Tink@LivingGround @LivingGround

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point. Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it.  It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this. But these are all just symptoms.  The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned. Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even *basic* steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future. Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment.  At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development. The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital. And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.  They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative. So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

A ceasefire will be welcome, but Biden’s cynical electoral move in proposing this ceasefire plan for Gaza now only proves that he could have done this 8 months ago. THREAD:

“I am deeply disappointed by the intolerance for freedom of speech and the right to civil disobedience on campus.” A student speaker at Harvard’s commencement went off-script to discuss the protestors who were not allowed to graduate:

Zionists are like "Excuse me it's actually against my religion for you to oppose genocide. You need to stop religiously persecuting me with peace activism."

BREAKING: Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, becomes the first university in the U.S. to fully divest from Israel. This was Rachel Corrie’s school.

Animals interrupting wildlife photographers - a thread 🧵 1. A curious fox by Dan Dinu

So I was supposed to deliver the keynote at a @Columbia symposium on climate and language this Friday, but I have informed the organizers that, with true sorrow, I am pulling out because I will not be associated with this university at this political moment. 1/n

Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) 🪬 @DoctorVive

2 years ago

I'm giving the keynote at this @Columbia symposium about language and #ClimateChange on Friday, May 3rd. And the next day's program looks really interesting and important! Registration is open for both in-person & livestream (link in first reply). Hope to see you there! 💚

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The @GazaFFlotilla must sail. 5,000 tons of aid must reach Gaza. Ireland must allow the Freedom Flotilla to sail under the Irish flag. Sign the petition to @EamonRyan my.uplift.ie/petitions/allo…

Stephen Walt is undoubtedly Harvard's most renowned professor of international relations. Here is what he says on Iran's strike, which is an immense departure from what we commonly hear in Western media 🧵 foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/15/mid… First of all, he writes that Iran's general support of Hamas is legitimate under international law: "According to the Geneva Conventions, a population living under 'belligerent occupation' has the right to resist the occupying force. Given that Israel has controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, colonized these lands with more than 700,000 illegal settlers, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the process, there is little doubt that this is a 'belligerent occupation.' Acts of resistance are still subject to the laws of war, of course, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups violate them when they attack Israeli civilians. But resisting the occupation is legitimate, and helping a beleaguered population do so is not necessarily wrong, even if Iran has done this for its own reasons and not from a deep commitment to the Palestinian cause." Secondly, he qualifies Iran's response to the bombing of its consulate by Israel as reasonable: "Iran’s decision to retaliate after Israel bombed its consulate and killed two Iranian generals is hardly evidence of innate aggressiveness, especially given that Tehran has repeatedly signaled that it had no desire to widen the war. Indeed, its retaliation was conducted in a way that gave Israel considerable warning and seems to have been designed to signal that Tehran did not want to escalate further. As U.S. and Israeli officials typically say when they use force, Iran is simply trying to 'restore deterrence.'" Lastly, he says that "the responsibility [for what's happening] lies more in Washington than in Tehran." How? Basically because the U.S. "provides Israel with billions of dollars of sophisticated military equipment every year, along with repeated assurances that U.S. support is unconditional". Walt writes that "states with unchecked power tend to abuse it, and Israel is no exception. Because Israel is vastly stronger than its Palestinian subjects—and more capable than Iran, too, for that matter—it can act with impunity against them, and it typically does. Decades of generous and unconditional U.S. support have enabled Israel to do whatever it wants, which has contributed to its politics as well as its behavior toward the Palestinians becoming increasingly extreme over time." He also notes that a situation has been allowed to develop whereby only effective armed resistance tends to have an effect on Israel: "Only on those rare occasions when Palestinians were able to mobilize effective resistance—as they did during the First Intifada (1987-1993)—were Israeli leaders such as former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin forced to acknowledge the need to compromise and attempt to make peace. Unfortunately, because Israel was so strong, the Palestinians so weak, and U.S. mediators so one-sided in Israel’s favor, none of Rabin’s successors were willing to offer the Palestinians a deal they could accept." He concludes that they're an immense irony here as "the individuals and organizations in the United States that have been the most ardent in shielding Israel from criticism and pushing one administration after another to back Israel, no matter what it does, have in fact done enormous damage to the country that they were trying to help." He describes the current situation where 1) "the two-state solution has failed", 2) Israel is "turn[ing] into a pariah state", 3) "support among younger Americans—including many Jews—is cratering", and 4) Iran is "close to having a nuclear weapon, and thwarted U.S. efforts to isolate it". Unescapable conclusion: "if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies were capable of self-reflection, they’d be mortified by what they have helped Israel do to itself." And, I'd add, all the suffering they've unleased on the Palestinians (if they were capable of basic human empathy, that is).

