#there can never be any moral colonialism

[transbeamrooikat]

thinking about how its implied that Paul WILL eventually ecologically destroy dune. how in his quest to bring them "paradise" he will destroy their way of living. the way my heart sunk whenever it was mentioned. the way we see how badly water effects the worms

[puke-ur-gutz]

i will cashapp $10 to the first person who can name 3 real life harmful things bob bryar did without accusing him of thought crime

[avese23]

I feel like it says something that a famous 19 year old being extremely shitty on the internet is trending more than anything about politicians or effective protests or the actual acts of genocide.

Like yes, people feel betrayed that their parasocial bond with someone not trusted with alchohol or public office has been broken. And yes tumblr would rather focus on fandom than politics and the fact that stranger things is trending but Palestine is not is perhaps evidence of tumblrs (alleged) suppression of what’s actually being posted.

But it still feels gross to see. Telling a Jewish kid to kill himself helps literally no one, and no one cares that this scandal upholds your pre existing dislike of a show and now you feel superior. Yes his actions should upset you, so let yourself feel that anger and disappointment, boycott his stuff, express he’s in the wrong. But then focus on the more dire problems at hand.

In general can we, *for once* make brown people’s suffering about something besides whether you favorite white celebrity is ok with it?

[hussyknee]

Wonder how far I can prod libs into finishing their full thought bubble behind all this "harm reduction" "genocide is a single issue" "you don't care about marginalized people in the US" "dyou want fascism WITH genocide???" screeching.

Okay, class, say it with me: "I don't want to live in a third world country like the ones we keep destroying."

Because you know. The countries your war criminal leaders keep bombing and starving and destabilising and leeching dry? We don't have trans or gay rights or women's rights or disability benefits or environmental or labour protections. No one would want to live in our countries obviously. You'd kill yourselves before you had to live like we do. Sure, we're only like this because you keep us trapped in poverty and violence and we still have full, happy lives worth living despite it but that's because we're used to it! We don't know any better! Not like you! You know what you deserve and you shouldn't have to lose anything as a consequence of your own political choices! Your government is supposed to happen to other people! Not you! So like, yeah, it's bad that the poors are being massacred wholesale or whatever, but like. That doesn't mean you gotta die with them, y'know? And by "death" you don't mean actual genocide like what's happening over here but "death" as in "having to live like we do".

The trolley problem metaphor is so goddamn attractive to you because you see yourself outside the tracks, objectively assessing the situation and making the "tough" "moral" choice for the collective good. It's imperialist horseshit. You don't have a democracy and it's not a trolley. What you have is an imperial death machine running on an apartheid system that decides who gets fed to it and who gets fed by it. That's your "two tracks"— the colonized and the colonizer, the core and the periphery, the white and the coloured. "Harm reduction"? Have you counted how many fucking millions in and around the world your death machine eats to keep how many of you "safe"? But our losses are a foregone conclusion, a matter of course, a regrettable necessity. The only variable is yours.

Every political choice in 200 years of your settler colony has been "genocide AND". "Genocide AND women's rights". "Genocide AND workers rights". "Genocide AND fascism". "Genocide AND democracy". The difference is that for the first time in your history you're now watching it livestreamed to the entire world in real time 24/7, exactly as your colony is about to capsize under the weight of its own bloodlust. A sea change from when your parents threw parties watching bombs dropping on Baghdad and then spent twenty years watching movies about sad it made the soldiers.

How do you count the victims when we are numbers and you are people? You scream about trans rights in the US while Palestinian trans children don't have the right to reach puberty. OSHA for you but Congolese children have to die in mines. Reproductive rights for the US while Sudanese women are raped in millions. Yes, but it's always been "genocide AND" no matter what, right? Do we want to sabotage the party that has never fucking cared about us and don't now even with half their own country screaming at them on the off-chance they might possibly maybe one day do?? Why are we acting so mad like it's YOUR fault that you're fighting for your quality of life over our corpses?? Do we want YOU to lose your rights over it??

Yes, actually. We do. We want you to have a taste of the reality that generations on generations of your illegal illegitimate white supremacist occupation has inflicted on us just so your worthless hide can sit there and call our genocides a single fucking issue. And let's be real: that's what you're so fucking afraid of.

[ot3]

If you genuinely believe it is acceptable to join the us military because you're desperate or you don't know any better then you are prioritizing the right of an American citizen to be ignorant and self interested over non-americans right to live. Yeah I understand people have to make certain difficult choices if they're poor! But you have to draw a moral line about what you would or would not do to improve your own economic status at some point. The place I draw that line is at joining the united states military and if that's not where your line is drawn then you either don't know enough about what this country has done and should really look into it, or you're too racist for harm committed outside of this nations borders to impact your decision making.

Talking about how "vulnerable" the people who join the military are is something that can only hold any weight if your frame of reference for vulnerability begins and ends within the borders of the united states. Even the absolute least privileged US citizen reaps imperial benefits that are completely out of grasp of most people on the planet. Being ignorant of the crimes the us military has committed is the privilege of someone who has never been victimized by them. Being in a position where you have the option to economically benefit from participating in the military occupation of foreign countries, participating in any step of that apparatus at all, is arguably one of most the definitive and egregious manifestations of colonial privilege that the average american has access to.

Meanwhile, the people in many of these formerly colonized and/or currently occupied countries have had their economic opportunities gutted. The upward mobility you all seem to think justifies any amount of service to the empire is not even an option for them. Cobalt, coffee, rubber, chocolate, bananas, sweatshop, chemical plants, all of their labor and natural resources being siphoned off to boost our economy, funnel money into our military, which is then used to continue massacring them and collapsing their governments if they dare to try and improve domestic conditions. God forbid they own their own water and land! And God forbid they try to come here either because we all know how that works out!

