Yesterday, I published an article about https://t.co/0bhBHhWvVa
I want to issue a public correction and a sincere apology for an error.
In that article, I said 500,000 people had signed up. That was incorrect.
It is now 600,000 — and counting.
Real change is coming.
Farewell to film director and artist David Lynch (1946-2025). His visionary work, frequently unsettling and surreal, has influenced countless generations of other creative minds. We can speak so clearly of something being 'Lynchian' today!
Angela McRobbie introduces both her new edited book on Ulrike Ottinger’s oeuvre and a screening of the queer feminist avant-garde film ‘Ticket of No Return’
#filmstudies#ulrikeottinger
DIGITAL BODY FESTIVAL is a brand new festival exploring the moving body and digital technology, taking place next weekend Hackney Wick 15-17 Nov 2024. https://t.co/I6keXLZXNS
We have panel presentations, dance performances and installations, and my own keynote.
‘There is no shortage of TikToks of crying students warning prospective enrollees to go somewhere else.’ A potted history of relentless, brutal cuts & resistance at @GoldsmithsUoL published by @_TheLondoner https://t.co/XPqzHG7rKT
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.
I could not agree more old man hubris sheer stubborn arrogance no thought for others ....or for the party that elected him. He could have gone 3 years ago with grace.
I am fed up with this false argument that we are all responsible, which I can easily contradict with some basic facts and figures.
Why do people use arguments like this, when plainly these arguments are untrue?
1/🧵
If you listen to anyone this morning, let it be Gideon Levy. A phenomenal Israeli journalist who has been speaking truth to power for decades. Share his words. Far and Wide.
It’s starting to dawn on Israelis how bad they fvcked up.
Also, they aren’t protesting because they see Palestinians as human. They’re protesting because they can’t win.
1/ What is happening in Israel today? We should begin with what is not happening. Very few are calling for an end to the genocidal campaign in Gaza that is spilling over into the West Bank. We don't care about the Palestinians and fail to connect their plight to ours. --->
Tickets will go on sale from 24th September to coincide with a full festival programme launch. Head to the Digital Body Festival website for more details, including information on how you can get involved.
Announcing the first DIGITAL BODY FESTIVAL, taking place in East London this autumn. Digital Body Festival will provide the platform for world-class artists, thinkers and emerging talent to showcase work across multiple digital formats.
The new festival, exploring the creative intersection of the moving body and digital technology, will take place across a series of spaces within Hackney Bridge, Hackney Wick from 15-17 November 2024.
At Goldsmiths University of London 62 have agreed to leave, 17 people have been redeployed, there are 18 people with their situation unresolved until this evening. As a union branch we're trying to save those 18.
@goldsmithsucu
Extraordinary text by Israeli historian Omer Bartov, a former IDF soldier who's now the world's leading scholar on genocide and the Holocaust: https://t.co/BCjj3HNeUC
He directly compares the ideology in today's Israel to that of Nazi Germany, says Israel is committing genocide and that it might be headed towards "self-annihilation".
Some extracts:
"[Israel has adopted a] logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis...
I told [some Zionist students] the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany’s internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 1930 to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them...
By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”."