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I refuse to reblog this from a blog named "liberalsarecool"

Liberals are the ones means testing us

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In the town where I grew up, there was a large statue in one of the parks, of a famous historical white colonizer. I'm not going to say who specifically, suffice it to say that it was someone who wasn't worth memorializing for their deeds. And as you can imagine, this statue was a frequent target of vandalism, with paint or toilet paper or eggs on multiple occasions. Now, the local council was generally pretty lax when it came to repairing potholes or other public damage in the town, but every time, 24 hours after this particular statue was hit, the same person would always appear in a Hi-Vis vest, hat, mask and sunglasses, carrying a bucket of water, and wash it clean. They would do it as quickly as possible, but always made sure the face and the name carved at the bottom were generously scrubbed. This only encouraged people to do it again, and so it became a vicious cycle.

Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn't even work for the council. They were supposedly just some 'good samaritan' who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn't bother putting the statue up again.

Much later, we found out that the anonymous 'samaritan' had been deliberately washing the statue with a bucket of saltwater, which had dramatically corroded it, causing irreversible accumulative damage far worse than spray paint ever would have done. It's even theorized that they were also often the one spray-painting it, just so that they had an excuse to come back after a day to wash it.

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"The YouTuber patriarch of a right-wing Canadian family, Arend Feenstra, decided that he’d had just about enough of the gay people existing in his country. So he decided to take his family to Russia instead.

“We didn’t feel safe for our children there in the future anymore,” said avowedly Christian dad of eight Arend Feenstra on Russian state TV. “There’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ+, trans, just a lot of things that we don’t agree with that they teach there now, and we wanted to get away from that for our children.”

...

Would it have been a good idea for them to learn Russian before they went? Yes, yes it would. Did they do that? No, they did not. “We were naive on that,” said Anneesa Feenstra, matriarch and former beet farmer. “I needed to use the washroom, and on the doors said male and female, but I didn’t know which was which!”

...

In a YouTube episode titled “our first week in Russia”, Arend Feenstra showcases the hospitality that the local people living in their district had shown to the clueless family, who hadn’t brought enough cold-weather clothes. The locals donated snow suits for the children, and even helped them with their language issues.

...

Unfortunately, no amount of kindness from strangers can make up for significant financial problems: something the Feenstras encountered because – who knew?! – Visa or MasterCard don’t work there, and authorities closed the Russian account they moved their money to due to it being a suspiciously high sum with no explanation of where it came from. Similar anti-money laundering laws exist in the UK and US.

Arguing for their money proved incredibly challenging since Russia doesn’t require any bank, or any business, to hire English translators.

This caused a fairly significant tantrum, posted on YouTube by Anneesa Feenstra and then deleted. “I’m very disappointed in this country at this point,” she said – about a snag that could have easily been solved in advance with a quick Google search. “I’m ready to jump on a plane and get out of here”."

Read the full article here: https://t.co/t1b3Y7xFce

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Somebody on Twitter pointed out that almost all of the netflix Avatar show was filmed so that the focus of the action would be at the center, so it could be viewed vertically, like on tiktok

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Wow, a pensioner bought a home for the Ukrainian refugees staying with her, that’s just so nice. I hope this headline is 100% true and I can move on with my day. There’s some good people in this world.

THAT IS NOT BUYING SOMEONE A HOUSE. THAT’S BECOMING THEIR LANDLORD.

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 if anyone’s wondering how most Scottish folk reacted to Thatcher’s death this interview is a classic

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you ever put reporting scotland on the TV and feel like you're being talked down to?

That's the BBC for you

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this reply kills me 😭

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And you can do that right here: https://iww.org/membership/  Wow!!

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I don't think now, at the time Iran is viciously defending against US imperialism, is the time to be making left-communist critiques of them.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not some unimpeachable bastion of anti-imperialism in western asia and it is dangerous to withhold critique just because it is opposed to US hegemony. The IRI is a theocratic ethnostate pushing back against euro-american imperialism while enacting its own centuries-long imperialism on the ethnic and religious minorities that fall within and around its borders. On a weekly if not daily basis, the IRGC, the paramilitary basijis, as well as the regular police harass, arrest, and kill not only such minorities as Kurds, Balochs, and Ahwazi Arabs (don't have to look far for this), but also ethnic Persian political dissidents and gender and sexual minorities.

