#no fucking business controlling our government and no fucking business controlling our political decisions. ever. fuck off

[lettersfromthelevant]

#I don't even care anymore y'all don't realize how privileged you are#this isn't about you#that's the point#but when that diasporic antisemitism gets to be too much you can come and join me and all of my fellow Israelis#because despite your ignorance we want you safe too because a jew is a jew is a jew...even the jews that throw us under the bus

^💯

Anon said - How about some resourceful people over there prevent Bibi’s insanities from coming true?

Talking down to Israelis as if we're fucking children who can't function without a babysitter... I honestly can't comprehend the nerve it takes to say this to Israelis, y'know, the people experiencing an active war who just went through a brutal massacre.

I've had this little rant in my drafts for a few weeks now, wondering if I should bother posting it, but I'll just stick it here.

To all of the Americans shouting at Israelis because Bibi hasn't been thrown out yet, what exactly do you want us to fucking do? Start a coup while we're in the middle of a multi-front war and several major internal crises? That's fucking suicidal. He'll be tossed out during the elections because that's the only viable way to not immediately get wiped off the face of the Earth by our enemies.

This does not effect you. At this point, you're no better than the pro-Palestine crowd screaming for Israel to be hanged in court. You are treating this like a spectator sport just as much as they are. The "solutions" you're throwing forth for us are just as unrealistic and insane as the leftists screaming for us to be dismantled and expelled. Just because you aren't directly advocating for our genocide, doesn't mean you aren't still advocating for policies and actions that would lead to our cultural or physical genocide. I would honestly argue that what you're doing is worse because you are actually out there proposing legislation for Israel to be tried in court, sanctioned, and have our government be controlled by yours.

What the fuck are you doing? Sit down. You have no place in determining the political future of Israel. It is not your business. You do not fucking live here. You do not have the right to dictate how we defend ourselves, how we organize our government, and how we plan our future.

The sheer audacity of people like Anon, who claim to be diaspora Jews, positioning themselves as morally superior to Israelis and completely erasing everything we've been through over here. I've seen actual, off-Anon diaspora Jews on here implying that October 7th wasn't personal for Israelis, that it wasn't our neighbors who killed us, that we don't experience antisemitic violence on the same personal level as diaspora Jews do.

Israel please recognize what we are facing

Bitch, we are fucking dying.

We live in an active war zone.

My neighbors were slaughtered, my friends have been killed, I haven't been able to sit and mourn for any of them in over 100 days.

Israelis need to look at the bigger picture

Sincerely and wholeheartedly, go fuck yourself.

Breathe.

It is normal to feel pain, alarm, and sorrow, as we see what our world has turned into, as we hear what so many want to do to us. It wouldn't be human to feel any other way. I've been deeply involved in this issue for many years and truly did not expect so much of the goyische world to immediately go full werewolf on the thrill of seeing Jews tortured and massacred in high-res. Many of them are lost to us, and as far as I am concerned, there is nothing they could ever, ever do to regain my trust. They would never even think to give an apology, and even if they did, I would never accept it.

It makes matters all the worse that Israel - this age's morph of the reason to hate us - has for the last ~16 months been run by objectively evil and horrible people. A few of them have talked publicly about "encouraging voluntary resettlement" or claim to have held negotiations with African states. In all cases, less vile people from the same government have immediately denied those stories and said there is no such policy, no such talks, it is all just suggestions. When you have a government run by Internet trolls, criminals, and terrorist sympathizers, that is how they talk. There is no imaginable mechanism for any of this - it is impossible to believe any country would go along with it, or that it is taken seriously by anyone beyond whichever racist asshole is thinking out loud next to a reporter at that time. But even as idle blather, it is immensely dangerous. It represents a threshold we cannot cross. We cannot - as you said - "make that look good." The best we can do is recognize that this particular evil racist doesn't actually have the authority or method for doing it, he's just jerking off, the Attorney-General told them to shut up and stop advocating crimes.

There have been so many times when the world went utterly batshit about Israeli actions that were totally innocuous, about rumors that never even happened. I talk about it here all the time. Part of me is hoping that is an element of this case, even as I'm afraid, this time, it might not be.

And as I'm also afraid that things will get even worse for us if, as looks very likely, Trump wins next time.

So it is okay to feel utterly terrible about things.

And yet, we still have to breathe.

We are alive because Jewish people got through much worse times than these, with far fewer resources and allies than we have today. Everything we know, everything we worry about now, exists because even though They Tried To Kill Us, We Survived.

Confront reality - without despair. We are facing bad times and they may get worse, but we will get through them.

[txttletale]

hi miss healed, could you elaborate what you mean by dictatorship/authoritarian not being useful/meaningful terms? i know they're terms the west likes to tack on its political enemies, but i thought it might be a case of just misuse of terms that can still be useful, rather than outright a problem with the concept itself, so id be interested to understand your opinion. thanks!

so i don't think 'authoritarian' has any useful analytical value because every state is 'authoritarian' -- the only metrics by which one state might be seen as less 'authoritarian' than another are the metrics which privilege liberal democracy and a free market as a meaningful sort of 'freedom', which as a marxist, i don't! every state is an institution for class suppression--in the state and revolution, lenin quotes engels as saying:

[...] it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to holddown its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.

every state uses violence to perpetuate and legitimize itself. there is no state that would let you march into the capital and declare its dissolution without deploying armed men against you -- every state is authoritarian, it excercises authority, this is a tautological statement about how states maintain their own existence.

