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[r-ob-yn]

[“White culture is characterized by behavior meant to control, punish, exile, and exterminate.

It is useful to say aloud that these patterns are real, and that they have become part of who and how we white people are in the world—it is only then that we will stand a chance at changing them.

White people control people. We want people to behave a certain way and we use power to try to ensure that they do so. In our own families and relationships and communities, we police behavior we regard as aberrant, as embarrassing, as strange, as improper, as rebellious, as imperfect, as somehow inconsistent with our supposed superiority, and we try to stop that behavior. To do so, we use incentives, we give or withhold money, we give or withhold love, we call on notions of loyalty and family and belonging, we embarrass people, we talk about people, we deceive people, we imply threats, and we issue overt threats—threats of exclusion, of deprivation, of violence, and of shame.

When we do not succeed in controlling people, we punish people. We withdraw support, withdraw love, withdraw resources, withdraw access. We discipline, we insult, we demean, we humiliate, we beat, we burn, we injure, we violate, we abuse, we wound, we shame. And when punishment does not work, we exile. We throw people away. Our very own “white trash.” We disown people, kick them out of our homes, our families, our communities. We deny our ties to them, deny our history with them, deny our part in them and who they are and what they do. We refuse their calls, block their access, block their numbers, block their names from our lips and our memory. We change the passwords, change the story, change the locks. And when even exile fails to remedy the perceived threat to who we think we are, we exterminate. We kill. We kill and kill and kill.

This way of being is a recipe for mass incarceration. It is no coincidence that the criminal justice system white people built has four main functions: control (in the form of policing), punishment (in forms ranging from fines to imprisonment), exile (in the form of incarceration), and extermination (in the form of executions). But this way of being is also a recipe for violence. It assumes that behavior is shaped by power and control rather than connection and responsibility. And all the way through, it is anchored in shame—by the avoidance, threat, and experience of shame, the most reliable driver of violence around.

Many white people, particularly those who are poor and working-class, have experienced the cruelty and inhumanity of these functions of white culture, even as they have benefited from the advantages that accompany it. They have been punished or exiled from their families, their churches, and their communities for their behavior or the behavior of their loved ones, their criminal convictions, their addictions, their mental illness, their violence, and their mistakes. Most people in working-class and poor white communities have experienced harms that are connected to this culture, precisely because of how damaging the current socioeconomic structure is for them. Plenty of middle-class and even wealthy white people have also endured these harms, which include addiction, physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, other forms of violence, and loss.

Trauma like this can have an ossifying effect—it can solidify our beliefs beyond intervention, it can narrow the range of people we trust and listen to, and it can create an appetite for a channel for our anger that, when coupled with those other effects, can be disastrous. Combine that trauma with a story that we are superior, and, whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the combination can make us behave in hateful ways to the people closest to us and in horrific ways to those we regard as “other” or less than us.

We could end this kind of violence in white communities (or at least render it no longer normal) if we wanted to, just as we could end the high levels of incarceration everywhere. One way for us to do so would be by using even a fraction of the resources we currently spend on incarcerating people of color. If we did not allocate spending as we do, we could—not just for white people, but for everyone, equitably—restore cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, build functional schools, invest in economic development programs that gave people a pathway to a dignified living wage, close the gap in access to healthy affordable food, or fix our roads and bridges and community centers and hospitals in all communities.

But none of that has been our priority.”]

danielle sered, from until we reckon: violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair, 2019

[r-ob-yn]

If social pressure is enough to make you not mask during an ongoing airborne pandemic, then how the fuck are you going to fight against the rising tide of authoritarianism?

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I was on this website 7 years ago when we had "sidewalk discourse" because someone dared to question the ideology of sidewalks (as a predetermined path that seperates you from nature) which brought out all the usual bad-faith reply guys ("being against sidewalk is ableist!") And guess what?, in that elapsed time we've paved over even more of the earth, had even more species go extinct, had more mountains blown up by oil companies, and started scraping the sea for minerals.

All this to say that when you see the big blogger du jour who's made it their daily mission to write 10,000 word posts about how much they hate anti-civ anarchists have a quick scan to see if they ever dedicate their precious time to mourning all the hundreds of ways we're poisoning the only planet we can live on. People who worry more about a fringe philosophy than the very air they breathe being turned into ash are deeply unserious, and it speaks to the left's utter failure to see environmentalism as the most urgent issue of our time.

[r-ob-yn]

Do not really know what to say. A year ago we were making posts about how Gaza was being bombed through Christmas- how the oldest Christian community was being bombed- how the birth place of Jesus was being destroyed and his people murdered. A year later, it is going to be Christmas again soon, and the bombings have not stopped. But the news, and the attention seems to have died down considerably. It feels terrible and scary.

[r-ob-yn]

It's insane how the same set of news has been coming out of Gaza every single day for the past 14 months and I know for a fact people have grown numb to it; numb to reading the numbers or headlines like "Israeli strike targets school" because Israel made it so. Israel has bombed the first hospital in this aggression and pretended it wasn't them. Saw how quickly the outrage died down so now they have practically destroyed the entire healthcare system in Gaza.

