#like if my white ass can understand the nuance of what is happening in palestine rn i know urs can too

[datafii]

i fuckin hate white men

[womenfrommars]

I'm sick of people pretending this is the same as Palestine or Afghanistan or whatever. I'm sick of people also pretending no one cared about those. People fucking cared. YOU didn't care. YOU don't actually watch the news and think no one is paying attention. YOU are indifferent or uniformed and YOU think everyone is like YOU! But you also seem unable to understand that caring about things around you more than things far away from you is NORMAL HUMAN BEHAVIOUR. YOU'D FUCKING CARE WAY MORE ABOUT YOUR HOUSE BURNING THAN SOME ONE ELSE'S HOUSE BURNING. THIS IS HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN WORKS. People become so alienated from normal human functions bc they're so online they forget how people act. "Didn't have this energy for middle eastern refugees" yeah you know why? Bc Ukrainians either seek refuge in bordering countries or they die bc the other borders are Belarus and Russia. Ukrainians are coming to my country which doesn't border Ukraine because they already have family here. There's a key nuance there but I don't expect stupid fucking yanks to be able to understand it least of all aknowledge it. And this is not comparable to Palestine or Afghanistan or any other conflict these people drag out to gotcha and play what about ism, as if they care about those anyway. This conflict has no ambiguity whatsoever - a nation attacked another with no prior threat. There is no ambiguity. Also "you don't care about *whatever conflict i say so I can seem woke*. Are your brains so rotted out that you think we can have any actual impact halfway across the world? Do you think we as regular people who happened to be born in Europe can solve the conflicts in Yemen or Ethiopia or Afghanistan or even in fucking Ukraine right now? What kind of sociopath do you need to be to be a grown adult saying shit like this while people mourn? What the fuck do you want US to do about armed conflict a world away? Post about it? Yeah, posting about it is solving the ukranian issue, right? How braindead do you have to be to think that we don't solve the conflicts in Yemen, Ethiopia, south Africa etc for lols. Do you think we have the power to stop any of this? Do YOU think you're doing ANYTHING to help those people you fucking PRETEND to care about to one-up Europeans by posting about it? Might as well post "likes charge, reblogs cast" you stupid fucking assholes.

I'm sorry, it's been a long day and the level of just absolute sociopathic behavior I've seen from Americans online is astounding. Shame on you. Pray to God no actual war comes to your country, pray to god you can seat there forever being a smug asshole and throwing around people's real tragedies so you can one-up other people going through tragic times, as if you fucking care. The Oscar should go for these ass clowns, they're really good at pretending they care about populations they don't give a fuck about and don't know anything about.

I disagree with the people saying Ukraine is only getting attention now because it's a white and/or European country. The conflict between Palestine and Israel has received a lot of media attention over the years, and the Afghanistan situation also gathered a lot of attention. The European Union is more directly involved with this conflict because we're sending weapons and posing economic sanctions on Russia. With Afghanistan my country was only involved in so far as that we evacuated our troops (poorly I might add). Americans are quite weird because on the one hand they support ''doing something'' (whatever that is) but they also oppose(d) sending the US army to Afghanistan. Maybe they just mean accepting refugees but not actually fighting back.

The other day I was on Instagram and saw the story of a Turkish girl I went to school with. She said people only care about Ukranians because they're white. Muslims have this victim complex where they think muslim victims never receive media attention just because they're muslim. As if social media isn't largely pro-Palestine because it's woke. Woke people just want to compare this situation to other situations that are not at all similar and then pretend it's all about race and/or religion or whatever seems woke to them. It's tiring and not helping. If anything it really isolates people and I think it's offensive to Ukranians to suggest they're ''privileged'' in this case just because they happen to be white. It's been a few days and we're already hearing these cold takes that nobody asked for and that help nobody. You're helping neither Ukranians nor Palestinians to compare for the Oppression Olympics. And yes, I agree people tend to care more for things that hit closer to home. I think that's normal behaviour that doesn't relate to race at all. In Europe we haven't seen a war like this since the fall of Yugoslavia, I think. People are shocked because they didn't expect to witness a war on the European Continent in their lifetime. That also ties in with why the EU was ever founded in the first place: to prevent war (and to promote economic relations). Possible EU Membership for Ukraine also comes into play here

[johnnysjabs-blog]

Hillary and Her Cult of Personality

Hillary’s been making the rounds on the talk show circuit promoting her newest book, “What Happened,” and while I’ve been in South Florida isolated from 24-hour cable news (thanks Irma!), I am feeling a bit of FOMO reading the cited sound bites on my social media feeds.  To be clear, I am a politics junkie, not a die-hard Hillary fan.  But for anyone who has a passion for American politics, the fact that Mrs. Clinton published a book about her failed 2016 campaign is exciting news indeed.  Her breadth of experience in the White House, Senate, State Department, and on the campaign trail makes her a public figure very much worth this sort of attention.

I voted for her.  I’ll be up front about it rather than have you try to read through the lines here…  And I’m usually way more interested in discussing policy nuances and debating the merits of someone’s proposed agenda, but I think it’s important that I be up front about this.  Because while I admire her as a shrewd politician and a noble stateswoman, I was not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, the 2016 candidate for the Democratic Party.

