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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • That’s a silly argument. Biden (aside from being an unrepentant segregationist!) acted as an active agent of white supremacy, and Kamala would have too, just like every President has.

    As an aside, it wasn’t the majority of the population. It wasn’t even the majority of the voting-eligible population. It was like a little over a quarter, I think.



  • Rights are not handed to us by God or by Nature, they are legal constructs, created by people. They are not immaculate or immune to criticism or alteration on the basis of what we think would be better for human society. White supremacy must be smashed to its very core, and part of accomplishing that task is making sure it’s as difficult for white supremacists to recruit and congregate as we can possibly make it.

    It’s bizarre idealism to think that opposition to white supremacy will be overcome with no loss of enthusiasm or membership, that any interference actually has zero effect and we’re just better off letting them do what they want.






  • (I am excluding illegal settler communities here)

    Israel isn’t, you fucking idiot. There can be no removal of settlers unless we have the destruction of the state of Israel. That doesn’t mean pushing Jews into the sea, that means the former Israelis who don’t flee (as many will) are now living in a restored, non-ethnonational Palestine.

    Palestinians don’t want people’s apartments!

    Those in diaspora don’t want someone’s garden!

    Broadly speaking, assuming they don’t need to live under siege conditions, they want their land back. That’s what movements like the March of Return were about. If it was your family’s house, then whatever mockery of the human condition was built on it by settlers is logically also yours. Talking about stealing gardens is especially goofy since it’s materially just a pile of fertilizer and dirt.

    The fight is more about freedom than land.

    This is such a convenient story because it lets you ignore all the historical injustice and Israel’s role as a settler-colonizer and look only at what is happening right now – Palestinians being penned in and bombed, where of course their first concern is not being bombed – and make that the whole issue. Remove siege conditions and suddenly they aren’t as concerned with their ability to migrate to Egypt, what a funny thing!







  • That’s not at all what the quote is and neither is the top level commenter’s interpretation, and I think it not being these is pretty obvious if you read No Exit. The point that he was making (and this is putting it crassly because I know jack shit about his Heidegger-based phenomenology) is the presence of other people forces us to be self-conscious, to regard ourselves as the object of someone else’s perception and judgement. That’s why Sartre goes out of his way to say the room (their jail cell in Hell, effectively) had no reflective surfaces, so that the character’s perception of themselves could only come from the people they are stuck with (this doesn’t entirely make sense, but I am pretty sure it’s what he meant). You can read him talk about some of the premises informing this by checking out his writing on “The Look,” like is quoted below this comic.

    So it’s a slightly obtuse point about intersubjectivity that people have turned into a cutesy way of talking about their own misanthropy. It’s probably more emblematic of the meaning of the quote how people in this thread, original commenter especially, are talking about silently judging people for this and that action.



  • The highly racial framing you are using is one that even Hamas rejects. Palestine is an Arab country in the sense that it’s mostly Arab, it is not Arab in the sense of being an ethnostate like Israel. Likewise, the point of conflict here is not that the Israelis are Jews, but that they are former colonizers, aside from the second-class citizen Arab (etc.) Israelis. Jews do alright in Palestine right now.

    Even if it just stopped there, the fact that there would be some hate crimes as blowback from the genocide committed by Israel is a much smaller and more manageable problem than having a rogue state launching hellfire missiles indiscriminately at cities.

    But I think there are other factors to consider, first among them being that people of Palestine have the much more important jobs of a) reconstruction and b) the extensive trials that will be required, along with their associated fact-finding missions. There’s a lot of shit to do and most of it is for the direct benefit of Palestinians, plus any spite they have can be satisfied by the just convictions of countless Israeli criminals. It’s not like they are some racist savages who won’t be satisfied until the last Jew has been bled dry, contrary to their hasbara depiction. Overwhelmingly, what they want is to live in peace, because so many of them have spent their whole lives living under violence.

    So nothing about this seems like it would be an equivalent problem to leveling one of the most densely populated cities in the world, plus all the other shit that is going on. It is, in function, just a refusal to allow any blowback Israelis caused to actually hit them, no matter how many Arabs get slaughtered in the meantime.

    I do agree with the other commenter that it would be good for some NATO-sphere country or countries to set aside land and migrate out those non-criminal Israelis who want to leave, but that’s almost certainly not ever going to happen. I acknowledge that it’s possible, but the use of Israelis to these states is as a ranks of a militarist state terrorizing its neighbors. What use would Israelis be to the imperial project in Alberta, Canada?




  • Dissolving Israel doesn’t mean kicking every Jewish person out. There are Jewish people in Palestine already, and the point is to make a multiethnic state, not replace one ethnostate with another. Many Israelis would definitely leave for a number of reasons, very much like how a meaningful part of the white population fled South Africa in the wake of Apartheid being defeated, but there are houses where there are no other claimants and, God forbid, the remaining former Israelis can also just buy or rent homes instead of stealing them. There would be a big population shift, but there is absolutely no need to build a 10-million-person-ark.