about the world) but a societal prejudice. men are, overwhelmingly disproportionately and even when similarly situated, treated as dangerous and unclean and predatory and disposable, in need of being kept away from ppl whose safety and purity fetches a higher price

disproportionately severe treatment at almost every stage of the criminal process is one obvious manifestation of this, historically much higher rates of quasi-carceral psychiatric confinement pre-deinstitutionalisation is another.* im not sure why you dont consider this in and of itself a form of injustice, going to prison in my country is just about the worst social fate i can imagine for anyone, and the fact men are not only far and away more likely to be condemned there but more likely even controlling for similarity of criminal circumstances seems like an obvious knockdown argument for the horrifying reality of misandry

these are obviously extreme examples, but i think similar patterns play out in most ppls lives very regularly. which is why i can be reflexively hostile: this all seems so obvious to me i assume it must be to others as well, so my first instinct is to assume malice

idt these prejudices are unique to women, liberals, leftists, or feminists. similar fundamental distrust of men is talked about just as openly on the opposite end of the political spectrum. but i think the way ppl dismiss these concerns in communities friendly to feminism is both pretty unique and quite bad

*(some ppl in the thread were complaining about how this doesnt hold for contemporary inpatient hospitalisations. this apples/oranges: large mental hospitals in their heyday played a very different and harsher role than being forced to spend a couple of weeks in the psych ward, and ppl blithely comparing one to the other are just parading their ignorance. state mental hospitals, the actual direct institutional successors to the madhouses of yore, are basically nowadays adjuncts to the carceral system itself, and thus skew overwhelmingly male; see p. 10 here)

#ask #anon

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hussyknee · 20 days

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it’s rare to find a sinhalese person (online atleast) who is supportive of tamil self-determination. genuine question: among leftist circles in sri lanka, how common is such a stance?

I don't know whether I'm a reliable source to answer this question because I'm very jaded about this in general. A couple of days ago, someone on the Sri Lanka Reddit started up discourse about Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's choice to reject identifying with the country that tried to genocide her people, which I'm still chewing wire about. I'm a very isolated person with a very small social circle of like-minded leftist friends. They're mostly not SinBud and anti SinBud nonsense, but none of them are Tamil and I'm the one who really convinced them about Eelam I think. The people I learned from, who are out there doing the work of building inter-ethnic dialogue and overturning Sinhalese propaganda, might have a more hopeful view.

Thing is, there's no one "leftist" faction here because "left" doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the West. The Rajapaksas' party SLPP is socialist, a legacy of their ancestor the SLFP who was the party aligned with the USSR. They and their voters and their saffron terror acolytes (Buddhist priesthood) are all for public infrastructure they can rob blind and central government they can use to crush minorities, and build on the nationalist fervour of genocidal Sinhalese Buddhism that's served both major parties independence. There's quasi-communists, descendants of the ethnonationalist Marxist JVP that rose in opposition to the class corruption of ethnonationalist USSR-aligned socialist SLFP and enthonationalist US-aligned neoliberal UNP. They've since distanced themselves from their ethnic myopia, possibly due to suffering much of the same state terrorism as minorities via militarisation and policies like the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. They're the most vocal about the abolition of the executive presidency, the defunding of military and police, and restructuring and executing the long-mismanaged socialist infrastructure. These are usually the working class and university students, but their base has been growing in other demographics too, since we "held our noses and voted" for the Yahapalana government in 2015 and it ended up fucking us over. But despite their sympathy with the suffering of Tamils and Muslims and favouring the devolution of power, most still cling to the idea that Sinhalese majoritarianism is a fair result of democracy.

The kind of pro-LGBT, anti-racist, feminist liberals that would pass muster with the western left otoh, are a minority of urban, English-speaking professionals. Their panacea for enthofascism is voting for the neoliberal party, whose idea of reducing corruption and increasing efficiency is privatizing everything, are against racism because it's bad for tourism, and coasts on the promise of never actively feeding ethnosupremacy, even if they won't do anything about it either. Both these groups hate each other but are equally deeply uncomfortable with if not entirely resistant to the idea that the North and East are Tamil lands colonized by the Sinhalese. Both groups are aware of the corruption and complicity of the Buddhist priesthood and are prepared to do exactly nothing about it.

What I'm trying to say is that Sinhalese Buddhist ethnosupremacy is baked in to the Sri Lankan political fabric. "Left" means jack shit when it comes to whether Tamils have rights, in much the same way that the western left agrees on everything except Palestine. It's a political no man's land everyone tries not to look at.

The fundamental problem is that Sinhalese people who know enough about 1958, 1983, or the full scope of genocide perpetrated against Tamils during the last push of the war, let alone all 26 years of it, are very much in the minority. It takes a particular education to understand that "Sri Lanka" is a post-colonial invention that took over from "Ceylon", which was nothing but a construct for the ease of British administration. As far as I know, this education is confined to activist organizations and whoever followed my sociology program. So my kind of anarchist leftism that calls the war a Tamil genocide with their whole chest and the priesthood saffron terrorists and recognises Eelam is, afaik, vanishingly small.

