i was walking down the street and a nice black man asked for my help folding a tarp. i helped and he playfully said 'thank you very much! done like a gentleman and a scholar!'

how could anyone be so petty and ungenerous, so narrow-minded and contemptuous to pretend that he was being threatening or violent?

"misgendering a cis person is just as bad as misgendering a trans person" is truly disconnected from reality. misgendering isn't just something that hurts people's feelings lol it is an implicit threat of personal or societal misogynistic/transmisogynistic gendered violence

transmasc surgeries r nauseating but nothing compares to ffs in offensive putridity

kind of goated that Jews were excluded from death penalty case juries becuz of the perception that we are not bloodthirsty enuf to want anyone killed.... proud of that

Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake

Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake

william blake

landlording is rent extraction based on property division. financialization is rent extraction based on debt. therapy is rent extraction based on feelings

cool memories iii

jewish antisemites for palestine vs jewish antisemites for israel vs jewish antisemites for jews

"So: what is the Israeli long-term strategy, really?

Insofar as there’s an answer, it seems to be that they simply don’t have one; the Israeli government no more has a long-term strategy for dealing with their future in the region than Exxon Mobil has a long-term strategy for dealing with climate change. They seem to just figure that, if US power does collapse or give up on them, something will turn up. No doubt too they have people in thinktanks brainstorming that, too, coming with reports and scenarios, but all this is basically an afterthought. The driving force behind the colonization of ’67 Palestine is not any sort of grand strategy; it’s a kind of terrible confluence of short-term political and economic advantage.

First, the settlements. They were originally the project of a relatively isolated, if well funded, collection of religious zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them. The government pours in endless resources. Why? The answer seems to be that since at least the ‘90s, rightwing politicians in Israel have figured out that the settlements are a kind of political magic. The more money gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns to the Right. The reason is simple. Israel is expensive. Housing inside the 1948 boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are a young person without means, you increasingly has two options: to live with one’s parents until well into your 30s, or find a place in an illegal settlement, where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in Haifa or Tel Aviv—and that’s not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities, and social services. At this point the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological, reasons. (This is especially true around Jerusalem.) But consider who these people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students, well-educated young parents, have been the traditional constituency of the Left. Put these same people in a settlement, and they will, inexorably, even without realizing it, begin to think like fascists. Settlements are, in their own way, giant engines for the production of right-wing consciousness. It is very difficult for someone placed in hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons and warned to be constantly on one’s guard against a local population seething over the fact that your next-door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno-nationalism as common sense. As a result, with every election, the old Left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious, fascist, or semi-fascist parties win a larger and larger stake of the vote. For politicians, who can barely think past the next election, the lure is inescapable.

...I only came to fully understand the agony of the Palestinian situation when I came to understand that the entire point of life, in traditional Palestinian society, is put oneself in a position where you can be generous to strangers. Hospitality is everything.

...Wherever we went, Palestinians would tell us about all the different sorts of people they had historically welcomed to the Holy Land: Armenians, Greeks, Persians, Russians, Africans, Jews… They saw the Zionists as originally their house- guests. Yet they were the worst house-guests one could possibly imagine. Every act of hospitality, of welcome, is turned into license for appropriation, and the world’s most skillful propagandists leapt into action to try to convince the world that their hosts were depraved inhuman monsters who had no right to their own homes. In such a situation, what can you possibly do? Stop being generous? But then one is absolutely, existentially defeated. This is what people really meant when they talked about a life of calculated degradation. People were being systematically deprived of the physical, the economical, and the political means to be magnanimous. And to be deprived of the means to make that kind of magnificent gesture is a kind of living death."

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/hostile-intelligence-reflections-from-a-visit-to-the-west-bank/

"One should never underestimate the power of institutions to try to preserve themselves. One explanation for the thirty-year impasse of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”—if at this point one can even call it that—is that on both sides, there are now powerful institutional structures which would lose their entire raison d’être if the conflict ended, but also, a vast “peace apparatus” of NGOs and UN bureaucrats whose careers have become entirely dependent on maintaining the fiction that a “peace process” is, in fact, going on."

david graeber

interesting how the UN has been completely exposed as an impotent distraction from anything resembling real politics. and yet the genociders are the only ones calling for the dismantling of this apparatus of imperialism and the neoliberal order.

how convenient for those in power, that this institution of American-led bureaucratic hegemony is held up as being aligned with popular anti-war efforts, when it has been as obfuscatory and stifling as it couldve been

"We had appealed to a friend of the colored peoples, and this friend had found nothing better to do than demonstrate the relativity of their action."

"While I, in a paroxysm of experience and rage, was proclaiming this [Senghorian Négritude], he [Sartre] reminded me that my Négritude was nothing but a weak stage. Truthfully, I'm telling you, I sensed my shoulder slipping from this world, and my feet no longer felt the caress of the ground. Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness."

"With all my being, I refuse to accept this amputation."

fanon

"I couldn't hope to win. I tested my heredity. I did a complete checkup of my sickness. And when I tried to claim my Négritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me."

fanon

interesting how the UN has been completely exposed as an impotent distraction from anything resembling real politics. and yet the genociders are the only ones calling for the dismantling of this apparatus of imperialism and the neoliberal order.

how convenient for those in power, that this institution of American-led bureaucratic hegemony is held up as being aligned with popular anti-war efforts, when it has been as obfuscatory and stifling as it couldve been

"...a kind of pornography of hatred, where the moral virtue of empathizing with one who has suffered provides an alibi for the vicarious experience of feelings one would otherwise have to treat as profoundly reprehensible."

the universalism of my anti-nationalism compels me to recognise myself in everyone who takes up arms against Israel. As a materialist I know the only laungage that the imperialist speaks is that of violence and the world must be made to listen to the Palestinians. An 8 year old boy told me from a top a car 2 days ago that we are all Palestinians, and I know I have never spoken without a dimension of anger when I feel I am not being heard

note: not the one who 'hates the white man,' 'the one who preaches hatred of the white man'

the man who strives to whiten his race, to territorialize his nation, is as wretched as the one who preaches hatred of the white man

i think the strongest lesson im learning from the encampments is that 'liberation of the palestinians' is a leftist metaphor with no teeth. calling for it makes someone feel more moral than people who are not calling for it. and thats really the primary work it does. uniting people in their pleasure-in-disgust for the figure of the unrepentant/ignorant colonizer. nobody agrees on what it literally means(unless you interpret university 'palestinian studies programs' as inherently liberating) and the fantasies it inspires are all just reactionary projections of our liberalized imaginations, ranging anywhere from the bureaucratic freedom of the 'palestinian neoliberal territorial nation-state' to the cannibalistic freedom of 'rivers of blood to be liberated from mountains of zionist/colonizer bodies'