I don't know how else to say it. I am begging you to consider these people as being as fully human as you are. If you wouldn't justify murdering your neighbor for college tuitionyou shouldn't justify joining the army for it either. The bare, bare, rock bottom minimum of allyship against colonialism is not joining the army and not justifying anyone else's decision to do so either. I'm not trying to moralize. I'm not trying to grandstand. This is a fully earnest plea to please consider the wellbeing of the people victimized by imperialism, not just the ones carrying it out, coerced or otherwise. There are plenty of moral gray areas in life but this is not one of them if you consider the lives of people in the global South to be valuable.

[fairuzfan]

I have concern that I may still be technically zionist despite claiming to be pro-palestine. This is because I knew very little about Palestine when October 7th happened, so in the time since I have been reluctant to have a stance on a two-state or one-Palestinian-state solution. I know now that almost all of Isreal is stolen land and recognize Isreal only exists due to colonialism, it took me a long time to learn that but I know it now. Before I knew that, I knew that regardless of the prior history that in current day Palestine is being subjected to a genocide. However, I struggle with politics and therefore struggle with understanding how a one-Palestinian-state could be achieved and have concern about what would happen to any genuinely innocent people who live in Isreal. To be clear, Isreal as a whole is guilty and I just have concern about what will happen to the portion of people in Isreal who are just as horrified as the rest of the world at what their government is doing. I do not personally know any Palestinians, so I have not known who to talk to about this especially since I do not want to overstep in any way. Theres more context I could provide but I wont because this is roughly the gist of where I am currently at when it comes to my concerns about whether or not I am still zionist. Do you have any reccomendations as to what I can do about my concerns? I am not sure whether or not I am overstepping right now by asking you this, but I do not know any other Palestians on a personal level that I can go to.

hey thanks for sending this in. i think we all have zionist biases that we have to unlearn, even i catch myself falling for it sometimes. so it's not necessarily a moral failing if you're trying to undo the zionism you've been taught. thanks for trying to undo it!

i do want to correct you a bit thought, in that *all* of israel is stolen land because israel is a settler colonial society. until it is relabeled as "Palestine" it can't not be stolen land.

I guess my advice is that you read scholarship and perspectives on palestinian thought and heritage. i can't tell you what a free palestine will look like but i can tell you what i imagine it to be. but what i can tell you is that the state of israel is fully intent on erasing all traces of palestinian life no matter what.

i guess i can tell you why "two state solutions" don't really work because there is no.... prevention of settlement building in the west bank and they'll never really promote *not* settling in the west bank. like i really cannot imagine a world where there aren't settlers on palestinian land no matter the case. and that's even not allowing palestinians the right of return to their homes and expecting them to give up what they dedicated their lives to. many palestinians in the west bank and gaza are themselves refugees because they were displaced in '48. so no matter what, palestinians will always get the short end of the stick and told to "just deal with it."

plus, why are we concerned with the supposed future danger towards israelis when the current, very real danger towards palestinians exists? shouldn't we prioritize actual events over hypothetical ones? why should we concern ourselves with the future when for palestinians its not a guarantee? i have no idea what's going to happen to gaza, for example.... shouldn't we prioritize that gaza lives on today?

i think i would question why you think israelis are inherently in danger in a one state solution? like do you assume that palestinians will all universally commit violence on all israelis? is it because you believe that hamas wants to kill every single israeli jew no matter what? if so, i think that's where your problem lies — in the assumption that peace can only be achieved through segregation just in a lighter form (because the state of israel relies on segregation as a principal of its existence as a jewish state). what about the palestinians who fear living side by side with the same people who raped, tortured, and murdered them for 75 years, or advocated for their deaths? aren't they inherently in more danger?

i mean palestinians have consistently been painted as the villains for more than 75 years. like in every aspect. i think to really truly be antizionist you need to prioritize palestinian concerns and worries over israeli ones because of how.... unwilling much of the world is to even consider them.

approaching zionism from an idea of an inequality structure is also necessary — rather than assuming its a one off system, we examine it as a perpetuation of multiple types of systems of inequality embedded into one. i recommend the institute for the critical study of zionism (click) for more information on this. There's also this book by Ismail Zayid written in the 80's (click) about the longtime violence the ideology of zionism has done to multiple communities, not just palestinians.

Here's a great reading list by palipunk about different aspects of palestinian thought and culture (click). i suggest looking through them to help decolonize our way of thought.

i might add on to this later if i think of something else to say.

[metamatar]

ok. so. baby's first moral philosophy in war. moral consequentialism apparently demands not fighting any war where you don’t have as many weapons as the other side. but first of all that denies like? actual history especially because we have a history of so called unwinnable wars where under resourced sides beat more powerful ones, specifically in anti colonial contexts vietnam, algeria etc. there is a whole philosophy and history of tactics for the underdog which even dilettantes like me know. like you can do a careful analysis of palestinian firepower and conclude that now was not the right time, but you certainly cannot conclude that the time for palestine is never. if you choose to only fight when you can match in conventional firepower, you also lose the opportunity to economically weaken the powerful state. holding fire till you believe you can win every objective is a very short termist view. war is a long theater.

not all people who recognise the value of anti colonial liberation movements do it bc they're idealists who valorise the power of doing the right thing. conceding the possibility of winning before trying to win is conceding that the powerful only get more powerful and we should just leave them to it. sadly for you nietschzean freaks, history proved you false. why don't you advocate for the rights of kings?

