Those who stand for nothing fall for anything

A repository of sociopolitical content.

[marta-bee]

The Abortion Absolutist

Warren Hern has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients as ever.

This was an interesting read. Surprisingly nonpreachy given the subject; and well worth the time.

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

This is oaywalled but it made me weep with relief to see an honest recounting for once, so I’ve saved some good bits:

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

[nsomniacsdream]

I have a hard time talking about American law enforcement, because I have ptsd (like a therapist told me this and everything) from my own experiences with cops and because it's so balls quaking insane.

Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.

There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.

A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.

If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.

You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.

These aren't like crazy things that I'm just making up, these aren't some weird twisted way I'm looking at something, these are all very real things that we all just.. ignore? Police abolitionists and the media bring these things up all the time, and the overwhelming response to it is: so what? Don't break the law and it won't matter. Blue lives matter. More police funding. Cops should have tanks. It's insane. And I always feel like im just rambling and sound insane when I say this kind of stuff because if you wrote a book and had the dystopian government doing the stuff that the police in this country do every single day, those same people who "back the blue" would line up to say stuff like "*Books government* wouldnt have a chance before us real americans stopped them" on twitter and not even get a hint of the irony.

[slopaganda]

biden placing sanctions on four (4) west bank settlers to placate pro-palestine americans instead of calling for a ceasefire… bitch every single one of the 700k+ west bank settlers is violating international law

[slopaganda]

like ok you’re willing to go there now? good, start doing something about this

[ohmuqueen]

Read the entire thread here

Edit: transcribed version of this post can be found here

[nativenews]

[nativenews]

[bloglikeanegyptian]

two palestinians from the west bank have died of torture within israeli custody. the number of palestinian prisoners in israeli prison, who are on administrative detention (which means they have not been charged with anything) in june 2023 was 1117, of which 18 were children. the number being held awaiting sentencing was 1158, of which 85 are children.

the number of overall prisoners in israeli prisons in june 2023 was 5,200 most of whom were held on political charges including just being in israel illegally. many are held on false grounds, in inhumane conditions, including minors. they are political prisoners—hostages. since october 7th, that number has doubled to 10,000. so far israel has notified that it has murdered two in its custody. in the west bank (which is not ruled by hamas) over 90 palestinians have been extra-judicially murdered by settlers and the IDF since october 7th.

israel also has a policy of withholding corpses of palestinians who die in its custody. it's called "post-mortem detention." israel says it only has this policy for hamas fighters, but it is not true. there are currently at least 80 corpses of palestinians withheld from families, and around 370 who were either buried in undisclosed locations or kept in the morgue. when they are released, families are given 30 minutes to bury their loved ones in the dead of night, supervised by israeli soldiers with a limited amount of family members in attendance.

[iphnh]

For those who want to learn more: There's an organization called Breaking the Silence which keeps detailed records of the human rights abuses and war crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

Breaking the Silence was started by a group of ex-IDF soldiers who deserted the army out of shame for the atrocities they committed and witnessed. After deserting, they felt compelled to begin documenting the human rights abuses and war crimes they committed against the Palestinians. The hope is for their testimony to be used in front of the International Criminal Court.

For those who would like to read the testimonies of hundreds of ex-IDF soldiers about Gaza specifically, you can do so by clicking here. This particular collection concerns the massacres that happened in Gaza in 2014, but it paints a picture of what life is like in Gaza, and how the IDF soldiers see the people in Gaza.

[psychotrenny]

And people keep trying to justify Israel's existence on the basis that it is somehow a safe place for the preservation of Jewish people and their culture and not only is that an awful argument for establishing a Settler Colonist Apartheid State but it's not even true. Like the state is politically and economically dominated by Ashkenazi Jews from Northern Europe and their descendants. While not as severely mistreated as Palestinians, there is still a significant disparity between the European and Non-European Jews in terms of income and education. Non-European Jews are still regularly subject to interpersonal bigotry (hell earlier this year there was a news story about a viral video where Ashkenazi girls in a Purim made a skit mocking the Mizrahi) and Israel government policies towards non-Ashkenazi migrants have done severe damage to their social structure and cultural traditions. Not to mention the fact that the whole reason why many Mizrahi migrated in the first place was to escape the violence caused by European Jews committing atrocities in their name, tearing communities apart as neighbours that had peacefully co-existed for centuries found themselves on opposite sides of this new ethno-religious conflict

