My family is has a lot of artists including painters, musicians, a poet etc. all of them seem to immediately recognize the suit against internet archive as an attack on culture not a defense of it. So it’s bizarre for me to see some artists threat IA as some existential threat. Copyright laws hurt far more artists than they help, especially in an era of digital production, sampling, etc. they present a barrier to entry, while only really benefiting a handful of celebrity artists and primarily large corporate entertainment conglomerates.

Potentially losing one of the largest archives of human knowledge, and a freely accessible one at that, because of a copyright really shows how much copyright laws are a threat to human knowledge and culture. The internet archive hosts so much, and so many different kinds of things, art, music, and films, primary documents, books, and research journals, audio and visual recordings, and website backups.

I think it’s really telling that some leftists on here who seem to be exclusively posting content about fascists in Ukraine totally ignore shit like Neo-Nazi paramilitary leader Vladimir Zhoga fighting for and being honored by the Russian state: People who definitely understand why constantly saying shit like “free Gaza from Hamas” is fucked up for ignoring the occupation, & that Israel is its main source of legitimacy, even if they recognize Hamas as being reactionary, clearly cannot apply that same analysis to Ukraine.

I have no idea who is winning the war, nor do I think it is worth speculating on as I do not have reliable information on what is happening behind the scenes on either side and neither do most of the people making confident proclamations about who is winning. A lot of people seem to be making assumptions based on who they want to win and as such many people who generally back Ukraine are pretty confident Russian supply lines are about to collapse. While many who generally back Russia highlight territorial losses for Ukraine.

Abolish the death penalty. Even for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Shows the hollowness of the whole idea of a “progressive DA” that Rollins is supporting using it here. And so much for Biden claiming to want to end the death penalty but still appealing this case to kill a man. To be clear Rollins is not the DA anymore, she is now a US attorney for MA but she made her name for herself as a “progressive DA” in Suffolk county (which includes Boston) despite calling to end cash bail in elections only to raise bail on people about to be bailed out by MBF.

From what I’ve seen so far the solidarity and anti-war statements from leftists in Russia and in Russia’s periphery (Lithuania, Georgia, Finland, etc) and of course in Ukraine are so much clearer about what is actually happening and the stakes than statements from the US/west EU I think the underlying difference is that for those whose people have been subjected to versions of Russian imperialism directly Russian expansion is not an abstract force that is seen as a counter balance to western imperialism but a genuine & material threat to freedom itself.

In the arguments that “security culture isn’t relevant to _____” it almost always seems that many people in that very group have had to practice it as a survival strategy and as such have made some of the most important contributions to its practice. They may use different terms. I have seen this argument made for Black people specifically, for POC, for undocumented people, for immigrants, for people in the global south and now I saw it for sex workers but these practices are generally formed out of necessity in the streets by people in all these groups

An anti-fascist using misogynistic language while kicking out a mask-less reporter (even if she isn’t that is common among reactionary streamers) who was clearly not respecting the desired anonymity of the bloc is actually less bad than watching on as fascists try to kill someone

https://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1429699585782390789

If you can’t intervene to potentially save a life your presence there is worth precisely nothing and playing the victim while enabling fascist violence is truly pathetic.

Dont trust people who tell you to dox yourself and constantly try to delegitimate your threat assessments, especially if their response to anyone pushing back on it is to try to dox them. There is also a very big difference between doing a threat assessment and determining that the level of risk is not worth a certain level of disruption and imposing the decisions from that assessment onto other people who don’t feel as safe in forgoing security as you.

