UNRWA is the primary mechanism by which Gaza receives aid and runs its own institutions. It is a thorn in Israel’s side because they want control over all of that as well and are pissed that Gazans can direct resources where they want.
The entirety of US “democracy” has been oligarchical. Voting was originally restricted to white landowning men and naturally the only people who could “serve” as representatives were the richest people from that group. Everyone has always had to struggle to get anything at all and even then it would be incomplete or weak - like getting the right to vote for your oppressor. The largest liberatory changes required violence and direct action, with the most dramatic being the ability of slavery and the battles of the labor movement. And at no point has the root of oppression (and the oligarchy) been overturned: capitalism.
“How dare you tell me to be against genocide”
The first point - Your previous comments made it seem as though you were saying only people in such position held that opinion. Whether you meant to or not.
I don’t think they did. I think you read it into it because you had a defensive response.
[Your story]
Thank you for contributing to and working with your community and thank you for sharing.
Then the genocide started. I have worked with people to design billboards for the issue. I have canvassed for them. I have been generally active, and helpful, as I can. There is an organization here called CAIR, it is national, I assume you know who they are.
Yes of course. It is a weak organization. I was curious to see if they had any recent news and looked at their website. They are hosting a gala in November at which Jamaal Bowman, who voted for the iron dome, will be present. I’m sure he is there because he was targeted due to even just taking a (late) milquetoast stance against Israel and then losing due to AIPAC, having abandoned any grassroots organizer-based strategy. CAIR has been largely excised from my local community because they compromise too heavily in exchange for nothing and are a vehicle for exactly the NGO climber types I’ve mentioned before. The community watches their people leave and then turn their backs. Of course, they do not say this very publicly, as family is important, but when having individual conversations, so many are happy that their kids are getting paid well but are unhappy that they spend their time with such groups.
I am returning to this point because it is important. These types of organizations are easily coopted and defanged, and they follow a single trajectory given their funding models and staffing methods. They split a community into those in them and those without, and those within them have a different interest and begin to socialize with the insiders. Even an org like CAIR, which is outside the mainstream of political discourse at least half the time, is impacted by this and sets its sights low and uses ineffectual methods of advocacy.
Through this exposure I have been around a number of this community large enough, to be the vast majority, locally, at one time or another. I have sat in meetings and listened to them talking. I have seen where they decide to apply their donated funds to take political action. I have a friend who translates discussions to english for me. There isn’t a huge group that are hard line on the idea of staying out of voting, in the presidential election, totally.
For clarity, you mentioned business cards many times. When you say community, do you mean a wide community of everyday people, or mostly business owners, heads of NGOs, and maybe imams?
A lot of those that are, discuss how white Americans have to participate, and while they will stand out, they urge that, if you are going to vote, vote for Harris.
“A lot” can mean 3 or 7 or 50. There are, of course, some people who advocate for this. But the idea that they are even outnumbered by those opposed it completely alien to my experience and, if you don’t believe that to be enough (as you have your own experience), it is also in disagreement with the polls, including those done by CAIR!
The reasons I have been given for this, is simple, while no party is good for them, and the US immigration practices are most often hostile, unlike the people you know, they saw a very noticeable increase of activity from the government, against their community, when Trump put forth his anti-muslim sentiment.
They are currently the worst they have been since 9/11, per the very nice and opinionated uncles my community. It goes in waves.
My cousin’s law firm says they experienced a large spike in cases during that time, as well, particularly ones that the government “lost” (as in it was deemed illegal/unconstitutional, but too late now, and no one was punished).
What does your cousin say about now, the last year? Are you near any college campuses or places where actions take place? The current islamophobia is focused on targeting those who take actions resisting the genocide, generally targeted by Zionists with doxxing and harassment that they leverage into calls for expulsions and deportations. While fascists are often doing this, people that present themselves as liberals also do so.
One of the big, specific, things they discuss is that long term, established, people, in their community, started to be targeted, where as, previously, their was no question about their immigration status, or position as Americans. They saw a lot more prying into who they were related to, arbitrary contact with individuals, etc. They saw a lot more of these people being taken by ICE, and deported.
This did not stop under Biden, in my area. There is still constant fear.