[palms-upturned]

But you can take direct action AND vote harm reduction as much as possible. In fact, you SHOULD be doing that. Yeah there are too many people whose stance ends at "vote for the least bad" but the problem is the worst of the politicians have dedicated followers who will aggressively vote their guys into the office to the detriment to everyone else. So, yes, get involved and march and everything else but please still vote harm reduction. That's all most of us are asking. Because the worse side of this is still going to be doing genocide, they're just going to be sure to bring some of that genocide home and use it to ensure immigrants and queer people here are killed as well.

I think you need to sit with that last sentence you wrote. The point of my post was that if you cast a vote for people who actively participate in genocide in another country because you think their domestic policy is better for you, then you have to be able to understand and sit with the fact that you are breaking solidarity with colonized people. You are voting for the “leopards who promise to only eat the faces of people in the global south” party. You have to be prepared to accept what people extrapolate about you and your politics from this rather than take it as a slight against your morals that you need to defend yourself from.

Immigrants and queer people are already dying here. The Biden administration has not curbed the sudden rise in homophobic/transphobic legislation we’ve been seeing. Roe v Wade has been repealed, and we very nearly lost the Indian Child Welfare Act, too. We’re seeing a covid surge with numbers rivaling the very start of the pandemic, but none of the protections that we had at the start, which weren’t even good to begin with. And now that people are mobilizing across the country for Palestine, this administration is actively making it more difficult to even express anti zionist sentiments in public. Palestinian communities here are facing increased policing. You can talk about harm reduction all you want, but I struggle to see the value in supporting a party whose only appeal is “at least we’re not the other guys,” who can brazenly go against the majority of the American people over and over and over because they believe that they’ll remain in power no matter what because hey, what’s the alternative, let the republicans win? If there are no stakes for them, then what’s the fucking point? Why would they ever accede any demand that their constituents ever made of them? And if not, then what good is it to put them in positions of power?

Personally, I will never forget any of what I’ve seen as long as I live, and you will never catch me voting for any of these people. I won’t legitimize their strategy. I think it’s a fucking bad one, and I think that these people are never going to do anything but toe the colonial line. I can’t stop you from voting however you want to vote, but I genuinely fail to see how trying to rally people to vote against their better judgment is a better use of your time and energy than trying to rally your party to do something that people would actually vote for. In the meantime, regardless of who’s in what seat, the work laid out before us remains the same. It is always the same. We have to protect each other separate from and in spite of the state.

[zedecksiew]

(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour

In the ongoing project of rescuing useful thoughts off Xwitter, here's another hot take of mine, reheated:

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."

The quote comes from Luke Gearing and his excellent post "Against Incentive", to which I had been reacting.

My thread was mainly intended as a fulsome nodding along to one of Luke's points. It was posted in 2021, and extended in 2023 after Sidney Icarus posed a question to it. So it is two threads.

Here they are, properly paragraphed, hopefully more cleanly expressed:

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(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour

This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.

As Luke Gearing puts it:

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."

Bear in mind that I'm not saying that pro-social play can't have rewarding outcomes for players. Any decision should have consequences in the fiction. It serves the ideal of portraying a living, world to have these consequences rendered diegetic:

The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy; pamphlets appear, quoting from your revolutionary speech.

What I am saying is that rewarding abstract mechanical benefits (XP tickets, metacurrency points, etc) for ethical decisions stinks.

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A subtle but absolutely essential distinction, when it comes to portraying and exploring ethics / morality, in roleplaying games.

Say you reward bonus XP for sparing goblins.

Are your players making a decisions based on how much they value life / the personhood of goblins? Or are they making a decision based on how much they want XP?

Say you declare: "If you help the villagers, the party receives a +1 attitude modifier in this village."

Are your players assisting the community because it is the right thing to do, or are they playing optimally, for a +1 effect?

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XP As Currency

XP is the ur-example of incentive in TTRPGs. It began with D&D's gold-for-XP, and has never strayed far from that logic.

XP is still currency. Do things the GM / game designer wants you to do? Get paid.

Players use XP to buy better mechanical tools (levels, skills, abilities)---which they can then in turn use to better perform the actions that will net them XP.

Like using gold you stole from goblins to buy a sword, so you can now rob orcs.

I genuinely feel that such systems are valuable. They are models that illuminate the drives fuelling amoral / unethical behaviour.

Material gain is the drive of land-grabbing and colonialism. Logger-barons and empires do get wealthier and more privileged, as a reward for their terrible actions.

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If you want to present an ethical choice in play, congruent to our real-life dilemmas, there is value in asking:

"Hey, if you kill the goblins you can grab their treasure, and you will get richer. There's no reward for sparing their lives, except that they are thankful."

Which is another way of asking:

"Does your commitment to the ideal of preserving life outweigh the guaranteed material incentives for taking life?"

The ethical choice is the difficult choice, precisely because it involves---as it often does, in real life---sacrificing personal growth and gain. Doling out an XP bounty for doing the right thing makes the ethical choice moot.

"I as the player am making a mechanically optimal choice, but my character is making an ethical choice!"

A cop-out. Owning your cake and eating it too. The fictional fig-leaf of empathy over a calculated a decision to make profit.

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Sidney Icarus asks a question which I will quote here:

"... those who hold to their beliefs of good behaviour don't feel rewarded, and therefore feel punished. And that's not a good feeling. It's an unpleasant experience to play a game where the righteous players are in rags, and the mercenary fucks have crowns and sceptres. So, what's the design opportunity? How do we make doing the right thing feel pleasant without making it mercenary? Or, like reality, do we acknowledge that ethical acts are valuable only intrinsically and philosophically? I have no idea how to reconcile this."

I would suggest that the above dichotomy---"righteous players in rags, mercs in crowns"---is true if property is recognised as the only true incentive.

