that Kissinger’s death was celebrated but Carter’s is not is a tragedy of historical illiteracy. Carter’s legacy is millions of dead, Soviet collapse & famine, born again evangelism in US politics, the rise of neoliberal economics, & foreign interventionist liberalism 1. Carter was the first major president to legitimate born again Christianity as the basis for politics, and the second to last of the southern democrat tradition among presidents (Clinton 1 being the last).

As Khalidi argues, this seemingly ever present overly confident attitude, as an ideology & frame for action, plays a substantial role in the failures of the Palestinian National Movement. People have been saying this kind of thing for 100 years.

https://twitter.com/newleftreview/status/1804137130811121966

There was a point a year or two ago when some genuinely new tactical developments seemed to be growing in the West Bank, based around decentralized networked resistance of affinity groups, focusing on concrete tactical aims, local power, and building of civil society

The most awkward radical silence in the U.S. is on the drug war.

It is implicated directly & causally in 100s of Ks to millions of violent deaths.

Indirectly causally linked to millions more violent deaths & to an even greater number of ‘non violent’ deaths. And beyond that it is indirectly & more marginally a catalyst in still further.

On top of that it is linked to incalculable imprisonment, torture, bodily injury, as well as to egregious to economic inequality.

The role it plays in colonial land seizure is extreme.

If polling results are to be believed then the two stakeholder groups whose views are most similar on Israel Palestine are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, and Jews who are not. Both by something like 4:1 support two state solution, 10-20% 1 state, & 0% expulsion etc While if Palestine Pulse polls are to be believed Israeli Jews and Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza are mirror images—50% of Israeli Jews & 40% of Palestinians support 2SS,14% of IJs & 10% of Ps support 1SS, and 25% IJ & 30% of Ps chose polled options ‘expulsion’ or ‘apartheid’

In the 90s at the height of post Cold War postmodern decentering there was a lot of bullshit in academia & political discourse much of which persists but ironically some of the few truths to be argued, namely deconstructions of homeland, nation, identity etc, have been forgotten While my arguments to follow primarily discuss nationalism (repeating what I’ve said in other threads), they apply, in pari passu, to heritage and homeland & similar ideas and those are the main focus on my thoughts as of late.

My bottom of barrel tv binge has led me to the Mentalist, which upon watching, I think interestingly is the only tv thriller action show whose stupid conspiracy theory background is actually based on fact unlike most other shows Scientology, a not subtly disguised element of the show, really did infiltrate the government en masse, recruit agents of influence, and had ties to powerful people and California politics

One of the most annoying and ignorant statements i hear so often, even from otherwise knowledgeable thoughtful scholars, is the claim that with modernity evolution, either by natural selection, or in general, has ceased to operate on humans This often has straightforwardly eugenic presuppositions, the idea is that ‘before’ the ‘’’weak’’’, the meek, the unskilled, the sick, the injured, the neurodivergent, the elderly, the antisocial, the hungry bellied idle hands, etc, would just die, or some other such nonsense

If the goal of prisons was incapacitation there’s no reason they shouldn’t be a 5 star hotel. If the goal is deterrence there’s no reason it has to be so long, instead very quick corporal punishment would be the best bet. If the goal were rehabilitation, whatever that means, punitive measures actually work against the aims. The only thing prisons make sense for is their original Quaker intention, a heavily Christian form of torturous loneliness as a form of retribution.

Comparing the thesis that Christianity was somehow super popular among slaves, women, the poor and oppressed, vs. any other thesis but especially the merchants & minority elites thesis several things must be borne in mind The issue is not just whether there were X or Y people, but their proportions. Slaves were 20% of the empire, the poor were 80%, women were slightly more than 50%. Jews may have been anywhere between 5-20%. Migrants, settlers, merchants, soldiers etc were common.

The implication of labor aristocracy analysis is not ‘okay so labor should just give up and passively await being saved by the lumpen of the global south’ lol that’s so lame

https://twitter.com/jacobin/status/1649729770635051008

Recognizing that labor in its current form cannot achieve any final victories, and the victories that it does have prior to end of empire will benefit from it, does not entail the desire to not be victorious that’s absurd.