The main reason I’ve focused so hard on Gaza these last six months isn’t so much because of how evil and horrific Israel’s mass atrocity is in and of itself, but because it’s so intimately intertwined with all our world’s other problems, and with the future of the human species. In a very real way, the destruction of Gaza appears to be a moment in history where humanity is collectively mulling over whether it wants to keep behaving in a crazy, self-destructive way and continue along its trajectory into dystopia and toward self-inflicted extinction, or abandon this madness and push for something better. Whether it wants to keep buying into the lies and propaganda and tacitly consenting to the psychopathic murderousness of the powerful, or let the light of truth shine in. A live-streamed genocide happening right out in the open forces a civilization to start asking questions about itself. If something like this can happen in plain view of everyone, and the people in charge not only do nothing but actively facilitate it, then you have to start wondering if everything about your entire nation is deranged, and if everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie. If something so nakedly evil — undisguised by anything besides a thin veneer of Zionist gaslighting telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing — can be allowed to stand by those we’ve entrusted to run things, then it means our entire society is diseased. Our government. Our political systems. Our media. Our education systems. Our worldviews. Our culture. It’s all rotted and corrupted, right down to the core. The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza is dark. Dark, dark, dark, dark. They’re currently using artificial intelligence to create kill lists and to determine when its targets will be at home with their families to ensure maximum civilian deaths. We used to worry about a dark future where humans send machines to go kill people indiscriminately, but it turns out it’s actually happening the other way around — we’re programming machines to tell us who to kill. The horror in our present dystopia isn’t so much autonomous murderbots as ethical decisions about killing being outsourced to AI. We’re being asked to accept this and move forward in this direction into the future. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for our governments to knowingly support an unforgivable act of mass slaughter upon the inhabitants of a giant concentration camp. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for the mass media to lie and distort and misinform the public about a matter of such urgent importance day after day, month after month. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for a blatant genocide to take place right in front of our faces, and then move on as though nothing happened. And right now we’re collectively ruminating on the question of whether we’re going to decide to do those things, or if we’re going to decide to do something else instead. The Gaza genocide is such a massive thing in and of itself — the injustice, the murder, the loss, the unfathomable suffering. But what’s happening in Gaza is also about so much more than Gaza. It’s a moment in history where humanity is thinking seriously about real revolutionary change, and weighing the options between that and continuing along this tired old blood-soaked path we’ve been travelling on for millennia. Gaza proves that our entire civilization is cancerous, and that everything we’ve been doing has failed. When you come across information which blows apart your worldview in your personal life, you can either collapse under the weight of cognitive dissonance until you find some way to plug yourself back into the comforting lies, or you can set about the hard work of forming a new way of looking at things. That’s the sort of moment we’re being collectively offered with Gaza. We’ll either accept the invitation, or continue our slide into darkness.