To be honest, I never really questioned the propaganda and narrative we've been spoon fed myself until I went to Canada when I was 23 to complete my anthro degree (became disabled and dropped out after). One thing that struck me was how racist the Sinhalese diaspora was. I was raised SinBud, my school didn't admit any non-Sinhalese, half my uncles were in the military, but these people that had left the country decades ago still hated Tamils and Muslims in a way that nobody else I knew did. I wondered whether this was what it had been like when it had all started; whether this hatred that seemed to have been preserved in amber was a true taste of what had ignited Black July. Suddenly the attitude of the Tamil diaspora towards the Sri Lankan government and Sinhalese people didn't seem so unreasonable.

Then, later in the same uni term, I went to an art exhibition of a white artist who travelled the world collecting information about their genocides and made art about them, and found a painting depicting Sri Lankan Tamils in 2008. Promptly had a meltdown. Went to the lady and told her tearfully that it was all propaganda, we didn't really hate Tamils, not even my uncles in the army hated Tamils, it was a war, the LTTE had terrorized us for my whole lifetime. Bless the woman, she didn't fight me, just let me cry at her and patted my hand and pretended to take me seriously. This made it easier for me to really think about what I knew once I'd stopped wailing and stamping. It prompted a years-long self-interrogation and fact finding that made me unearth how much brainwashing had been done to us by everyone, from our families to our school textbooks to news media. It's like the air we breathed was propaganda. And I still didn't know a fraction of what life had been like for Tamils (or Muslims) and the scope of atrocities perpetrated by the Sinhalese until I began my Society and Culture degree at the Open University when I was 30. The first year textbooks were only broadstrokes facts, but at last I found out about Gnananth Obeysekera, Prageeth Jeganathan, Stanley Thambaiya, Malithi DeAlwis. Their work on nation-making, ethnicity, historical revisionism, genocide and ethnic conflict and state terrorism...everything I should have been taught as a child. The chapters on the rapes and murders and shelling and war crimes and IDP camps were..indescribable. That was what properly radicalised me about Tamil self-sovereignty, because there's clearly no possible way the Tamil people will ever be safe and safeguarded under a Sinhalese majoritarian government.

I had to drop out of that programme too because of my health. But during the mass protests against the government in 2022, I learned even more about Tamil indigeneity, the extent of JR Jayawardena's crimes, and the persecution of Marxists and victims of the '71 and '89 insurrections. So much of the protests and their encampments were directed and galvanized by social media, that organised online and in-person lectures, teach-outs, and live discussions that anyone and everyone could attend right alongside the protests. I've never seen that kind of truly democratized, free, egalitarian civic education and discourse before. That was the very first time I saw academics, survivors, refugees and human rights activists being given a respectful platform, the masses hearing firsthand accounts from people of the North and East and witnesses of Black July. April to July 2022 was a truly golden bubble of time where I saw people finally start listening, believing, and challenging all their convictions. It was the closest we ever came to realising the hope that things could be different; that we could, as a society, understand how Sinhalese ethnosupremacy had been the black rot killing this country from the first, stop being racist Sinhala-first cunts and actually hold any of these murderers accountable.

Teach us to hope, I guess.

But I suppose it's no small thing that I learned about the Tamil resistance and struggle and taught all my friends about it. I'm sure they're informing their own circles in small ways too. These tendrils are hard to see, but they exist and grow. Especially with the fall of the Rajapaksas and their Bhaiyya contingent, more people can see ethnosupremacy for the grift that it is, and the younger generations are less defensive, more willing to listen and eager for justice and change. So I guess the answer is: not very common, but less uncommon than it used to be.

#sorry if this is long winded. I hyperfixated #sri lanka #sri lanka politics #tamil sovereignity #eelam #tamil genocide #asks #anon #knee of huss

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carsonjonesfiance · 10 months

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The subconscious homophobia of "brunch" being the symbol of liberals-you-don't-like aside it just does not make sense even as a strawman because if anyone out there is renowned for political complacency it isn't the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" Pussyhat-feminists and Manhattan Gays.

It's the fauxgressive Twitter slacktavists that say shit like "back-to-brunch liberals" and think their Twitter bullying is a political force affecting federal policy but refuse to vote for anyone that isn't the exact same type of esoteric quasi-Leftist as them.

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fatehbaz · 3 months

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[T]he political philosophy underlying Westphalian, modern sovereignty [...], foundations of the modern state, [...] [formed] in relation to plantations. [...] [P]lantations [are] [...] laboratories to bring together environmental and labor dimensions [...], through racialized and coerced labor. [...] [T]he planters and managers who engineered the ordering and disciplining of these [...] [ecological] worlds also sustained [...] [p]lantations [by] [...] disciplining (and policing the boundaries of) humans and “nature” [...]. The durability and extensibility of plantations, as the central locus of antiblack violence and death, have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...]

