#this is why we should nationalize these companies
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Mumia Abu-Jamal called the CUNY Palestine encampment to lend his support for all students across america in their efforts to divest their universities from the israeli apartheid regime and weapons manufacturers.
The struggle against american mass incarceration and the fight to free political prisoners here is directly tied to the freedom struggle of political prisoners in Palestine.
From prison & security companies like wackenhut back in the early 00s to allied universal today, the companies who run security, surveillance, and training in america are the same ones as in occupied Palestine.
This is one reason why Black liberation is bound together with Palestinian liberation.
During the Vietnam war Huey P. Newton said that the pigs occupy our neighborhoods like the us army does Vietnam. A pig is a domestic soldier and an army man is a policeman on the global beat.
The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam took up Huey’s analysis and said we fight the empire from the outside and you fight it from the inside.
This is how we should view our support for Palestinian self-determination: As a pincer move against us imperialism. The weaker we make America, the easier the fight becomes. For us and from them. And for all oppressed people around the world
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#this is why we should nationalize these companies#space#science#lunar lander#the moon#odysseus lander
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Hey guys, I know there are a lot of really severe tragedies in the world right now and I in no way desire to push those aside, nor do I really want to load another thing onto people's plates, but anyone here in the US needs to be aware that on March 11, 2024, an agricultural company known as NEW Cooperative spilled 265,000 gallons (1500 tons) of liquid nitrogen fertilizer into the East Nishnabotna River. This is the ecological equivalent of dropping a nuclear weapon into the river. Over a 60 mile stretch downstream of the spill its been a near total ecological wipeout for the river. So far, an estimate of 850,000 fish have been killed from this spill, and that's to say nothing for the insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds that relied on or lived in this river. It is literally filled with animal corpses. This river flows into the Missouri River and the impacts will likely continue to spread far past this 60 mile stretch. And this disaster has barely made local tv in Iowa, let alone national tv, despite the fact that 60 miles of river ecosystem were just wiped out in a way that may be impossible to recover from. And what's the punishment for this heinous act of destruction through negligence, you might ask? As it stands, its looking like a 6k fine from the DNR to the company. Not 600k. Not 60k. 6000 dollars. The maximum fine that the DNR can charge in Iowa is 10k unless they decide to take it further in court. That's why these spills are so frequent in Iowa: it's literally cheaper to eat the fines than it is to bother properly storing fertilizer. I don't know exactly what the proper course of action is here, or who needs to be contacted to enact change--I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than me will chime in with that information--but at the very least, every one of us should know. Every one of us should make sure we don't forget this. And every one of us should blacklist NEW Cooperative fertilizer unilaterally.
Sources:
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Post 9/11 Trivia
Most folks on this site were either children on September 11, 2001, or weren’t even born yet. But America went crazy for about a year afterwards. Here’s some highlights that I remember that might not be in your history books:
There was national discussion on whether or not Halloween should be canceled because…fuck if I know why. After planes crashed into buildings in NYC it follows that 6-year-olds in Iowa shouldn’t be allowed to dress up like Batman and ask their neighbors for candy, I guess. (Halloween wasn’t canceled, by the way.)
On a similar note, people asked if comedy - any sort of comedy - was appropriate anymore, ever.
People sold shitty parachutes to suckers “in case your building gets attacked and you have to jump out the window.” There were honest-to-God news reports warning people not to jump out of the window with shitty mail-order parachutes because they wouldn't work.
As a follow-up to the attacks, someone mailed anthrax to some prominent politicians and news anchors - you know, famous people - along with some badly-written notes about “you cannot stop us, death to America, Allah is good” and after that every time some random dumbass found a package in the mail they didn’t recognize they thought that the terrorists were targeting them, too.
Everyone was similarly convinced that their town was going to be the next target, even if they were a little town in the middle of nowhere. "Our town of Bumblefuck, South Dakota (population 690) has the largest styrofoam pig statue west of the Mississippi! Terrorists might fly planes into that too! It's a prime target!"
People started taping up their windows and trying to make their houses or apartments airtight out of fear of chemical and biological attacks. There were news reports warning people that turning your house into an airtight box was a bad idea because, y'know, you need air to breathe.
"[X] supports terrorism!" and “if we do [X], the terrorists win!” were used as arguments for everything. "Some rich Arab you never heard of donated to his organization that backs Hamas which backs al-Queda, and also owns stock in a holding company that has partial ownership of the Pringles company, so if you eat Pringles you're supporting terrorism!" "The terrorists want to tear down our freedoms and our way of life and rule us through fear! Eating what you want is one of our freedoms as Americans! If you're afraid to eat Pringles, the terrorists win!" (I promise you that this sort of argument is in no way hyperbole.)
(This argument is how Halloween was saved, by the way. “If we cancel Halloween, the terrorists win!”)
People worked 9/11 into everything, and I mean everything, whether it was appropriate or not. If you went to the grocery store the tortilla chips would remind you to support the troops on the packaging. Used car sales would be dedicated to our brave first responders. You couldn't wipe your ass without the toilet paper rolls reminding you to never forget the fallen of 9/11, and again, this is not hyperbole.
My uncle, who lived in Ohio and had never been to New York except to visit once in the 70′s, died of a stroke about 8 months after 9/11, and the priest brought up the attacks at the eulogy.
On a similar local note, on the day of 9/11, after the towers went down, gas stations in my home town immediately jacked up gas prices. The mayor had the cops go around and force them to take them back down. I doubt any of that was legal.
Before 9/11, Christianity in America - and religion in general - was on a downward swing, with reddit-tier atheism on the upswing. Religion was outdated superstition from a bygone age. The day after 9/11? Every single church was PACKED. (This wasn't a bad thing, but the power-hungry on the Evangelical Right saw this as a golden opportunity to grab power and influence.)
EDIT: By Popular Demand - Freedom Fries. I initially left these off because they came a couple years after the initial panic and most people thought they were kind of absurd (and I don't recall anyone really going along with it other than maybe some local diners here and there). France didn't want to get involved in our world policing so some folks were like "TRAITORS!" and wanted to call french fries "Freedom Fries" instead, so as to stick it to the French.
Besides dumb shit like that…it’s really hard to overstate how completely the national mood and character changed in the span of a day, or how much of the current culture war is a result of the aftermath. (9/11 was the impetus for the sharp rise in power of the Evangelical Right, who made themselves utterly odious and the following backlash helped the rise of the current Progressive Left, for instance.)
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Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?
One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.
Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.
I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.
We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?
He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?
Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.
But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.
Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.
Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.
Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.
It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.
This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.
And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.
And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?
But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.
It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.
Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.
The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.
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re: ohio chemical disaster
OP of the post I reblogged earlier regarding this turned off reblogs (understandable have a nice day) but I got a request to put the information in its own post, so here.
First thing: PLEASE be careful about claims that "The Media" is suppressing something as part of a malicious agenda, or that an event has been purposefully manufactured by "The Media" to distract from something else.
Not only is this a really common disinformation tactic (not only urging you to share/reblog quickly, but discouraging you from fact checking), treating "The Media" as a monolithic entity with purposeful agency and a specific, malicious agenda—particularly one that manufactures events to "distract" from other events—is a red flag for conspiracy theories.
There's already a post in the tag attributing the supposed lack of media coverage to "reptilians." Please connect the dots here.
Second—"the news isn't focusing on this as much as I think they should" is not a media blackout. Every major USA news source is reporting on the Ohio train derailment. Googling returns at least 4 pages of results from major news media sources. Even just googling "Ohio" gets you plenty of results about it.
