The IDF has already killed many many times more civilians, using many more missiles over many weeks, than Hamas has in a single major attack.
Despite that, this the cartoon depicts 3 panels of 3 missiles each from Hamas compared 1 panel of 1 missile from the IDF.
Given that overwhelming and disproportionate response has been Israeli policy for as long as I've been alive, it's fair to say that this comic deliberately misrepresents reality
Issues that don’t alter economic arrangements yet are the focus of mainstream politics, or issues amplified and masqueraded as politics for this specific purpose. The idea that people you resent being treated worse than you is a political achievement, is the foundational mechanism of culture war. As the basic economic arrangement is no longer on the table or negotiable politically, politics increasingly becomes focused on individual resentments. The right is fueled by culture war right now more than any other political faction.
It does seem like a good diversion tactic to blame a completely unrelated minority for a completely unrelated problem when you really want to protect billionaires from raised taxes.
I mean just move the discussion as far away as possible from them.
They want people to punch down, blame the person scraping by on welfare or the person who’s identity is maligned for what is actually caused by massive wealth disparity. MLK Jr didn’t advocate fighting a vague notion of racism, he convinced black and white unions they were stronger together and that economic equality as a class program was the mechanism to combat the issue, with specific laws and legislation and job action as the tools available. In a certain context, the biggest advocacy group for the rights of gender non-conforming individuals in the world right now is the AFL-CIO.
The TEXTBOOK playbook for bringing people together to find peace, is to start by finding some common ground. On LITERALLY anything. Then you build on that. “Maybe, given enough time, we can grow to understand to have enough the same that we can work together”
Culture war is the simple inversion: find something, ANYTHING that you can disagree about. Then you build on that. “Maybe, given enough time, we can grow to understand others to be different enough that working together is impossible”
The right is way more hooked into the culture war, but plenty of leftist communities cannibalize each other via “no true Scots”-ing each other with intersectionality. I see very little patience or compassionate education on intersectionality, and instead see a competition about how quickly one can scold. Regardless of whether that’s valid, it sure as hell makes it difficult to build bonds with other groups or onboard new folks to leftist ideas.
Definitely agree and I think sometimes people conflate intersectionality with the way it’s been commodified and adopted by capital and it causes debates because it’s not precise about what the problem is. A lot of left scholars have been a lot more pointed about the “problem with diversity” not being about “diversity” or inclusion etc. It’s just important to recognize why it doesn’t threaten capitalist institutions, which doesn’t mean it’s bad, it means it’s ineffective for that purpose, it’s like being nice to people at work. Education on intersectionality that a lot of people are exposed to is often mediated/coerced by employers through business relationships with HR/diversity industry consultants. They’re presenting very specific notions of the topic that they’re able to sell to employers, and employers are being sold on it as basically a branding/marketing thing to “make the company look good,” but leadership might even be personally invested in it and genuinely want people to feel included at their company, it’s not a radical notion at all. The problem is the inherent conflict between employers and employees and how it dictates what notions of intersectionality or EDI are presented in that context.
Yeah as a culture war target I don't have anymore choice in being a part of the war than Ukraine does. I don't get to opt out, and people can say, "Just don't fight the culture war, fight the class war," and it's like, dude, you're telling the majority of your potential allies to fuck off and die so you can charge a pillbox solo. It ain't gonna go well.
Yeah, class reductionism will only ever lead to more oppression of those already marginalised.
If your leftism doesn't include intersectionality, you're doing it wrong.
(to be clear - "culture wars" are a right winged distraction, but they are based on very real and massively impactful systems of oppression that they are trying to maintain, ignoring this only enables them, and guarantees those systems will remain even if we get economical change)
This is the right take, IMO. Labelling race, gender etc issues as “diversions” has the same flavour as “I know the slaves are oppressed, but freeing them doesn’t end capitalism, does it?”
The diversion is the idea of rainbow capitalism. For example: fighting for the right for people of any identity to own slaves is not a valid goal and also won’t “free the slaves.” Ending slavery is the goal. Rainbow capitalism acts as a shell game to divert energy toward token concessions and labels them victories. Anti-racism and feminism should be (and I would say, are) at the core of any coherent flavor of leftism, but diverse oppression is still oppression and a rainbow flag on a Raytheon missile is not a win.
