#adoption abolition
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fraudulentareas · 2 months ago
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can someone genuinely in good faith explain the anti-adoption perspective to me? i am asking sincerely. i understand that all parental loss is trauma, i am very personally aware of this myself. i also understand that there is trauma of trans-racial adoption often. i understand that the adoption industry, especially the international one, is basically human trafficking and have heard horror stories. i agree that all of these things are systemic problems and have researched them but there is still one thing i am hung up on: which is stating that adoption in general is bad. what is a child to do if their parents die or do not want them? or if their whole community is abusive? these are very real things. all children deserve a stable home. i cannot see how that would be achieved if we lived in a system where children cannot be placed with families or caretakers. if the solution is to just have state run facilities of caretakers similar to orphanages, that seems inadequate and unfair. i have only seen that solution mentioned once tho. i appreciate any good faith response, as i see a lot of discussions of the problems but very little end goals
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lunarmagicteatime · 8 months ago
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As an anarchist I am opposed to all systems of oppression That includes adoption. Happy celebrate loss weekend.
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anarchne · 5 months ago
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as a q/ueer adoptee (or rainbow adoptee) it pisses me off so much when members of our community say stuff like this.
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Shit Takes on Adoption Abolishment.
I don't really want straight people to adopt either but somehow we're always circling back to lg/btq (censored to avoid the searches/ tags).
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theremina · 4 months ago
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An adoption abolitionist’s plea:
Don’t say your for-profit artwork has been “adopted”.
Don’t advertise your portraits with cutesy phrases like “Isn’t Uwu Smolbean Rag Doll Doodlybunz peachy keen? Adopt her today for just $299!”
Don’t call buying an inanimate friggin object “an adoption”.
Doubt I’ll be heard by many. But I’ll keep saying this stuff til kept people who claim progressive and leftist values begin to comprehend that countless millions of actual living, breathing people in this world have been bought and sold as infants or children and it AIN’T FUCKIN CUTE.
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ofdinosanddais1 · 1 year ago
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Hi,
Stopping human trafficking requires:
Abolish the prison industry built on slavery
Providing food, water, healthcare, and shelter as basic human rights
Providing resources to minors who runaway
Abolishing the adoption industry that was built off the foundation of a human trafficker (Georgia Tann)
Supporting the Land Back movement so that traffickers can't exploit loopholes when abducting Indigenous people (also because Indigenous people deserve their land back)
Accepting and loving LGBTQ+ youth
Rebuilding the crumbling mental health system
Decriminalizing drugs so that traffickers can't force people to traffick drugs in an effort to make sure they aren't choosing between being an illegally enslaved person or a legally enslaved person.
Decriminalizing sex work so that children forced into sex work aren't going to prison for being a rape victim.
Recognizing that human trafficking is not just being kidnapped and sold but that family members, teachers, employers, friends, roommates, etc. can traffick people and that it's the most common form of trafficking
Recognizing that human trafficking isn't always just drug and sex trafficking but also labor
Human trafficking feeds off the flaws in our system and it is our job as a society to fix those flaws and starve the industry out.
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bhagavanbhakthi · 6 months ago
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Violence or Non-violence - What Hinduism says?
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rejoyous · 9 months ago
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Why pay for adopts when I have screencap?
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fatehbaz · 5 months ago
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was thinking about this
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To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.
About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.
"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.
Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)
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"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.
Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.
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"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.
Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.
All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".
Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.
Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.
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"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.
Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.
You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.
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komsomolka · 1 month ago
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Women in the GDR were the largest group to lose out through unification. They may now have access to material goods not available before, but they have been pushed back into dependence by a dominant ideology of women serving men. In the GDR, 88% of all adult women worked and another 8.5% were in full-time education, which meant that 96.5% took an active part in the wider social context outside the home and they also had their own income. Work was the basis for economic independence, a sense of self-worth, a place for communication and social interaction, not just a source for additional household income or, as some critics have argued, a state-imposed, obligatory activity.