Daniel Levy brings a mysterious grin to my face every time he opens his mouth. sharp and thorny. Watch #WorldCentralKitchen

Opposition to the slaughter in Gaza is becoming mainstream, which is obviously great, but when political impulses go mainstream it means there's going to be a massive and concerted effort to funnel public sentiment in a direction that doesn't damage the interests of the empire. They're going to try to blame this all on Netanyahu. They're going to insist that Israel itself is fine and all that went wrong was a fluke incident in which an aberrational right wing faction briefly got into power. They're going to try to wash the western empire's hands of the mass atrocities it directly facilitated in Gaza. They're going to try to frame Biden as a basically decent politician who found himself trapped in an impossible situation. They're going to keep pretending a two-state solution is right around the corner and doing everything they can to stall out meaningful change on Palestinian rights, while blaming any obstacles to peace on the Palestinian resistance. They're going to pollute the information ecosystem with a deluge of messaging which is all designed to counter the notion that Gaza means the entire status quo needs to be overhauled — with regard to Israel-Palestine, with regard to US foreign policy, with regard to the US government itself, and with regard to the western power structure in general. They're going to say everything they need to say to ensure that everyone understands that the basic status quo in Israel, the United States and the western world is working perfectly fine, and this was all just an innocent little oopsie poopsie caused by a few bad apples. They'll justify, they'll excuse, they'll exonerate, and then they'll distract, moving public attention on to the next big thing and allowing the amnesia of the daily news churn to wash Gaza from our attention — all while pretending to be on our side. This messaging will need to be fought tooth and claw. We cannot allow them to neuter this political moment with spin and propaganda. We need to make sure their criminality remains front and center of public awareness, and we need to push for the real revolutionary changes that Gaza plainly proves are needed. Let mainstream sentiment turn against the current Israeli regime and bring an end to the butchery in Gaza, but don't let the imperial narrative managers co-opt anything. Don't let them hijack the zeitgeist that's been building. View all words and actions of the western political-media class with aggressive skepticism, and push back forcefully every time they try to push public sentiment in a direction that advantages the empire.

State Department Spokesman Urged to Resign Over 'Despicable' Attack on UN Expert ⁦@FranceskAlbs⁩ #Gaza #Genocide #Nakba #ResignMiller commondreams.org/news/state-dep…

As an Italian-Palestinian I absolutely adore @FranceskAlbs expressions when she is asked a stupid question. As an Italian, because I have similar expressions when I am asked stupid questions, as a Palestinian because I know she is genuinely speaking up for us.

Hanno Hauenstein @hahauenstein

3 years ago

Naturally, this question came from a German journalist working for a major Berlin newspaper. Watch @FranceskAlb's response.

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I don't think that we are processing yet that Western Civilisation united behind a message like 'Yes, the children are being bombed, are starving, are being orphaned and amputated in their thousands, but management says that's just policy'. We don't know how to cope with this. The gap between the evil content and the everyday form is too much

Ahmed Paul Keeler: “ 15 miles away there is food in lorries, & there are children starving & dying from starvation” #Israel

As an Israeli in this dark disgusting inhuman time, there are many things I see and hear and can tell you about and are worthy of research and serious consideration, but there is one part of it that is so uncanny, so disheartening, so extraordinary, that I can hardly describe it, and you won't get it. Because it's so hard to believe, or conceptualize. I'm referring to the total and complete lack of public debate in Israel about any of this. Try to get this to your head: for Israelis, the genocide is not happening. The war is not real. Even the low-intensity conflict with Hizbullah up north is not real. How can I explain something that doesn't exist? But it doesn't. Can you believe it? No one argues about any of this, and no one weighs the pros and cons of any single part of it. It is not talked about. Israel has captives in Gaza, but no one knows why, or as part of what. It is not talked about. It is forbidden to talk about this, or about starvation, of the scale of death and destruction in Gaza. Moreover: it is forbidden to talk about Palestinians in general, so they are never mentioned, and haven't been mentioned in 20 years at least in Israeli media. So if you try to talk to Israelis about Palestinians, they will not know what you're referring to. They will think you only say it because you hate them. Could you believe it, that the most crucial element of a society's situation can be disappeared from its conversation, its consciousness and its politics. But for Israelis, Palestine and Palestinians don't exist, I'm telling you. If they ever do exist, it is in the moment before being shot to death by a soldier or police officer - and then they die, and vanish once more. There is no genocide, no Gaza, no Palestine, no occupation, no starvation, no dead children, no pregnant women in unimaginable distress. None of it exists. It is all, 100% of it, ancient antisemitism's new clothes. You cannot truly comprehend it. It is too much to believe, I know it. I live it and can't believe it. But it's true. Israel's management of consciousness has become so expert, its propaganda skills, so profound and total, internalized so fully, that Israelis have no idea - no idea at all - where, when, and how they exist. Absolutely zero idea. And it is this component of Israel that will stay with me, and I will marvel at, and continue to always think about, and grapple with. This is the truly incredible part of it. If you told me this, or if I read it in a book, I would not believe the extent to which thought control is possible. But now I do.