This is an unusual amount of media attention for a U.S. environmental disaster.
Because this kind of thing happens all the damn time.
The "media blackout" narrative gives the impression that this is an unusual event that isn't receiving wall to wall coverage only because it's being suppressed—when the reality is that similar disasters happen a lot, and hardly ever get the attention the Ohio disaster is getting.
Consider this example, not too far from my local area: A few years ago, almost 2,000 tons of radioactive fracking waste were illegally dumped in an Eastern Kentucky municipal landfill, directly across from a middle school. Leachate from that landfill goes into the Kentucky River, which is where most of the central part of the state gets its drinking water. As far as we know, the radioactive waste isn't leaking yet, but it could start leaking at any time.
Zero national news sources covered this. Why? If I was to hazard a guess, I would say "because it's business as usual for the fossil fuel industry."
Consider also the case of Martin County, KY, which has had foul-smelling, contaminated drinking water for decades. Former coal country in Appalachia is poisoned and toxic, and laws have little power to punish the companies that created the destruction.
What happened in Ohio is just a little window into a whole world of horrors.
The Martin County coal slurry spill that is still poisoning the water 20 years later killed literally everything in the water for miles downstream (a book Mom read said 70 miles of the Ohio river were made completely lifeless). It was 30 times larger than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and it was in some sense "covered up"—in the sense that the Bush administration shut down the investigation because the Republicans are buddies with the fossil fuel industry, and proceeded to relax regulations even further.
Seriously, read that wiki article to get pissed enough to eat glass.
Hopefully the Ohio chemical spill will inspire real action to institute regulations to prevent shit like this from ever happening again. It's not the end of the world. It's not radically different from what industries have been causing the whole damn time. It is pretty bad.
I would urge everyone to actually search up information about it instead of getting news from Tiktok or Twitter, because the more false information gets distributed, the less momentum any effort to respond with improved regulations and changes to prevent future disasters will have. Plenty of facts here *are* public and being publicly discussed and pretending that they're not is actively detrimental.
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I WANNA BE YOURS | LIONESSES X READER | PT 7
pairings: lionesses x reader
summary: in which you're accidentally added to a random group chat, not knowing they're all actually famous footballers, and obliviously end up having many of them competing for your love and attention.
part: seven
part one here
✦ ——— ✦ ——— ✦
THE NATIONAL DIVING TEAM
the REAL karate kid
good afternoon losers
and y/n <3
the imposter
hey
willybum
good afternoon you dumbass
and hello to you too y/n
the REAL karate kid
rude
how are you y/n?
the imposter
eh i'm doing fine i guess
stairway
is everything alright
the imposter
i got fired from work today 😔
lotte
what happened?
if you don't mind me asking
the imposter
so i told ya what i do for work yeah?
well i've worked for this company for the past
whole year as their main solo media manager
and then my boss found out that his good old
friend's son was looking for a job and he's also
a photographer and social media manager so he
decided to fire me and hire him instead to
keep his relationship strong with his old friend
the REAL karate kid
that really sucks
your boss sounds like a terrible person
the imposter
yeah he was a really difficult person
i am kinda glad tho ngl
i don't have to see his annoying face ever again
but back to job hunting again 😔
neev
if it makes you feel better
leah got head-shotted in the head
by lessi during training
the imposter
i really hope someone got proof of it
stairway
i gotcha
maya
HELP
lotte
got K.O-ed lol
willybum
this isn't funny
i got a full on concussion
i'll get you back russo
the REAL karate kid
not my fault you're a terrible defender 🤷♀️
willybum
EXCUSE ME?!
the imposter
dam
them calves 😮💨
has anyone ever asked you
to step on them?
neev
um y/n is there something you'd
like to share with the group ...
willybum
weirdly enough yeah
i have been asked that
elton
it was actually just y/n asking
on a secret account
the imposter
don't expose me like that 😩
meado
every time i open this group chat
i get deeply concerned for you all again
i don't even know who y/n is and i feel like
i should be concerned about her as well
the imposter
woah
meado
i thought we were getting along well 😔
stairway
well if meado is concerned then
i guess she's offering to pay for
our therapy so let's go gang
the imposter
also
why do guys always train and
play football together?
elton
oh you know
we just like to play football together at times
stairway
yeah
it's fun
the imposter
okay ....
who am i to judge
✦ ——— ✦ ——— ✦
THE LION KING SQUAD
russo
uh
so guys
i have done something
toone
oh no
that is never a good sign
le tissier
okay i'm intrigued
this is gonna be bad
wubben-moy
the fact that she's using the group chat
without y/n is not a good sign
stanway
is she about to introduce her new wife
to us or something? did you like run away
and get married in vegas or something?
charles
we literally saw her yesterday georgia
so if she had then that would be
insanely impressive
toone
is that why you weren't at training today?
greenwood
ella looked very lost today
it was worrying
russo
yeah
i ran away with y/n and we got married
toone
HUH
stanway
WHAT
charles
EXCUSE ME
russo
OF COURSE NOT YOU IDIOTS
not yet anyway 😏
but back to the point
leah was also in on this
bright
oh like that's any better
williamson
excuse me??
wubben-moy
here we go
russo
okay
so
you know how y/n's looking for a job yeah?
well leah and i thought we'd put in a
good word for her in our media admin so
that you know .... maybe she can get
offered a job here and you know we can
actually meet her and get to know her irl ....
stanway
that is actually ....
the most decent idea i've heard from ya
charles
yeah fr
hemp
oh my god y'all are such simps
stanway
shut up
toone
i do wonder when y/n will find out about
who we are or if she ever will
charles
nah she's got to find out soon with
the euros starting next week?
williamson
i reckon we tell her after the euros
wubben-moy
well that shall be eventful
part eight here
#lionesses x reader#woso x reader#engwnt x reader#lionesses#engwnt#leah williamson x reader#alessia russo x reader#ella toone x reader#georgia stanway x reader#niamh charles x reader#lotte wubben moy x reader#beth mead x reader#maya le tissier x reader#woso imagine#woso#woso fanfics#womens football
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What do you see as the practical point of the student protests? What Israel is doing in Gaza is a moral horror, but the actual demands being made at e.g. Columbia seem so unlikely to affect it in any way (school sells small amount of stock in companies with some connection to Israel -> ??? -> ??? -> fewer children die) that it's hard to wholeheartedly support the protests escalating.