There have even been attempts in Israeli history at the forceful assimilation or even biological reduction of non-European Jews; the kidnapping and adoption of Yemeni Jewish children in the 1950s is significant example of the former while the forced contraception of Beta Israeli (Ethiopean Jewish migrants) with the explicit intention of reducing their population's birth rate is an example of the latter. There's also very clear favouritism when it comes to recent converts; white Afrikaner converts are given the right of Aliyah while Nigerian Igbos are not. Like the fact of the matter is that Israel's fundamental nature is as a European Settler Colony, incredibly racist not only towards the indigenous Palestinians but the many Non-European Jews it claims to represent. It's an outpost of Western Imperialism, not a haven for the Jewish people. If it was ever meant to be the latter than it has failed miserably

[alfedena]

People do not realize that when we say Israel is a settler-colonial state, we mean it was literally devised in junction with European imperialism around the turn of the century.

Political Zionism was founded by Theodore Herzl. Originally, Zionists were not specifically interested in the land of Palestine as a colonial project. In fact, Herzl was debating making Argentina the focus of mass Zionist migration, which is quite ironic considering Argentina's colonial and Aryanist past. British-controlled Uganda was also offered as a possibility by Joseph Chamberlain, a Conservative imperialist.

To encourage mass Jewish migration to Palestine, he worked with the British, who had recently drove the Ottoman Empire out of the Levant, and now boasted political dominance in the region, thanks to the Sykes–Picot Agreement between the UK, France, Italy, and Russia which covertly authorized British influence in Palestine, which had become a target of colonial expansion. He specifically wished to collaborate with Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist who played a lead role in colonizing Zimbabwe and Zambia, and later took inspiration from his time spent extracting wealth from Africa as the founder of mining conglomerate the British South Africa Company.

Herzl’s personal goals for Zionism were colonial. He said in a letter to Rhodes:

“You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews […] How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial […] I […] have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable. It is a plan full of culture, excellent for the group of people for whom it is directly designed, and quite good for England, for Greater Britain [...]”

At that time, Palestine was predominately populated with Arab Muslims and Christians, as well as Arab Jews (Old Yishuv) and Druze. Jews made up around 6% of the population. The Ottoman government specifically released a manifesto at the start of Zionist migration condemning the colonization, stating:

“[Jews] among us […] who have been living in our province since before the war; they are as we are, and their loyalties are our own.”

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 on behalf of parliament, officially established the British Mandate of Palestine, sowing the seeds for the modern state of Israel, by means of the UK's ongoing occupation of the region.

Zionism was never about promoting Jewish culture or safety; it has always been tied up in Western (settler-)colonial expansion. !من النهر إلى البحر

[alfedena]

Reblogging again because I see some really great points in the tags:

European endorsement of Aliyah at this time was absolutely motivated by anti-semitism and the removal of Jewish people from Europe. Even to this day we see the remnants of this Christian Zionism in far-right movements in the US, for example, with people like Richard Spencer praising Israel for its admirable qualities as an entho-state while simultaneously holding views in line with the world Jewish conspiracy. It is not coincidence that we see neo-Nazi circles in the West backing Zionism and Jewish migration to Israel.

Aside from that, I want to clarify my last point. The tactic often used by colonial states of attaching Indigenous culture to settler national identity is also seen in Israeli society with the revitalization of ancient Canaanite and Hebrew culture (as well as the appropriation of Palestinian culture). Along with this came the historical and contemporary suppression of Jewish culture within Israel.

Historically, Yiddish has been censored by the Israeli government. Yiddish art and publications were heavily discouraged and lots of Ashkenazi Jews immigrating to Israel Hebraized their last names and continue to do so to this day. Yiddish theater was taxed 10% while Hebrew theater was not.