The history of the 1979 revolution speaks to the development and rise of Khomeinism in the 1970s as a bourgeoisie opportunism that claimed the martyrs of Iranian communists while at every turn promising the disenfranchised baazaaris the protection of their private property. The purge of the Mojahedin in the months after the revolution, the associated purge of all deemed communist, and the immediate suppression of Kurdish autonomy movements in the northwest, all form the legacy of Khomeinism. It is important to be honest about this, to be honest about the reformulation of institutional misogyny and the other ills of Pahlavi Iran under the IRI, while simultaneously recognizing that the revolution was successful in one thing: exorcising the puppeteering hands of the united states from the country. It is important not to fall into the trap of valorizing an imperial power, while understanding that the only liberatory future for the people on the plateau and surrounding regions is revolution from within and below, not external intervention. These are compatible and, indeed, complementary halves of a whole politic!

As a Tehrani, and particularly as an ethnic Persian/Iranian Azerbaijani (Iranian Azerbaijanis being subject to linguistic and cultural suppression, but nonetheless perhaps the most integrated minority), it strikes me as my responsibility to talk about this. And it is something I talk about regardless of what is going on. As an esoteric Shi'a, it especially seems like my responsibility to talk about what Khomeinism has wrought.

And all of that is to say nothing of the fact that in my post I was just critiquing left-Shi'a infatuation with Khomeinism qua ideology, with no mention of the IRI—whose relationship with Khomeinism is varied, nebulous, and I would say secondary to the three decades of theocratic nationalism that has developed since Khomeini's death.

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almost a year after i released a 2019 copy of the nofly list for journalism and research there is now an in depth paper on the ethno-religious over-representation in it. very interesting read, and confirms much of what we already suspected!

Garofalo, M. (2024) “Singular Purpose: Calculating the Degree of Ethno-Religious Over-representation in the US No-Fly List”, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. doi: 10.5204/ijcjsd.3069.

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Getting There: The Road to the Zapatista Encuentro

https://crimethinc.com/Encuentroad

The Zapatistas burst onto the world stage on New Year's Day 1994 with an uprising that established an autonomous zone in Chiapas. Thirty years later, at the opening of 2024, they hosted a gathering to commemorate those events and look to the future. In this report, our correspondent describes a series of adventures the road to this gathering, and what they found when they arrived.

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"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

-Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossesed

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"The North Korean regime in the ‘50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortable—sit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward position—only, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them you’ve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniques—according to Korean friends of mine, they’re actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small children—they were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.

Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country that’s being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But I’m speaking here even of the ones that aren’t. For most, it’s as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerable—only, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. There’s never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You can’t get a permit. You’re always standing in line. If something breaks it’s impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you can’t get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), it’s anyone’s guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense. It can take eight hours to drive 20 kilometers to see your girlfriend, and doing so will almost certainly mean having machine guns waved in your faces and being shouted at in a language you half understand by people who think you’re subhuman. So you do most of your dalliance by phone. When you can afford the minutes. There are endless traffic jams before and after checkpoints and drivers bicker and curse and try not to take it out on one another. Everyone lives no more than 12 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean but even on the hottest day, it’s absolutely impossible to get to the beach. Unless you climb the wall, there are places you can do that; but then you can expect to be hunted every moment by security patrols. Of course teenagers do it anyway. But it means swimming is always accompanied by the fear of being shot. If you’re a trader, or a laborer, or a driver, or a tobacco farmer, or clerk, the very process of subsistence is continual stream of minor humiliations. Your tomatoes are held and left two days to rot while someone grins at you. You have to beg to get your child out of detention. And if you do go to beseech the guards, those same guards might arbitrarily decide to hold you to pressure him to confess to rock-throwing, and suddenly you are in a concrete cell without cigarettes. Your toilet backs up. And you realize: you’re going to have to live like this forever. There is no “political process.” It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life."

-David Graeber, Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank