@inquiline

https://tilde.zone/@nytpu/117418495539762175

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Zionism From The Standpoint of its Victims

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFkODgFsBSg

"I don't just want someone who can tell me what freedom is. I also want to know like what does your freedom cost the people around you?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHQMFNNBGJY

#philosophy

Yet, this is the very thing myself was doing by continuing to participate in eating animals and animal by-products. In both cases, by doing the thoughtless and easy thing, the thing that is normal, we're implicated in the harms.

By choosing the thoughtful and more challenging path, the ethical path, we don't stop those harms. We don't get to wave a magic wand and make it "If nobody bought meat" or "If everybody still masked".

Nonetheless, for myself, my own anger—at how quickly folk chose to pretend an ongoing pandemic was over—revealed myself as a hypocrite.

Wearing a mask consistently is more work. It requires more thought. Refusing to participate in systems of harm, however many steps removed we may individually be, is never going to be the easy path.

Nonetheless, if I'm gonna be angry with others for not putting in that work, then I don't get to claim it's too hard for me to put in the work of finding alternatives to eating animals. That was the day myself chose veganism.

6/6

Further, we learned that viruses move through the air, can even hang out in the air for hours after someone shedding them has gone.

We learned that respirator masks served as effective source control, and that even cloth masks were better than nothing in limiting concentrations that we and others were exposed to.

Yet, there was resistance. Wearing a mask, and wearing it properly, took more thought and effort.

We're offered the promise of a vaccine. Do this and you won't have to mask anymore, we're told. Only the vaccine was non-sterilizing. You can (and will) still contract and pass on the virus despite doing your civic duty to get the shot. Protecting ourselves and others wasn't so easy and thoughtless as getting a jab.

Yet the consensus was to return to normalcy. Folk wanted to get back to the conformity of 2019. Me and my household, we still mask. For a long time, myself carried around so much anger about how society took the thoughtless and easy path.

5/6

#CovidIsNotOver

We don't get to say "Yeah, but my personally not participating won't change anything," and wipe our hands of it.

With respect to your own journey, perhaps this will help you to fully embody. Myself for years brushed off all the standard vegan debate bro arguments for veganism.

Like, sure, yes, it's bad to eat animals, for any number of reasons, without even asking the question of how it impacts the animals themselves. Enlightened self-interest alone, as inhabitants of a planet being rapidly changed, in significant part, by industrial animal husbandry, should be reason enough to not participate in those systems.

But as someone who lives subject to those systems, it would just be more difficult to not eat animals or animal by-products. It would require more thought and effort on my part. And that was where my engagement with the issue ended.

Then 2020 happened, and we learned that chains of transmission, however many steps removed, can kill or disable people we don't even know.

4/6

#veganism

Yes, there's the proximate cause: the soldier lines up his sights and pulls a trigger. But what are the systems that puts the soldier in that position, gun in hand, with the belief that the action that follows is a thing to do?

We want it to just be the soldier, or the government of an apartheid state, or the supremacist ideology that state is organized around, that is to blame. The off-hand gratuitousness of his description (reminding me, apropos to context, of a Geller essay) invites us to hear it as the evil that person who pulled the trigger engaged in. It has nothing to do with us.

But then if that were the case, why would any of us protest? Why would we demand that our own governments act differently in relation to that state? Why would we demand that the resources and legitimacy that empowers those who direct and perform the killing be withdrawn?

We might not be pulling the trigger, but in protest we acknowledge that we're nonetheless implicated by the gun ever being in the hand of that soldier, in that place, with those rules of engagement.

3/6

That's what Dave is effectively arguing. He's not implicated, because it all happens without his involvement.

Jack, reaching for rape as a metaphor, fails to even engage with Dave's get out of jail free card ploy, even when Dave, in breaking down the inapplicability of Jack's metaphor, leads him half way to recognizing Dave's own fallacy.

Yes, you can introduce degrees of separation. Those degrees of separation are not the escape hatch Dave wants them to be. Yet Jack instead doubles down with a "threshold argument".

Which allows Jack to double down with a no ethical consumption cop-out. "If nobody bought meat" once again externalizes the locus of control. If it were normal, if everybody didn't do the thing, then going along with the crowd wouldn't be ethics. It would be conformity.

Dave opens to citing to targeted gun violence against children during a genocide. How does that happen?

2/6

Dave's whole line of argument, that his not buying the animal won't stop the animal from being killed, is just one step removed from hand-waiving "no ethical consumption" as some free pass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNTumkfrxjI&lc=UgyW8panTn8Wpwz3FM14AaABAg

Where that formulation was initially intended as a confrontation, to invite us to think about how to move more thoughtfully in a society that would have us move thoughtlessly, it has contrarily become a thought-terminating cliche, a mantra for opting out of culpability for our own participation.