Women were highly skilled - only 6% had no qualification at all, as against 24% of West German working women. In the GDR, 50% of all jobs in medicine and law were carried out by women and a third of women worked in technical professions.
Given the great importance that work represented to women in terms of their identity, unemployment on the scale, that happened after unification, had a devastating effect. Even after 20 years, on the territory of the former GDR, two thirds of the unemployed were women (in agriculture it was as much as 75%) and they made up at least 70% of the long-term unemployed. Post-unification, the labour market was biased against women; men had a better chance of finding alternative work. [...]
Although gender discrimination was by no means completely abolished in the GDR, this blatant disparaging of women as a group appeared like history going into reverse. This perception is underlined by the fact that, in the general hunt for jobs, children are now deemed to represent a problem. It is well-known that the GDR had excellent childcare facilities which made it possible to combine work and parenthood without financial hardship. In 1989, 68% of working women in the GDR had children under the age of 18, whereas in the Federal Republic it was only 25%. [...]
Unification brought another considerable change for women: the abolition of their right to an abortion on demand. In the GDR, since 1972, women had had the legal right to terminate their pregnancy free of charge within the first 12 weeks. West Germany has a penal code (paragraph 218) which states that abortion is unlawful and those who attempt to abort face up to three years in prison or a fine. After unification it became necessary to bring West German and East German law on this issue into alignment. In 1992, paragraph 218 was amended to adopt GDR legislation, but a compulsory consultation prior to the procedure was added. After protests from the CDU/CSU and the Bavarian state government, which wanted abortion itself to remain illegal, even this amendment was declared null and void by Germany’s Constitutional Court only one year later. [...]
Even after 25 years since unification there still exists a very different perception of equal rights among women in the territory of the former GDR. According to an investigation undertaken in 2008, 80% of East German women wanted an equal division of labour in the family, but only 50% of West German women, among whom traditional family models still exerted a strong force. In fact, the more emancipated consciousness of GDR women has increasingly influenced women in the West, even though they often appear to be unaware of where their new confidence has come.
Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It by Bruni de la Motte & John Green with Seumas Milne (Contributor), 2015.
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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 2 months ago
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by Dion J. Pierre
The campus group National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) is waging a campaign to gut Jewish life in academia, calling for the abolition of Hillel International campus chapters, the largest collegiate organization for Jewish students in the world.
“Over the past several decades, Hillel has monopolized for Jewish campus life into a pipeline for pro-Israel indoctrination, genocide-apologia, and material support to the Zionist project and its crimes,” a social media account operating the campaign, titled #DropHillel, said in a manifesto published last week. “Across the country, Hillel chapters have invited Israeli soldiers to their campuses; promoted propaganda trips such as birthright; and organized charity drives for the Israeli military.”
It continued, “Such actions reveal Hillel’s ideological and material investment in Zionism, despite the organization’s facade as being simply a ‘Jewish cultural space.'”
DropHillel claims to be “Jewish-led,” although only a small minority of Jews oppose Zionism, and the group has been linked to and promoted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters.
Hillel International has provided Jewish students a home away from home during the academic year. However, NSJP says it wants to “weaken” it and “dismantle oppression.”
The idea has already been picked up by pro-Hamas student groups at one college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the school’s official student newspaper. On Oct. 9, it reported, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) unveiled the idea for “no more Hillel” during a rally which, among other things, demanded removing Israel from UNC’s study abroad program and adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Addressing the comments to the paper days later, SJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, proclaimed that shuttering Hillel is a coveted goal of the anti-Zionist movement.
“Zionism is a racist supremacist ideology advocating for the creation and sustenance of an ethnostate through the expulsion and annihilation of native people,” the group told the paper. “Therefore, any group that advocates for a supremacist ideology — be it the KKK, the Proud Boys, Hillel, or Heels for Israel — should not be welcome on campus.”
The #DropHillel campaign came amid an unprecedented surge in anti-Israel incidents on college campuses, which, according to a report published last month by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have reached crisis levels.
