“Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel, and Monsanto. The center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others.” It cosponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series called “The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Nonviolent Social Change.”
— Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy (via rikodeine)
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
— The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
not really a fan of the amount of people here who now hear “war crime” and immediately think “fun meme term”
A good part of the tumblr userbase understands that rape jokes are bad, they understand that using “rape” and “rapist” as “funny quirky meme words” is fucked up and bad.
But at the same time we’ve reached a weird paradigm where a lot of people who understand that consider “war crime” and “war criminal” to be Funny Quirky Meme Words without realizing that war crimes very much includes rape!! It very much includes rape of all kinds in all kinds of scales!
It includes doing the most heinous things against children, it includes a wide range of the most heinous things. Just read the definition of war crime.
Why is it that you think that rape jokes are unacceptable but war crimes jokes are funny and cute and harmless?
Isn’t it trivializing of actual war crimes the amount of people in this site who now have the immediate reaction on their brain to thing of “war crime” as Funny Meme like a Pavlovian response?
Is it too weird that I think that this is fucked up?
Man.
I just wanna say, when I originally wrote this post I remember wondering if maybe the reason why people have different reactions to rape jokes and war crimes jokes had to do with people being largely ignorant about what war crimes entail.
Now it has gotten increasingly clear to me that it has less to do with ignorance and everything to do with people not thinking of war crimes as something “real” the same way they think of rape. Rape is something that can happen to them, within their communities. War crimes on the other hand are something that happens to other people, to other countries, therefore they don’t even register it as “real”. People treat it as some sort of imaginary concept because the victims don’t even register as real to them.
take a shot every time an american liberal uses the turn of phrase “not perfect” to refer to a political candidate’s explicit intent to enable more mass death of foreigners and immigrants.
and queer people
the interesting thing here is that in the context this post was made, it was expressing frustration at primarily queer liberals for using democratic candidates’ token support for queer issues as a reason why those same candidates’ open willingness to dehumanize and kill brown people both within and beyond the united states’ borders shouldn’t discourage progressive voters from supporting their campaigns. not to say that queer people (and most specifically in recent years, trans women) don’t get left behind in pursuit of some sort of ‘lesser evil’, but i think the tendency to redirect discussions of other minority groups being harmed back towards queer issues is a big part of the unthinking homonationalism that’s prevalent on tumblr and probably an instinct that’s worth trying to curb.
This isn’t Greta Thunberg’s fault, she couldn’t have been a better ally, but it’s so disheartening how her kidnapping and mistreatment for five days have rallied so many people, when what she went through is only a fraction of a fraction of what thousands of Palestinian men, women, girls, and boys — who have been routinely kidnapped, tortured, and raped to unimaginably evil lengths for months or even years, often to the point of death, — have endured and are still enduring as we speak.
And I know that’s the whole point of why she did what she did. She knew that, as a young high-profile White European girl, her mistreatment would result in more uproar and she intended to use that privilege to raise awareness of what is happening to Palestinians. That’s why the first thing she did after her release, when the press asked her to speak in detail about her own mistreatment, was to shift the conversation instead to how Israel continues to escalate its genocide against Palestinians.
I just wish people understood her message and gave the same energy toward helping Palestinians without waiting for a White Westerner to risk their life first.
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Find a protest near you here (UPDATED):X, X, X, X, X, X, X,
My ancestors would have wanted pasteurization, vaccines, antibiotics, disinfectants, birth control, psychiatric medications, pain management, anesthesia. My ancestors would have wanted to be able to keep their loved ones around longer, and not lose them too early/too soon to childbirths, injuries, bacterial infections, mental illnesses, and diseases that are curable and/or preventable in our modern day life.
Modern medicine saves lives.
In fact, we know they did want these things, because they invented them. They gave them to us out of generations of struggling to understand and make use of nature itself. “Ancestral knowledge” includes the unglamorous things like germ theory, the functioning of the immune system, and how to manufacture lifesaving vaccines. It’s not just magical or mystical or remote, it’s present in our lives at every moment. It’s the reward of human connection: the sum total of human discovery and the boundless ingenuity of human invention, surrounding us at all times with absolute miracles made banal by their familiarity.
If we reject modern medicine, then we reject all the labors and trials our ancestors went through for us; we reject our very nature.
Please, for your ancestors’ sake: vaccinate your kids, and take your goddamn medicine.
wild how like PCOS, endometriosis, vaginismus & hell, even frequent yeast infections are “mysterious” with no well known cause and little to no decent treatment, but we have tons of supposedly well researched body fat removal methods, about 20 different kinds of breast implants, laser hair removal, and 100 different dermatologist recommended anti aging creams. we sure had the money and brainpower to cure those “diseases”