Unless the theory is "make demands that the college won't meet" -> "cause attention-catching disruption" -> "Biden admin finds it embarrassing" -> "Biden maybe pressures Netanyahu", in which case the specific demands are completely arbitrary?
one of the primary demands is disclose: the financial investments are not transparent information, thus the demand for the administration to reveal what they are. second, as i've mentioned before, university divestment is an established practice dating back to apartheid. there's nothing crazy, controversial, or quixotic about the demand. students are not making the demand with the idea that it will be the final straw that will finally crush the war effort, but with the understanding that it's their money, their community, and that a boycott of israel is the morally correct choice in line with the BDS movement. would you be comfortable attending a school that was investing in russian assets? i wouldn't. even if it's not a ton of money (we don't know how much) it's still likely to be significant given columbia's $14 billion endowment (and i find your phrasing unnecessarily condescending here.) harvard, where an encampment has been set up, is worth $50 billion. some of the ivies, like cornell, invest in raytheon—setting aside israel, why should any university have investments in the military industrial complex to begin with?
here is the preamble to the most recent currently available columbia divestment resolution:
not exactly pie-in-the-sky stuff here. the apartheid protests resulted in successful divestment, and even the 1968 protests resulted in all demands met by the admin. it's a very practical goal. it's also one that happens to be morally righteous and just.
furthermore, i don't know where you have been for the past week, but who have you seen escalate the protests? the reason why there is now a worldwide protest movement is because, for the thousandth time, minouche shafik called the cops to arrest 108 students. the NYPD itself said the students were peaceful and offered no resistance whatsoever, even as police also arrested legal observers. it was not the intention of the protesters to get national or international attention. "hard wholeheartedly support the protests" is an exceedingly strange comment to make that i, frankly, have a hard time understanding. i find it extraordinarily easy to wholeheartedly support fellow graduate students and professors i personally know at multiple universities who are meeting the ire of a lying media, lying administration, and lying government in the form of a police baton for the crime of sitting on some university's lawn.
at this point, given the sheer level of violence the police has unleashed on students and faculty across the country for showing up to said lawns, a portion of the protest support for them stems from the defense of free speech.
additional demands in light of the arrests and suspensions include the reinstatement of SJP and SJVP and amnesty for all arrested. again, not absurd, not without precedent.
lastly, i invite you to go to a protest and see what's happening for yourself. at this point, there's bound to be one near you.
#it's exhausting seeing everyone learn about them exclusively through twitter videos GO TO ONE!#free palestine and free the university
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Chapter 2 - Places!
Simon Riley x Johnny MacTavish x F!Reader 4.4K words
Warnings/tags: 18+ MDNI, mild swearing, feelings of loneliness/isolation, imposter syndrome, feelings of anxiety, reader is oblivious to Johnny and Simon's advances. Masterlist
Delaney O’Riordan, despite her petite frame, pulls you along with a strength that rivals some of your male counterparts in the English National Ballet, iron grip wrapped firmly around your bicep as she berrates you for making her come looking for you.
“What on earth are ya’ doin’ down here?! An’ drinkin’ no less!” She doesn’t let you get a word in as she hauls you out of the hotel bar away from the two men, through the lobby, and herds you into the lift. “We’ve forty-five minutes to get to the theater and you’re down here flirtin’ with strangers?”
“Laney, it’s fine. My bag is packed and I’m dressed to go, all we need to do is grab it from the room and catch the bus. It’ll take thirty minutes, tops,” you assure the fiery-tempered woman as the doors to the lift close and she presses the button for your floor. “And I wasn’t flirting.” You weren’t, right? You just lost your balance. He’d caught you–they’d caught you–and set you upright again. That was it. No flirting. Even if the way the dark-haired man had called you pretty made your stomach flip-flop the same way it does every time Connor has to toss you through the air in rehearsals, and the way the blond wearing the mask, Simon you think he was called, made your skin warm with the hand that lingered on your back for longer than any polite touch should have.
“Aye, so you admit you were drinkin’ then?” Delaney crosses her arms and fixes you with an admonishing glare.
“It was just a cocktail, a mint julep. There was hardly any liquor in it,” you say in an attempt to placate her, knowing her irritation comes from a place of concern rather than annoyance. “Just something to calm the opening night jitters.” Despite decades of experience and many, many opening nights for productions big and small, for company exhibitions and tours abroad, some of them still had you tapping your fingers methodically over your thighs and shifting your weight from one foot to another every few seconds.
Her gaze softens but her arms remain folded tight to her chest. She knows tonight is important. It’s your first show as the company’s first principal dancer. The prima ballerina of the English National Ballet, dancing the lead role of one of the most quintessential ballets—a night that will define the rest of your career. “You’re going to do just fine tonight. I know it feels different, having the title now, but you’ve danced this role before. You’ll dance it hundreds of times more, no doubt, now you’ve made a name for yourself. The Bolshoi will be beggin’ ya to dance for ‘em in Moscow after tonight. I know it.”
You scoff at this. “Bolshoi made Swan Lake, Laney, they don’t let just anyone dance for them. Especially for Odette and Odile.” You couldn’t imagine being asked to the Bolshoi Ballet. It’s one of the oldest, toughest, companies to dance with and for. Their dancers are all hand selected, scouted for their looks and physique in their youth, and train with a militaristic intensity to be the best of the best. The Soviet and American schools of ballet are both similar in that way. Aggressive. Emphasizing and attacking their movements and the sharp lines of their form with an energy the English and French schools lean away from. But that was the very reason why you’d been offered a contract with the Kensington-based company. For your ability to dance the part of Odette with the elegance and grace required for the demure damsel, and simultaneously portray the brazen and arrogant seductress Odile, who moves with much darker intentions. A duality that is coveted among dancers.
The soft ‘ding’ of the lift alerts you to the fact that you’ve reached your floor, heavy doors sliding open to reveal the gaudy carpet and busy wallpaper lining the hallway of the hotel you’re staying in for the time being. You nod a brief goodbye to Delaney, promising to meet her in the lobby, and step off the lift. The room is comfortable, has everything you need and is by no means lacking, but still it’s less than ideal. You miss your cozy apartment in the suburbs, the early but peaceful mornings before rush hour and all the sounds that come with it, and the beaux-arts architecture giving way to modern urban highrises. Soho isn’t that different, all things considered, but staying in a hotel until you can find a new apartment in London leaves you feeling out of place and untethered with just a few suitcases full of essentials and a contract for work in your possession. It makes you feel temporary. In this city. In this job. Easily replaced at a moment's notice. You try not to imagine what your life would look like if those things were true, pushing away the poisonous and intrusive notion that at any moment you’ll wake up from this dream and mourn it for being just that–a subconscious fantasy–as you sling your duffel over your shoulder and head back down to the lobby to meet Delaney and catch the bus.
Backstage at the London Coliseum thrums with the typical pre-show chaos. Last minute adjustments to props and the set before rolling everything into place behind the curtains, mending any overlooked rips or tears in costumes sustained in dress rehearsal, and hundreds of dancers, crew and musicians fluttering about the narrow halls between dressing and storage rooms. Hairspray lingers thick in the air of the dressing rooms and the scent of gels and pomade have a cloying effect that leaves you grateful for the privilege your status as first principal affords you. A green room.
It’s not very big. Just enough space for a backlit vanity, a rolling costume rack, small loveseat and a powder room. It feels odd, not sharing a room with fifty or sixty other dancers as you prepare for the show. Feels even stranger that someone else is doing that for you now, slicking back your hair and affixing your headpiece, rouging your cheeks and lining your lips in a blush tone. One more thing you’ll have to get used to.
Once the hair and makeup artist deems their work is finished you waste no time breaking in your pointe shoes and allowing yourself a final warmup before leaving your little bubble of calm amidst the chaos of opening night. The sound of the orchestra checking their pitch and tuning accordingly mixes with the chatter of the settling audience, and as the stage manager announces five minutes to showtime the wings of the stage begin to fill with all manner of performers. Everyone stretches, marks choreography, and goes about their pre-show rituals, wishing one another a good performance with smiles and encouraging embraces. Across the stage, you find Delaney smiling at you among the other dancers in the wings. She lifts her hands, presses them together in the shape of a heart over her chest, and you mirror the gesture. ‘Good show.’
“Places!” the final call rings out, and the house lights dim. The audience falls silent as the opening bars played by the orchestra signal the opening of the stage curtain, and with a deep, steadying breath, you leave behind the wings to take the stage.