Israel is also heavily racist towards Black Jews. Ethiopian Jews have been targeted by the Israeli government for sterilization. Ethiopian women have been coerced by doctors to take Depo-Provera, a long-lasting contraceptive, making up 57% of those who have received the drug in Israel. In some cases, they were told they could not immigrate unless they took the drug. The birthrate of Ethiopian-Israelis has dropped by 20% because of this. Blood donation by Ethiopian-Israelis is banned. There have been instances of Ethiopian-Israeli students being forced to learn in complete isolation from other students, as well as the beginning of Ethiopian-Israeli students' education being delayed by months by the government. Beyond this, Igbo Jews from Nigeria were not permitted to make Aliyah.

And lastly, In the '40s and '50s, aprox. 1,000 to 5,000 Yemeni-Israeli children disappeared. 1 in 8 of Yemeni-Israeli children were affected (Tunisian, Morrocan, Balkan and other Arab-Jewish groups were also targeted). There is large speculation that many of these kids were abducted by the government specifically to be adopted by white, Ashkenazi Jews with more and more elderly Mizrahim coming out to this day about their experience being adopted.

I'm sure there are many other instances like these that I'm just not aware of. However, it becomes obvious that the creation of an Israeli state was for the purpose of continuing Western imperialism in SWANA while covertly expelling Jewish people from increasingly nationalist states in Europe in the 19th-20th centuries, not to cultivate Jewish security or culture.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

[is-the-post-reliable]

requested by anonymous:

RATING: RELIABLE

The above is from this article from The Guardian.  The images are from MYA Network. The caption on their website reads:

Source: ‘When a sperm and egg get together, the body creates tissue in order to support the developing pregnancy.  Here are photos of that tissue from 5-9 week pregnancies.  This is called the gestational sac, and it’s like the “house” for the pregnancy. Inside this sac there are cells that have the potential to become a fetus but there is no visible embryo at this stage. We rinsed off the blood and menstrual lining (decidua) for these photographs.’

The published images sparked a lot of debate, leading to the story being picked up by other news outlets. For example:

Source: ‘Last week, the Guardian published images of pregnancy tissue after abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The small size and appearance of the tissue were shocking to many. We have all absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, the pervasive anti-abortion narrative that a pregnancy resembles a tiny baby starting in the earliest weeks. Though an early embryo can be seen under the magnification of ultrasound, it can take months for it to be perceptible to the naked eye.’

Source: ‘People have responded in disbelief, citing the (magnified) images they’ve seen on ultrasounds. […] ”Think of the illustrations on pregnancy and medical websites. The Mayo Clinic, one of the preeminent medical organizations in the country, shows week-by-week illustrations of embryonic and fetal development without any context of scale, like the rulers in the MYA photos.’

As stated in the article, whilst people talk about a ‘heartbeat’ at 6 weeks, there is no heart developed at this stage - only a group of cells that will become part of the heart.

Source: ‘But what exactly do we mean when we talk about a “fetal heartbeat” at six weeks of pregnancy? Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case. Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.’

It should also be noted that the images show an embryo, not a fetus, until the 9th week.

Source: ‘In human pregnancies, a baby-to-be isn’t considered a fetus until the 9th week after conception, or week 11 after your last menstrual period (LMP).’

The co-founders of the MYA Network responded in a New York Times article.

Source: ‘Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion. A Stanford gynecologic pathologist has validated our photos, but many people could not believe the pictures were presented unaltered.

[rebelqueenofferelden]

Ffs... SO "fun" story from Al-Khalil. Families attend the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, in Al-Khalil, a bunch settlers have arrived and started looting the home of a Palestinian family and taken the building for their own, and they're calling this "Building Aquisition".

The family was at a f*cking funeral and their home is now stolen.

This is what it's like being a Palestinian in Palestine. There are PLENTY of similar stories of people visiting their families or going shopping and returning to their homes either empty of valuables or outright claimed by settlers.

[rebelqueenofferelden]

[socialistsephardi]

God seeing y’all’s take away being “This is why we need to vote” and not “why the fuck didn’t the democrats codify any of their gains in the last 50 years” is really disheartening. Do you really not see the fact that our civil rights have been deliberately kept as a bargaining chip on the table so the democrats never actually had to do anything while elected? How is it not blatantly obvious to y’all that this is the system working as intended, that the democrats are collaborators to the republicans and not genuine opposition? This mess us where “vote blue no matter who” gets you, because you’ve all voted for the most conservative members of the blue team, you’ve outright says your only standard is “not a Republican” which means the officials who are practically republicans but registers as democrats have been able to retain power for decades, shifting the democrat party to the right. You guys cheered on people like the Biden’s, the Clinton’s, Pelosi, blue dog democrats, democrat war hawks, etc and you’re surprised the party is functionally just republicans with different lobbyists.