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Friends As Property

Modern games try to solve the righteous-players-in-rags "problem" in various ways. Virtue might not net you treasure or XP, but may give you:

Contact or ally slots, which you can fill in;

Relationship meters you can watch tick up;

Favour points you can cash in later;

etc.

How different are these mechanical incentives from treasure or XP, really?

Your relationships with supposedly living, breathing beings are transformed into abilities for your character: skills you can train; powers you can reliably proc. Pump your relationship score with the orc tribe until calling on them for reinforcements becomes a once-per-month ability.

Relationships become contracts. Regard becomes debt. Put your friend in an ally slot, so they become a tool.

If this is what you want play to be---totally fine! As stated previously, games say powerful things when they portray the engines of profit and property.

But I personally don't think game designers should design employer-employee relationships and disguise these as instances of mutual aid.

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Friends As Friends

In the OSR campaigns I'm part of, I keep forgetting to record money. Which is usually a big deal in such games, seeing as they are in the grand tradition of gold-for-XP?

In both games, my characters are still 1st-Level pukes, though it's been months.

I'm having a blast, anyway.

My GMs, by virtue of running organic, reactive worlds, have made play rewarding for me. NPCs / geographies remember the party's previous actions, and respond accordingly.

I've been given gills from a river god, after constant prayer;

I've befriended a village of monsters, where we now live;

I've parleyed with the witch of a whole forest, where we may now tread;

I've a boon from the touch of wood wose, after answering his summons.

I cannot count on the wood wose showing up. He is a character in the world, not a power I control. Calling on the wood wose might become a whole adventure.

Little of this stuff is codified my stats or abilities or equipment list. They are mostly all under "misc notes".

Diegetic growth. Narrative change that spirals into more play.

This is the design opportunity, to me:

How do we shape TTRPG play culture in such a way that the "misc notes" gaps in our games are as fun as the systemised bits? What kinds of orientation tools must we provide? What should we say, in our advice sections?

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A Note About Trust

The reason why it is so hard to imagine play beyond conventional incentive structures has a lot to do with trust.

Sidney again:

One of the core issues is the "low trust table". I'm not designing just for myself but for my audience. For a product. How much can I ask purchasers and their friends to codesign this part with me?

Nerds love numbers and things we can write down in inventories or slots because they are sureties. We've learned to fear fiat or player discretion, traumatised as we are by Problem GMs or That Guys.

The reason why the poverty in Sidney's hypothetical ("righteous players are in rags") sounds so bad is because in truth it represents risk at the game table. If you don't participate in the mechanics legible to your ruleset (the XP and gear to do more game things), you risk gradually being excluded from play.

You have no assurance your fellow players will know how hold space for you; be considerate; work together to portray a living world where NPCs react in meaningful ways---in ways that will be fun and rewarding for everybody playing.

You are giving up the guarantee of mechanical relevance for the possibility of fun interactions and creative social play.

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The "low trust table" is learned behaviour--the cruft of gamer culture and trauma.

When I game with folks new to TTRPGs, they tend to be decent, considerate. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence from folks playing with school kids / newcomers / etc to suggest my experience is not unique.

If the "low trust table" is indeed learned behaviour, it can be unlearned.

Which rules conventions, now part of the hobby mainstream, were the result of designers designing defensively---shadowboxing against terrible players and the spectre of "unfairness"?

How can we "undesign" such conventions?

Lack of trust is a problem that we have to address in play culture, not rulesets. You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.

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This is too long already. I'll end with an observation:

Elfgames are not praxis, but doesn't this specific dilemma in the microcosm of our silly elfgames ultimately mirror real-world ethics?

To be moral is to trust in a better world; to be amoral / immoral is to hedge against the guarantee of a worse one.

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Further Reading

Some words from around the TTRPG community about incentive and advancement in games:

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However, the reason there is a big debate about this is that behavioural incentives in games clearly do work, either entirely or at various levels. This applies outside gaming, as well. Why do advertising companies and retail business use "rewards" structures to convince people to buy more of their products? Why do people chase after "Likes" on social media?

A comment by Paul_T to "A Hypothesis on Behavioral Incentives" from a discussion on Story-Games.com

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the structure and symbolism of the D&D game align with certain structures and values of patriarchy. The game is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.

D&D's Obsession With Phallic Desire from Traverse Fantasy

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In short, my feeling is that rewarding players with character improvement in return for achieving goals in a specific way impedes some of the key strengths of TTRPGs for little or no benefit in return. 

Incentives from Bastionland

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When good deeds arise naturally out of the players choices, especially when players rejected other options that were more beneficial to them, it is immensely satisfying. Far more than if players are just assumed to be heroic by default. It gives agency and meaning to player choice.

Make Players Choose To Be Kind from Cosmic Orrery

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Much has been made about 1 GP = 1 XP as the core gameplay loop driver of TSR D+D. But XP for gold retrieved also winds up being something of a de facto capitalistic outlook as well. Success is driven by accumulation of individual wealth -- by an adventuring company, even! So what's a new framework that can be used for underpinning a leftist OSR campaign?

A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR from Legacy of the Bieth

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Growth should be tied to a specific experience occurring in the fiction. It is more important for a PC to grow more interesting than more skilled or capable. PCs experience growth not necessarily because they’ve gotten more skill and experience, but because they are changed in a significant way.

Cairn FAQ from Cairn RPG / Yochai Gal

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Thank you Ram for the Story-Games.com deep cut!