By the time you step off stage you’re exhausted but elated. You had a stellar performance, a standing ovation from the crowd, and your directors sing their praises to you all the way from the stage after curtain call to your green room. However, the theatrics aren’t quite done for the night. There is to be a rotation of swans to pose with families for photos after each performance, and as first principal you are expected to set an example. That’s how you found yourself back in front of the vanity with another hair and makeup artist taming your hair back into place and making adjustments to your makeup. A costumer comes to help you change, guides a pair of wings onto your shoulders and shows you how to fasten them to your wrists, how to pose with them, and you’re sent off to the lobby.
You greet each child with a hug, mindful of the extra berth required to do so with the wings, and smile for cellphone cameras through the pain radiating from your knees and ankles. Some of the smaller children are too enamored with the feathers and the rhinestone-dusted gossamer to pay attention to their parents, and it takes several attempts to steal their attention away and take a satisfactory photo. Parents throw apologetic smiles your way as the children all take their turns, and you assure those who voice them that it’s really no trouble at all, though the twinging of your right knee would beg to differ. You’re holding a back attitude, relying on the small section of barre hidden behind the small recreation of the lake erected around you to maintain your balance and sustain the pose with your leg high in the air behind you, and you nearly sigh in relief when the child in front of you darts back to their parents once the photo is taken.
That relief is short lived, however, as you come back down on two feet again and turn to greet the next family. You’re wholly unprepared to find the dark-haired, blue-eyed man from the bar, masked, blond companion at his side, towering over you.
“Hello, little bird,” the former greets you and a roguish grin tugs at the corners of his mouth.
He has a mohawk. You hadn’t noticed in the bar, and you tell yourself it must have been the dim lighting that had kept that detail hidden from you. It certainly wasn’t the way his arm had felt wrapped snugly around your waist, or the way concern shone in his eyes and made them look more like sta-
“Yer friend carted ye off before we could have a proper introduction. Name’s Johnny. Ye remember Simon,” he says with a gesture to the statuesque, masked blond, and you force the shocked expression from your face and replace it with a polite smile, nodding in recognition.
“Yes. It’s… nice to meet you both. Officially. Would- would you like a picture together?”
Simon’s eyes dart towards Johnny and the shorter man turns his face up to meet his gaze. There’s a moment of silence between the two, an internal conversation you’re not privy to. When Johnny looks to you again there’s an impish look about him, a mischievous glint in his eyes as he steps forward, leaving Simon with his phone.
“Si isn’t fond of photos,” he says as he approaches, sidling up to you between the wooden props. He bends down to whisper into the shell of your ear, “We’d like to have a photo of ye though, pretty little bird that ye are.”
Heat blooms across your cheeks, and before your brain can fully process the implication of his words he’s wrapping an arm around your waist and pulling you closer. Your lips part on a yelp of surprise as you’re suddenly being hefted into the air and-
He’s perched you on his shoulder, you realize with no small degree of shock, a large, steadying hand firm on your thigh and the other resting on your shin just above your ankle. The look in his eyes and the sultry smile he gives you as he peers up at your shocked expression causes your stomach to flip and you grip onto his other shoulder to balance yourself. “Sorry for the scare, hen, but I can’t have our pretty bird stranded on the ground. Ye should be up there,” he says with a wink.
What do you even say to that?
“It’s ok, I just- I wasn’t prepared is all,” you reason aloud and cross your ankles, willing yourself to relax in his hold. When you lift your gaze from Johnny’s you find Simon right where you left him, brows pinched together in what you think is exasperation, but the corners of his eyes crinkle in a way that suggests amusement.
“Quit your yappin’, Johnny, and look ‘ere,” he grumbles, and Johnny does as he’s told, reluctantly tears his gaze away from you to look at Simon, holding up his phone for the photo.
You plaster a demure smile over your features, hold yourself steady with a hand on Johnny's shoulder, thick, corded muscle rippling beneath- No. Stop. Now is not the time for thoughts like this. This man is a stranger and you’re still at work. You inwardly chastise yourself and extend your free arm above your head, attempting a loose fourth position, posing prettily for the photo, and dutifully ignoring the warmth of Johnny’s hands on your legs, how solid he feels beneath you.
Just as easily as he’d hoisted you upon his shoulder he guides you gently back to the ground, hands lingering around your waist, unwilling to let you go again. “We want to ask ye somethin’,” he says as Simon steps forward, hand finding its way to the small of his back and Johnny’s hands pull away from your waist reluctantly to lean closer to Simon. “When yer done here with…” He pauses and gestures broadly to your wings and costume, and his smile turns apologetic. “Performance? I’m sorry, I dinnae ken what to call it. But, we’d like to have a proper drink with ye.” He looks hopeful as he slips his hands inside his pockets, and Simon’s head tilts ever so slightly to the side as they wait for your response.
You? They want to have a drink with you? You shift your weight nervously from one foot to the other, fighting to hide the scrunch of your nose as your knee barks under the pressure. “I won’t be done here for at least another hour, it will be quite late.”
“That’s not an issue for us,” Simon quickly supplies. “You’re stayin’ at the Broadwick?”
You nod.
“We’ll meet you there then, at the bar. Same place as before.” His voice is confident. Commanding. He says it like it's a fact, like you’ve already agreed. And at this point, you might as well. You’d be lying if you said you weren’t curious about the two men. Curious about Johnny’s flirtatiousness and Simon’s encouragement of it. And you need friends outside the company. Someone who you can talk to about boring and mundane things like the weather or how outrageous the price of a latte is at that little corner bakery you’d been frequenting. Something other than commiserating over long rehearsals and the blisters they cause, or how the director was in a sour mood with the cast that day over something beyond their ability to control. Anything other than work.
“Ok,” you finally agree, and you think Johnny's face might tear in two if his smile were any wider.
An hour and a half later you’ve returned to the hotel and rushed yourself into the shower, scrubbing at your skin with a soapy washcloth and carefully avoiding getting your hair wet. It’s still done up nice enough, and there's no sense in going downstairs looking like a drowned rat with damp hair when it’s already been… Shit, they’ve been waiting nearly an hour. You speed through the rest of your routine, washing the thick show makeup off your face, digging around in your suitcase for the sweater dress you know is here somewhere- Ah! There, buried under a mountain of leotards, and, graciously, next to the comfy flats you planned to wear with it. You trade the generic hotel bathrobe for the dress and step gingerly into your flats, mindful of the blisters already forming, and spare a few minutes more to swipe some mascara over your lashes and conceal the ever present dark circles of exhaustion under your eyes before heading downstairs.
Your heart pounds behind your ribs the same way it had earlier in the evening standing in the wings at the start of the show, and you take slow, deep breaths as you approach the hotel bar, half expecting to find it empty after you've kept them waiting for so long. You wouldn’t blame them if they’d left already. It’s nearly eleven p.m. on a Thursday, well past late for most of the working professionals in the city.
And yet, there they sit, occupying the same seats at the bar they had hours earlier. Johnny spots you first, beaming at you from over Simon’s shoulder, and your heart calms a bit, flooding with relief at the sight of his smiling face and easing some of your fear that they would be upset having waited so long.
“I’m so sorry for making you wait down here, I didn’t want to show up covered in sweat or looking like I’d come straight from the shower-” you say by way of greeting, and Johnny is quick to smother your apologies.
