A right thing. And not a very substantial one. But don’t sell the UK short. The government might be despicable, but the massive marches in London by the people have been inspiring. The power of that crowd needs to be channelled into direct action.
I’m pretty sure that the United States was founded on the principle of self determination
Self determination for who? For rich, land-owning, white males.
The US was founded on the same genocidal settler-colonialism as Israel.
Maybe it won’t make an impact this election, but if people start voting for third parties regardless, the Democrats would be incentivised to do better and/or to introduce ranked-choice voting.
In any case, people need to stop waiting for elections and to start taking action now.
In case you - or anyone reading this - are unaware, the term covering the patterns you’re describing is ‘settler colonialism’. It differs from ‘exploitation colonialism’ in that it aims to not only profit from a territory, but to replace the population that is there with another population. What you describe are the logical consequences of that. I think your first two points are understating the history in Palestine/Israel, though. There was intentional displacement of the indigenous population from the start.
It’s not both sides doing the same thing. Israel has been displacing, brutalising and killing Palestinians for 70 years. Israel has a modern army, a modern air force, nuclear weapons and a functional economy.
Since 1948, Israel has taken the vast majority of the land and continues to chip away at what little remains to Palestinians through illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Gaza is an open air prison that Israel constantly surveils and bombs, controls who and what gets in and out and even regulates how many calories per day Gazans are allowed.
It’s not both sides doing the same thing. It’s a settler colonial apartheid state brutalising an indigenous people who are holding on for dear life.
It’s just a war about a magical sky God, and his magical holy land
No it’s not. It’s about settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Many states in the U.S. have ‘proof of surgery’ requirements before they will legally recognize people’s trans people’s gender identity: https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/identity_document_laws
A surprisingly large number of countries: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/09/01/why-transgender-people-are-being-sterilised-in-some-european-countries (paywall jumping archive link: https://archive.is/K336g)
Switzerland, Greece and 18 other, mostly eastern European, countries have a final hurdle: sterilisation.
Surgery is not the end goal for all trans people, and even if it were, requiring that it be completed before they can have their gender identity legally recognised is unnecessary and unhelpful.
I was thinking that would come under ‘prefiguration of new institutions’ (although actually it permeates all aspects), but you are right to name it explicitly, comrade 🖤
That’s a matter of some debate… 😆
For my part, I’d say direct action and prefiguration of new institutions are good places to start. We of course need to educate people in various ways - in addition to direct action and prefiguration, which are educational in their own right. I also think we need to engage with art and culture to build consciousness and expand popular imagination of what’s possible.
We need to understand and dismantle the systems that produce them.
I feel compelled to point the author is hardly unbiased.
No author is unbiased. If you think they’re unbiased it’s just their biases are the same as yours or those of the status quo (whatever you might consider that to be).
I just don’t have it in me to accept anything at face value because someone says so.
Thankfully, you don’t have to! You have a brain in your head, so you can read the arguments being made, think about them, and critically evaluate them. You can try to come up with counter-arguments, or failing that, look around for counter-arguments other people have made and critically evaluate those too.
The commenter above gave you sources for the quotes, so you can find copies of them and read the complete argument being made in those works.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Details here if anyone is interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_on_eight-thousanders#K2
This is the stat the top-level comment is misinterpreting:
As of February 2021, 377 people have completed a summit of the mountain, while 91 have died trying, a staggering 4:1 ratio.
Fuck that industry and everyone that fuels it.
There’s nothing up there worth dying for, or worth letting someone else die.
Downvotes for a comment pointing out that forcing people to fight and die is fucked up? Okay, people…
And it would still be fucked up in every single one of those countries.
Why “thankfully”? Fuck Biden.