As the situation has gotten more desperate they have been using their local businesses to reach out to non-middle eastern customers, and some have literally been putting pamphlets, explaining the situation, in their bag, as they check them out.
It reeeally sounds like you mostly talk to business owners.
Don’t get me wrong, they don’t like Harris. They see one that is not backing off selling weapons to Israel, and the other is vowing to take an active role in accelerating the genocide
This is foolish, of course, as the Biden-Harris administration is actively doing the genocide and they are extremely competent at ensuring its continuation at full steam. Israel is already doing, more or less, whatever it wants outside of implied restraints on how to attacks Iran. This is why the position you present is a minority position among both Palestinian Americans and the wider muslim community.
so they are either voting the former, or suggesting that other Americans do so, because they are in the extreme of the rock and a hard place analogy. There is no good choice, there is only the possibility of, some level of, harm reduction.
There is a good choice. You vociferously oppose the genocide and have discipline.
Those interested in electoralism often talk about “accountability” and “pushing” for things. This is the chance to test that theory. If a person will still vote for a genocider candidate, what does accountability mean to them? Nothing, of course.
Re: harm reduction, again, this is the administration doing the genocide, supporting it to the hilt. There is no harm reduction here, it is full-steam-ahead genocide. These are bog standard Dem PR talking points, not the common positions of real people affected by this.
There is more, but I have explained enough of my personal life, for you to get the picture.
To be honest I’m not sure why you’re sharing so much of your personal life, though it is nice of you to do so. I think it would be good for you to share less information, for your own security.
I’ll let you have the last worse I guess
This discussion is getting tiring and fragmented and going nowhere.
Because it is mostly a series of straw men coming from you at this point and an aversion to replying to what I say instead.
I will again reiterate that anarchist instances doesn’t mean that the admins always have the time to take the effort to sort them out in the most anarchistic way possible.
And there’s another! “The most anarchistic way possible”. If only someone here had said that.
Therefore some decisions will be taken as obvious and done directly to protect the instance members. Many anarchists will consider a tankie-haven like hexbear as valid an instance to block without further discussion as much as exploding-heads.
You are now telling stories instead of acknowledging it was one admin making a decision with no discussion or feedback, lmao. Just be direct and to the point if you don’t like things to meander or become tiring.
This is obviously accepted given the lack of outcry by their members.
That is certainly true! But it does not make it less funny and absurd.
There’s plenty of ways to handle these decisions and your inability to consider them in favour of trying to goad me with it being “funny”
Goad you? I said it right off the bat as a one-off observation and it has snowballed because you are not being direct.
just betrays either immaturity and complete inexperience modding large communities, or that you’re just trolling and I’m inclined to think of the latter.
Or maybe I just think it is funny and at odds with anarchistic thought.
The arguments you make in this thread and your insistence about the 20s betrays you as a Marxist-Leninist, but feel free to tell me I’m actually wrong and I would be surprised. Stranger things have happened. However as an ML, you have scant understanding of how anarchists work and therefore it’s impossible to take seriously your moderation suggestions as coming from an anarchist perpective.
“I expect you to be able to explain this without my input, as you are so certain, right?”
This is a topic that is entirely your deviation by the way.
Given that I think you seem to just be trolling to amuse yourself, you are a waste of time to engage with as there’s nothing constructive to be gained by reading you try to goad and gotcha me endlessly.
I agree that this is a silly conversation, but this is because you leave a pile of inconsistencies and illogic and guesswork and evasion at my feet and say, “here is my counterargument”, and I have to say, “wow look at all this nonsense” and then say exactly what is wrong with it. It is the opposite of trolling, I am trying to take you seriously. You aren’t making it easy.
And I said there’s plenty of other decades with “misunderstandings”?
And of fucking course the 20s and 30s are the primary focus because that’s the period with the last revolutionary potential which MLs squandered to build Capitalism again.
If you skip over what I say, you will end up making us go in circles. The next thing I wrote: “I am of course not saying “the only things are from the 1920s”, but that this is a primary focus. And when asked about the time periods you think of as primary, they popped up. Full circle, lol.”
No, an affinity group is an affinity group a bunch of admins is something else, but can also be valid.