Claims that modern colonialism & imperialism (or globalization or something else) are radically dissimilar from past forms is very frequently asserted, but very infrequently are those assertions backed by any attempt at proof or argument The few times people do try to argue the point they do so with patently circular arguments. What differentiates it is race, and yet, race is inescapably modern a product of colonial encounter. What differentiates it is capitalism but is is what differentiates capitalism too etc

Weird because this isn’t how the Maoists themselves described their tactics of enhanced socio-affective persuasion lmao Our aim is to totally break you down through harsh euphemistic education measures designed to change your worldview whether you like it or not

Turns to

They did a heckin love bomb :)

Assimilating the crusades to the rubric of imperialism is an odd move of a certain postcolonial thought. Neither the Leninist nor unequal exchange definition of imperialism apply, & the European, & West Asian powers were relatively equal in power. Empires of a classic variety were pursued only some of the crusades but mostly they are often transnational collaboration of sub national units. More akin to the UN model of empire than the US model.

I was always suspicious of claims that this or that conquest didn’t involve settlement & population exchange. Esp in cases of well documented written records of conqueror diasporas & migrations such as the Crusades, Mongols, Umayyads, various iterations of Imperial China etc So in one case I decided to follow it down—I looked at several cases i very commonly hear from leftists and academics were NOT cases of conquest migration, settlement & displacement—I’ll start with a controversial one, the rise & spread of Islam & the successor empires

In the new throne games the city watch goes through the city dismembering people, beheading, maiming & castrating them, and the thing people found offensive about the episode is that a queen couldn’t assume the throne lol Maybe we should watch the sword and sorcery with a little bit less self seriousness lol

Often I see people on here criticize death of the author ideas, formalism, or deconstruction on the idea that they’re idealistic for ignoring social context, & it’s telling because that reveals they can’t conceive of doing historical work w/o individualism or romantic great men I also suspect that they haven’t read the titular essay by Barthes or similarly titled one by Foucault, nor related writings by Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Jakobson, Beneviste, Wellek or Warren, because NONE deny the role of historical, structural & social analysis

All pro prison arguments have to walk a weird statistical line, because either something is rare enough in the population that it could be controlled carcerally without social disruption, but then intrinsically you’ll always get false positives, frame jobs & discrimination OR the thing is frequent enough in the population that you can make reliable identifications, but there’s no way to enforce it without causing untold direct and indirect harm, and complete social disruption

‘The Last Samurai’ is a very interesting movie bc even as it portrays specific events exactly the opposite how they happened,its *general historical accuracy* is quite high.& the central conceit of the movie is that Japanese Samurai & American Indian Fighters are of the same cast Both are caught up in a battle of modernity with tradition, against their own will, but must loyally perform their duty out of a sense of honor. In both the fight is between old world modernizers and new world traditionalists.

I like ‘Preferable to Telephone Paul’ because it mocks the two dominant tropes in law & cop media—the cop or lawyer who, in a broken world must break the law to uphold it,& the noble defender who stands up for defendants on the basis of higher belief in noble procedural principle So instead of, ‘sometimes you have to break the law to enforce it’ and ‘sometimes following the law means defending criminals’ it says ‘sometimes defending criminals requires breaking the law but that’s a good thing’

Reading political theories drop any critical or skeptical eye when it comes to law and jurisprudence makes sense when you realize law is basically the only conceivable way for liberal or leftist academics to directly affect politics Well, it’s law, the administrative state & bureaucracy (which is often the same thing as the law, for our purposes), NGOs (which are equated with ‘Civil Society’ as such), the bully pulpit & cultural change (whether journalism, criticism, or the arts), & philanthropy

The impact of medical care on lethality is very interesting. While it doesn’t affect the question of whether or not we are ‘safer’ over time, it does affect if we are more or less violent. Lethality rates often decline alongside or independent of violence rates Since 1960 lethality of homicides has continually fallen. However the national homicide rate rose until 1972 then remained steady while the urban rate rose until 92, after which both fell until after the financial crisis, then falling slowly, & then sharply rising with Covid