( Image sources: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/neuron-activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_Sim https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/special-reports-pdfs/10490978.pdf https://varnam.my/34311/untold-tales-of-indian-labourers-from-rubber-plantations-during-pre-independence-malaya/ https://nobonzo.com/ )

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PS: used with permission from Sandro, art by Maxa', a reminder to self:

[hero-israel]

I mean, sandy hook wasn’t perpetrated by indigenous Americans

I see your point but it’s not necessarily an accurate comparison

Nothing prevents Native Americans from buying AR-15s. Native Americans absolutely physically could have committed Sandy Hook, along with every other school shooting you've heard of.

Why didn't they?

And if they did it, would you have less of a problem with it?

If "colonizers" "deserve it," then why was Brett Kavanaugh wrong for what he did to Christine Blasey Ford? Or are his actions only wrong based on whether or not he said "This is for the RESISTANCE!", and we have to stand patiently and watch him finish and listen to hear whether he says the magic words before we can judge?

Gonna blow your mind with this - maybe the entire frame of "liberating struggle" as mutated through a strongly culturally normalized lens of antisemitic violence and exterminationism is not a good basis of moral principle. The only thing "not the same" about any of these crimes is that some involve Jews, making those crimes understandable, and some don't, making them obviously pure evil.

To quote myself from exactly one year ago:

You never see Tibetans or Uighurs massacring hundreds of teenagers at a rock concert in China then packing the women onto rape trucks. Yezidis do not send suicide bombers into Arab old age homes on major holidays to kill off 3 generations of families. There is no way to view this topic without confronting the specifically anti-Jewish chauvinism, supremacism, and genocidalism that has been the norm in Arab and Muslim societies for a millennium or more. The entire "well, what do you EXPECT Palestinians to do??!" frame is pure colonialism. It says only Palestinians know how to have problems, only their tactics count, and anyone who doesn't bomb school buses either doesn't have problems or is doing it wrong.

You shouldn't feel like you have to rush to respond to this. Really, really think about it first. How normalized has society made it for you to listen to the excuses of people who torture and slaughter us? How are those excuses any better than those of anyone else who commits other crimes? Really think it through.

[thedreadvampy]

I mean fundamentally the thing about Israel/Palestine that makes people uncomfortable is not that "it's complicated" it's that it's extremely fundamentally morally simple, it's just difficult

there is not a morally acceptable solution that will be accepted by the expansionist Israeli government or its allies in Europe and America

the balance of power has remained basically the same since Balfour handed the country over. Israel has the power to displace and kill Palestinians without accountability because it's backed by the majority of major world powers. there's fundamentally no back and forth of power. Palestine and its people were sold from the control of the British to the control of Israel for the political convenience of a bunch of people on different continents. there's no retribution or wrestle for power. Israel has had power over Palestine for decades and Palestine, despite Palestinians occupying the land for millennia, has never had power over Israel.

the fundamentals of the situation are discomforting because Israel is in many ways the last surviving bastion of the type of turn-of-the-century colonialism which the contemporary economy of Britain, America and much of the West is rooted in.

that's why the media and political classes are so invested in the Israeli party line - not because Israel ~controls the media~ or whatever but because the fundamental existence of Israel is the interests of the British ruling class, for example. It is in the interests of the British ruling class that we accept as a basic precept that there are Civilised and Uncivilised nations, and that it is right and good and natural that the Civilised nations should be able to decide the fates of the Uncivilised nations, for their own profit, without brooking any complaint from the Uncivilised Peoples. The structure of Western capitalism requires, as well, that we accept that any number of deaths and any amount of suffering among the Uncivilised Peoples is an acceptable price to pay for the comfort of Civilised Peoples. That's why the media classes are more interested in pearl clutching that somebody slashed up a hack painting of a famously antisemitic and genocidal British lord than in the loss of swathes of priceless and irreplaceable artworks, historical relics and Human Fucking Lives in Gaza.

it isn't complicated. it's just uncomfortable because fundamentally it lays bare the basic reality of colonial capitalism, and generally we in the UK are sort of trying to pretend we're over that whole thing even though we're obviously not, politicians just try to be a bit less obvious about it. so it's discomforting to people to be faced with the rawness of Israel's open colonialism, and so those who can't or don't want to divest from Britain's own ongoing colonial endeavours end up tying themselves in knots trying to justify why it's Fine Actually.

while obviously Israel is a Zionist project so it can no more be decoupled from Judaism than the British empire is decoupled from Christianity, the conflation of Jewishness and Israel is a mostly irrelevant (and harmful) distraction from the underlying Problem With Israel, which is that it's an incredibly 19th century European style of colony in 21st century Asia, and the nature, consistency and ferocity of its colonial project has been pretty unchanged for like 3-4 generations.

but it's a very successful distraction because

a) a lot of people do actually hate Jews a whole bunch so yeah antisemitism is a genuine and legitimate fear, but it doesn't connect to the core issues of genocide, oppression and colonialism (and conflating Israel with Jewishness does play into existing antisemitic ideas of the Jewish perpetual foreigner and perpetual dual loyalty)

b) people want it to be complicated. They don't want it to be simple in a way that would create discomfort for them. We don't want to acknowledge that to free Palestine we'd have to take a hit to our own economies by not selling arms to Israel. We don't want to acknowledge that what's practiced openly in Israel is the same structure of systemic injustice underpinning almost all British and American foreign affairs, but with more of a veil over it. We don't want to challenge the underlying assumption that there are those who should rule and those who should be ruled over. But with the assertion that Israel=Jewishness, and the rewriting of history to say there's an Endless Cycle of Violence on Both Sides, Who Can Say Where It Started Really, you're off the hook! It's Complicated! Who Can Really Say?