When the full effect of your politics is a sticker slogan in your laptop and voting a few times every few years, don’t be surprised at the frustration that nothing is changing for the better. You’ve opted in to having no power, it shouldn’t shock you that they don’t care.

[socialistsephardi]

The difference is that the different factions of republicans work tugether on the common ideological points (the fundies, the neonazis, the fiscal conservatives, tea party types, etc), whereas the democrats, due to decades of the attitude toward policy I mentioned in the post, have no ideological cohesion. Republicans voters and republicans politicians sound the same, whereas democrat voters are completely different from democrat politicians. The democrat party as a whole is ideological divorced from its voter base.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

The only humane way to reduce abortion is to reduce the number of unsafe and unwanted pregnancies.

Some abortions will always be necessary healthcare, even in a utopia where there was no rape, no incest, no domestic violence, no poverty, mandatory comprehensive sex ed before puberty, free birth control and contraceptives, and an excellent standard of medical care for all pregnant people with new research into how to prevent dangerous pregnancies.

Abortions are morally neutral medical procedures and no one particular group's religious proclivities should dictate public health policy.

Doctors and patients should get to decide what healthcare is necessary for the patient together without the interference of politicians, insurance companies, or other people's religious feelings.

Abortion should be publicly funded along with all other healthcare, readily available, and done with real, scientifically fact-based informed consent.

If you disagree with any of the above, please kindly eat glass and stay the fuck away from me.

[emptydragonseverywhere]

post-shoah, there was this weird rebranding of jewish ppl as being the exact same as the gentiles around them except with a different religion. which is just... not even remotely accurate

but it explains how modern mainstream american attitudes towards jewish ppl exist:

if the jews who fled to eretz yisrael post-shoah are ethnically germans and poles and austrians that just practice the religion of judaism, then of course they are white european colonizers even if they are refugees. but the jews who feld to eretz yisrael post-shoah WEREN'T ethnically european. because judaism is a mainly-diasporic ethnoreligion. in order to be diasporic you have to be removed from some homeland; that homeland for the jewish people is the area around jerusalem. not europe.

if jews are just white europeans with a different religion, then they are part of white supremacy and therefore aren't marginalized. but jewish people are actually the primary target of nazi-brand white supremacy and a secondary target of kkk-brand white supremacy, but ultimately are that the core of nearly all white supremacist beliefs and conspiracy theories. jewish people are incredibly marginalized, generally speaking, and deserve allies and protections.

if we're all white europeans with abrahamic religions, and if we share the old testament, then surely judaism is "just xtianity without jesus." but judaism isn't xtianity without jesus. judaism is its own individual religion. our tanakh is not the same as your old testament. we have also spent thousands of years interpreting and re-interpreting our religious texts, further increasing the distance between xtianity and modern judaism. also, judaism is a religion of praxis whereas xtianity is a religion of orthodoxy, which means that the fundamental way our religions operate is different. you cannot treat judaism as xtianity without jesus. you cannot lump judaism together with xtianity as "judeo-xtian" or "abrahamic," in most cases those labels aren't accurate and just serve to mean xtian.

if jews are just europeans with a different religion, then hashoah was a white-on-white genocide and is "european problems." jewish people also cannot be victims of white supremacy today (similar to above). jewish people have been seen as middle eastern outsiders in europe for thousands of years. hitler's hatred of jews was specifically racial, not religious, and converting would not spare a jew from hitler's final solution. white supremacists then and today view jews as "white interlopers," non-white sub-human beings posing as white people to infiltrate the white race and degrade it with our inferior genetics and nefarious plans for world domination. if that sounds ridiculous, it is, but that is genuinely their belief. light-skinned jews do enjoy white privilege the majority of the time in the modern west, but that privilege is often conditional on a)if the other white person knows they are jewish and b)if the other white person considers jewish people to be white or not.

there are so many more examples but i think my point is clear. this is what forced assimilation looks like, and this is the harm it causes to the group being assimilated. the fact that our reality is considered a lie and lies are peddled as reality is actively harmful. this assimilation is not proof of improvements in antisemitism but proof that antisemitism is systemic. erasure is not and never will be good.