She poses the title of her book as a rather candid question to us that I’m sure was painstaking for her to address.  What happened?  While she seems rather sincere in taking responsibility for her campaign’s shortcomings, she needs to address a few elephants in the room – her e-mails, James Comey, and Bernie Sanders.  What I am waiting to see is if she addresses the cult of personality that on one hand, emboldened some of her most fervent supporters, and on the other, left many would-be supporters like myself feeling, “meh…”

What do I mean by her cult of personality?  Well, there’s been absolutely no one like her in American politics.  She is sharp, aggressive, unapologetic about her values, and unabashed in her steam-roller style that has no mercy for her political opponents.  <Queue the militant feminists among us> “Well, would you be saying that if she were a man?” No, I wouldn’t.  And that’s the exact point.  She is a woman.  And the aura that was built around #ImWithHer was a misrepresentation of the implied female empowerment movement latent in her campaign.

Let’s be honest.  Some Democrats supported Clinton because they thought she finally deserved the coronation… Sorry, I meant nomination.  With Bernie’s campaign surprisingly attacking from the Left, ardent Hillary fans weren’t having it though.  Does anyone remember the profanity-laden “All-Caps Explosion of Feelings Regarding the Liberal Backlash Against Hillary Clinton” that circulated on social media in early 2016?  Or how about signs at anti-Trump rallies reading, “If Hillary won, I’d be having brunch right now.”  These are cringeworthy and, at-best, superficial understandings of what a Clinton presidency would have looked like.

I really didn’t care about her e-mails.  I think that right-wing pundits made a big deal out of it because they had nothing better to attack her with.  If they were so concerned with national security, they should have been just as fixated with Donald Trump’s ties to white nationalism and the possibility of Russian influence on our governance.  What I did care about though was the fact that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accepting money from corporate donors and that the Clinton Foundation was accepting money from foreign governments.  And what a shame for her being that Bernie Sanders swore off the practice and still ran a solid campaign.

Speaking of Bernie, I’m kind of tired of being labeled by Hillary and her supporters as a “Bernie-bro.” On one hand I like the moniker, but on the other, coming from her, there is such a snide undertone that implies some sort of false sexism that motivated his supporters.  Wasn’t Susan Sarandon one of his most prominent endorsers?  I’ll get into why your argument is bullshit later on.  Just keep reading…

Anyways, for all the shit that Trump’s gotten for his ties to Russia, let’s talk about the Clinton sympathies for racist and apartheid politics in Israel that she has espoused for YEARS.  Does no one else see this as a problem?  Benjamin Netanyahu is basically the David Duke of Israel, and yet in an op-ed she authored in 2015 entitled, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond with Israel – and Benjamin Netanyahu,” she claims that violence on all sides must stop.  All sides… sound a bit Trumpian, huh?  So for my so-called feminist friends, when did it become okay to blame the victim?  I guess feminism, gay rights, and child advocacy are worthy causes until they protect Palestinians.  Is it okay for me to use the term “feminazi” just yet?

Let me not mince words – this is a BIG FUCKING DEAL and informs me, as an American voter, about a candidate’s inherit views on race relations, criminal justice, foreign policy, and the boldness of his or her leadership.  Jimmy Carter worked hard for justice in Palestine, albeit as a former president, but even Obama didn’t pretend like he was chummy with Bibi Netanyahu.  Hell, Israel is not a monolithic electorate!  There are swaths of Israelis and American Jews that think Netanyahu is not good for the security of the US or the Middle East.  The fact that Mrs. Clinton thought it was necessary to write that op-ed angered the hell out of me.  And the fact that my Hillary-supporting friends thought that my hesitation to vote for her was unwarranted drives me just as mad.

About 2 weeks before the election, I had a conversation with my Republican mother about who we were planning to vote for.  Trump was out of the question for me, but I was leaning towards Jill Stein.  And for the first time ever in my life, my mom encouraged me to vote for a specific candidate.  She was fully supporting Hillary Clinton – not as a liberal, not as a conservative, not as Hillary’s cult of personality... Just as a voter who was looking objectively at two candidates and deciding which deal was better for our country.  And it’s not just because my mom was (is) disgusted by Trump.  My mom was convinced that Hillary was well-qualified to lead the world.  In that conversation, I figured that maybe she was seeing something that I wasn’t. Mama’s words were enough, and so I went to the ballot voting for Hillary, but keeping in mind that the fight for social justice was absolutely not over.

Well here we are.  The fight for social justice is NOT over. But instead, we are trying to fight Trump’s tendencies towards white-washing this great country of ours. Look – Trump SUCKS ASS.  Literally.  You could probably find some tape in Moscow of him doing so with a Russian prostitute.  He is a detriment to our government, gets in the way of legislative processes, and is a very poor statesman with little negotiating capital.  He has a Republican majority and can’t get shit done.  As my old man would say, it’s like a eunuch in a whorehouse. Hillary would have gotten shit done. So by her addressing “what happened,” she is allowing an appropriate moment for America to have a national conversation about who we are and where we would like to go.

My heart broke for her when she lost, and despite having many disagreements with her, I think she is an asset for any political party and has a right to share her voice on American politics for as long as she desires.  She is STILL more seasoned than Donald Trump and can still bring about effective change in Washington and on Main Street.  Unfortunately, it’s just not in the White House.  Love her or hate her, she sure is fascinating.  Plus she’s about to make a shitload of money with that book.  Go get it Mrs. Clinton!