politicallytrix

[politicallytrix]

Hey y’all remember when Nixon said “it’s not illegal if the president does it.” And we all agreed that was insane and unconstitutional? Well what a difference a couple decades and lots and lots of dark money make

[politicallytrix]

Attention Australians!!

If you're an Australian resident, sign this! If you're not Australian, reblog this!

Let's make sure that our politicians cannot get away with supporting genocide.

@anarchistmemecollective @theauspolchronicles @kropotkindersurprise @antifainternational @lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers

[politicallytrix]

a society that allows people to starve when there is food has failed. like. that’s it.

[politicallytrix]

Another note on climate change despair:

My politics are pretty leftist, especially by the standards of a red state, but I think there is a such thing as Too Far Left re: the systemic nature of problems

It happens when you start to believe that nothing will ever change unless the current system is completely destroyed and a new one built in its place. In particular, when you believe that taking steps to reform, or decrease the harm of, a corrupt system is pointless or even bad, you've gone off the deep end imho.

People from my own country—the United States—will say things like "Gradual, incremental change is pointless, we need Revolution!"

Look me in the eyes and tell me that women's rights, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, etc. are in the same state they were in 1950. Maybe just google these things first.

Revolution IS an incremental change!!! This country has tens of thousands of elected officials and officeholders!! Every life-supporting industry is run by a fucked up Rube Goldberg machine of bureaucracy that could stretch from here to the Moon 87 times!!! This country's laws, institutions, and supply chains are a Bethesda game programmed in the 1700's, released unfinished and currently running thousands of mods, at least half of which either remove crucial game mechanics and content at random or do things like "make your character take damage when he pees." Do you think it's really possible to raze this clusterfuck to the ground and rebuild it from scratch?

anyway, I say this because a concerning amount of people believe literally nothing meaningful can be done to save the planet until our current government and economic system no longer exist.

I get it. Capitalism is what got us into this mess and it's making it worse right now, but we do not have zero agency, capitalism does not have infinite power and wisdom, and humans and governments can and do make decisions that are contrary to the immediate interests of capitalism. I think it's not only possible but normal throughout history for people's actions and beliefs to flow against the prevailing power of the time.

Think of dandelions. They flourish not because they are wanted, but because they are numerous, and the power that controls the grass and sidewalks cannot reach everywhere at once. And so they are unstoppable, and will never be destroyed.

We must have the raw, opportunistic resisting power of weeds, taking hold in every crack in the terrible machine that controls our lives. We must hold on like little plants in an expanse of cracked concrete—the slab will not be dug up and the soil set free anytime soon, but if enough of us live our lives in spite of it, its power will be weakened and its impenetrable nature changed.

Also, just because technological solutions to climate change don't feel right—they don't satisfy the longer-term, idealized principle of healing the Earth and creating a more sustainable society—doesn't mean they wouldn't, in the short term, work.

Get in losers, we're burning incense to Caesar and tomorrow we will be alive.

[politicallytrix]

I know there's like two hundred of these "if there's one israel and palestine video you need to watch" captions but truly there is nobody more qualified to sum up the reality of this occupation than palestinian historian rashid khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at columbia university and served as one of the delegates for negotiations during the oslo accords. for everyone who's only vaguely familiar with the conflict, who doesn't really know how to respond to a lot of the common arguments you might hear, who gets confused about historical sticking points, this is a highly informative video that covers the following:

01:15 - Palestine before 1948 03:07 - How did Zionism emerge? 05:30 - The Balfour declaration 08:30 - Zionist resistance to Britain 12:47 - Britain's chaotic withdrawal from Palestine 14:44 - Was the Nakba inevitable? 18:40 - The violent partition of Palestine 20:49 - Do the Palestinians reject peace? 26:19 - Is Israel a good neighbour? 28:51 - The six day war 30:54 - Palestinian resistance over time 34:27 - Are Hamas terrorists? 40:18 - The end game in Gaza.

[politicallytrix]

Don’t know who he is, unfortunately, but I’d like to buy him a slice.

[politicallytrix]

Did Australia really say NO to a referendum recognizing Indigenous Australians despite its history of violent colonization?