Then acknowledge what I said before this and that you skipped over: “Right so they are anarchist instances. And they make important decisions about federation by fiat of a couple admins. And that is very funny for anarchists to do. Inventing scenarios that didn’t happen to say how they are reasonable is… not relevant. In many ways you implicitly acknowledge how silly it is, because none of your examples are, “a couple admins just decide it”, instead you talk about affinity group subsets.”
There’s plenty of scenarios where anarchists take decisions without voting.
Yes of course there are. This is not a real response to anything I have said. We have already long established that this is about making site-wide censorship decisions re: federation, not literally everything. That is just another implicit straw man.
I think, of course, that is it obvious that a site-wide censorship decision is an important one that it is very funny for an anarchist instance to decide via a couple admins.
Again, you don’t get to declare by fiat what is a “major decision”. But I’m glad you’re self-amused at least.
I do get to say, by fiat, what I think is a major decision. And I think it’s actually pretty obviously a major decision, which is why despite being 3-4 comments deep we still have to talk about things like “There’s plenty of scenarios where anarchists take decisions without voting”.
Nonense
Yesnsense.
I’m pretty certain you’re a Marxist-Leninist, so you (critically?) support the usual suspects of USSR and PRC. Probably also Cuba and if you’re extreme enough North Korea. Am I wrong?
“I expect you to be able to explain this without my input, as you are so certain, right?”
That’s not a naturalistic fallacy. That’s me pointing out that this way of acting is obvious when you don’t decide by fiat why something is “major decision” for others.
I do get to decide my opinions by “fiat”, lol. Got the thought police in here. Why are you copying my terminology to use it inappropriately for other situations?
But okay, I will accept that what you meant was that it was obvious. I will simply disagree (for the 5th time), because I think it is obvious that site-wide censorship is obviously a significant decision.
No, I didn’t say that doing this justifies it. That’s bad uncharitable reading on your part to claim a fallacy. I’ve actually done “voting on every ban” so I’m familiar with how well it works. Have you?
My point, which I will say was not obvious, when it comes to voting on every ban, was that it would be better to overcorrect in the opposite decision.
Just for the record, do tell, what experience do you have running an instance or a comm?
I have experience with both. It’s thankless, isn’t it?
Do you know that for sure? Did you check when slrpnk defederated hexbear?
slrpnk did not defederate from hexbear. It blocked hexbear without announcement, by fiat of its main admin. It confirmed this blocking/“defedereation” in August last year. This was not something discussed nor presented, lol. It’s just one admin doing what they would like.
Again, why do you think you can declare by fiat what is a major decision?
lmao there it is again.
A censorship decision is of course major, it is about who your instance’s users can interact with via your website. If your federated social media website is anything at all, it is about users and how they interact, what they post, etc.
And again, non-anarchist instances have done this. It’s very very very funny that anarchists ones don’t.
It certainly is.
It is painfully obviously not. An admin quietly implementing a decision to block after the instance existed and then letting people know this is how it was last year is not in any way an anarchist collective where everyone’s just agreeing to those pre-existing bylaws by joining. It is just a website with an admin making the decision on their own.
Again, do you know when such instances were blocked comparative to the life of the acting instance?
Uh yeah?
Just because you disagree what is a “major decision” for other groups of people you don’t belong to, doesn’t mean you are right.
I think this straw manning thing might be a habit.
The impact of the decision and who gets to vote on it is determined by the people most affected by it.
Of course that is literally not the case here, is it? Or did slrpnk vote to block/defederate?
That’s the core anarchist principle you don’t seem to understand.
The core anarchist principle that nobody gets to judge who is anarchist unless they are a member of that particular anarchist group? I would love to see that core principle justified. Please show me your sources!
Sure, but you better make sure that you do it before January 6th, because if Trump wins, it is not going to take very long for Netanyahu to kill every Palestinian in Gaza.
Netanyahu already has unconditional support from the US. You cannot just pretend your way into putting a bigger gun to someone’s head. The Biden-Harris regime is genociding Gaza and rather than oppose it, you are defending them.
But I’m sure by then you will have found some way to absolve yourself (either that, or it’s literally the outcome you want).
I require no absolution, I work against genocide.
You betray your guilty conscience with your incredibly selective responses, though.