“Dinna fash, hen,” he interrupts, standing from his seat and guiding you to take his place on it with a warm hand on the small of your back. “We didn't mind waitin’. Had ourselves a nice little chat, eh Si?”
You settle yourself on the barstool and Simon hums thoughtfully beside you. “We did.”
Johnny takes the open seat beside you, angling his body so that he can brace an arm on the bar top and sit facing you. “So our little bird’s a dancer?”
“‘S a bit obvious, Johnny,” Simon quips.
Johnny huffs an exaggerated sigh as he retorts, “Aye, but what if she’s not really? Could be a spy. The Russians have done it before,” he says and winks in your direction.
Simon groans but you can’t help grinning at Johnny’s teasing. “Yes, I'm a dancer. Not a spy. I don’t think they could keep up with our training.”
Johnny lifts a curious brow and leans forward. “How long do ye train for somethin’ like that?”
You make a show of pausing to think before answering. “Hmm, it’s been a little over twenty years now, twenty-two I think?”
He mutters something under his breath that sounds like swearing. “Twenty-two years?!”
Simon’s eyes shine a rich, amber color in the low light of the bar, and a glimmer of something akin to recognition passes through them as he nods appreciatively. “Ya must be good at it then, if you’ve worked that long for it.”
You feel warmth blooming across your cheeks and a similar warmth working its way from your chest to your stomach, lower, as his eyes, the only part of his face visible above the mask, continue to study you, and your dress suddenly feels too tight against your skin. “I’m as good as any other dancer who’s worked most of their life for it.” A modest answer.
“Which one were ye then, on stage tonight? Were ye one of the swans?” Johnny’s voice pulls you out of the hold Simon’s wandering gaze has on you. You blink several times to clear your thoughts, and when you finally turn your attention back to him he's smiling down at you with a glimmering fascination in his own eyes.
You hesitate, briefly consider lying so they don’t make a fuss over the truth, but ultimately can’t find it in yourself to do so. “Yes, two of them actually. Odette and Odile.”
Johnny’s brows furrow, and Simon sighs with feigned annoyance but explains for him anyways, “She’s the swan Johnny. She’s the leading lady.”
“Christ, yer the star of the whole thing and yer playin’ it off like yer just in the background! I’d be tellin’ everyone if it were me.”
“Thankfully she’s not. She has class, something you could use more of,” Simon chides and you laugh quietly to yourself at their back and forth.
Johnny looks as if he’s about to come back with another smartalec comment but the arrival of the bartender defuses his need to have the last laugh as a glass of scotch is pushed towards him, a mint julep for you, and a tumbler of bourbon for Simon. Johnny takes the drink without question, swirling the contents of the glass and taking a slow sip, but it’s your turn now to pinch your brows in confusion.
“I didn’t- I haven’t ordered anything?”
“The bartender came by while you were explainin’ your trainin’ to Johnny. I ordered for us,” Simon explains.
You look from Simon to the drink in front of you, brows still pinched together.
“‘S what you ordered earlier, would ya rather have somethin’ else?”
“No! No, this is perfect, thank you. It’s just… I don’t think anyone’s ever bothered to pay that much attention to me?” you quickly explain, pulling the mixed drink towards you.
“Aye, he’s a charming bastard like that. Observant to a fault.”
You hum in answer and bring the glass to your lips, taking a slow, savoring sip.
“How long have ye been in london?” Johnny toys with the glass in his hand as he watches you, tracking the movement of your throat and your tongue as it darts out to swipe across your lower lip.
“We’ve just come back from tour a few weeks ago, so not long.”
“And you’ve been stayin’ in a hotel?” Simon seems perturbed at the notion.
“Hard to look for a place to live when you’ve been on tour for three months.” You take a longer sip from your drink this time. You really need to dedicate some time to that this week, maybe contact a real estate agent.
Simon and Johnny share a look, another unspoken conversation between themselves, and that glimmer of recognition returns to Simon’s eyes. “We’re… familiar, with that particular struggle.” When you turn to him with a puzzled expression he explains, “We travel a lot for work.”
“You work together?”
“Somethin’ like that,” and that’s the end of it. Their closeness makes sense then, if they travel together often. It’s hard not to get close to someone when you're obligated to be with them all the time. Hell, it’s the reason why you and Delaney are so close, having shared a room while on tour.
“D’ye have a borough in mind?” Johnny asks to redirect the topic of conversation back to you.
“The studio is in southern Kensington, close to Stamford Bridge, and we perform at the coliseum and Royal Albert Hall when we aren’t touring, so I’m hoping I can find something centrally located. Maybe in Belgravia or Westminster.” The few places you've been able to find online are quite pricey, but your contracted salary is enough for a decent flat in either neighborhood. It’s not like you order takeaway every night and your busy schedule certainly doesn’t allow you to party every weekend. Well, maybe the takeaway part isn’t exactly true. Frozen dinners from Tesco don’t count as takeaway, do they? Either way, if you have to spend the money, it may as well go towards a comfortable and conveniently located appartment, even if it’s overpriced.
“Bit of a highbrow area,” Simon comments and Johnny does his best not to outright snort when he starts to laugh, taking a long swig from his half-empty glass of scotch.
“Highbrow is an understatement. Ye’d be a stone's throw from the palace in either borough,” he seems to agree, and tacks on under his breath as he drains his glass, “The whole south of London is full of posh bampots.”
Simon huffs from behind you and when you peer up at him you’re met with a simmering glare pointed in Johnny’s direction.
“Och, dinnae gi’ me tha’ look Si. Ah Ken yer fer Queen an’ country, but ye ken well enough how Ah feel aboot-“
You try and fail to hide your amusement, doubling over to clutch at your sides in a fit of giggles and half-suppressed laughter, finding both Johnny’s thickening accent and disdain for the richer neighborhoods and the stuck-up personalities they breed within them comical in an ironic sort of way. You’d always been of a similar opinion, holding contempt for the privileged and entitled attitudes of the people who lived in gated communities—and now you would be one of them.
When you regain your composure and right yourself once more, your lungs take longer to catch up, breath stalling in your chest as you realize you’re being watched.
In the dim lighting, Johnny’s eyes are luminescent, the reflections of headlights as cars pass by the window like comets blazing a path across the steely-blue night, and it reignites the warmth you’d felt under Simon’s gaze. He regards you with the kind of rapturous intensity you think a soul ascended to the gates of heaven might behold a guardian angel and the heavenly fire they wield, and it leaves you breathless. It sucks the air from the room like a raging inferno, rips the oxygen from your lungs and replaces it with delicate whispers of smoke and a burning need to draw lungfuls of the very thing he’s stolen from you, but all you can do is inhale the intoxicating fumes it leaves in his wake.
“Sorry, it’s just… the irony, and your accent. I didn’t mean-”
“No dove, don’t apologize. Not for makin’ such beautiful sounds for us,” he says in a husky voice and that spark of heat flares brighter, low in your belly.
Oh. Oh… Your denial of all his flirty comments and your resolve to ignore them begins to disintegrate as you realize this isn't just some bit for him. He really means it. He simply watches you for a moment longer, and you shift nervously under the scrutiny of his gaze until you think he must know you're having trouble breathing because a slow, confident grin splits his lips as he looks past you, over your shoulder to where Simon leans casually against the bar. His glass of bourbon is somehow empty despite never seeing him drink from it and he’s bent forward at the waist, elbow braced against the bar top and his fist pressed to his temple.