Revealing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena, the report — titled “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2023-2024” — painted a bleak picture of America’s higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.
“As the year progressed, Jewish students and Jewish groups on campus came under unrelenting scrutiny for any association, actual or perceived, with Israel or Zionism,” the report said. “This often led to the harassment of Jewish members of campus communities and vandalism of Jewish institutions. In some cases, it led to assault. These developments were underpinned by a steady stream of rhetoric from anti-Israel activists expressing explicit support for US-designated terrorists organizations, such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and others.”
The report added that 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents — 52 and 38, respectively. Harvard University, the University of California – Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10. Violence, it continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
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lunarmagicteatime · 10 months ago
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You know what... getting tagged in a post that slaps adoptees around and demands that we be grateful first thing on a monday morning is only going to make me angry.
I am a god damned adoption abolitionist. It should not fucking exist. There are models out there for better. There are so many ways to fix shit now. But no... they make too much money off our trauma.
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probablyasocialecologist · 1 month ago
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Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent. In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?
[...]
The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can. But the party’s leaders are to blame, not that many in the center have cared or even seemed willing to reflect on a decade of catastrophe. Has anyone who complained that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion would cost Democrats votes due to the extremism of its associated demands reckoned with the empirical finding that the opposite proved true? That the narrow victory of Biden in 2020 was likely attributable to noisy protests that liberals wished would be quieter and calmer? Has anyone acknowledged the unique popularity of Sanders with Latinx voters, a once-core constituency that the Democrats are now on the verge of losing outright? The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and cultivate relations with corporate allies.
8 November 2024
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theremina · 5 months ago
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“No one told me that a part of healing from complex trauma was mourning everything I didn’t get to experience. This is your reminder that it’s okay to mourn; you lost your childhood, and that’s a heavy realisation. You deserved better.”
~Jazzlyn Greenzee
Above: a faded, yellowing 70s snapshot of a traumatized af adoptee toddler dissociating like a bawse watching a mirrored vinyl circus carousel spin.
I spent a majority of my little kid years checked out or being performative and I have struggled with multiple debilitating mental and physical health issues my entire life. No one figured out the root cause, not even me, until my late thirties.
I love my life today. I am grateful for all the blessings and kinship I’ve found. I cherish my family, both chosen and biological.
And I am an adoption abolitionist.
Keep abortion safe and legal. Family preservation first. Legal guardianship or bust.
And FFS, let’s add plenary, non-kinship adoption to the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) list, already.
The fog is lifting. A kinder and more equitable world is possible.
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marxistlesbianist · 17 days ago
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Imo, Marx's old line on religion—that it is “the heart of a heartless world, [. . .] the opium of the masses”—can be largely applied to anarchism in the imperial core. From my experience working with anarchists across multiple US cities, for every smug crypto-imperialist there are more people with a genuine interest in challenging capitalism (and increasingly imperialism), but who don’t know where to begin. Anarchism is the resistance of a complicit society, the adderall of the masses—and just like how our criticisms of the Catholic Church as a conservative political institution have to contend with the fact that religion still serves a genuine need of the people, our criticisms of anarchism have to contend with the fact that imperial core citizens adopt it for a reason.
Like, we can complain all we want about how the CIA promoted left anti-communism to undermine the US’s communist orgs, but the sober fact is that the bourgeoisie will always do everything that they can to undermine communism and that it is the job of the vanguard party to anticipate and combat such subterfuge. After WWII there was something like a genuine info war, and the communists lost. The prevalence of anti-communism among the far left here is the fault of bourgeois propaganda, but it is also the failure of past communists to effectively combat misinformation—and until we correct this error such anti-communism will persist!