(this Who Can Really Say thing is fascinating in itself. It's not like it's ancient history! it's been slightly over a century since the birth of the Israeli project! you can look it up! we have the news articles! we have the correspondence! this is my grandparents' generation not the distant mists of time!)

but yeah like fuck 'Israel controls the media' bullshit. It does not require a Shadowy Jewish Cabal of Puppetmasters to create mass appeasement from the media and ruling class, and if you think that's the best explanation you're fucking gross. The media and political establishment of Europe and the US are not being Controlled By The Wicked Jews. They are colonial projects. Israel is a colonial project. Their interests are aligned. It's not complicated it's So Fucking Simple. Our ruling classes, whether in Tel Aviv, Washington, Westminster or Berlin, are enthusiastically invested in the project of global apartheid. It makes them money. It maintained them power. It is in their interests to preserve the impunity of the occupying state where it shores up the civilised West vs barbarian East paradigm. It is not "too complicated" it's just huge, implacable and miserable to recognise.

[alienpossession]

Body a Day 27: Closet

I think it's convenient that these humans can be called in a whim and they will just come with no suspicion whatsoever that I need someone to fix my walk-in closet every single day. Well, I did call different companies in rotation and came up with different excuses or details, but so far, these handyman really proven themselves to be handy bodies to be worn by my people as they entered my walk-in closet with their gears eager to do their work and walked out already wrapped under our control

So after around a month or so, I already built a sizable group of our kind's first colony on Earth. So I couldn't really control the type of bodies of the people I called to come, but I think this blue-collar sector filled with fit people with muscles that is not just for vanity but indeed useful and filled with strength. Some of them walked out gingerly after the possession, but some other just dashed out confidently as if they've never been possessed

A few of them even outlandishly wanted to have sex with my vessels right off the bat after the takeover, it's like as if they directly wired to their human's lustful desire and let it control them rather than they override it, which is disappointing because we shouldn't degrade ourselves as if we're really human. We just used their body because it's easier for us to navigate this planet in their skin undetectable, and well, lucky that we ended up right away in a rather fit compound of people. Let's just say that I punished the morally-depraved right away and force them to be above their desire and not let their dick do the talking

Anyway, the colony that we established slowly yet surely expanded because the work of these blue-collar worker exposed them to the home of the rich and famous around this neighborhood, which is known to be the most expensive zip code in this country. They sometimes left their original vessel to acquire the more socially endowed ones while leaving the rugged empties just a mere husk they can tell to do their dirty work. So, upon looking at their upgrade, you could say that I was inspired to get my very own upgrade, after all I'm the oldest colonist, I need to establish my dominance over these youngins, right?

So, right before Christmas, this huge guy walked in after I asked some help in my bathroom. I never expected such fine older person would casually walk in as this person couldn't be just a regular handyman. But I realized that he came down to my house because my vessel used this guy's service for the bespoke bathroom before.

Being the prideful business owner that he is to the craft and services he provided, he decided to oversee the whole repair process. He came along with this other big, fully-tattooed guy that resembled more of the kind of people that I expected to come instead while the owner could talk his way to me about doing some other renovation in this house that his services can handle. Sizing him up and sensing his strength, the big guy seemed like a tough nut to crack in 1-on-1 battle, because.....just look at the guy, he's easily towered over any of us at 6'5" and that shoulder is as wide as a professional swimmer or something. I glanced around at the hard-working handyman kneeling to fix one of the broken tiles and started plotting. I decided to use the help of the tattooed bufffoon by taking care of him first, so when his boss was busy with another client call (I made another member of the colony to distract him), I asked him to came along with me to the walk-in closet in my bedroom as I need some help. Upon entering, one of my kind latched itself to his head and started crawling for control. He tried to swat my insectoid fella away, but he was not fast enough before the 12-legged-freak managed to get inside the buffoon. It was quick, just around a couple minutes or so and he's ready to help me get my upgraded body

When his boss returned from the call, all in a sudden, he choked his boss and easily lifted the 250 lbs muscle mountain with just one hand.

That's when I crawled out from my vessel and with the help of the vessel's hand that still moved under my will, he grabbed my form and landed me right on the service owner's nose that I learned to be named Youssef. My used vessels then said stoically

"Well Youssef, you should rejoice, because you've been selected to serve a bigger purpose. Your service will be helping us tremendously to expand further, so let's crack that mouth open so I can squeezed in---"

---

That was a couple days ago. Now, I'll let you be the judge. I look way better now, right?

[hadesoftheladies]

“that’s just war” is what i keep getting told. women get raped and butchered? that’s just war. children get bombed and buried? that’s just war. when i read stories of the hamas hostages and the frustration and pain of jewish families caught up in the war, what do online politics offer? “that’s just war.” that’s just the price of resistance. when i tell my dad while watching the news on palestine “thousands more children were bombed by israeli forces this week” all he can say is “that’s just war.” if a man pointed a gun at you wouldn’t you want to have a gun, too?

were the allied soldiers better than the nazis? depends on who you ask. they bombed, raped, sabotaged the planes of women in their own army. nazis were terrible. did that make allied soldiers saints? we weep for the mass graves in 20th century concentration camps across the world. then when we grow up we learn that those black and white photos were actually grey all along. the victims had also victimized others. male prisoners could rape as the soldiers did.