1/ A personal thought- I feel no satisfaction regarding the UNSC resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. I doubt Netanyahu has the gumption to invade Rafah without American cover. The world can be pleased with itself for "getting involved". This pleasure frightens me.--->

Humanity doesn’t just need to escape from the mental prison of imperial indoctrination. It needs to escape from the heart prison as well. I’m always talking here about the need to fight empire propaganda to help the public awaken to the fact that everything we’ve been trained to believe about the world is a lie, because that insight taking root in sufficient numbers would be the first step toward the revolutionary changes our world so desperately needs. But large numbers of people opening their eyes to the reality of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful would by itself be insufficient, because people need not only to see the truth — they also need to care. Realizing the depravity and immense human suffering the US-centralized empire is responsible for creates an opportunity to respond to this insight with horror and begin resisting it — but it is only an opportunity. At that juncture it’s still possible for someone to realize that we’re not being told the truth about what’s happening in the world, but decide to play along with the lies anyway, either because the existing world order has made them wealthy, or because they are too indoctrinated with support for western power structures, or because they ideologically support Israel, or because they’re afraid of the changes and upheaval that would come with an overturning of the status quo, or because they are intellectually and morally lazy, or some other selfish reason. Realizing that you’ve been indoctrinated into accepting a pernicious status quo unlocks an important door within yourself, but just because that door is opened doesn’t mean you have to walk through it. Walking through it requires another kind of awakening — an awakening of the heart. Really no amount of knowledge or intellectual insight will ever set us free as a species in and of itself. You could upload the sum total of human knowledge into the brain of everyone on earth — including even government secrets that aren’t public knowledge — but unless this is accompanied by a collective opening of the heart, it wouldn’t make any difference. Unless people can find it within themselves to care deeply about the horrific things our rulers have been doing to our fellow human beings, no amount of knowledge about those things will catalyze real change. And there are plenty of people who know but don’t care. The most powerful government agencies in the world are run by people who know terrible secrets about our ruling power structures that we ordinary members of the public are not allowed to know, but because their loyalty is to the empire and not to humanity, they don’t care about the moral implications of what they know or the human suffering the empire is responsible for. So the demand of this moment in history is not just to understand, but to care. Not just to know what’s wrong with the world, but to feel it. Not just to awaken on the level of the head, but to awaken on the level of the heart as well. Not just to value our own personal understanding, but to value humanity as a whole. Knowledge of the truth can lead to a profound compassion for the victims of the globe-spanning power structure which rules over us and a determination to oppose its cruelty — that’s why said power structure pours so much energy into keeping everyone propagandized. But it doesn’t necessarily need to lead to such compassion. The light of truth can stop its expansion at the gates of the heart, unless there’s some willingness from somewhere deep inside us to throw those gates open. Ultimately humanity just needs to wake up, on every level. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of propaganda. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles on our hearts. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the ego. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the dualistic perspective which obfuscates the oneness of all of reality from our vision. That’s what’s being asked of us at this juncture. To wake all the way up and become a conscious species. That’s the only way we’ll ever be able to move about on this planet in a healthy and harmonious way. And we’ll either rise to the occasion or we won’t. We’ll either wake up, or we’ll destroy ourselves. I believe we have the freedom as a species to go either way.

The first night of Ramadan, Al Jazeera Studio decorates with the names of the Palestinian children killed by Israel in #Gaza Photo source: @TamerMisshal