It’s easy to point out all the ways that anarchist ideology reflects imperialist chauvinism, but as materialists we have to admit that a large degree of anarchism’s popularity in the west has to do with the fact that anarchist social reproduction is simply miles ahead of our own at this time. With the dire state of Leninist organizing in the west, who can blame young would-be-revolutionaries for finding their ways into anarchist collectives? Anarchist punk shows may not be an effective venue for resistance, but they are a type of genuine community service that communists are simply not providing. Across the US, anarchists lead MLs in organizing protests, food banks, bail funds, etc. (organizing them poorly, but organizing them nonetheless), and so someone looking to challenge the system is simply more likely to be taken in by anarchists than communists from the numbers alone.
This is why I find the common line that anti-capitalism is a meaningless ideology unfulfilling. Whilst it may be true that simply positioning yourself as anti-capitalist is not enough to challenge capitalism, I would posit that someone who calls themselves “anti-capitalist” is a step closer to becoming an actual communist than a vaguely progressive liberal. A hypothosis supported by the high quantity of former anarchists within the younger ranks of ML orgs to-day. Those who are truly serious about challenging the bourgeois state do tend to find their way into Marxism-Leninism, but it’s still our job to build a movement that people will be drawn to.
Like religion, anarchism cannot be abolished until the social need it serves is more effectively met. In this case, the need is for an effective revolutionary movement. To chastise anarchists for letting chauvinism misdirect their mode of resistance is to come close to the same theoretical error we so often critique in their theory—that the abolition of something oppressive (here, faith in the bourgeois state) will necessarily result in something liberatory (here, the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism). An effective challenge to capitalism won’t manifest until we build it.
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antiquepearlss · 3 months ago
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As a history lover, I actually do like that Tangled doesn’t have a set time period, it’s somewhere between the 1600s-1850s. This way I can imagine my favorite characters hanging out with various historical figures without having to think too hard about it.
Eugene and Anne Boleyn are besties. (Jane Seymour is his sworn enemy.)
Arianna and Queen Victoria are pen pals. So are Rapunzel and Princess Alice.
Prince Albert keeps trying to convince Varian to join his court. He will adopt him one day. Albert invited him to the Great Exhibition.
Varian hates Thomas Edison. He thinks he’s a hack. He was friends with Louis Le Prince and is fully convinced Edison killed him.
Eugene was fully in support of the French Revolution, until Varian joked it was going to come to Corona. Then he was a little less in support of it.
Cassandra met Edgar Allan Poe in her travels and even has a poem he wrote for her.
Rapunzel visited Eliza Hamiltons orphanage, and the two remained friends and Rapunzel often provided support during her financial troubles.
Despite appreciating Corona being anti-confederacy and helping to support abolition, Abraham Lincoln wishes Lance would stop asking to try his hat on.
Cass and Julie D’Aubigny fucked.
Varian started WWI
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mariacallous · 8 months ago
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If there was a pro-Palestinian movement that wanted to capitalise on the disgust at the destruction of Gaza, it would be moving now to demand a compromise peace.
Western and Arab governments should use every sanction to enforce the removal of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, it would say. They are designed to so change the demography of the West Bank that a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility.
 Since Netanyahu came back to power in a coalition with the far right,  mobs have wrecked Huwara and other Palestinian villages.  It is not too fanciful to imagine a future when ethnic cleansers will run riot.
Western governments have already made tentative and, from the point of view of any robust and principled supporter of Palestine, wholly inadequate gestures. They have issued sanctions on groups that fund extremism, and left it there.
But instead of the global left demanding that the world begins to lay the groundwork for compromise, it insists on war, and a war to the death at that.
I could moralise about left ignorance. I could say its position that Israel is a settler colonial state is at best a half-truth which fails to acknowledge that its population is made up of the descendants of refugees from Arab nationalism and European fascism.
Let me for once avoid preachiness, however, and say that from the practical point of view, the global left has adopted a disastrous position.
It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.
In any war to the death, Israel will win. It has nuclear weapons and a population under arms
Those who urge the abolition of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” or by demanding that the descendants of Palestinians refugees have a right to return to swamp the Jewish state may think they are being principled. But they are playing into the hands of the Israeli right.
