Rights, autonomy, and what civil society owes its members.
It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, right wing or left wing or centrist.
The world seems divided into those who think bad people should die and those who think bad people should repent.
And those who think bad people should die are in the streets and in the halls of power.
If a Nazi, a terrorist, a boer, a fascist raises their hand against you – do what you need to do to protect yourself
But a civil society based on law and order has due process for criminals, not mob violence
Chanting for their death or calling for violence against them is succumbing to their ethos, as immediately emotionally satisfying as that might be
Characterizing this as a matter of freedom of expression both ignores the consequentialist arguments and precedents against unrestrained public calls for violence, and conflates legal permission with deserving a platform
The West Bank has become a lawless zone.
We so clearly need law and order in this country, and instead we’re being pitched on expanding the same lawlessness that results in a mother being shot on the way to give birth.
May her blood be avenged in the voting booth.
It’s always disappointing to see people I once considered open-hearted, sensitive, and intelligent souls, mutate over the years into bitter, bigoted promoters of reactionary politics.
Some of it’s the trauma of COVID (that was a seriously traumatizing global event), but I think that it’s also decades of consuming a special type of propaganda aimed specifically at a certain type of intelligent individual who prides themselves on their “independent thinking.”
Confession: I am so fcking intolerant of intolerance.
I understand it, I sympathize with its causes, I don’t sit in judgment of those whom it infects.
I get it.
But I don’t tolerate it. I am viscerally resistant to it. I even react harshly to it, when I see evidence of it running deep in someone’s spirit.
(Sometimes a thunderclap is needed to clear the air.)
Because a tolerant society – comprised of tolerant individuals – can and should tolerate everything but one thing: intolerance itself.
Because intolerance of other people – to take an irrational, xenophobic, and persecutory stance towards your neighbors – is the beginning of bad faith engagement with society. It is the exploitable vulnerability that eventually leads to death camps.
Yes, death camps.
To tolerate everything but intolerance:
That is the paradox of civil society.
So close your eyes and ask yourself:
Who and what are you intolerant of – and why?
“Sending people to concentration camps and slave labor mega prisons is bad.”
“Well what’s your alternative? I’m genuinely asking….”
🧐
And he genuinely was. People don’t even get how deeply they’ve been brainwashed to casually accept the completely unacceptable.
Thoughts to disturb groupthinking reactionaries on all sides:
Human sex is a generally binary biological fact. It’s dependent on the scientific construction of the idea of sex but it’s still a concrete reference to objective phenomena that, depending on your level of analysis, can not necessarily be changed with cosmetic surgery or hormonal treatment.
Human gender is a socially constructed spectrum of behavior and the identity it both expresses and reinforces. It’s socially and culturally dependent and references a subjective (self-)perception formulated in the context of others’ (self-)perceptions, and includes ranges of gender identity and expression far beyond any mere dimorphism; to be reduced to a mere two genders is to reduce gender to sex, and while cosmetic surgery and hormonal treatment may enhance one’s gendered self-perception, they don’t effect an absolute shift from one imaginary gender pole to another.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, gender theory was on the cusp of something bold and beautiful. Political ideologies and media narratives have since muddied the waters, derailing the discussion until the point where people’s lives are now actually at risk over what is essentially a personal question of how we choose to express ourselves in society.
Those who act violently are ultimately responsible for their actions as well as their beliefs. Misguided and misinformed fear is no excuse for unprovoked violence. And the suggestion that we should extend empathy only to those who are similar to us simply reinforces the lie that our differences are more essential to who we are than our similarities are.
Trans people are *people*, who choose to express their identities in ways that are different from how I choose to express myself. We don’t have to agree on gender theory for us to recognize that we all deserve to have our human and civil rights protected.
The thing about self-determination is that it requires that one not lose or abdicate the responsibility to determine one’s self.
This means participating in a robustly democratic civil society, not being subject – or subjecting one’s self – to an authoritarian, let alone fascist, party or government.
This means that yes, you can recognize a people’s right to self-determination without accepting all outcomes of that process. Not all outcomes reflect actual self-determination.
We must build a shared society that facilitates our actual self-determination, as individual people and as groups.
(This will require a new story.)
I think that Mahmoud Khalil is pretty clearly a tool of the Russo-Iranian propaganda and influence machine and its support of fascist proxies in the Levant and Gulf,
But
That doesn’t mean he, a Green Card holding legal permanent resident of the USA, should be arrested without a warrant or committing a crime or sent to a concentration camp and held without charges or a trial, for being a tool.
If he committed a felony, then investigate him, arrest him, charge him, try him, and punish him.
This fascist police state sht is nothing to celebrate and כל רעיי who are praising Khalil’s arrest have seriously lost the plot.
I’ve heard rumors that the ADL praised his arrest as well. I can’t find anything on their website, but if true – it would fit a disturbing pattern of transactional sycophancy emerging in their response to the rise of American fascism. I’m not impressed with what I’ve been seeing from them these days: they should be seizing the moment to be all over the ruling party’s neonazism and white nationalism.
The flip side of my previous post:
If humanity is to become a truly spacefaring species, we will have to leave fascism behind.
Our destiny is in the stars.