“ignore war men will be men” some women say. “they’ll find a way to keep killing each other. let them have at it.” is it feminist action to bask in our own self righteousness as women? do people sleeping while sirens go off in their city have any choice other than to wake up and run? can they ignore such a thing?

where should i stand? will the white women online help me if their president ordered a siege of my country? my country’s history is riddled with blood. the resistance gave me freedom. I can walk on my own land. go to school and own a car. I can dress myself without dressing a white mistress first. I can farm for myself and not for some smelly englishman. that’s good, isn’t it? but they also killed scores of setttlers, the resistance. they raped white women and girls. slaughtered white children and dumped their bodies in pits for their husbands and fathers to find. wasn’t that bad? but wasn’t it the black kikuyu children and women that bent their backs over white fields? wasn’t it the white people who put them in camps and exacted harsh curfews. didn’t white men shove broken glass up black detainee’s private parts? which white women came to free them? didn’t they laugh at the same racist jokes as their husbands did? didn’t she smile and pour tea for him as he told her about work? didn’t she love having such a wide sprawling estate? wasn’t that bad?

“so you stand with the evil black men that raped white women just because they could? you think their rape served a purpose?” no, but— “so you stand with white women who were okay ordering your people to be shipped, slaughtered and starved?” no! these questions are like asking me which bullet i’d prefer to be shot with. the answer is i don’t want to die. i am not comforted by the rape of women or by the enslavement of my people. why would either be something i want?

what this all is, ultimately, is a question the entitled never like to hear. in regard to the oppression of women by men, blacks by whites, the indigenous by the colonial, the one question at the heart of it all is this:

who has the right to self defense?

why is the woman that killed her rapist jailed? why is the slave that killed his master himself killed? by what means and to what extent do we rule an act of violence as self-defense or something monstrous?

the answer is even more uncomfortable: to the extent that we view the aggressor as human.

it’s not an answer that really solves anything. it doesn’t change what happens in war. it won’t stop any war.

but in these scenarios, my way has been to accept that there is rarely such a thing as moral purity in a human, and for this reason, our default attitude may need to be humility, the acceptance that we can be hypocrites. that we aren’t exempt from tragedy or more special than another life. that we’re as alike as we are different, even if we may not be equally guilty of certain acts. because if we are open to the humanity and dignity of the life of others (and I do extend this to animals as well, because they have the capacity to suffer and the will to live), we are bound to be less prone to repeat the cruelties we decry.

and maybe that’s more of a solution than a neat, easy answer or a casual dismissal like “that’s just war” might be.

[aphidclan-clangen]

Wait- if starclan is like god in this universe. And sometimes clan cats say “ star damned” instead of “god damned” dose that mean pearls stars pronouns are: god and godself!?

I mean, if a Saint Tine made their pronouns glow/glowself it would definitely be a bit awkward lmao

(shine/gleam/light/glimmer/radiance/etc. pronouns would be fine however)

In that case it would be closer to giving yourself god/godself pronouns (which I’m certain is a real thing!), but in my mind Starclan, as an Aphidclan-specific religion, isn’t really…a religion so much as it is a generalized belief that 1. nature and the sky are interwoven with mystical, spiritual forces, and 2. belief in souls/an afterlife. (infodumping mode activated /lh /affectionate) As a wild cat colony, they’re just naturally very strongly and culturally connected to the spiritual side of the wilderness and the cosmos, more so than a kittypet or city cat ever would be. They don’t believe in any god or any central force controlling or designing the world, I don’t think they even have a “creation myth” or an idea that there could ever be a sole “god”/deity-like figure. They believe in souls and an afterlife because their ventures into the spirit realm showed them the souls of their ancestors, friends, and even complete strangers. They know the dead can go whenever they please after life, because some cats have reported seeing these spirits in the woods with them, or standing out amidst the plains. But they’ve also seen the spirit realm largely resemble the sky, so they probably assume the souls of the dead live up there, and may fly down to earth whenever they please.

(plus the sky is also just generally a very..incomprehensible, mystical, “larger-than-life” powerful force to look at, especially when you’ve got 0 light pollution and look up to see a whole wide galaxy of beautiful unknown above you each night)

Perhaps the souls of their loved ones can even grant gifts and boons, or even curses, since the spirit of the wilderness and the sky is woven everywhere, and can surely influence the movement of a log, the calling of rain, the way of the winds, and maybe even the sickness of the land. Nonetheless, the wilderness takes lives as it gives food and water and a home, they believe this to be an entirely natural cycle. The wilderness gives, the wilderness takes, the wilderness eats and devours whole, and when you die, you’ll fly up into the sky, where you might even get to speak with your loved ones again someday, either through random sightings in the woods, in dreams, or intentional astral projection in more…energistically charged locations.

Even the Saint Tines don’t believe in The Glow as a person, but nonetheless a more congealed, solid entity than what the clan cats believe. It is a force of nature as well, but a specific one. The force of decay, of sickness, of life, of glory and triumph in living, that is hungry and gluttonous and never satiated. In AphidClan, you’ll never have to prove your worth or character to the way the winds blow, but to a Saint Tine, if you are impure enough, the Glow shall eat you whole, and you shall rot for all of eternity (and this is a bad thing). It is a strict and demanding force that will punish the unworthy and the impure. It is all very morally attached, very heavily wrapped around the idea of sin and repentance and innate existential value. The Reverend has a very large influence over the doctrine and the opinions of The Glow, as its speaking voice and the head of the church. (In reality, “the glow” is just the nuclear radiation they saw in the power plant the colony used to live in, before the power plant horribly collapsed for reasons unknown.)

In that way, the Saint Tine Church is a closer analogy for a Christianity-like religion, while Aphidclan’s beliefs are closer to that of general pagan spiritualist beliefs. The Saint Tines are a god-fearing people, while Aphidclan just believes in the innate spiritual power of the earth and the universe, who would be confused by the idea of a central god or entity controlling the name of the game.