Leaving out from this coverage that Palestinians have been denied access to vaccines, or even any mention of Palestinians at all, is just doing the work of apartheid. businessinsider.com/israels-covid-… More atrocious coverage here, this time blaming incredibly low vaccination rates in Palestine on hesitancy saying there is no issue with supply (Israel outright blocking shipments and trying to pass off expiring doses says otherwise) npr.org/sections/goats…

This person @ShitPost4Apo posted this absurd meme comparing the northern alliance (which RAWA has said is no better than the Taliban for women) to a women’s self organized protection force then blocked me and hid my comments for pointing out the absurdity: He particularly does not want you to see this:

https://twitter.com/thecoleslaws/status/1429063824104169474

This is not a good comparison. The top are women who are part of a democratic freedom struggle and fighting for themselves, the other is the son of a patriarchal war lord who’s alliance RAWA claimed is as “equally detrimental to women’s advancement and equality” as the Taliban:

https://twitter.com/ShitPost4Apo/status/1428947924008849411

Very possible you might prefer him to the Taliban (although I am going to listen to RAWA here that this is a false choice) but the claim the that his father “was about women’s rights” either a deliberate lie or is from someone too uninformed to listen to.

https://twitter.com/ShitPost4Apo/status/1428954718731079684

Y’all should read this again, you are reading what you want to see into it. He says explicitly “that primitive communism... furnishes the finest and broadest basis of exploitation and despotism there, as well as in India and Russia” he framed that as worse than the colonization.

https://twitter.com/rockhominid/status/1402569172417196032

This is very explicitly celebrating colonialism as progress “in the conditions of modern society it turns out to be a crying anachronism (which has either to be removed or almost made to retrograde) as much as were the independent mark communities of the original cantons.”

borders only exist as violence the border is the crisis.

The supply line blockade is a potential way to reestablish the power of the classic workers movement under conditions of neoliberal globalization of production in which a factory can simply be moved elsewhere if its workers become too militant. This tactic allows for contemporary street movements to approach the power of the general strike and directly challenge the profits of capital in a way that occupying squares does not.

This piece is excellent. It historically situates the movement as a workers movement, recognizing internal contradictions, and counters the framework of both apologists for the repression & liberal cheerleaders of the student movement on how we should understand the consequences

https://twitter.com/lausanhk/status/1401658604961161217

Pulling out sections I especially feel are worth highlighting:

On the US-China Cold War line:

The US and Chinese competition is an inter-imperialist rivalry, the Cold War was also an inter-imperialist rivalry over so in that sense it has an element of truth but I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they say that. I think most who talk about that on the left especially against any acknowledgement of Chinese capitalism/imperialism, are trying to appeal to anti-Americanism. But materialism here demands a bit more than that in a one dimensional US bad China good way. Both are worse.

This nonsense is a great example of why decolonization cannot be a state process imposed from above but must be a movement of by and for the colonized masses. As Sandino said “only the workers and peasants go all the way to the end”

https://twitter.com/agent_of_change/status/1278260757461901314

https://twitter.com/emberflux/status/1401677792845107207

Almost like for some of these people critiquing the democrats isn’t actually about principles (they have none) but a marketing strategy/brand for their grifts

https://twitter.com/hasan_jf/status/1401622768651804674

I am skeptical of Medicare for all as a socialist proposal because Medicare really sucks to be on and the state controlling shit doesn’t actually mean workers and communities reliant on it do, but not having to pay out the ass for basic healthcare would be nice.

The S in BDS does stand for sanctions & below seems to limit it to boycotts. The point about sanctions being used as a tool of state violence is true they can cut people off from basic aid, medical supplies, food, etc but there is a reason BDS calls for them here and why it’s apt

https://twitter.com/elbartoarmy/status/1395350813443252234

Arms trade, policing, military production are global processes governments frequently have connections to the oppressive policies of other governments when that’s the case continuing it is complicity and state violence in itself.

This is the same thing that came up on @the_antifada a while ago from a guest claiming to advocate abolition... the DDR didn’t really denazify either, they set up a party explicitly for former Nazis and targeted autonomous anti fascists who showed they hadn’t eliminated it.

https://twitter.com/t4rig/status/1394953855331454977

The presence of fascism in East Germany today can’t all be blamed on the fall of the wall and the brutality of integration into free market capitalism (sometimes the left here sounds like liberals in talking about anything but whiteness) nazi networks persisted in the East too.