That an entire system exists, that POSIWID, is presented as the harm being done by the system, with us outside that system, the system being an external locus of control: Ourselves powerless before it.

The system, however we may choose to name it, is reified as a demiurge, creating and destroying the world without our having any part in any of it. My not buying the animal won't stop God from killing the animal, so at the very least let me buy the animal God commands a greater sacrifice for.

1/6

Violation of consent isn't limited to rape. It's an organizing principle of patriarchy. It culminates in rape, yes, but that's against a backdrop that normalizes such entitlement to violations of consent, which makes non-consensual sex something anyone would imagine, let alone plan, as something they were similarly entitled to.

Rape culture is that normalized backdrop of entitlement to violate others without their consent, even without ever touching them. Most of which we take no notice of, most of which we hold no one, least of all ourselves, accountable for, because to do so would require a fundamental reconciliation of patriarchal society itself.

So, instead we quibble over definitions of what does and does not constitute the most extreme form of such violation. Because that makes it about the exceptions, and not the rule. The rule being that violation of consent is the norm we dare not confront.

2/2

As someone who is likewise estranged from family, now for multiple decades, from those who were unprepared to talk about harms that were done, thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIHUSHQ66oc&lc=UgyEuiSPv99Tf-0XWFl4AaABAg&pp=0gcJCUsANpG00pGi

The challenge, of course, is that if everyone who violated consent was held to account for their unpreparedness to address those harms, society as we know it would be unable to function. (As we know it being the operative concern. As we know it is the problem.)

Sex has nothing to do with any of this. The desire to read rape narrowly, as being about sex, seeks to constrict the scope of inquiry, because if the actual issue, violation of consent, entitlement to violate consent, as an exercise of power, were held to account, too many people would be implicated. Too many people would have to be held accountable.

1/2

So apparently we've gone back to naming epidemic strains after countries?

Because that's always a good sign that we're not focusing on the wrong things.

Seriously, Stratus already had a name. But, y'know, the other superpowers of last century are getting a call-out, so why not...

#CovidIsNotOver #Plague #PublicHealth

Just a reminder from my favorite sexual violence researcher @sharon to check in on the sexual assault survivors in your life. 1 in 5 women survive rape and 1 in 2 survive some kind of unwanted sexual contact (according to the CDC), so I’m sure that everyone knows someone.

@DeliaChristina ok so the other disturbing thing is that my German friends have been like, well they taught us all at school how to spot a Nazi and watch out for the rise of fascism again. But THEY DIDN’T TELL US WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.

My roommate, this afternoon, attended an event dubbed "The Longest Table", a community potlatch that was overflowing with food.

Roommate suggested that maybe homeless people in the neighborhood might be invited to particiapte.

"Oh, no, this is just for neighbors to get to know one another."

Homeless people in the neighborhood are your neighbors. You'd know that but for the contortions of perquisitive classposture.

The longest table. Oh, no, not that long!

#lumpentheory

@inquiline

Wendy's! At The Emo

IYKYK

@inquiline

https://mastodon.ie/@WesternExposure/117370762657863676

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Listening to Netanyahu's speech at the U.N.:

"We sent millions of text messages warning civilians to leave combat areas. We made millions of phone calls. We dropped millions of leaflets....What genocidal regime [would do this]?"

You're literally describing ethnic cleansing. Etnicko ciscenje. Forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups. You're unapologetically crowing that you told millions of people, by every communication method possible, to abandon their homes or be buried in the rubble you would make of those homes.

Admitting to crimes against humanity as a defense against a charge of genocide is certainly a choice.

"If the task force's mission is not to solve the problem of sexual assault, as Love stated, then it has achieved a remarkable success."

~ Editorial Board of the Cornell student newspaper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoqr6Bzowuk

"The last thing I would like to talk about before concluding today is that Cornell University itself imposed much harsher penalties on students at the same time this alleged gang rape occurred, for the crime of demonstrating for the lives of Palestinians.

"The protesting students at Cornell were physically assaulted , had their academic privileges revoked, and suffered forms of punishment and surveillance far harsher than those men who allegedly raped this student.

"This says a lot about Cornell's priorities."

It's what Steenhagen, in 2022, named as "health supremacism". Sure, I've got chronic conditions that may require even daily management, but I'm not "disabled", I can still work, I'm healthy, unlike those other people. I'm a worker. Ours is a working family. We're "compatible with life" (that one phrase so grinds my gears; echoes of "gotta live your life"). We're normal.

Three in five Usians have an underlying condition, but "normal" is the glorification of one's status as a worker. Not our status as a human, thus necessarily our status as living, at some stage if we're sufficiently lucky to live long enough, with chronic illness, with disability, with age and frailty, all compatible with life for the very reason that they are what life is.

No, our status, our popularity, our respectability, our sociality, is as those who subject ourselves to the machine, that's what constitutes "normal".

2/4

#lumpentheory