"toward A Provisional Avant-garde" From A Handbook Of Disappointed Fate, Anne Boyer

new favorite reddit user

whenever i'm trying to talk myself out of buying something i don't need i always hear my old russian professor's voice echoing in my head: "WHAT??? WILL YOU DIE THE RICHEST MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD?" and then i make an unwise financial decision

"immortality sucks because all your friends die" all your friends die anyway. those we do not mourn are those who mourn us.

"immortality sucks because you forget who you are" we always forget who we are. do you remember who you were at four years of age? who you were at fourteen? "who i am" is a shadow cast on the wall.

"immortality sucks because" skill issue. skill issue. skill issue. give me your liver

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/virginia-eubanks-interview-automating-inequality-poverty

Here is a masterlist of every single genocidal statement made by the State of Israel, all appropriately quoted and sourced.

These statements cannot be retracted.

Quote from the Israeli State Minister of Agriculture and Development.

And yet, Zionists will tell you that “This is not a genocide, Hamas are using Palestinians as human shields!”

One of the absolute biggest failures of the US/Western "left" is the fact that most people are only capable of being anti-imperialist in the abstract and/or in hindsight. "Of course invading Iraq was bad!" people will say. "Of course invading Vietnam was bad! Of course the US lied about Iraq in the 90s to initiate the Gulf War!" (and Vietnam in the 60s, and Iraq again in the 2000s). But when it comes to what the empire is doing now people get fucking goldfish brains and are incapable of critically analyzing any new information. You see, we just have to stay in Syria to save the Kurds and defeat Assad. We just have to go to war with China if they try to reunify Taiwan to protect democracy. We should have stayed in Afghanistan to protect women and girls. Or people will try to both-sides it and say "well of course US imperialism is bad, but [insert Official Enemy State here] is just as bad if not worse!". Then when the empire makes its move and inevitably it kills thousands of people and makes the world objectively worse, then people will say "oh I guess it was bad after all", and the "anti-imperialists" of 20 years from now will pat themselves on the back for remembering that bad thing the empire did and knowing it definitely was bad.

All of this is supremely useless. If anti-imperialism means anything it means stopping the empire before it ever even starts, and if it does start, doing any and everything possible to sabotage and defeat it.

David Suzuki in this interview about facing the reality of climate change and other environmental issues from Moyers & Company.

Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah's thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman's. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman's thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah's writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?

There's a common charge leveled by supposedly "open-minded" liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just 'blindly' support any force that's contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?

We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called "Free Syrian Army" consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn't make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.

The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.

In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered "open-minded"? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west's iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.

There's plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they're struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational' way to look at the world?

Personally, I think not.

Trying to revivify this blog, spent fifteen minutes searching how to log out of tumblr on desktop

Rudolf Bauer Space, 1932