Netanyahu tells the West that he has no partners for peace. By supporting the programme of Hamas and Iran, the global left is proving him right.
When Iran attacks, the Israeli right can say completely accurately that its enemies want to wipe Israel from the map. And look what happens then. Not just Western countries but Arab states like Jordan defend Israel.
Two can play at the game of demanding total victory, and one side has all the advantages.
As the charter of the hard-line rightist Likud party put it, in  language which sounds familiar: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
If I were Palestinian, I could imagine myself wanting Israel gone. But the hope of total victory has been a disaster. In 1948, 1967 and 1973 the Arab states tried to wipe Israel off the map and succeeded only in strengthening it.
There is still a great deal of argument about what Hamas thought would happen when its terrorists attacked Israel in October. One theory holds that Hamas was possessed with the same delusion that misled the Bolsheviks in 1917, and hoped to ignite a general uprising.
The Arab masses failed to rise up on Hamas’s behalf and Iran made it clear it was not prepared to engage in more than token warfare with Israel.
Once again, an attempt to wipe out Israel has brought harm to Palestinian civilians.
If you doubt me on the dangers of going for a purist, maximal strategy and demanding total victory, listen to a true leftist, Norman Finkelstein.
There was a time when I admired his attacks on the “Holocaust Industry” and Jews who exploited Nazism to help Israel.
But after my own experiences of left antisemitism, I became suspicious of an argument which, when taken to extreme, was used to maintain the pretence that anti-Jewish racism did not exist, or barely existed, and that accusations of antisemitism were log rolling by cunning Jews seeking to exploit the compassion of naïve gentiles.
The parallels with anti-black racists who claim their opponents are merely “playing the race card” were too obvious to labour.
No such qualms held Finkelstein back. He helped build the anti-Israel movement in the US, and you might have thought his comrades would have listened to him.
He gave a speech at the student sit-in at Columbia university saying they should not chant for the abolition of Israel and for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”.
If you leave “wriggle room for misinterpretation,” he said, your enemies will exploit it.
The speech was a faintly embarrassing performance. Finkelstein is an old man now, and he rambled down many rhetorical cul-de-sac​s. At the end the students just laughed at him and began chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”.
A part of the explanation for their disastrous flight to the extremes lies in the appeal of ​Manichaeism.
People want to feel wholly virtuous and by necessity want to believe their enemies are wholly evil. In these circumstances, only the co​mplete destruction of evil from the river to the sea will suffice. It’s simply not enough to say that Israel must merely withdraw from the occupied territories. Satan and all his works must be renounced.
You might object that some protestors say they want to replace Israel with a sweet, multicultural liberal democracy. But this is progressive thinking at its woozy wishful-thinking worst: an argument made in clear bad faith.
If they were serious, they would damn Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran who want to create an Islamic state. But it is not just that they do not criticise radical Islam, they barely acknowledge its existence. If you listen to the speeches at the rallies and sit-ins, Hamas and its ultra-reactionary blood-stained ideology are simply not mentioned.
The effort is self-defeating. By going to the extremes, a protest movement has a Manichean appeal but it plays into the hands of its enemies.
The “evaporation theory of protest” explains the phenomenon. When the Gaza war ends, and let us hope that it ends soon, most of the protestors will drift away and get on with their lives.
As they evaporate, all that is left will be a residue composed of the most committed and the most extreme.
They will carry on campaigning when the cause is all but forgotten. When Palestine and Israel are no longer in the news, they will still be there.
And when the next war begins in Israel/Palestine – and I am afraid that there will be a next one – they will organise the protests, write the extreme slogans and set the maximalist demands.
This is why the far left dictates the terms of left-wing protests, and why those protests fail.
Or to put it another way, this is why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party and then lost every election he fought
I could be wrong. Perhaps the global wave of protest will bring change for the better. I hope it does. But I fear that, as so often, Palestinian people will be worse off than they were before.​
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