and sure, you could then say 'well we can just call all states authoritarian', but i don't think that makes any sense. the criticism of a state 'authoritarian/totalitarian' implies that there is an alternative, a point of comparison against which the state comes short--and i simply don't think it's possible to use 'authoritarian' as a cogent criticism without having such a point of comparison (usually the US or some european liberal democracy) which in turn means buying into liberal & capitalist ideas about 'freedom'.

as for 'dictator', i have a different criticism of that, also stemming from my marxist perspective. basically, i just think it doesn't describe anything useful in terms of political analysis and massively overemphasizes the role of individual psychology and personality. i frequently criticize both anticommunist and 'stalinist' views of stalin by joking that he must have been a very busy man if he singlehandedly ate all the grain or killed all the nazis. which is obviously a glib way of putting it--but my point is that any dictator who has ever 'done anything' could only do it because they could order a government official to do it who in turn could order a department to do it that could in turn mobilize hundreds or thousands of soldiers/construction workers/bureaucrats/etc. in order to make that happen.

sure, the leaders of countries might make decisions, and in some systems an individual leader might have greater leeway than others. but there are always very clear hard limits about what they must do and what they cannot do. i am sure i can say pretty uncontroversially that mohammad bin salman has an extreme level of political control over the economy and government of saudi arabia, but if he woke up tomorrow and said 'good news everyone, we're converting the country to wicca and donating all our oil to iran' then that would not happen and he would be deposed instantly. for a more realistic example, imagine any 'dictator' of your choice saying 'well, it's time to massively defund the military' -- this would be completely fucking impossible without some kind of loyalist paramilitary organization (which then exerts its own forces upon the 'dictator'.)

and of course all that leaves aside the massive extent to which 'dictator' is politically charged. do i think that vladimir putin was democratically elected? obviously not! but i don't think that any US president has been in any meaningful sense 'elected' by anything other than capital either, and two of the last four straightforwardly lost a popular vote even by the standards of liberal democracy! i think that any political system is best analyzed in class terms, in terms of what interests the government serves in terms of class struggle and competition between global capitalists, rather than in terms of individuals or what formal power structures give out the fancy titles

tldr: as a marxist, i think that 'authoritarian' is a useless distinguisher because excercising authority is the sole purpose and function of a state -- 'dictator' is a useless distinguisher because even the most autocratic fiefdom-state is ultimately a class dictatorship first and foremost

[leviathan-supersystem]

@yourtoradorasextendedwarranty most of the dogshit in that interminable long argument wasn't even worth addressing but this part jumped out at me as especially moronic and blatantly dishonest.

first i'd like to clarify that i'm not trying to get involved in electoral politics, i'm not interested in trying to prove that republicans are fascist, and i'm certainly not trying to prove democrats aren't. the point i'm making here is simply "these arguments presented here are dogshit"

like, for one thing, the idea of "more state rights"="not fascist" is very dumb. if a state were, say, rounding up black people and putting them in camps, is it non-fascist for them to do that (since it's a state government doing it, not the federal government) and conversely is fascist for the federal government to prevent the state from doing that? if for whatever reason that hypothetical isn't striking a chord with you, maybe switch black people in the hypothetical for, idk, christians.

or to use a more down-to-earth real-world example, which side do you think most actual fascists side with when it comes to state rights regarding slavery? or integration? (and certainly the degree to which fascists and libertarians are in agreement when it comes to whether states/businesses should be compelled to integrate would call into question whether those two ideologies are really "opposites")

"state rights" on it's own has no real political alignment-the alignment of any given "state rights" issue hinges on the question "states right to what"? obviously fascists are all in favor of states having the right to suppress minorities, or impose excessive draconian laws.

which brings us to the subject of what i can only assume it what you were alluding to with this whole "states rights" thing- namely the overturning of roe v. wade- the "states rights" in question is the right for states to surveil women and to lock them in prison for the decisions they make regarding their own personal reproductive healthcare. such personal liberty!

and of course building off of this, trump and co. are not by any means consistently pro-states rights. see the federal abortion ban that has been floated by those in trump's camp- the pose of being "pro states right" was obviously just a tactical maneuver until he could get abortion banned federally.

now, of course none of this proves he's a fascist- being willing to impose draconian measures to control women's reproductive health is widespread among all sorts of right-wing ideologies- but it certainly doesn't prove he isn't one either.

(also regarding "sending taxes overseas"- do trump and his supporters want to stop sending those taxes to israel? no of course not, the parties are in perfect lockstep on that, just one of the many reasons both parties are ultimately worthless)

regarding the "stop putting naked kids in front of our kids" claim- it's hard to know what the fuck you're even talking about here. my closest best guess is that this is about "kids seeing drag"- and if that's the case this is some of the most disgusting misrepresentation of that issue i've ever seen. the whole culture war around kids and drag has centered around parents taking their own kids to all-ages drag shows- so those aren't your kids, and the people they're taking them to see aren't naked. and far from your narrative of the poor best-upon right-wingers just trying to raise their own children in peace, what has actually been happening is right wingers calling for parents who take their kids to see drag shows have their kids taken from them and be thrown in jail.

now, again, right-wingers wanting to take away the kids of progressives is not something i'd consider to be exclusive to fascism. all kinds of right-wing ideological groups support that (although the "taking your kids to see mrs doubtfire is child abuse" shtick is a new spin). you, on the other hand, did claim that wanting to take people's kids away is specifically fascist- so make of that what you will.