[politicallytrix]

Hi, this is very ignorant. I'm trying to read as much as I can on Palestine and Zionism but there is one point I cannot find an answer for. Given that Zionism is not Judaism, given that at the beginning most Jewish people did not share this view and was actually supported by christians with antisemitic views, given that it was conceptualized as a colonial project that could only be actualized by ethnically cleanse Palestine, one thing I don't know how to disagree with Zionists is the idea that Jewish people do come from that land. Even if European jews are probably not genetically related to the Jewish people from there, I think Jewishness is something that can be constructed as related to that land. This of course does not mean that Palestinians are not natives too and they have every right to their land. However I don't really know how to answer when Jewish (Zionists) tell me that Jewish people fled that land during the diaspora. Other than "yeah but the people that stayed are native that underwent christianization before, arabization later, grew a sense of nationhood in the 19th century and are Palestinians now"

It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what "indigeneity" is to believe that it means "whoever has the oldest claim to the land." Rather, to describe a people as "indigenous" is a reference to their current relationship to the government and to the land—namely that they have been or are being dispossessed from that land in favour of other private owners (settlers); they have a separate, inferior status to settlers according to the law, explicitly; they are shut out of institutions created by the settler state, explicitly; they are targeted implicitly by the laws of the settler state (e.g. Israeli prohibitions against harvesting wild thyme or using donkeys or horses for transportation); the settler state does not punish violence against them; &c. &c.

It is a settler-colonialist state that creates indigeneity; without one, it is perfectly possible for immigrants to move to and live in a new location without becoming settlers, with the superior cultural and legal status and suppression of a legally inferior population that that entails.

If all that were going on were some Jewish people feeling a personal or religious connexion to this land and wanting to move there, accepting the existing people and culture and living with them, not expelling and killing local populations and creating a settler-colonialist state that privileges them at the expense of extant populations, that would be a completely different situation. But any assertion of the land's fundamental Jewish-ness (really they mean white or European Jewishness—the Jewish Arabs who were already in Palestine never seem to figure in these arguments) is a canard that distracts from the fundamental issue, which is a people's right to resist dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

Decolonize Palestine lays out some of the ethnic and cultural history of the region, but follows it up with:

So, what does this all mean for Palestine? Absolutely nothing. Although the argument has many ahistorical assumptions and claims, it is not these which form its greatest weakness. The whole argument is a trap. The basic implication of this line of argumentation is as follows: If the Jewish people were in Palestine before the Arabs, then the land belongs to them. Therefore, the creation of Israel would be justified. From my experience, whenever this argument is used, the automatic response of Palestinians is to say that their ancestors were there first. These ancestors being the Canaanites. The idea that Palestinians are the descendants of only one particular group in a region with mass migrations and dozens of different empires and peoples is not only ahistorical, but this line of thought indirectly legitimizes the original argument they are fighting against. This is because it implies that the only reason Israel’s creation is unjustified is because their Palestinian ancestors were there first. It implies that the problem with the argument lies in the details, not that the argument as a whole is absolute nonsense and shouldn’t even be entertained. The ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first. It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years. If we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been. These positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism. After all, this ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed, well defined, unchanging homogenous group having exclusive ownership over lands corresponding to modern day borders has nothing to do with the actual history of the area, and everything to do with modern notions of ethnic nationalism and colonialism.

I would also be careful about mentioning a sense of "nationhood" or "national identity" in this context, as it could seem to imply that people need a "national" identity (a very specific and very new idea) in order not to deserve genocide. Actually the idea that Palestinians lacked a national identity (of the kind that developed in 19th-century Europe) is commonly used to justify Zionism. Again from Decolonize Palestine:

This slogan ["A land without a people for a people without a land"] persists to this day because it was never meant to be literal, but colonial and ideological. This phrase is yet another formulation of the concept of Terra Nullius meaning “nobody’s land”. In one form or the other, this concept played a significant role in legitimizing the erasure of the native population in virtually every settler colony, and laying down the ‘legal’ and ‘moral’ basis for seizing native land. According to this principle, any lands not managed in a ‘modern’ fashion were considered empty by the colonists, and therefore up for grabs. Essentially, yes there are people there but no people that mattered or were worth considering. There is no doubt that Zionism is a settler colonial movement intent on replacing the natives. As a matter of fact, this was a point of pride for the early Zionists, as they saw the inhabitants of the land as backwards and barbaric, and that a positive aspect of Zionism would be the establishment of a modern nation state there to act as a bulwark against these ‘regressive’ forces in the east [You can read more about this here]. A characteristic feature of early Zionist political discourse is pretending that Palestinians exist only as individuals or sometimes communities, but never as constituting a people or a nation. This was accompanied by the typical arrogance and condescension towards the natives seen in virtually every settler colonial movement. That the early settlers interacted with the natives while simultaneously claiming the land was empty was not seen as contradictory to them. According to these colonists, even if some scattered, disorganized people did exist, they were not worthy of the land they inhabited. They were unable to transform the land into a modern functioning nation state, extract resources efficiently and contribute to ‘civilization’ through the free market, unlike the settlers. Patrick Wolfe’s scholarship on Australia illustrates this dynamic and how it was exploited to establish the settler colony.

