mesoplastics gourmand 🇵🇸 get on upscrolled!

syndic of the water tribunal of the plain of stickney

[Sean Padraig McCarthy @SeanMcCarthyCom]

The term “conspiracy theory” is something the ruling class repeats to produce a Pavlovian response where liberals shut down all critical thinking and decide yes, a plane can dive 14,000 feet without any water cups spilling

[Sarah Lazare @sarahlazare]

Reminder: Dockworkers in France, Greece, Basque Country, Turkey, Morocco, and Italy are calling for strikes on October 30 “against war and militarization” and to protest “the genocide of the Palestinian people.” https://t.co/8Iy2KvO9fU

[Cardi @ohcrapohno]

Big whoop. In America our professors live in studio apartments and go to jail for saying the word zionism out loud

[Ahmed 🇾🇪 Zaid @Ahmed175143]

Aaron Bushnell you will always be remembered

[New Wojack City @deusexmoniker]

15 years ago when Obama started helping the Saudis bomb Yemeni children I bet he had no idea those kids would grow up to disrupt a trillion dollars in global shipping and crater the Israeli economy

[James🔻 @GoodVibePolitik]

No problem bro have fun

[DEI speedwagon🌹🇵🇸 〽️ YES on B&I, NO on 43 @uhshanti]

Pakistan out there talking to the Saudis like United Healthcare

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

Palestinians gave their lives to tell this story. Inside and outside of Gaza, we screamed to the world what Israel was doing, like we’ve been screaming for decades. But it’s only Israelis who are believed, celebrated as brave storytellers, the perpetrators humanized and given the benefit of the doubt, the vestiges of moral flickers amplified to complicate their decisions to kill our families.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

It’s crucial to remember that the Nova music festival was supposed to end on Friday, October 6, but the organizers reached out to the IDF to get permission to extend it for an extra day. We know that warnings were everywhere at that point, yet the IDF approved the extension and added no security.

Now we know, from new reporting in Haaretz, that Netanyahu had explicitly been warned 10 days earlier that Hamas was planning an “earthquake” of an attack.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Don’t let them re-write history: Gloria Steinem was a CIA asset who was tasked with subverting the feminist movement away from class-based analysis.

She founded the Independent Research Service that was funded by the CIA to spread anti-communist propaganda at youth festivals abroad.

When she was exposed as a CIA operative in 1967, Steinem confirmed her role to The New York Times without apology, claiming the CIA is “liberal, nonviolent, and honorable” and that she would do it again.

The CIA is one of the most violent organizations in history.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

she was also a zionist who consistently defended Israeli aggression. In 1975, went on the attack against women, mostly from the Global South, because they condemned zionism at the UN's first World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City.
like all zionists, she subordinated all she professed to believe in—namely, in her case, the agency of women—in order to uphold a chauvinistic, genocidal jewish colony in the heart of West Asia.

[Silt |🍄 @d1rtr4t]

Blew my mind with its clarity and answered so many questions ive had in the back of my mind ever since I started reading Marx and trying to apply it to daily life. Highly recc to my oomfs, even if you havent read Marx.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

true story: Ratko Mladić's own war time diary was used as evidence in his war crimes tribunal. In it, he wrote of the arms and training supplied by Israel to Serbia AFTER the international arms embargo, during the genocide, shortly before the Srebrenica massacre.

Journalists, international investigators, and human rights organizations documented extensive physical and circumstantial proof on the ground, which heavily corroborated the transactions hinted at in Ratko Mladić’s diary. They recovered spent artillery shells, mortar rounds, and specialized ammunition with distinct Hebrew inscriptions, found at Serb military positions surrounding besieged Bosnian cities, including Sarajevo.

When human rights lawyer Eitay Mack tried to petition to the court to declassify Israeli archives to ascertain the extent of the weapons transfers, Israel's High Court refused, claiming that the truth could damage Israel's reputation.

[Dr Vira Ameli | ویرا عاملی @viraameli]

Much has already been written about the hypocrisy of this letter. But one claim deserves particular attention. The authors repeat the story that Israel struck the ‘transgender section’ of Evin prison, purportedly housing 100 transgender prisoners. This false story circulated internationally after it was reported by the New York Times, before later investigations found no evidence to support it and the key source denied ever making the claim attributed to him.

Having spent my PhD years researching HIV in Iran, a subject that necessarily involved studying the legal, social and healthcare realities facing transgender people, I know full well that transgender people are not imprisoned in Iran for being transgender. Iran legally recognises transgender people and permits gender reassignment surgery. Furthermore, there are no dedicated prison wings housing 100 transgender prisoners.

Yet people who were willing to uncritically repeat such an implausible story are now writing open letters to Iranian prisoners, as though they possess a deep understanding of the people they claim to write to. It is another reminder of how often narratives about Iran are constructed from assumptions and second-hand mythologies, rather than from serious engagement with realities on the ground.

https://t.co/Sav02QXd2I

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

I'm struggling with this open letter, signed by people I admire deeply—individuals who've dedicated their lives to Black liberation and anti-colonial struggles.