As for Pearlstar, I think like…they’d be totally chill with pronouns, names, or titles that call back to the spiritual nature of the wild in some way or another, and in fact, it’s already a common thing interwoven into the culture. I mean, they call their designated spiritual leaders of the colony “star,” to honor their leader’s connection to the spirit realm and their initiative to walk between both worlds. If anyone is expected to revere the spiritual and integrate it into their daily life and identity, it would be the spiritual leaders of the colony. Cats are given prefixes and suffixes to reflect aspects of nature that they see themself reflected in. If names are viable territory for integrating the wild, the natural, the spiritual, then why not pronouns? A cat with breeze/breezeself pronouns is respected as a reflection of the wind, a cat with star/starself pronouns is respected as a person with a strong connection to the cosmic aether and the universe beyond. I imagine their kintypes work under similar beliefs as well, as the creatures or entities or energistical forces they see themselves very strongly in. A cat could tell their clanmates that they believe they were once a bird, and feel such a strong connection to flight, to soaring through the air, the clouds, the breeze on their wings, and that before their life as a cat, their soul once resided in an avian animal, and that’d be a common precedent that would totally work with the general cultural belief system.

So to summarize, glow/glowself pronouns would definitely result in getting odd looks and judgemental comments from Saint Tines (not Aphidclan cats though), but star/starself pronouns are totally normal, common, respected, and even a little expected in Aphidclan, and are…pretty much on the same level as giving yourself leaf/sky/cloud/tree/growth/breeze/etc. pronouns. S’just another factor of one’s identity that the wild may influence and make its home in, as it often does

[wonkyplate]

how could you not be obsessed with the soong's when this whole family are designed to make each other depressed

a brilliant man who fathers androids in his own likeness, more concerned with the continuation of his legacy and research than with showing love to his own children

a kind woman with so much love to give but her husband and children can't love her back in the same way (except maybe lore, but we know that at some point she came to fear him and he was deactivated)

[spoiler] the eldest android, one of noonien's first prototypes, who lacks the positronic net his younger brothers are built with. i can only assume he was treated differently by his father for the "failure" he built him with

the middle child who is designed with all the faculties of someone who can experience the best and worst of humanity and is punished for becoming wayward as a result, with little to no guidance or help ("you could have fixed me!")

the youngest android who is perfectly suspended behind the window of humanity and spends his life trailing after it, constantly in search of fitting in when he's aware it may never happen. if this father truly loved any of them, data was the most loved - which begs the question: was noonien so afraid of showing love that he required a son who couldn't know the difference?

and then you've got:

data not remembering anything about his family (wiped clean) but he has all the memories of the colonists who feared him ???

[spoiler] juliana's memories and humanity being unknowingly transferred into an android because her husband couldn't bear the thought of losing her, something which data learns after he meets her decades after the memory-wipe, but noonien still ends up losing her when she leaves years later and remarries

[spoiler] the conflict of morality when choosing whether to tell your mother she is now an android because you're desperate to have some sort of a family to share your life with, and not telling her to save her happiness !!!!!!!!!!!

data being left behind out in the cold on omicron theta while the crystalline entity destroyed the colony and all organic life on the planet, because juliana was afraid that he would turn out like lore and she couldn't bear the thought of damning another son to a life of misery

lore and data clearly feeling some sort of sibling connection but neither of them being well equipped to be the perfect brother. lore is on a crusade for a satisfaction that he'll never achieve without his family's help and data is too rigid to fully understand the intricacies. there have been too many betrayals and too much hurt for data to let lore in willingly (+ vise versa but the Mentally Ill edition)

b-4 being entirely too good for this world. he deserved so much more

this family is one of the most fucked up things about star trek. roddenberry didn't want to introduce conflict into the utopian series and so while it's a beautiful vision to aspire to, it's got this naïve and unfulfilled feel to it. people and stories thrive on conflict & solution, so the writers must have an exceptionally difficult time keeping things interesting for us. tng pulled it out of the bag with the soong tragedies

[the-nyanguard-party]

if we're talking specifically about portrayals of space colonization in sci-fi there could perhaps be an argument about whether a work presents it similar enough to real-life colonialism that it reflects a belief that real-life colonized territories were also terra nullius, but the key here is the problem would lie in showing the morally neutral hypothetical process of space colonization and drawing parallels with real life colonialism in such a way that it tacitly justifies the latter, not that space colonization itself inherently reproduces those ideas or that it is inherently morally bad. the point is that colonialism in real life is not generally about settling people on and extracting resources from an empty uninhabited land; trying to draw a parallel between the two either in a positive or negative light is simply incorrect.

the concerns about profaning the sacred are also very silly. like the most i can concede here is that it would be a shame if we lost the opportunity to do some productive scientific research on something because it was disrupted by settling or resource extraction (though this wouldn't make me say it is never ok under any circumstances). but fundamentally asteroids and planets and so on don't have any kind of soul or sacredness or whatever. it's a problem i have with certain forms of liberal environmentalist rhetoric, which express highly aesthetic, metaphysical, even religious concerns about profaning Earth, rather than concerns about the impact environmental destruction has on people.

i would rather you not to use non-human aliens as a stand in for indigenous people.

i do think you can do stuff with humans being exploited in space. as long as we understand that this is not just the natural unavoidable result of resource extraction or of people settling in space but a product of capitalism. this is purely a case of fiction though, i find it exceedingly unlikely that we will ever be doing much space mining or settling under capitalism. it's more a case of allegorical fictional representation of present day relations (which is what a lot of sci-fi is about) than a speculation into stuff that is likely to happen in real life.

this is all focused on fictional portrayals (and providing more nuance than some ppl deserve tbh). i fully support the Socialist World Republic in its strip mining of Mercury to build a Dyson sphere and move a bunch of people there, which is something that will happen in real life.