thanks AV

Ah okay so just up to that point lmao

Were they the ones for abolition? I always associate them more with the revolution than the civil war but I could be mixing them up with the whigs

I mean you can’t play that card when the entirety of slavery was justified by that same Christianity up until the point that a civil war ended the argument. Again, religion had nothing to do with it besides giving conviction to anyone based on what they feel, in their head, god wants. Abolitionists were religious just like every other person in america in 1880, and Abolitionists were not the majority.

Yes, entirely. That’s why they say it’s a good plan but not practical. Israel is a genocidal ethnostate; it’s citizens are nazis.

I guess you missed the riots in tel Aviv over Israel’s right to rape palestinians in captivity. Not against it, but against the government investigating and charging the prison guards with the rape and sexual assault of dozens of Palestinians who were imprisoned. It is unironically the most depraved country on earth and we pay their fucking rent.

You do understand what a shill is, right?

That’s fine and valid criticism! I am not speaking for all members of hamas, simply stating the obvious. The most hateful ideologies and inexcusable actions likely wouldn’t happen if the zionist regime had never been allowed to create the conditions for such hate in the first place.

Zionists openly stated their desire to displace and kill as many native people as necessary to secure their ethnic majority in Israel from its inception. After 40 years of occupation hamas is formed as a radical opposition movement. Their ideology, foundational ethics, and mission was colored entirely by their material reality under a genocidal occupation. I cannot fault them for their methods or rationale under those conditions from my privileged American home.

Unlike zionists, hamas was not formed for the explicit purpose of Jewish extermination but for liberation of the Palestinian people. What they saw as necessary for those goals may or may not be considered acceptable means of resistance to those in the west. It is not our place to morally grandstand about inconsiderate acts committed in resistance to genocide. We would not cast the same aspersions on Nat Turner or John Brown when talking about their fight for liberation even though they explicitly committed unthinkable crimes against the people seeking to benefit from the systems of oppression they were fighting against. We recognize that in the long arc of history that those actions were justified in pursuit of an end to chattel slavery.

What we are encouraged or even mandated by social pressures to decry as evil are actions taken under duress, under occupation, under threat of violent imprisonment with no fair trial even during “peace time.” It’s not so simple as pointing to individual immoral acts and calling them evil, we have to understand the history and escalations to this point. Israel does not respect diplomacy or international agreements, they only respond to force. I cannot fault the people faced with this reality for playing the hand they were dealt. As I said in my original response: had I grown up in those conditions I cannot deny that I would be compelled to risk my life and do whatever is necessary for a chance to save my country and it’s people from extinction.

It was true before October 7th but it is in plain view at this point that peace was never a goal for Israel and genocide is the explicit purpose of this ongoing “war.” The media framing of hamas as evil and terrorists only serves to dehumanize all Palestinians. If terrorism is fighting for freedom from oppression then you should be proud to call yourself a terrorist and stand for the rights of all people worldwide. Rebuke those who try to confuse the term and point out the hypocrisy inherent in promoting Israel’s right to defend itself while dismissing the opposition to their occupation as evil. It inherently biases the conversation. It taints the discussion by demanding fealty to Israel and their bloodthirsty crusade to claim all of Gaza as their territory. That is unacceptable.

That is all I was trying to get across, not directly at you but the royal you. Everyone is gently coerced into feeling the need to condemn hamas before their statements around Gaza, it’s not necessary. Hamas is the result of Israel’s inhumane occupation policy and any evil you percieve is a direct consequence of the conditions forced upon them by a belligerent occupier. We all recognize the human toll of their actions, and it is still so insignificant compared to the industrialized oppression of all Palestinians. They are not evil, their conditions are. We condemn the conditions Gaza has been forced to endure for almost 80 years. We do not condemn their actions.

This shit is often far too subtle for most people to spot it or fully understand its impact but can have big effects in the lives of just about everybody in a country and then people for example just go around feeling that their money doesn’t seem to go as far as before not putting two and two together to figure out they’re dieing the death of a thousand cuts as monopolies and cartels which should never have existed without corrupt legislation bleed them out, are dying younger because of avoidable air polution or exploitative private healthcare systems all possible thanks to legislation designed together by crooked politicians and lobbyists, feel their quality of life is much less than before as most public spaces have been made sold to private interest, and so on.

This hits so hard. Honestly your entire thread is fantastic, I’d say you should package this up into an essay and see if you can’t get it published in some op-ed sections.

More people need to understand the difference between big C corruption and small scale corruption and how the former affords the latter legitimacy. In america we are at the crossroads of institutional corruption finally becoming so blatant that the smaller structures will be able to follow suit without fear of stigma. The big guy gets his palms greased; it’s common sense that the little guy should get his too.