But I just can't reconcile my instinctive reaction to the letter with the respect I hold for the signatories. Prominent intellectuals in the imperial core are using their voice at this hour primarily to criticize a government under active bombardment. While I believe that no government is beyond reproach or criticism, I have a lot of questions and cautions about this open letter.

The overall framing of is of two equally opposing sides—two blades of the same scissors. This is a wholly unfair representation of what is in reality a profound asymmetry of power. On one hand, a country that has been subjected to crippling, decades-long economic sanctions, now fighting kinetically an existential anti-imperial struggle; on the other hand is nuclear, AI-powered empire, with its inexhaustible money, munitions, supply lines, coalitions, surveillance, and near total grip on international political, legal, information, and economic infrastructure.

The severity of the imperial onslaught seems to be minimized in the letter. This is perhaps for the sake of brevity, but it should not stand without critique. What the letter describes as "current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults" undersells what's actually happening in the "six months into a war". Unprovoked Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers that targeting a an elementary school that killed 180 children and teachers, the country's spiritual leader and his family, more than a third of the country's political, military, and scientific leadership, civilian infrastructure, including water, farmlands, electric grids and power plants, an unarmed navy ship at sea full of young cadets returning from a peacetime maritime exercise in international waters. This after decades of attacks that went unanswered by Iran, including Israel's repeated assassinations of Iranian scientists, assassination of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranians generals in Syria, strike on Iranian consulate in Damascus, assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil; the US shot down civilian aircraft of Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. There were endless cyber attacks, covert and overt naval sabotage and so much more—all of it without response from Tehran.

The letter does not identify who the prisoners are or why they were arrested. In neglecting to do so, there is no engagement with the very real security threats, proven foreign interference, terrorism, and espionage, which Iranian authorities cite as reasons for some arrests and prosecutions. I have no doubt there are some who've been wrongly imprisoned, but we also know that many of those who were rounded up confessed to working with the Mossad, and recently a group who gruesomely disembowled a young reciter of the Quran are among those who are imprisoned.

There are currently 2 million incarcerated people in the United States, the largest prison population anywhere on earth. It is estimated that 4-6% of them are innocent—that's 80,000-120,000, about two NFL stadiums full of innocent lives behind bars. Setting that percentage against Iran's estimated 15,000 political prisoners, that's roughly 600-900 individuals. They deserve fairness, but to center them in what is perhaps the most existential anti-colonial struggle of our lives feels misguided.

I would also argue that comparing Iran's prisons with Israel's decades-long, systematic, colonial detention of indigenous Palestinians is another form of false equivalence. So is the comparison with America's ICE detentions, separation of families and loss of children in the process (who are most likely trafficked). It is not remotely fair to put a revolutionary government, barely a few decades out from under colonial boots and still under sanctions, in the same "carceral" category as two settler colonial states. One cannot ignore the enormous disparity of political, military, and historical circumstances.

The people held in Iranian jails are overwhelmingly Iranian citizens, prosecuted under the state's own criminal and national security laws, regardless of whether one thinks the laws are unfair. Palestinians held in Israeli administrative detention are non-citizen subjects of a military occupation, detained and re-detained indefinitely under military decrees without charge or trial. People in US detentions are another category—non citizens held under civil immigration laws pending removal proceedings with access to immigration courts, however corrupt they may be. These are three distinct legal relationships—1) a state and it's own citizens; 2) a state and migrants crossing its borders, and; 3) an occupying power and a stateless occupied indigenous population. The letter collapses them all into a single architecture of "carceral states everywhere," creating an analysis that is not supported by the underlying facts. It creates rhetorical equivalence that treats "administrative detention," "political imprisonment," and "immigration detention" as though the political stakes of each were the same, when the questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and self-determination underneath them are not.

The phrase that knocked me off balance was this: "...we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism." I note that @agent_of_change addressed this in a recent post, which he identified as the "load-bearing phrase" of the letter. Indeed, it does so much heavy lifting and I'm at a loss why the word "hollow" would have been inserted. It's so clearly deliberate, but why? How can Iran's insistence on sovereignty and dignity be called "hollow," despite the grave and terrible cost to themselves? They could have taken the easy path a long time ago and bowed to empire, like some of their Arab neighbors have done. They've chosen self-possession and loyalty to their ancestors and children instead. That can be called many things, but hollow is not it.

https://t.co/6w2XgYeV4i

[Degen CPA @drewvento]

It was a tallboy that had 12% alcohol and 156mg of caffeine per can. We would drink two of them, vomit different colors of the rainbow, and then black out, as was the style at the time.

[David Griscom @DavidGriscom]

I like that the voice of the centrist dem party is a guy lying on his death bed

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

interesting how everyone who says this in dc has a photo like this

[Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09]

One of the most brutal scenes in human history has been leaked.

The moment the tents of displaced people were bombed in the southern Gaza Strip, in the Mawasi area of ​​Khan Yunis, killing more than 500 civilians.

A video that the world must never forget.

[Rashida Tlaib @RashidaTlaib]

Haley Stevens takes money from DTE.