[socialistsephardi]

Just adding on, the whole “Jews are/aren’t white” thing completely invalidates Jews who aren’t white de facto. If one argues that the Jewish default is white then every Jew who isn’t white is implied ti be less legitimate. At the same time we also cannot pretend that there aren’t white Jews, there absolutely are. Jewish sub-ethnicities are also not strictly racial (e.i. There are ashkenazi POC and there are white sephardim and white mizrachim etc). European antisemites, including but not limited to the Nazis, believed we were a “mongrel” race. For centuries they attacked obvious Jews until selective survival pressure meant that the whitest looking Jews were the ones who survives bc they could easier. It wasn’t just Jewish skin color (which was probably originally similar to other Semitic core populations e.i. arab peopl), they went after hair texture, nose shape, etc. Lightskinned Jews who had other ethnic features were not spared. This is why much of the Ashkenazi and the western part of the Sephardi populations are effectively white in the modern day, centuries of bleaching.

[socialistsephardi]

That’s a fair point.

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Hope you guys also realize that 90% of the time when you see one of those “Russian state-affiliated media” stickers on Twitter or Instagram it means that outlet maybe got some money from RT one time or they host their podcast and Russia has precisely zero editorial control over their content lol

[left-reminders]

Can't speak for all of the examples who receive this label, but Redfish is getting a lot of heat recently. If Redfish actually was Kremlin-controlled, it'd be doing a pretty shitty job making propaganda for its own interests.

Regardless of one's opinions of Redfish overall, it's a safe bet that mainstream media and a lot of the Blue MAGA types getting upset over it want to keep posts like this

from reaching people. Fuck Putin, fuck militarism, and fuck the oligarchs on all sides -- and also fuck the American establishment's propagandistic insistence that the US has never done anything wrong, and that it hasn't engaged in analogous acts of aggression throughout the world since its inception as a colonizer slave republic in the 18th century.

[left-reminders]

[@dreadedloreenkid]

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

This is quite literally the origins of "whataboutism" aka a fake logical fallacy yankee politicians and pet intellectuals came up with when the Soviet Union routinely called them out for state-sponsored racial terrorism every time they starting acting sanctimonious about "human rights" under communism.

All of the ghosts of the first Cold War are coming back to haunt the second.

[youaremyeverlovin]

so i'm seeing this post go around quite a bit uncritically with links to straight up donate to ukrainian neo-nazi groups so i'll break it down, here's the post you'll probably see:

here's the contents of one link, calling themselves "freikorps" and using what looks to be an azov battalion insignia as an avatar:

and here's what the azov battalion is if you don't know:

Azov Battalion - Wikipedia

now here's another link this time with with a pic of ppl flying a right sector flag:

if you dont know what right sector is:

Right Sector - Wikipedia

so please don't donate to this shit, the situation isn't just some simple little good guy vs big bad guy thing, if you see someone sharing that post, try sharing this with them bcus they probably don't know

[queeranarchism]

Here are two options to donate to anarchists in Ukraine:

Operation Solidarity: https://operation-solidarity.org/

UGMR: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=Q2K9RMBVVJMN4

Both recommended by Crime ThInc in contact with the anarchist group The Committee of Resistance in Kyiv: https://crimethinc.com/2022/02/24/russia-and-ukraine-grassroots-resistance-to-putins-invasion

[project-butch]

Better yet, donate directly to the Jewish community in Kyiv. Money will go directly to the people who are among the most at risk of scapegoating and violence, and who have lived through a special kind of hell for the past eight years.

For Crowdfunding and Fundraising Success

[papasmoke]

U.S. Bombs Somalia as Russia Bombs Ukraine

You do not, in fact, have to choose between American and Russian imperial aggressions. Better to bear witness to what is being done in your name.

[gameover03909987-deactivated202]

“Insurgent” “target” “ally”

It’s really true that people call things something differently just so they don’t have to think about what all this really means

[damnesdelamer]

“valid”

[nerdiepolitics]

does that person know how many years america and its allies have been bombing somalia

[liberalsarecool]