A Prime Example…

The Ukrainian letter of solidarity with Palestine, in part, reads:

“We, Ukrainian researchers, artists, political and labour activists, and members of civil society stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine who for 75 years have been subjected to and resisted Israeli military occupation, separation, settler colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, land dispossession and apartheid. We write this letter as people to people.

Our solidarity comes from a place of anger at the injustice, and a place of deep pain of knowing the devastating impacts of occupation, shelling of civil infrastructure, and humanitarian blockade from experiences in our homeland. Parts of Ukraine have been occupied since 2014, and the international community failed to stop Russian aggression then, ignoring the imperial and colonial nature of the armed violence, which consequently escalated on February 24, 2022.

Aware of the pragmatic geopolitical reasoning behind Ukraine's decision to echo Western allies, on whom we are dependent for our survival, we see the current support of Israel and dismissing Palestinian right to self-determination as contradictory to Ukraine's own commitment to human rights and fight for our land and freedom. We as Ukrainians should stand in solidarity not with the oppressors, but with those who experience and resist the oppression.

We strongly object to equating of Western military aid to Ukraine and Israel by some politicians. Ukraine doesn't occupy the territories of other people; instead, it fights against the Russian occupation, and therefore international assistance serves a just cause and the protection of international law. Israel has occupied and annexed Palestinian and Syrian territories, and Western aid to it confirms an unjust order and demonstrates double standards in relation to international law.”

All kinds of fun for zucc lately

I don’t know if these cops were unable to stop this murder, because they chose not to try.

An entire classroom was murdered while these fucking cowards tased and handcuffed the parents of those children who were begging these fucking useless men to do their fucking jobs.

Stop telling me I’m supposed to blindly support cops. These cowards want to cosplay as soldiers, and when the public they are supposed to serve needed them, they hid and showed us exactly who they are. Every one of these cops is complicit in these murders, and they should be held accountable for their inaction.

This is what happens when people become cops so they can bully and harass people with impunity. Thee cowards aren’t going to risk their lives for anyone. They’re cosplaying.

This police force gets FORTY PERCENT of the city’s budget. This tiny town has a SWAT team. That wasn’t enough to save these children and their teachers.

Fuck the police.

Watching ep1 of TFATWS (because I'm a masochist) and I swear when Raynor and Bucky are discussing the amends and she says "So, you did it all right, but it didn’t help with the nightmares" I can't help but facepalm myself so hard.

Of course it doesn't help with the nightmares you doofus, it's making them worse.

First you tell Bucky he has to make amends, basically telling him he's responsible for the WS murders and aggravating his guilt. Then you make him go after corrupt people who have achieved some form of power thanks to Hydra and you make him approach them, face them, tell them his name and if that wasn't bad enough he has to reassure them that he's no longer the Winter Soldier and "they're part of his efforts to make amends".

I'm going to say this again: you're making him tell these people who benefited from Hydra and abused the power Hydra gave them that he's no longer the WS and he's just trying to be good this time.

Basically he's reliving his trauma, he's reassured everything he did was his fault, you're not addressing his mental state at all and you just want him to follow 3 stupid steps so he can prove to be the little obedient soldier you want him to be. And fuck his mental health, I guess.

I'm sure many people have talked about this already but I needed to vent. I swear that line gets on my damn nerves.

The Electronic Intifada

There is no such thing as childhood in Gaza

Israeli attacks expose Palestinian children to daily horrors.

Children in Gaza can tell an F-16 from an F-35 from a drone. They know a whole litany of things that are beyond their years. Things that they shouldn’t have to know. Over 10,000 children have been killed in Gaza. The children who have survived have seen their families, friends and neighbors killed by the Israeli army. They have seen near-death by starvation and death by suffocation, under the rubble and by explosion. Children in Gaza do not have the luxury of death being a mystery. It is a daily presence. If a child in Gaza is hungry, they know not to throw a tantrum. They have become used to feeling hunger. The same is true of the cold. Every child in Gaza now knows what it is to be unhoused, to sleep in a tent or on the streets in winter.

I often think about how John Walker, still trapped in that dark abyss of emotional despair and pain and loss, still dissociating, with no one who can understand how he feels willing to actually help him process those emotions, with no way to access medical help and therapy, and left adrift to drown on his own with all the cards stacked against him, STILL managed to pull himself out of the darkness and do the right thing because he genuinely wanted to do good things all along

He could have kept falling deeper into the darkness. He could have let that anger and desire for revenge consume him. It would have been all too easy. The whole world was against him and he could have said fuck them all. But he didn’t. Because for all the “bad” the serum may have amplified in him, it also amplified everything about him that was good too. It amplified the man who wanted to do the right things and help save lives. Because that’s why he became Captain America in the first place. His genuine good intentions was never an act. It wasn’t for the cameras or fame or attention or to trick Sam and Bucky. He wanted to help. He always did, even when no one believed in him or wanted to give him a fair chance.