Edit: should have read the comment further down. Said what I meant but with gooder words.
If your leftism doesn’t include intersectionality, you’re doing it wrong.
Similarly, if your intersectionality doesn’t include leftism, it’s literally worse than useless because it functionally works to maintain the underlying material conditions that served to create whatever social injustice you are fighting.
I definitely don’t equate intersectionality with culture war, but I think it’s important to understand why capitalism has adopted intersectionality in the specific way it has. A lot of the debates about it on the left seem to be rooted in conflating intersectionality with how it’s commodified. Like you can think Robin D’Angelo is ridiculous without throwing intersectionality out the window.
All the big names I’ve seen labeled class reductionists are basically involved with diversity and intersectionality at some level, and openly express their support of those sort of initiatives, or have actually benefitted from them and admit it. Adolph Reed had a great example of when they were negotiating their collective agreement the EDI commitments were one of the first thing signed off and agreed to, but it took them a year of arbitration to get more sick days or something like that. It’s the same with my union as well. It just shows how capital is not against EDI or intersectionality, they’re against exploiting people less.
In Siberia they actually traditionally dried fly agaric (amanita muscaria) mushrooms. Flying reindeers are a thing, they always ate the mushrooms and got high af, but without any headaches the next day.
Vodka replaced the mushrooms, as its easy to store I guess. It was sold to them.
The santa claus story is veeery random. Like flying reindeers just like that, a dude in red-white clothes, a pine tree with red balls on it.
People dried fly agaric mushrooms on pine trees, they are red. Sibirian shamans dressed like a fly agaric mushroom and went from house to house to gift them to people and make them less depressed, because they are said to help with that
It’s a little more disgusting than you’ve mentioned here.
There was one aspect of Siberian mushroom intoxication, reported even in the earliest sources, that must have seemed singularly shocking to one who encountered it for the first time—the drinking of the urine of a bemushroomed person, and also the urine of reindeer that had browsed—as reindeer apparently like to do—on the fly-agaric.
By no means all the tribes that used Amanita muscaria also drank fly-agaric urine, but the custom was sufficiently well-developed and widespread to have drawn the attention of almost every observer—from Count Filip Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swedish colonel who spent a dozen years in Siberia as a prisoner of war and reported on his observations in the early eighteenth century, to the trained ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Europeanization of Siberia, which had begun in the seventeenth century, was well underway, but before traditional tribal life began to be radically transformed even in the remoter hinterlands in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
I’m admittedly not well-versed in international affairs, but hasn’t Israel been waiting for an opportunity to do exactly what they’re doing for decades? We’ve armed them to the tooth, and that has always been at least a little concerning because we understood this to be their disposition. I fully expected some light genocide after hearing about the Hamas attack. It’s looking like they might exceed expectations too. I’m a little shocked at our indifference.
Was about to say. It should be ‘Committing war crimes’ and ‘Also a victim’ lol.
Having 1,200 of your countrymen slaughtered through terrorist violence makes you a victim. It doesn’t give carte blanche to annihilate everything in your path for vengeance though.
My vote and political activism has some small chance of affecting Israeli policy so that’s what I’m more engaged in.
I saw somebody on TV saying “what people don’t understand is that Hamas wants civilian deaths”. Oh I get it, I get it just fine. It doesn’t change the fact that Netanyahu etc are giving them exactly exactly what they want.
Hamas doesn’t even claim to represent all of Palestine. They represent the Gaza strip which they governed legitimately after a free and fair election. They would indeed probably win in the west bank too if the collaboration government there held elections, but the Axis of Resistance is a broad coalition of groups opposing the illegal “Israeli” occupation of their land and ethnic cleansing of their people, and includes all sorts of colorful groups like the Marxist PFLP and general-nationalist Lion’s Den, as well as foreign groups like Hezbollah.
It’s just that braindead western propaganda only talks about Hamas because they’re the scariest to white people. They’re “like ISIS” as the vile Zionist pundits are quick to remind you every time they come up in the news (simply a ridiculous, childish comparison). Calling it the “Hamas-Israel war” is intentional to obscure the fact that it is the Zionist entity that is waging a war against the entire population of Palestine, and has been doing so for decades.
The only question that really matters for toilet paper is “texture”. If you have to start worrying about how much you’re spending on toilet paper get a bidet and a better diet.
memes
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.