“Think I could get drunk off’a that,” he murmurs, and you know that no other proclamation has ever sounded as delightfully dangerous as those eight words.
En Pointe>>>
©️Eilidh-Eternal.2024 ~ The intellectual property of Eilidh-Eternal is not permitted for reposting, transcription, translation or use with AI technologies.
#ghost x soap x reader#john soap mactavish x reader#simon ghost riley x reader#ghoap x reader#female reader#simon riley x john mactavish x reader#ghoap#ghost x soap#soap x ghost#simon riley#simon ghost riley#ghost#simon riley x female reader#john soap mactavish#soap mactavish#johnny mactavish#john mactavish x reader#john soap mactavish x female reader#call of duty#cod#cod fanfic#cod mwii#cod mw2#soapghost#ghostsoap#eilidh writes
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Twothirds Is Enough
A clique of 0.0000015% of the country is going to just unilaterally declare major human rights illegal in this country? Oh fuck no.
Fuck the supreme court. Fuck all politicians. I want a direct vote on everything, and if that vote reaches supermajority support it should be law. Two thirds, 66%, is the threshold for Byzantine fault tolerance, the mathematically strongest guarantee that a decision is the vote of The People in the presence of interference. Higher thresholds are completely unnecessary in a representative democracy.
69% of Americans want Roe to stay. That should make it law.
68% of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal. That should make it legal.
*89%* of Americans support raising the minimum wage. Why hasn't it been raised?
76% of Americans believe that members of Congress should be barred from owning shares in the publicly traded companies that they regulate. I think we know why *that* hasn't been passed!
We're not divided, not really. We are controlled by oligarchs deciding what we are *allowed* to vote on. No more. Votes for everything! Twothirds is enough!
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Update (2022-06-24): Well, it looks like six people have overruled hundreds of millions of people and revoked our federal abortion rights. Gee, it would sure be useful if there were some automatic mechanism for The People to tell the unaccountable god kings their opinions have been rejected!
These examples need to be made into a coherent list - I’ve started a side blog to track twothirds support polls. Please send any national polls with >66% agreement to @two-thirds, especially if the mainstream media pretends the position is “controversial.”
Even though the entire system is broken, we *can* come together to make decisions. Under twothirds, we can begin to clean up the pieces.
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Update (2022-07-07): Uh oh! Looks like England is down a government! Would you like a free one?
#politicians#us politics#supreme court#roe#politics#twothirds#twothirds is enough#twothirds party#abortion#optimistic
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Birdwatching got really popular in the early days of the Unpleasantness. However, now that the bosses are forcing us all back to the office, the birds don't have anyone to watch them. That's why I built an autonomous bird-observation robot. Its name is SparrowScope 9000, and I recommend not becoming too emotionally attached to it, because it is your competition.
There's a lot of obvious benefits to having a robotic birdwatcher. It can start up early in the morning and go to its charging dock late at night. It never makes a mistake identifying a bird. It won't get tired, cold, hungry, or develop pointless drama with "Uncle" Hudson Carl online over his fucking misdocumentation of Northern Cardinals. You can pop over to its little webpage and see what it spotted that day, and feel pretty good. It's like you're really there, even though you're stuck in an office building wondering if you have enough staples loaded in your stapler to get through the month, or if you should maybe talk to Jan in Requisitioning to get a fresh refill.
However, there are flaws. One of the big things is that the US military doesn't let regular people – civilians – have super-accurate GPS. They fuck with the data a little bit, so that you can't somehow threaten national security by knowing where you are. I didn't know this before I started on the project, and the bird sanctuary has a lot of elevated walkways ever since the flood. SparrowScope 9000 became more of a SoggyScope Wet-Thousand.
If a real technology company had assembled it, that would probably have been the end of the story. They'd have put in some total garbage like a modern microcontroller, maybe some parts made in this century. Not me. This thing is half old pinball machine parts and the other half Aibos. It kept trucking right down the river, and I never saw it again. I do get updates from it periodically as it spots a new bird, but my work schedule forbids me from taking a few days off to drive to the next county over and see if I can figure out which swamp it's floated into this time.
Even with this small disaster, I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished. Our avian friends get looked at by a creepy robot covered in seaweed, and we can all experience what it was like for one brief, shining moment in which we still had hobbies.
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I think a lot these days about how much bigger the U.S. is than Europe. I mean, part of this is just working for a European company---I talk to our legal counsel based in Paris, and they forget that California (about 75% the size of all of France) has a new law we have to care about, because---well, that's just a state! who cares about a state! My colleagues regularly refuse to travel to a country that's essentially 3 hours of train travel away, because that's so far! ignoring the fact that I have traveled 4 hours to our sister company within the U.S. and regularly drive 1+ hours to the office. (While that's annoying and I don't advocate for it, it's not necessarily unthinkable, that's my point.)
On my way home, I was listening to an NPR story about the Portugal model of drug diversion. It was a great story, thoughtfully reported and contextualized in the recent backlash against decriminalization in the U.S.---but their point of comparison with Portugal was New Jersey. Because they're about the same size, the Republic of Portugal and one of the smallest states in my nation. I just think that when we ask ourselves why things work differently in different countries, "literally, physically different" should occasionally feature in the conversation.
#we are interviewing for yet another european team member and it makes me want to scream#I cannot do all the things I need to do for the US because you're so busy finding people to handle the EU!!#you ALREADY have people plus external counsel for europe! I NEED HELP.#ugh. ugh ugh ugh.#the only benefit is that we have the most relaxed wfh attitude in the entire world#technically I need to be in the office twice a week; in reality my boss is halfway around the world and doesn't care#still. would drive 2 hrs twice a week if I could get someone to help me.#no wonder the company has to secretly manipulate you
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It’s Time to Roast Starbucks For Union Busting
Starbucks should be getting publicly roasted for union busting and refusing to even negotiate with unionized workers.
You see, if there’s one thing I love more than coffee, it’s unions. Because unions perk up pay.
And if there’s one thing I hate more than corporations who try to bust unions, it’s having to make my own coffee every morning.
I may be known for a lot of things, but making a good cup of coffee isn’t one of them.
I was thrilled to hear about workers in Starbucks’ stores across the country exercising their right to unionize.
A cup of solidarity brewed by a unionized barista? What could be better than that?
Definitely not me being my own barista.
Starbucks is a multibillion dollar company. Its new CEO will start with a pay package estimated to be worth over $28 million dollars. That’s roughly 800x the pay of the workers who actually brew and serve the coffee the business is built on — and who barely earn a living wage.
That’s why those workers have begun to unionize.
Since December 2021, Starbucks Workers United has won union elections in more than 300 Starbucks stores, covering more than 8,000 workers and counting.
And most of the union campaigns in individual stores won by overwhelming margins, gaining more than 70% of the total votes — and in parts of the country where private sector unions rarely win.
The Starbucks union campaign has inspired young workers across the country and breathed life into a U.S. labor movement that has been stagnant for decades.
It’s been so successful that Starbucks briefly brought its former CEO, billionaire Howard Schultz, out of retirement to bust the union, and still refuses to even sit down at the bargaining table.
That’s why I’ve been boycotting Starbucks.
As part of its campaign to tamp down further unionization, Starbucks corporate has fired scores of pro-union workers, closed stores that have unionized, threatened to withhold wage and benefit improvements from stores considering unionizing, and packed stores with outside managers to undermine organizing efforts.