[politicallytrix]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS’ legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[politicallytrix]

Security camera footage shows Russian soldiers marching into a children's home near the Russian-occupied city of Kherson in Ukraine.

The above link goes the Yle Uutiset article which includes video footage. No English subtitles available unfortunately. To the end of the post I'll include screenshots of one video for which I'll replace the Finnish captions with English.

Here's the article:

Russia has abducted an estimated several thousand Ukrainian children from the territories it has occupied and given the children to Russian families. The systematic operation is led by the presidential administration of Vladimir Putin.

Forced transfers from occupied territories are war crimes and flagrantly violate children's rights.

The UN was already worried about child abductions by Russia in the fall. The problem is still that Russia does not agree to provide almost any information about the children, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said at the end of January.

Yle collected several pictorial evidences of what Russia is doing to Ukrainian children. Part of the activity takes place near the Finnish border.

Russia takes children not only from orphanages but also directly from the hands of parents. This has also happened to the Ukrainian single father Yle met.

Russian occupation forces separated Yevhen Mezhevoi and his three elementary school-aged children last April at a checkpoint near the family's hometown of Mariupol.

Meževoi was sent from the checkpoint to the filtration camp for several weeks. In these prison camps, Russia uses interrogation and torture to search for people it considers suspicious.

Meževoi later received a call from his son, who confirmed that he and the other children in the family are indeed in Moscow, Russia. There, the children were told two options: they either end up with a Russian family as adopted children or in an orphanage.

We will return to Meževoi's story at the end of this story.

Yle does not show pictures of children held by Russia in a recognizable way, because they are in a particularly vulnerable position. It can be assessed that they were put in their current position against their own will or that of their legal guardians.

In May, President Putin issued a decree that allows children to be fast-tracked to become Russian citizens. This way they can stay with families by law.

According to Marija Lvova-Belova, children are not actually adopted, but placed permanently in families. Russian propaganda sources still often talk about adoption.

The exact number of children abducted by Russia is not known. According to the OSCE, Russia had already taken more than 2,000 children by the end of June. The Ukrainian authorities are aware of more than 16,000 children who have been forcibly transferred to Russia with their families or alone.

The Ukrainian human rights organization Magnolia tells Yle that children have fallen into the hands of Russia, for example, in shootings or bombings where one of the parents has died.

According to Magnolia, the Russian authorities do not call some of the children by their own names, but have changed them. It makes it difficult to trace children.

Even children from children's homes kidnapped by Russia often have living parents and relatives.

Children's homes in Ukraine have been the target of Russia's special attention since the beginning of the war of aggression.

Yle obtained surveillance camera footage from last summer, when Russian forces were still occupying the city of Kherson. The video shows how Russian soldiers broke into a children's home in the village of Stepanivka near the city. (See video in the article linked at the start of the post)

In late fall, Russia withdrew from the Kherson region. At that time, according to local Ukrainian authorities, Russia took at least a thousand children from institutions in the region.

The Russian authorities also said at the same time that they had taken almost a hundred small orphans and disabled children with them from the area.

The children who were hidden by the staff of the orphanage in Stepanivka were saved from being transferred.

-

Why is Russia taking children from Ukraine?

According to experts interviewed by Yle, one of the reasons is the Russification of children.

Proof of this is the children's "holiday camps", to which Russia has transferred Ukrainian children for shorter periods.

Yle found such a children's camp right near Finland in Terijoki. According to Russia, 1,600 Ukrainian children from Mariupol were brought to the camp during the summer. There have also been camps in fall and winter.

According to Russian propaganda sources, the camps last a week or two. It is not clear where the schoolchildren return from the camps.

Mariupol was badly destroyed at the beginning of the war. A significant part of its inhabitants fled or were forcibly transferred to Russia.

Like Yle, Sam Houston from the United States, who specializes in open source intelligence, has found a concentration of children from Mariupol in the two Terijoki camp centers.

Houston is currently studying international politics at Georgetown University in Washington. Previously, he has worked in US military intelligence.

He estimates in his coursework that the plans may include taking the children back to their hometown after they have been manipulated into believing Russian propaganda.

"From Russia's point of view, it makes sense to return them to Mariupol, because then the city will become Russian and a stronger part of Russia," says Houston in a video interview with Yle.

The director of research specializing in Russia at the University of Helsinki also estimates that the transfers of children are related to the Russification of the occupied territories.