A genocide is being carried out against the besieged population of Gaza and you are bearing witness to it. Your one mission is NOT to grow accustomed to the mention of these crimes. Repeat things over and over again. So long as this Zionist entity is lying, you are going to have to repeat things until you don't have to anymore. Keep talking about Gaza.

[r-ob-yn]

Why are people writing panygerical odes to washing machines and refrigerators as though there is any tangible political movement to abolish luxury personal goods in the global north? like every year a new mountain of electronic waste gets dumped somewhere in the global south, every year more and more battery acid leeches into the ground: your side is winning, no one is coming for your washing machine or your iPhone or your pesticides. We are so far from even having an organized political threat to universally hated luxuries like celebrity private jets, let alone dishwashers! No one has the imagination or strength of character to imagine any other life than the prison we call the present, despite thousands of years of human history without a refrigerator. It's exactly like how there's gaggles of book club communists more worried about "eco-fascism" than any of the real and urgent environmental issues.

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i just wish I could change these peoples positions with a poor third worlder working the shittiest job

[r-ob-yn]

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970)

[r-ob-yn]

just wanted to raise attention to @samah-h 's fundraiser. samah is raising money for her, her husband, her children and her husbands relatives. the area in khan yunis her family is in was bombed very close to them, every day is dangerous and prices are very high.

theyre really close to $10,000, please donate and share

vetted by: @bilal-salah0

$9,365 out of $86,500

[r-ob-yn]

nothing unnerves me more than the reddit-esque language of common sense that a lot of openly genocidal people here hide behind, like on occasion i make it a point to reply to these extraordinarily manipulative posts only because i think it's good to parse through what kind of language can be used to make things like collective punishment, the siege of millions of people in their homeland, starvation of children, destruction of hospitals and universities, and a death toll that includes 15,000 children acceptable.

and usually what does the trick is saying "it's so awful, it really is, i don't find it acceptable at all" then declaring the people who call it a genocide are actually committing blood libel. i think these kind of rhetorical sleights of hand are important to notice and important to point out. because at some point it'll have you nodding along to justifications of genocide (hamas hides behind civilians and steals the aid, the death toll is exaggerated, israel is actually super duper generous to allow anyone to even stay alive) while you watch tens of thousands of people die, and tutting and shaking your head at those who are trying to stop it. these are the people who are watching gaza get ethnically cleansed, the west bank get annexed, and tell you they hate it, they really do, but what can you do about it? what's done is done. it's a shame, of course, and i was always against it the entire time.

but you're too against it, and that makes me suspicious. how dare you cast aspersions on the intentions of the israeli military and its leaders and the government and the vast majority of the voting population? its only a coincidence that they have accomplished the exact genocidal goals they have declared they wanted to accomplish. their intentions were impossible to decipher if you understand that all their actions are committed in good faith, and all palestinians are inherently children of evil saturated with hate. anyway it's a sticky situation, of course, with some legal pedantry we can use as a loophole. yes perhaps someday it may be called a genocide but only once we decide it is. because we know the genocide was only committed accidentally and it doesn't make the people who did it bad people. that's the most important thing. if you do it now you are undoubtedly committing blood libel, like those biased antisemites... amnesty international and the ohchr and the lemkin institute and several foremost scholars of genocide.

[r-ob-yn]

I think that this wave of obstensibly pro-palestine voices suddenly agreeing with the US Department of State about Syria is pretty much the end result of vibepolitikal anti-imperialism. Refusing to engage with decolonization as anything more meaningful than saying the right things you see all your friends saying, "listening to voices" over actually reading and learning, will get you to a point where you cannot comprehend elements in a colonized state being reactionary. Assuming that everyone who supports a cause subcribes to goodism will bring you to reactionary viewpoints.

You saw this with Ukraine, and how on either side people argued that "MY side in this ghoulish proxy war is anti-imperialists". You're seeing this now, where people's sole conception of Palestine's material reality are infographics based on news stories by an arm of the Hashemite state - which gets them, in the same tone they can put down Zionists in, disparaging any "western leftist" who saw Iraq and Libya and knows what path Syria is going to go down.

[r-ob-yn]

Syria is so depressing because the US and west's legacy in the middle east is going to firmly be rampaging through dozens upon dozens of at least de jure secular governments, completely demolishing and dismantling everythign they built, all the while ensuring the next guys would either be incompetent, corrupt puppet regimes or literally the most insane religious fascists the MENA region can offer, over and over again.

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anarchists i once respected who’ve fully embraced the anti-masker movement half a decade into this shit horrify me. i’d say they’re either scientifically illiterate or eugenicists but their unwillingness to admit and correct the former makes them the latter regardless. hunger strikes in prisons and jails in the u.s. have happened *this fucking year* due to incarcerated people being forcibly exposed to covid over and over again by none other than fucking pigs. what makes you any different? your white supremacy sports a black flag in place of a thin blue line? fuck you.