If your only justification here is
The first thing I mentioned was ethnic cleansing, which tends to radicalize people after a few decades of it.
But also, Israel has Palestine inside a literal fucking fence. They control the fucking water supply. Yes, they are responsible for Palestine
Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat?
Because they were instrumental in creating that terrorist threat in the first place, not only by perpetrating ethnic cleansing but by directly funding Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterbalance against the secular PLO.
Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis
Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.
It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”
https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/
I’ll also throw in Asimov’s review of 1984 while I’m ranting about this creep
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
framework for statecraft
I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It’s sort of an “I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls” shibboleth.
Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
how old were you when the USSR fell? Did you experience communism, or the capitalist takeover after communism fell?
communism involves the abolition of the government. If you want to know what America does to communist movements undefended by government look at Indonesia in 1965–66
Economic liberalization is a defense against the kind of economic warfare that Cuba has been subjected to. Those are really the only two options: play ball with capitalism to some extent, or get strangled by sanctions.
I’ve been speaking with other more informed communists and they’ve told me
Lol this reads like social engineering to shift perception of ingroup mores. I guess I’m paranoid after seeing that Atlantic Council whitepaper calling for greater control of the fediverse.
it means they have one foot in the working class and one foot on the other side of the fence. their material interests are only partially aligned with those of other workers, and partially aligned with the interests of people who own for a living. they are in a position to throw another working person out on the street or raise their rent, and to potentially get rewarded for doing so. it’s a perverse incentive.
you’re doing less of the same thing the huge property groups are doing, but you’re still doing it
kills them by the hundreds
the death toll is a bit higher than that
5,590 Palestinians and 251 Israelis died in conflict from 2008–2020
The absurd thing is that Israel helped create and fund Hamas initially as a counterweight to the largely secular leftist Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat. This whole situation is partially blowback from an Israeli effort to divide-and-conquer Palestine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/opinion/letters/israel-gaza-palestinians.html
In 1981, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, told me that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090926212507/http:/online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says [retired Israeli official Avner Cohen], a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas.
The secular PLO has now largely been supplanted by Hamas in Gaza.
is the joke that you want them all to suffocate to death?
And don’t make the mistake of turning this into a class war about “oppressed people”. Muhammed filled palaces with treasure he stole from the people he murdered.
so, there’s no oppression in Palestine now because Muhammad was rich in the year 632?
it seems racist to view all Palestinians as a hive mind
And as for this comment,
- fears and mistrusts the media (to an extreme)
- “the West”
This is frustrating, because, while there’s a lot you don’t know, there are at least two instances you definitely do know about: the Nayirah testimony, and the Iraq WMDs reports. The wars and sanctions following those lies killed millions of people and displaced and immiserated millions more. There’s a term for this: manufacturing consent. Many other examples have never received the same degree of attention because America did not use them to justify major wars.
And yes, “the West.” Imperialism still exists, books and papers are written about this by serious people. Even in the thread where you were banned, people had already started to bring up details. Imperialism is a little better hidden than it used to be, but it’s still not that well hidden. Michael Hudson’s “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” is a good source.
They act like Nazis… the behavior makes a really bad first impression
nazis who were very intent on telling you about queer rights in Cuba and colonialism in the global south.
The conversation has gone stale while I’ve been swamped with work, but I’m going to respond anyway.
Looking back at the modlog, what you actually said was that their pronouns “look like an alt-right satire of pronouns” and that anyone using those pronouns must be a “basement dweller.” And people with those pronoun tags were right there reading your comments. Why the fuck would you do that? I actually got mad reading it. Whatever your motivations, you walked in and made it very clear you had no respect for people’s pronoun tags and no interest in understanding them, right to their faces.
At one point you compared neopronoun tags to being trans-species, whatever the fuck that meant
You also seemed dismissive throughout the thread, on every topic that came up, which was frustrating to read because first you made all these assumptions about people and then you showed so little interest in what they were actually saying! The one exception was maybe when you asked for a source on Cuba — but did you even expect to get one? What is just rhetorical? Maybe you got banned before you could respond, I don’t fucking know. Did you even click on the information you asked for? In 2022 Cubans themselves democratically drafted the country’s new progressive family code in over 80,000 citizen councils around the island. Hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free since 2008. I think this is interesting information that you might want to know. People also brought up trends in state regulation of farming around the world, neocolonial cash crop economics, Iraqi food imports and exports, IMF policies toward food exporters in the global south, the British planned economy during WW2, Chinese agribusiness and farming co-ops, soil exhaustion, and grammatical gender, and you seemed to show zero interest in any of it. You responded to these comments with paper-thin truisms about liberal values and basically tuned everyone out, called people misinformation trolls, and somehow managed to conclude that all the people in that thread were fucking nazis pretending to be queer communists for three years with no audience on a defederated site.
And for the most part, the worst thing anyone called you was “liberal,” except for one trans user who called you a fascist and told you to post hog after you said the trans-species thing — probably because it kinda sounded like one of those right wing “gay marriage today, bestiality tomorrow” talking points.
Reading that thread, yeah I understand why they were mad.
For the record, on hexbear, pronoun tags are not only a list of “things you can call me” but also a casual way for some users to communicate their identity and personality. Having two pronoun slots and an extended set of options not only allows for more flexibility in conversation (like them vs comrade) but also more granular self-expression, which is nice when you can’t fucking see or hear each other. In practice, the default thing people call each other is “they/them.” Someone with “love/loves” as their pronoun tag isn’t gonna get mad at you if you call them “them.” It’s the sort of thing you pick up on if you take the time to actually understand the site culture.
There’s not much more frustrating in conversation than when someone has their mind made up about you incorrectly and superficially, and they’re not interested in understanding who you actually are or what you believe or why you believe it. Maybe you were just bewildered by unfamiliar takes and you shut down a little. I don’t fucking know.
You called them unhinged for having neo pronouns. People have been attacking them for years, they expect a fight, and if you come in and fucking mock their pronouns and talk down to them they’re not gonna care enough to find out about your real world stances or activism, they’re just going to look at the comment right in front of them, and assume you’re some bigoted CNN lib who pays performative lip service to genderqueer rights but sees them as goofy caricatures and has no interest in understanding them. They get enough people like that already. If they took the time to investigate and understand and categorize everyone who threw shit at them it’d be a fucking full time job.
driving them out of their homes and into shrinking, increasingly crowded prison cities with horrendous living conditions is ethnic cleansing. But they also have killed many thousands of Palestinians, not counting the 11,000 since Oct 7.