"They are trying to turn Ukrainians into Russians. The younger they are, the better they succeed," says Judith Pallot from the Aleksanteri Institute in a telephone interview with Yle.

According to Pallott, Russia transfers Ukrainians to Russia to be Russianized and replaces them with Russians. At the same time, it brings Russian laws and Russian officials and teachers to the occupied territory.

According to Pallot, Russia is forcibly moving Ukrainians to remote areas, where the population is aging and decreasing.

Russia is also moving entire families with children from the occupied territories. Russia said in August that it has "evacuated" 3.5 million people, including more than 550,000 children.

-

Forced transfers from occupied territories are always war crimes under international law. If the purpose of the forced migration of children is to destroy a group of people, it is genocide.

For example, the human rights organization Amnesty considers forced migrations in Russia to be war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Ukraine's chief prosecutor is investigating child abductions as possible genocide.

Since Russia is trying to destroy the children's Ukrainian identity, it is precisely genocide, says an expert from the Magnolia organization.

"It's not easy, especially for older Ukrainian children. They remember what happened. Some of the children's parents were killed by the Russians," says Maryna Lypovetska.

According to Russia, the claims of forced migration are a figment of imagination.

The EU, Britain and the United States have imposed sanctions on Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children's Affairs, because of the abductions of Ukrainian children.

-

So what happened to the Ukrainian father who appeared in the beginning of the story, from whom the Russian soldiers took the children?

Jevhen Meževoi tells Yle how he went to get his children from Russia after his release from the prison camp. He figured out the route to Moscow, among other things, with the help of a network of Russian volunteers.

Yle has seen several documents that support the father's account of the trip.

According to Ukraine, of the thousands of children taken to Russia, about 300 have made it back.

The life of a single father and his children in Latvia is now like any family fleeing war. The father works in an auto parts recycling shop and the children are at school.

Recently, the father got a dog for his oldest son, which is a found dog. It's a little timid.

Yevhen Meževoi estimates that he got the children back from Russia because the authorities did not think he would arrive in Moscow quickly.

"They didn't expect me to reach Moscow in two days."

Meževoi's son tried to reach his friends from Poljana after the family got to Latvia. He was told that all were adopted.

-

[politicallytrix]

Hot take of the day: a worrying number of leftists are actually just Evangelical Christians with the serial numbers filed off

The world is sinful a capitalist hellscape but we just have to wait until the Second Coming the Revolution happens when everything will be magically fixed. Any attempt to make actual progress makes you a lukewarm Christian liberal anything less than the Apocalypse the Revolution (which we are forever waiting for btw) is completely useless . Also consuming certain media or makin certain lifestyle choices is sinful and unchristian bad praxis.

[politicallytrix]

“Nobody wants to work” yet im over here filling out 3945867483293064359469 applications on 500 different job hunting sites, each application demanding i take a 30 minute-test to PROVE that me and my paltry resume are worth a multi-million company giving me 16 whole dollars an hour. Nobody wants to work yet 97 of the 100 applications you fill out just ghost you (because when a Boss does it, that’s just how it is. But if you ghost? Unprofessional.) or give you some pointless runaround for 3 weeks until telling you you’re not a good fit because you only have 3 years of dick-sucking experience and they want 5. Nobody wants to work? Nobody wants to invest in employees. Nobody wants to hire, nobody wants to train, nobody wants to teach anyone new skills. Nobody wants to accept that YES, some people DO work to collect a paycheck and thats FINE, not all of us are born with a passion to be a Starbucks Manager. We’re all passionate about living and supporting ourselves and I wish bosses would stop being so lazy and rude and give my friends jobs for $20000 an hour

[politicallytrix]

[politicallytrix]

A whopping FIFTEEN states have important voter registration deadlines on Tuesday, October 11. If you’re in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Texas it’s time to register to vote!

To register to vote head to weall.vote/tumblr. 

If you have any questions or concerns, call the Election Protection Hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE.  

[politicallytrix]

A Florida Mom Claimed Trans Organ Harvesters Abducted Her Son. He Had Simply Moved Out

A Florida Mom Claimed Trans Organ Harvesters Abducted Her Son. He Had Simply Moved Out https://www.them.us/story/florida-mom-trans-organ-harvesters

[politicallytrix]

The pushback against smoking is certainly good for society but a lot of y'all who claim to be progressive and compassionate vis a vis substance abuse have an unfortunate tendency to be real assholes about it.

Like, if you're coming at the problem with the assumption that quitting smoking is something you can "just do" and the problem is that smokers are just choosing not to, you have already lost the plot before you began.

[politicallytrix]