I'm saving a ton of money over the last year. Here's my secret:
-Cancelled NYT subscription
-Cancelled WaPo subscription
-Cancelled Amazon Prime
-Cancelled Spotify
Turns out I'm saving money and also giving my more directly to smaller businesses, true journalists, and artists.
Really not that hard, people.
the #Democrats who censured US Rep Al Green aren't stupid. they're #collaborators.
make it a habit of calling them what they are.
#Palestine
#PA #collaborators
@palestine
"...the Palestinians know that while the genocide was raging in Gaza, Abbas was focused on making Jenin vulnerable to Israel’s raids. And he did nothing while Israel continued to “seize” much more than an “inch” of Palestinian land for illegal settlements"
"Last month, the PA did its utmost to suppress news of its crackdown on the Palestinian resistance in Jenin [they banned Al Jazeera]" A lot to be said about the PA
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250218-the-pas-delusions-are-dangerous-for-palestinians/
Obviously things in my life haven't been going well, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the changes in Meta moderation policies *expressly* designed to facilitate fascist propaganda, the dehumanization of people nazis don't like, and why this is an obvious example of the mainstream establishment (private and public) accommodating and directly supporting fascist agendas that will literally get marginalized people killed in the long run.
Archived link: https://archive.is/RTgE0#selection-1561.0-1579.1
Original link: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-meta-announcement-fact-checking-hate-speech-b2675594.html
Facebook lifts restrictions on calling women ‘property’ and transgender people ‘freaks’
"Added in to the policy are new clauses apparently designed to explicitly allow common anti-trans arguments, such as advocating for trans people to be banned from public bathrooms, school sports, or certain jobs.
"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation," reads one exception. The same section previously said that users couldn’t call protected groups “freaks” or “abnormal”.
Meta also replaced language banning “generalizations” about a protected group’s “inferiority” on the basis of “intellectual capacity”. Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity” — seemingly opening the door to scientific racism."
I chose this article, despite its simplified headline, because while most of the coverage of Meta's policy update has been critical, very few outlets are highlighting the reality that Zuckerberg is expressly creating exceptions to allow the targeting of marginalized groups like trans people, migrants, nonwhite people, and even women in general, while still maintaining rules that protect cracker fascists from that same form of targeting. Facebook and Instagram are still gonna suspend the shit out of you for saying things that make fascists uncomfortable, criticizing Israel's genocide in Gaza, and advocating for the end of reactionary capitalist police states; they are just creating direct exemptions for fascists to dehumanize people they don't like and facilitate pogroms against those people. As such the popular framing of this policy change as being about "free speech" or "depoliticizing moderation" is in fact a sick farce.
Furthermore, while I won't argue with the obvious reality that part of why Meta and Zuckerberg are doing this is an attempt to curry favor with an incoming (fascist) Trump administration, I don't think calling this appeasement goes far enough. In Meta's own explanation for these policy changes, they are making it clear that as far as they're concerned, this type of hate speech and dehumanization is now mainstream and normalized enough that they don't mind actively supporting it and providing a platform for expressing it; providing an outlet for speech (in exchange for advertiser revenue) is after all the business model of these platforms. Appeasement would look like keeping the policies against hate speech, but simply refusing to enforce them against influential fascists in the public and private sectors; which has already been the de facto policy at most large social media companies before now. By actively providing a megaphone for this type of hate speech and dehumanization, what Zuck is now doing is directly collaborating with a fascist agenda that will lead to violence against marginalized people, in precisely the way I told you American corporations would collaborate as the Pig Empire fascist movement gained power, several years ago. This is what that collaboration looks like, and while you might argue with me that it won't be that bad, the entire history of pogroms and genocides conducted by fascists against targeted marginalize groups says you're wrong.
Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces have set several homes on fire in the #Jenin refugee camp, as the #PA crackdown on anti-Israel resistance groups in the camp enters its second month, according to local sources.
#Collaborators #Criminals #Resistance #WestBank #palestine #Israel #Occupation #Apartheid #Politics @palestine
It's not very often I come across and article in the Guardian that A) agrees so completely with my positions on culpability, collaboration, corruption and climate crisis, while also B) is written well enough that I wish I'd penned it myself.
Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread
"Fanon saw that the terrible hardships of the struggle for liberation could be endured because the promise of freedom kept hope alive in the people. Seventy years later, in the grip of a global emergency whose tribulations are being visited upon the poorest of us already, few of our leaders inspire the hope and solidarity that could help us fight, endure and survive. Liberation doesn’t interest them. Many are devoted servants of the status quo. Which is a polite way of saying they’re collaborators.
They’re so ensnared in webs of patronage and co-option they can neither see nor acknowledge our real predicament, which is a state of global subjugation to fossil capitalism. What they offer us – young and old – is business as usual, and for all their deluded airs of respectability and legitimacy, our leaders are largely agents of desolation.
Deep down we know it. This is the source of our communal dread. Few of us want to admit it, but what we’re experiencing is the horror of resignation, the humiliation of captivity and the shame of collaboration."
Look, you may choose to quibble with Winton's choice of comparing Pig Empire subjects with colonized peoples if you want, although I would say that having read Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and C.L.R. James I have never been able to unsee the reality that colonialism and the brutality necessary to maintain it dehumanizes and debases both the colonizer and the colonized. What you cannot quibble with however, and what I've been writing about for ten years now, is the idea that our leaders have clearly sold us down the river to billionaire extractivists who'd rather install fascist dictatorships while billions die and the world boils like soup, than give up the wealth and power afforded to them by fossil fuels and the capitalist order that depends on it. Even now, we live in states and societies that are spending infinite money on walls, armaments, and security forces while doing precisely nothing about preventing climate catastrophe and the very real human cost that will come of it. When our rulers do nothing about fossil fuel capitalism and babble about fantastic net zero pledges and magical future tech that will save us, while buying bombs, bullets, and militarized policemen as the world grows hotter and hotter, you'd have to be some kind of rube not to realize they're gearing up to protect rich people, extractivism, and the capitalist order from you and yours when the shit hits the fan - and man, the shit is hitting the fan as we speak.
At some point the people around me are going to have to accept reality here and then ask themselves a simple question; are you ready to die in a world of scorching heat, ash and rising water so rich people can keep making five points a share on the fossil fuels and capitalist economy that's killing you? My bet is the answer is no for most of the billions of us who *aren't* rich nazis planning to crawl away to bunkers in New Zealand or run to Mars with Elon Musk, but I do admit that as the hour grows late I'm becoming increasingly concerned that I might be wrong about that. One thing I can say, and I'm sure Winton would agree, is that our so called leaders aren't going to tell us it's time to take back our power, and they're already helping to protect the rich people planning to murder billions rather than give up fossil fuels and capitalism, from us. Who watches the watchmen, when all the watchmen have been bought? If not us, the people, then the answer is no one.