Neither of those genocides and your reference to them cheapens the term and distracts from your actual knowing support for genocide. Instead of reaching for the quick excuse to stop thinking, do some introspection on why you are okay with normalizing genocide.
Out of respect, I would like to venter Palestinians and the genocide they are facing, but I will discuss what you’d like about China and Russia in another thread. Feel free to make one and link it here.
I have already described some of it throughout this thread. One if the things I do is organize with and among Palestinians to engage in actions and organization building.
Your turn.
You should be against genocide
It would take a huge amount of space to do those 4+ things justice. I’ll share in some of them but I think it would pretty quickly be something deserving its own thread or maybe just some reading recommendations.
Re: Kronstadt, calling that a betrayal is just incorrect. First, they launched a mutiny directed at the Bolsheviks (“no Bolsheviks in the Soviets”, so the lines went), of course the Bolsheviks would act in opposition. It was a direct, oppositional fight, not getting stabbed in the back. In addition, part of the “betrayal” narrative depends on characterizing the Kronstadt mutiny as emerging from those who had fought at Kronstadt for the October Revolution, as in, it was the people who fought and died alongside Bolsheviks for freedom who were later jailed and killed by them. But this is also largely inaccurate. The Kronstadt sailors mutinying drew heavily from new recruits from the south that had never been part of Kronstadt during the revolution, they were building their own structures (many of them questionable) using the principles they learned from the diverse ancom traditions in the south. I recommend reading contemporary accounts and items as close to the Soviet archives as possible.
Re: Makhnovschina, this one really requires reading heavily, to get a sense of the oppositional forces. It is, of course, much easier to justify a betrayal narrative here given the repeated alliances and breaking of alliances, the Red Terror, etc. These were people who fought side by side against the Whites, there is no doubt, and the Bolsheviks went to war against the Blacks and heavily oppressed them. My gut inclination was initially to say it was simply a mistake, a wrong. But if you delve more deeply into the specifics of operations, what the realities meant on the ground, it becomes clearer that this was not simply a revanchist attitude by the Bolsheviks, but a direct, material opposition due to the need to feed the workers in cities. This is why the Red Army faced no resistance in the cities and why the Black Army’s entire operation was deeply interlinked with the peasantry, namely a petty bourgeois peasantry premised on isolation and, oddly, frequent entitlement to the products of the city, which the Black Army often stole in order to support the peasant communes run by their mayors. Rather than bridge this divide, the Black Army greatly exacerbated it, worsening starvation conditions. And this was not limited in impact just to the region of Machnovschina, as it had long been an exporter of grain to the north. This did develop into a sectarian fight, though it was also not simply The Reds breaking alliances to attack The Blacks. As autonomous groups, subsets of The Blacks often declared agreements to be over sporadically and took up arms and killed of their own volition. So if we call it betrayal, I would say a qualified one.
Re: Spain I would ask you to be more specific.
Re: IWW that publication is a lengthy polemic about every perceived grievance they could muster, and mostly not about the IWW at all, including the inaccuracies about Kronstadt that were belabored without merit until the opening of the archives. I don’t know what you would want me to do with it except to suggest reading extensively and not relying on pamphlets. Every polemical claim requires investigation and specifics.
Is that so? What else do you do?
It is possible, but it doesn’t happen particularly often. The kind of thinking on display in this thread is defense of a barrier to doing these kinds of actions, from recognizing one’s own lack of political education, from developing a concrete notion of leverage or collective action.
When people do hold themselves to those standards but still hold out hope for Dems, they learn some uncomfortable lessons. The first one is that Democrats make you their opponent and gladly lie about you and will even throw their money and influence behind Republicans instead. Something else that people learn (at least when they are honest with themselves) is that they often don’t really have a concrete idea of how to make demands or build leverage, and so they will engage in actions and spin their wheels. The ones that are not honest with themselves will still claim a victory. The ones that are honest with themselves will engage in productive criticism and development of their political program.
But this is so many steps past what the people here are doing, relying on tired canards shared as memes. I would rather they at least get to the “try and fail” step of becoming politically educated and a force for humanity, but we are stuck at the “defend everything Dems tell us to do” phase.
The reason why is because asking for a new thread is just you trying to hide.
