Iska

they / them | better in red

[Omar Sakr @omarsakrpoet]

Many of the submissions in the royal commission into antisemitism are jaw-dropping examples of outright anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, explicitly demanding the erasure of any reminder of our existence from public life.

[they/them might be giants ☭ @babadookspinoza]

Knowledge is being hidden from public view at a terrifying rate. Simple info you easily could’ve found for free online 10 years ago is paywalled and buried under tons of AI slop. It’s like watching the Library of Alexandria burn. Our collective intelligence is being choked out.

[Iska @Iskadrow]

@DebunkPalestine @dlLambo Liar. Or lying machine. Targeting of paramedics, under international law, would require their *direct* participation in armed conflict, at the time of their targetting. Membership in a group is not that. Israel, by arguing otherwise, is perverting IL.

[R.Сам 🦋🐏 @Logo_Daedalus]

People have no idea that all of this is available on archive dot org for free, like every other old children’s show which isn’t a funnel for developing a gambling addiction. You can just watch all of these 90s Beatrix Potter adaptations right here: https://t.co/OklEKfHHNo

[Brian 🍄 @Is_Not_Brian]

This was all completely manufactured, there was no Thermidorian Reaction among the people. There was a generationally terrible administration that lost for very specific reasons, none of them were "they weren't racist enough" or trans bathrooms.

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

Excerpt from The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (2020):

“The fourth way that anticommunist extermination programs shaped the world is that they deformed the world socialist movement. Many of the global left-wing groups that did survive the twentieth century decided that they had to employ violence and jealously guard power or face annihilation. When they saw the mass murders taking place in these countries, it changed them. Maybe US citizens weren’t paying close attention to what happened in Guatemala, or Indonesia. But other leftists around the world definitely were watching. When the world’s largest Communist Party without an army or dictatorial control of a country was massacred, one by one, with no consequences for the murderers, many people around the world drew lessons from this, with serious consequences.
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:
“Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.”

[Gautam Bhatia @gautambhatia88]

Finally got around to reading China Miéville, the legal scholar.

I looked for shards of the lyrical science fiction writer leaping out of the legal prose, but this is a brilliant work of expository law on its own terms. And +100 for explaining Pashukanis better than Pashukanis.

[Christopher Satoor​​ @aufgehenderRest]

"Tosaka offers a ruthless philosophical critique of contemporary ideology that exposes liberalism's deep complicity with fascism. The Japanese Ideology provides a materialist analysis of the reactionary ideology then overtaking Japan, with profound significance for anywhere fascism has taken root. Modeled after Marx and Engels's The German Ideology, it critiques idealism as the common ground for liberalism and fascism, against which only historical materialism can suffice."

[Sturgeon's Law @Sturgeons_Law]

A pic of the figure specifically called "the bodhisattva of compassion who hears the cries of all suffering beings" might be the funniest one to use in a post about how Eastern religions are amoral.

[John F Sullivan @JohnF_Sullivan]

“If one enters almost any bookstore in the English speaking world in search of a book about classical Athens or the early Roman Republic written for a general reader, one will have many options. But if one looks for such a book about early Chinese history, there are none.”

[Maha Hussaini @MahaGaza]

"If anyone has survived this starvation,
it is this chicken.
She survived my knife through nine displacements.
Every time I reached for her neck, someone stopped me:
my wife,
Ayloul,
and Zein [my children], who found in his chicken friend something worth saving.

In a tent whose thin strips were colder than the hunger surrounding it,
she felt she was a burden to us—eating anything,
moving so lightly no one could hear her.
Even her clucking was faint,
and her gaze seemed to apologise for still being alive.
But what truly saved her wasn’t us.
It was the egg.
Every three days, she laid one egg—warm—
in a time when even a loaf of bread had disappeared.
We would divide it:
half for Zein,
the other half for Ayloul,
and I would postpone my hunger,
filling myself just by watching them.
And between one egg and the next,
a question circled in my mind:
Do I slaughter her, so we can eat for two days,
or keep her alive… so we can endure longer?

Even when my friend Hamed broke his arm
and needed any protein in this void,
I decided to slaughter her for him.
He looked at her for a long time,
then said:
“No, Malek… I can’t bear this guilt.
I won’t drink her broth… I won’t be the reason.”
In that moment, I understood:
we were saving ourselves from ourselves.
It was a test of the last part within us
that had not yet turned savage.
We could not bring ourselves to harm a chicken—
yet this vile world found it easy to abandon our children."

- Malek Shinbary, Palestinian from Gaza

[Hüseyin Dogru @hussedogru]

You can't make this up.
It's World Press Freedom Day, and these posters are on my doorstep: "Free Press. Protect what matters to us."

The very same @eucouncil literally sanctioned me for exactly that.

This is definitely going to be my campaign poster.

[Lake Eater @lakeeater]

"treatlerism" is so much more analytically precise and politically useful than "consumerism" it's ridiculous

[morbidly doebese @bighorsebox]

the reason this happens is really funny

raytheon figured out in like the 80s if they didn't make being gay as shameful in their corporate culture "give us state secrets or we'll tell everyone you're gay", a normally very effective blackmail technique, would not work as well

[zana @overdosingrot]

This is the abstract of the study THEY CITED

"More remarkably, we found that playing an action video game can virtually eliminate this gender difference in spatial attention and simultaneously decrease the gender disparity in mental rotation ability, a higher-level process in spatial cognition. After only 10 hr of training with an action video game, subjects realized substantial gains in both spatial attention and mental rotation, with women benefiting more than men. "

CAN TRANSPHOBES AND MISOGYNISTS JUST NOT READ OR SOMETHING???

[GlumBird @GlumBird]

Global industrial agriculture is on the brink of collapse. Planting season has been scuppered, and there's no let up.

[Nikhil Pal Singh @nikhil_palsingh]

Jasbir Puar basically got driven from the US academy for identifying Israel’s claim to “a right to maim.” https://t.co/gs4rpSZhm3

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

The media carries significant responsibility for allowing us to arrive at a place where Reform can announce that they will open concentration camps without mass shock and horror.

We are on dark and uncharted territory; we must turn back the tide on fascism.

[DeborahFeldman @Deborah_Feldman]

Also ich bin da definitiv nicht sprachlos, eher gelangweilt. Das alles ist die natürliche Konsequenz eines völlig ausgearteten Philosemitismus, wie uns schon Eleonore Sterling in 1965 vorgewarnt hat. Das hat System, und alle sind darin verwickelt.

[eyal weizman @weizman_eyal]

On architecture as the continuation of genocide by other means… https://t.co/e9Y8NpvclF