The National Labor Relations Board, which oversees all union elections in the U.S., has issued more than 93 complaints covering 328 unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks — and ordered reinstatement of at least 23 fired workers so far.
Yet Starbucks is unwilling to change its anti-union ways — even though Schultz was grilled in front of Congress
Starbucks claims to be a “progressive” company.
But based on the way it’s broken labor law and put unionized workers in the percolator, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Now is an opportunity for all of us to make our voices heard and to tell Starbucks to stop UNION BUSTING and bargain in good faith with Starbucks Workers United.
And it’s time for Joe Biden, who calls himself the “most pro-union president in American history,” to send a powerful message: we won’t tolerate union-busting by Starbucks or any other corporation — including Elon Musk’s Tesla and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.
Otherwise, my boycott will continue — and perhaps you’ll consider joining me.
If we want to brew a future where workers have power and dignity, then we need to show solidarity with unions…
And stand up to corporate bullying.
#youtube#unions#corporations#politics#business#union busting#Gen Z#video#videos#starbucks#coffee#Joe Biden
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The Onondaga claim that the United States violated a 1794 treaty, signed by George Washington, that guaranteed 2.5 million acres in central New York to them. The case, filed in 2014, is the second brought by an American Indian nation against the United States in an international human rights body; a finding is expected as soon as this year.
Even if the Onondaga are successful, the result will mostly be symbolic. The entity, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, has no power to enforce a finding or settlement, and the United States has said that it does not consider the commission’s recommendations to be binding.
“We could win against them, but that doesn’t mean that they have to abide by whatever,” Mr. Hill said in an interview.
The 2.5 million acres have long since been transformed by highways and utility lines, shopping malls, universities, airports and roller rinks.
The territory encompasses the cities of Binghamton and Syracuse, as well as more than 30 state forests, dozens of lakes and countless streams and tributaries. It is also home to 24 Superfund sites, the environmental detritus of the powerhouse economy that helped central New York thrive during the beginning and middle half of the 20th century.
Most notorious of these is Lake Onondaga, which once held the dubious title of America’s most polluted lake.
Industrial waste has left its mark on Onondaga territory, leaving the nation unable to fish from its streams and rivers. The history of environmental degradation is part of what motivates the Onondaga, who consider it their sacred responsibility to protect their land.
One of their chief objectives in filing the petition is a seat at the table on environmental decisions across the original territory. The other is an acknowledgment that New York, even if only in principle, owes them 2.5 million acres.[...]
Some Native nations have been willing to drop land claims in exchange for licenses to operate casinos. But the Onondaga say they are not interested in cash. Nor are they interested in licenses to sell cannabis or operate a casino — which they consider socially irresponsible and a threat to their tribal sovereignty.
There’s really just one thing that Mr. Hill says would be an acceptable form of payment: land.
The Onondaga insist they are not looking to displace anyone. Instead they hope the state might turn over a tract of unspoiled land for the nation to hunt, fish, preserve or develop as it sees fit. One such repatriation effort is underway: the return of 1,000 acres as a part of a federal settlement with Honeywell International for the contamination of Onondaga Lake.
The United States has not contested the Onondaga's account of how the nation lost its land. Indeed, the lawyers representing the United States in the Onondaga case have centered their argument on legal precedence, noting that courts at every level — including the U.S. Supreme Court — rejected the Onondaga’s claims as too old and most remedies too disruptive to the region’s current inhabitants.
To the Onondaga, the logic required to square these contentions seems unfair. Why should the United States be allowed to steal their land and face no obligation to give some back?[...]
In New York, [...] Native people were not considered to have standing to sue on their own behalf until 1987.[...]
In 2005, the Onondaga filed a version of their current claim in Federal District Court in the Northern District of New York, naming as defendants the State of New York, its governor, Onondaga County, the City of Syracuse and a handful of the companies responsible for the environmental degradation over the past centuries. A similar case filed by the Oneida Nation was, at the time, pending before the Supreme Court.
But just 18 days after the Onondaga filed their petition, the Supreme Court rejected the Oneidas’ case. The decision referenced an colonial-era legal theory known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which holds in part that Indigenous property claims were nullified by the “discovery” of that land by Christians.
The “long lapse of time” and “the attendant dramatic changes in the character” precluded the Oneida nation from the “disruptive remedy” it sought, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority decision.[...]
[L]awyers for the Onondaga used the rejection as the premise for a new argument. They contended that the U.S. court system’s refusal to find in their favor proved that they could not find justice in the United States.
The petition filed before the international commission amounts to the most direct challenge of the United States’ treatment of Indigenous people to date in terms of human rights — and the first to apply the lens of colonialism.
“What the Onondaga litigation is doing right now is to force a political dialogue with the colonial occupier,” said Andrew Reid, a lawyer representing the Onondaga, adding that a favorable finding could prompt a political conversation about the United States’s treatment of native people on the world stage.
Representatives for the State Department declined to be interviewed and did not respond to requests for comment. But in legal documents, the United States contended that the Onondaga’s central claims have been rejected in prior cases; that they have had “abundant opportunity” for their case to be heard; and that they are merely unhappy with the outcome. It also contended that the commission has no jurisdiction, given that the bulk of the nation’s losses took place two centuries before it was established.
“The judicial process functioned as it should have in this matter,” the United States wrote in legal papers.
15 Mar 24
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The Whole Watcher Debacle
Just giving my two cents on the whole Watcher situation. I've been following this since it started, and initially, I wasn't going to say anything, but honestly, why not? (lol)
I want to start off by saying that this was not a good business decision to make. By pulling this, they are essentially alienating their international and low-income fans. The world is going through a global economic crisis, and the fact is that creating a streaming subscription service when companies like Disney and Netflix themselves are struggling is not a sound financial decision. Saying $6/month is "affordable for everyone and anyone" is a tone-deaf statement. In this economy, that is the difference between getting to eat for a day or not. It's not just "two cups of coffee". It's quite literally life or death for some people.
Now, before I get hounded by people saying that "artists deserve to get paid for their works" and "it's all about paying artists until you have to pay them yourselves." I do support small artists and small business owners. I support smaller creatives whenever I can and whenever I have the means to. The problem is that Watcher is not a small artist. They are not even a small business. They are, and apparently always have been a company. In addition to that, they are getting paid. They profit from ad reads, views, Adsense, patreon, merch, and live shows.
Their patreon alone nets them at a minimum of $30k per month. This is on the lower side, mind you. I've heard some other content creators talk about this, and it's estimated that they make around $50k-$100k from AdSense and views. On top of that, they get paid $15k-$30k per sponsored video, and a vast majority of their videos are sponsored. They would make around 60k-120k from sponsorships alone. Add all this together, and they make at least $140k monthly. This is, again, the least, and this does not count in profit from their merch or live shows. Their merch sells for anywhere between $60-90 depending on the item, and they continuously sell out. I don't know how much their live shows are, but I imagine it's something along those lines. If even 100 people bought merch, although this is likely in the thousands, they would make 6,000 minimum from just merch. The current national minimum wage in the United States is around 7 dollars. Per month, if you worked for 40 hours per week, you would make around $1,120. They are making nearly 5 times that just from their merch. They make, on the low end, $150k per month. This is more money in one month than most people can make in 2 and a half years. Even the lower end of money on Patreon makes them more money than most people make in a year. Annually, they are making, and this is greatly underestimating the amount they make, at least $1 million. On the higher end, if we calculate that they are making around $100k per month via Patreon, and we estimate with their sponsorships, the range only increases, to around $320k, adding the higher end of sponsorship money and AdSense. Yearly, that's almost $4 million. Their range is $1million-$4million. I'm sorry, but if you are netting in this profit and still need more for your business, then you are doing something wrong.