Through having a discussion in a public forum? Don’t be silly.
Odds are no one would see the new thread
You can link it here and they will see it if they are interested. Go ahead. I’m waiting.
and you’re also putting the effort onto others knowing that it likely won’t be done, so then you can act like you won.
It is unlikely it will be done because you don’t really care about the tooic. It is just an excuse to stop thinking about your complicity in genocide.
Do you really think the “gotcha! You don’t care about genocide you hypocrite!” line is coming from someone trying to actually engage on the Biden-Harris genocide of Palestine? Because it is obviously about deflection.
You’re intentions are crystal clear though and you just look like a fool.
Feel free to make a thread and link it here. Go ahead.
It’s not lying and I agree folks can check out the link I posted.
I did correct what you said. The whole past 100 years have showed us lessons. Not just these dates. This is not hard to understand.
What I said initially: “Perhaps they are thinking of the “anarchists” that just watch YouTube videos to get angry at “the tankies” based on a misunderstanding of history in the 1920s”
I am of course not saying “the only things are from the 1920s”, but that this is a primary focus. And when asked about the time periods you think of as primary, they popped up. Full circle, lol.
The instances are anarchist because anarchists run them. They are not full of anarchists. An instance that is run by anarchists but open to others doesn’t always have to always require a voting by non-anarchists. There can be an internal affinity group handling this. There can be plenty of approaches to this, depending on the time and effort one can afford.
Right so they are anarchist instances. And they make important decisions about federation by fiat of a couple admins. And that is very funny for anarchists to do. Inventing scenarios that didn’t happen to say how they are reasonable is… not relevant. In many ways you implicitly acknowledge how silly it is, because none of your examples are, “a couple admins just decide it”, instead you talk about affinity group subsets. Or is that meant to be euphemistic cover for “a couple admins”?
Sure in a perfect world, everything would be done much more perfectly, but we do what we can with the time we have.
Personally, I don’t think “two people make the important decisions” is complaining about imperfection when it comes to an anarchist instance. It’s really just unexamined centralization that is otherwise an implicit part of the process of hosting software. And it’s very funny.
If only you would request the same level of purity from the authoritarian regimes you support…
The “purity” is “basic correspondence to the core principals of what you claim to be”. I’m not a big stickler, really. But please do tell me about the regimes I support and how I am inconsistent on this. I expect you to be able to explain this without my input, as you are so certain, right?
How is that a naturalistic fallacy?
A short version of the naturalistic fallacy is, “what is, is what should be”. That you justify what should be simply because it is how things are done. That is the logic you presented! “You don’t vote on each ban your> admins and mods take either.”
Did I prescribe something as “good” or whatever because of we’re doing it already? No, I said that the current practice is consistent with anarchist principles.
You did not say the latter, actually. But you did say that you don’t vote on each ban, as if this justifies the practice. It sounds kind of like these instances should!
To argue the opposite you have to argue 2 things. 1 that setting some rules as soon as the instance opens (including defederated instances) is anti-anarchistic. And that 2. Anarchist running an instance deciding that some instances are too toxic to federate with is a “major decision” that always requires voting.
No I don’t and I already responded to that. This situation is not one of what people joined, it was a censorship decision, it required a change. Gotta flip that ‘block’ button and all that.
Yes of course it is, at least if you want to say you are anarchist. That’s a major decision and it is something that even “authoritarian” instances can accomplish. I know that anarchists could do it even better!
That’s exactly what we’re talking about! Just because we don’t do it in your approved manner doesn’t mean this isn’t exactly what we did.
No, it is not what we are talking about.
“And not everything is a major decision”, just ignore half of what I said, whydontcha.
It’s funny because while I didn’t ignore that, because I’ve already directly said in no uncertain terms that I disagree 3-4 times, you ignored my response to what you said: it’s a silly straw man.
A casual skimming of that thread shows 5 abusive DMs in screenshots alone.
It did answer your question but you clearly don’t actually care about the topic. It is just a rhetorical device for you to avoid thinking about your complicity in genocide.
Let me know when you have the courage of your convictions. If it were me, I would be damn sure I knew what I was talking about if there was any risk of me normalizing genocide.
Yes thank you for adding this!