Therein lies the “slippery slope” that opens the floodgates to beat cops shaking someone down in a traffic stop for lunch money. It doesn’t come from the bottom up but from the top down. The most powerful officials will have the most leeway to embezzle and defraud and shake down what or whomever they see fit. Those below them are free to find their own means to enrich themselves from their position of authority, and so it goes all the way down to the lowest enforcer of this state of affairs. As long as they don’t disturb the affairs of their superiors, they are free to wheel and deal as they wish.

Once it has reached the general population and begins affecting their daily lives it is already too late. The traffic stop on your work commute is now a natural occurrence and you begin to carry a purse just to ensure safe passage, because you can’t simply report this to the precinct.

I fear we are not too far from reaching this point. A few years may be all we have left to prevent the system being permanently, irreparably damaged.

We had our opportunity to let the power structure play out and it failed to hold the most powerful in the country accountable for any of their crimes. What’s happening in France gives hope that the rest of the world will take this threat seriously and begin strengthening their countries against these threats. America has already proven itself incapable of enforcing the law. I’m not sure how we go about amending that from within.

I’d need to do more study on Portugal to understand how you managed to overturn such a corrupt system in modern times but I hope your message can reach more people and open enough minds to bring us out of this descent into kleptocracy.

The first step, I’d imagine, is making everyone aware. My hope is that it doesn’t take all 300 million people in America personally witnessing the corruption first hand to create a popular uprising for change.

In america we learned that laws don’t apply if everyone in power agrees to not apply them. The french are lucky enough to know how to force their government to comply, let’s just hope they ensure the laws are carried out and le pen is removed from politics permanently. They have a front row seat to see what happens when you let the law apply itself. The french government would be wise to heed the warning.

Hamas is not evil dawg lmao I would be hamas if the shit happened here. Any reasonable person would take up arms in defense of their land whether they agree with the organization fully or not.

If American bombs destroyed your entire neighborhood and killed your entire family along with all your neighbors and everyone you went to school with you would rightfully seek out a way to fight the party responsible.

It’s disingenuous to call hamas evil. Israel broke a ceasefire, killed 500 people(mostly children), kidnapped rescue workers and executed them, and has refused to allow aid into Gaza for over a month. That is evil. Any resistance to that in any form is just and righteous.

To call it evil is covering up Israel’s decades long war crimes against Palestinians. A hundred thousand deaths on Israel’s bloody hands? That is evil. Reducing an entire civilization to rubble for giving you a well deserved black eye after 70 years of oppression and apartheid is evil. Any evil you percieve from hamas is an in-kind response.

Resisting is human nature.

Stop playing their game.

Any time you feel tempted to condemn hamas, condemn Israel for propping them up and creating the conditions for Oct. 7th. Anything less is giving them cover to continue this genocide. If hamas is evil then killing all Palestinians is rational and necessary. You are unwittingly manufacturing consent for genocide when you do this.

The bow was my entire reason to play this game

Famously when the nazis demanded obedience they did so not by making laws outright banning speech. They simply made sure that nobody in any position of power would risk drawing attention and behave accordingly “of his own will”

Its brilliant that a hundred years later people with access to any human in the world just… do the exact same shit Germans did.

From They Thought They Were Free, the Germans 1933 - 1945

[…] "I gave them French and English literature, more so than before, although to do so was one of those vague betrayals of the ‘new spirit’; still, it had not been specifically forbidden. Of course, I always said, to protect myself (but I said it in such a way that I hoped the students would see through it), that the foreign works we read were only a reflection of German literature. So, you see, Herr Professor, a man could show some—some independence, even, so to say, secretly.” “I understand,” I said. “Many of the students—the best of them—understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today.”

[…]

"Tell me, Herr Hildebrandt, what about [Shakespeare’s]Julius Caesar?”

He smiled very, very wryly. “Julius Caesar? No … no.”

“Was it forbidden?”

“Not that I remember. But that is not the way it was. Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”

Cautiously going to say I’ll take your word for it but I’m not putting my faith in anything except my own abilities to agitate, organize, and disrupt govt functions. If there were a mechanism for creating real change able to be used by congress we wouldn’t be allowed to vote. System’s working perfectly. It lasted long enough to let a despot and his cronies infect every aspect of the system, just to tear it down and replace it with the open face nazi government the oligarchs have been demanding since 1865.

I’ve seen something about this pop up occasionally on my feed, but it’s usually a conversation I’m nowhere close to understanding lol

Could you recommend any resources for a complete noob?

Ah yes the age old economic practice of creating an extortion racket against an audience of what I’d assume are mostly kids

The markets are never wrong, lemming!

Idk how monopoly go is getting that much in micro transactions but it should be illegal