Relations of dependence between planters and their laborers, sustained by a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, are the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery, and even after the cessation of monocrop cultivation.

The estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation subjectivities, being a major blueprint of socialization into work for generations and up to the present. [...] [Contemporary labor still involves] the policing of [...] activities, mobility and access to citizenship [...].

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[There is] persistence - until the 1970s in most Caribbean and Indian-Ocean plantation societies, and even until today in Indian tea plantations [...] - of a system of remuneration based on subsistence wages [...]. Plantations have been viewed as displaying sovereign-like features of control and violence monopoly over land and subjects, through force as much as ideology [...]. [W]itness the plethora of references to “plantocracies” [...] ([...] sometimes re-christened “saccharocracies” in the Cuban and wider Caribbean context [...] [or] “sovereign sugar” in Hawai’i). [...]

[T]race the genealogy of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation starting from early modern plantation systems - just as genealogies of labor management and the broader organization of production [...] have been traced [...] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories [...] or diamond mines [...] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships - understood as "quasi-sovereign" forms [...].

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[I]n fact, the relationships and arrangements obtaining in the space of the plantation may be analogous to, mirrors or pre-figurations of, or substitutes for the power and grip of the modern state as the locus of legitimate sovereignty. [...] [T]he paternalistic and violent relations obtaining in the heyday of different plantations (in the United States and Brazil [...]) appear as the building block and the mirror of national-imperial sovereignties. [...]

[I]n the eighteenth-century [United States] context [...], the founding fathers of the nascent liberal democracy were at the same time prominent planters [...]. Planters’ preoccupations with their reputation, as a mirror of their overseers’ alleged skills and moral virtue, can thus be read as a metonymy or index of their alleged qualities as state leaders. Across public and private management, paternalism in this context appears as a core feature of statehood [...]. Similarly, [...] in the nineteenth century plantations were the foundation of the newly independent Brazilian empire. [...] [I]n the case of Hawai’i [...], the mid-nineteenth-century institution of fee-title property and contract labor, facilitated by the concomitant establishment of common-law courts (later administered by the planter elite), paved the way to the establishment of sugar plantations on the archipelago [...].

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[T]he control of movement, foundational to modern sovereign claims, has in the plantation one of its original experimental grounds: [...] the demand for plantation labor in the wake of slavery abolition in the British colonies (1834) occasion[ed] the birth of the indenture system as the origin of sovereign control on mobility, pointing to the colonial genealogy of the modern state [...].

The regulation of slaves’ mobility also represented a laboratory for the generalization of [refugee, immigrant, labor] migration regulation in subsequent epochs [up to and including today] [...] [subjugating] generally racialized and criminalized subjects [...]. [P]lantations appear as a sovereign-making machine, a workshop in (or against) which tools of both domination and resistance are forged [...].

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All text above by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

#abolition #ecology #multispecies #landscape #imperial #indigenous #colonial #tidalectics #archipelagic thinking #plantations #ecologies #carceral geography #caribbean

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bimboficationblues · 2 months

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What is the difference between liberal and reactionary defenses of the family?

I don’t think they’re easily generalizable, and to some extent they’re not wildly different from each other (this is part of my project in understanding contemporary familialism as a key component of reactionary modernism, which in turn was forged within the fires of liberalism - that is to say they’re nested subjects rather than mutually exclusive or merely overlapping)

but generalize we shall. liberal familialism is about the importance of preserving private life from the overreach of the polity and civil society, which I think ties into liberalism’s interest in procedural quasi-agnosticism about what is “the good life.” because that’s contentious and different people will have different intuitions about it, the idea is that leaving families alone, letting them act as sort of societies or states in miniature (though with some degree of oversight/obligations because of state interests) kind of keeps things relatively stabilized socially. it’s an attempt to generally depoliticize the family.

reactionary familialism is more about the polity as a macrocosm of the family (and religion), treating it as the fundamental mode of social organization and a model to emulate - they’re all about relations of proper place in the world and obedience to that telos. it’s an attempt to renaturalize the family as a prepolitical entity.

the reasons I say they’re nested subjects is that these justifications bleed together because of both the unfirm boundaries between ideologies and the history and development of the bourgeois state as a security state (which is clearly attentive to both of these different ideas), you might see the language of “parental rights” or concerns about the rationality of children (a la Mill) for what is nakedly a desire to subordinate. or biological justifications for why the family arrangement is ultimately the most pragmatic.

trans kid debates are illustrative - the reactionary position is that this needs to be stomped out by government power, “parental rights” only really matter insofar as it’s used to make it functionally impossible to be something that they regard as destabilizing to familial and political life. whereas I think a lot of liberal discourse tries to stake out a sort of minimalist parents’ rights positions (hence the “it’s all blockers, no kids go on hormones or get surgery” refrain). transfeminist or more radical discourse just says bodily autonomy or perhaps “children’s rights” are the salient values.

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