The city of Philadelphia will pay $2 million to a Black woman who was pulled from a car, beaten by officers and had her toddler used for social media fodder by the police union, officials said.

Nursing aide Rickia Young was headed home in the early morning hours of Oct. 27, 2020, when she unknowingly drove into a large protest over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr.

She tried to make a three-point turn to get away from the tense scene when officers smashed out her windows with their batons, according to her attorneys.

Young was handcuffed and separated from her teenage nephew and 2-year-old son for several hours, and no one was ever charged or cited, according to the woman’s lawyer. The hearing-impaired toddler lost his hearing aids during the tussle.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police labor union, posted a Facebook picture two days later showing Young’s toddler in the arms of a Philadelphia police officer just after the incident.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/philadelphia-pay-2m-black-woman-beaten-officers-separated-toddler-during-n1279134?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

my life as a transgender meme

you talk about communism but what do you think of freemarket capitalism?

I don't like pure, unfettered capitalism any more than I do absolute socalism. I prefer capitalism or more capitalist systems than more socialist systems but that doesn't mean I'm for 100% free market capitalism.

I believe regulation is needed at times. "The market" reacts, it doesn't preemptively stop things. If a kind of candy has crack in it, addicting the consumer, the market hasn't stopped a portion of people from getting addicted, it only serves to stop it AFTER the fact and by then it is too late.

It also can have an issue with monopolies. If any one company manages to get a stranglehold on any one market, be it due to expensive start up, the collapse of their major competitor or merging with their competitor, then the lack of regulation can keep that company at the top.

New start ups would be faced with near impossible odds as there'd be no protection for their product, so PepsiCoke Inc could buy out somebody trying to compete with them. Or get their recipe and sell their own 100% same product at a loss until it drives the competition out of business, since it's expensive to produce soda on a large scale.

It has issues with location. If a company is dumping waste into a river that causes a town to get sick, there's zero explicit pressure to stop that if they sell their product outside that area. If some Illinois podunk town gets wrecked will the New Yorkers consuming that product care? Isn't that exactly the issue with China now, where people are happy to buy iPhones made from (essentially) slave labor?

And then there's the issue with cartels, which capitalism encourages because non-competition and price fixing at a bottleneck overly rewards the companies engaging in that practice. Sure, it means everyone gets a slice of the pie, but they all get to get more pie than if they fought one another for customers.

A lot of libertarians believe that capitalism, unfettered and free market, could solve a lot of issues. But they operate on a similar line of thinking as communists; they assume everyone will play fair, which by human nature there will be people who don't. There are people who are going to violate the NAP (as much of a meme as it is) and put their finger on the scale.

Both extremes of capitalism/communism are utopian ideals. As always, there's a balance to be had. And that's why I don't consider myself a capital L Libertarian, I just have some libertarian ideas.

I prefer a mix. I like my country's universal healthcare, I don't mind taxes but I wish they were lower and, overall, I want to see a scaling back of government control. But I still want there to be some government presence for things like industry regulation, various protections and laws, like copyright/patent laws.

I didn't like Falcon and The Winter Soldier myself. For a number of reasons. This article explains some of them: www*forbes*com/sites/erikkain/2021/04/27/the-falcon-and-the-winter-soldier-review-biggest-problems-preachy-politics-captain-america/

Thank you for sending me THIS article. The author neatly summarizes most of problems. Most, because I would also add the fact that TFATWS retcons some stuff from previous MCU movies, the timelines of some stuff just don't make sense and Sam and Bucky are sometimes OOC. And I hope that Sharon is a skrull, because otherwise her character doesn't make sense.

The biggest problem with MCU now is that they have a world that had a giganctic global crisis after 50% of the population wanished. Probably famines in some regions, wars in others, maybe even a few countries stopped existing at all. And five years later, when things started normalising, the population of the whole wolrd doubles in one day. There is no food for these people, no jobs and no place to live. Probably new wars because of it. Generally a very interesting settings for a story, but instead this show ignores all of this and hammers to the audience a message that.... racism is bad. And we should "do better". What exactly that means we will not know because the answer is too complicated, and Disney just wants simple stories with familiar faces. They sell better.