Watcher are not struggling artists living paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet. They are a multi-million dollar company whose owners live very comfortable lives. This is fine, but they should not act like they are struggling when this business venture was because they were operating outside their means and want to go even further beyond that. YouTube is terrible regarding many things; I get it. There is nothing wrong with creatives wishing to expand, but if you financially cannot support that decision, you should not do so. I am not okay with people being hateful and bringing up unnecessary things. Still, the fact remains that all of their CEOs show their very lavish lives and spending online and constantly talk about it on their podcasts. They could not afford those things if they were truly struggling like they tried to make people believe. Some people are being rude online, yes, and that's not a good thing, but the vast majority are being rightfully upset and are giving valid criticism on why this is a bad idea.
Watcher is not worth a $6/month subscription. They do not have enough content to justify this decision, nor do they have enough followers. Youtubers with followings much larger than theirs have tried to do this and failed. Paywalling their content is not the right move. It essentially stagnates their growth. How are people going to find them, and how are they going to get attention for this? Posting one video on YouTube every time you make a new series -which we don't know how frequently they will update- will not push that content to people. Also, most people who see that initial trailer or episode will not pay $6 monthly to see the rest. The fact is that, like it or not, at $6, they are competing with some of the biggest companies in the industry. Companies like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime, and more all have standards ad supscriptions ranging from $ 5-8 dollars, and they have a catalog of thousands of shows, movies, and more. Yes, it sucks that there is a capitalistic monopoly on these services, but switching to it is not going to help them. Going from YouTube to Vimeo OTT will not net them the profit they think it will. They will struggle on this platform because it's arguably worse than YouTube, and eventually, it will raise the price to keep content up, so they will raise their streaming price.
That's another thing. They advertised this as their own service, unattached to anything else when it's not. It's still run by another company, and now they must pay that company. It feels disingenuous to say this when it is not true. It is not an app or something you can play on TV; it is a website, a fairly sketchy one at that.
There is, again, a cost of living crisis going on. Most people cannot afford to put food on the table, much less spend this money on a streaming service. And even if people wanted to pay, they've barred their international audience from doing so. If you are not in the US, you will have to pay for a VPN to use since the website is not available outside the US, and you will also have to pay a conversion fee since they did not include regional scaling of prices. $6/month is already a lot for people in the US but for people living in other countries with a weaker currency? That's anywhere from a week of groceries to a third of their rent. They did not consider how this would affect international fans, and that's not a good business practice.
And since I will get the inevitable, "You aren't entitled to free content," I'll say this. Yes, people are not entitled to content, but creators are not entitled to people's money. The truth is that if your audience does not like something or want something, then you will not get their support. As a content creator, you must cater to your audience; you can't expect them to pay for or be interested in other content or passion projects. Also, their content is clearly not free. They do get paid. In no world do they not get paid. I will reiterate that they are not small, struggling artists who can't afford to live. Watcher isn't a small indie company that barely gets by. It is a million-dollar company with around 25 employees who live lavishly in one of the most expensive cities in the world. They do not need more money. They want more money.
Plus, people are entitled to their content when that content is mostly based on fan-submission. A lot of Watchers shows rely heavily upon fan submissions and support. Are You Scared?, Too Many Spirits, Food Files, and Ghost Files happen because fans submit stories, places to go, evidence, and more. In fact, Are You Scared and Too Many Spirits are just stories and personal anecdotes that fans share and submit, or that Watcher finds online and read aloud in a backyard. (NOT what I would call TV quality, but okay...)
They posted a while ago that they were taking submissions for a new season of Are You Scared?, Too Many Spirits, and Ghost Files. They did this fully well-aware that they would soon release a paywall. Do they expect fans to pay 6 dollars to see their own submissions? Additionally, they could pass it off as free before this- even though they were getting paid- but now they are locking this service behind a paywall, meaning they make money directly from these stories and this content. People who submitted stories should be compensated since Watcher makes money from fan content.
This still does not acknowledge that they have not responded yet. It has been nearly three days since this blew up, and they have been almost silent. And it is deafening. The only things people have gotten are posts and statements from friends and spouses of the owners that are as out-of-touch and ridiculous as this decision. This shows people that they are doubling down. They had time in the initial 24 hours to respond, and the longer they took to respond, the worse it was getting. It's very telling and a slap in the face to people who have supported them for years, from Buzzfeed to this, through many different times, including the pandemic. Watcher relies so heavily on their audience, yet they do not have the respect for their audience to at least put out a small statement. That is why people are upset. They were helped and built up so much by their audience, then made a video saying, "Thanks for supporting us for years, but if you can't afford us anymore, get out," and maintained radio silence. At the same time, their close friends and family basically called people entitled for not wanting to pay for a service they did not ask for, during a global economic crisis. No one asked for "higher production value" or "TV quality." People were happy with normal, low-production content, like the kind that got them famous/popular in the first place. Yes, they can want to make more expensive content, but they cannot guilt-trip their fanbase into paying for it. I am a small creative. If I make a ridiculously expensive art piece or something with expensive materials, then hand it to someone and say, now you have to pay me for this, even though you didn't ask for this, they will not pay me. It's as simple as that.
Yes, artists should get paid. But Watcher already get paid generously. Not only have they done wrong to their fans, but they have also screwed over their patreon members by essentially saying that they have to pay double for their content. They suddenly switched the tiers on Patreon, removed most of the content, and left only the podcast, and their members do not even get the subscription for free. Most of their Patreon members pay between the $ 10 and $20 tiers, but many also pay around $100. They don't get the service for free even after paying Watcher that much and for so many years. That's spitting on the people who have financially supported you for years.
All in all, this is a very poor financial and business decision, and they are making it worse by remaining silent. They have alienated most of their audience, upset most paying supporters, and been trending for three days for all the wrong reasons. Massive YouTubers have made videos on this, and it has broken from fandom drama into the general internet. This is the beginning of the end, unfortunately. I don't wish any ill will, this is not hate at all. No one at Watcher is a bad person at all, they just made a bad business decision. Unless they apologize, I can't see this working out.
Sorry for the massively long post, I’m not an avid watcher (hehe) or fan of their content but I've had many thoughts bouncing around my head about this business decision since this started, and I wanted to share.
TLDR: Watcher made a seriously bad business decision that upset most of their audience, including paying supporters; claimed to be struggling even though they very clearly aren't and have not responded to their incensed fanbase yet, despite the urgent need to do so.
#watcher#watcher entertainment#do i think some people are being really insane racist and hateful?#yes#do NOT do that shit#but they aren't struggling THAT much#they don't need to do this#they just want more money tbh#most of the criticism is constructive and valid#Am I investing in this because I'm devastated by Ice Adolescence being cancelled and this distracts from it?#absolutely
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essential reading.
Opinion - There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. - by Peter Beinart
And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
"In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”
Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.
There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.
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Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.
In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.
The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.
As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.
Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.
Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.
Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”
But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.
It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.
And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which represents more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.
The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.
Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.
The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.
That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.
The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.
Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”
Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.
The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.
After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”
As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.
Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”
Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.
Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.
From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.
#articles#definitely one of the best most extensive most personal most meaningful articles i've read this week#also addresses a LOT of uh. talking points recently
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