i dont know why people are so bad at parsing out beauty standard related to breast size specifically (i do know) it's not that complex and certainly not hidden at all, larger breasts connote an undisciplined body in a specifically racialised way, so they're always objects of both sexual interest and social stigma. the two don't contradict and the kind of violent sexualisation directed at larger breasts is of an entirely different category than when someone is made to feel shitty for having smaller breasts, the same way 'skinny shaming' is not a comparable phenomenon to anti fat discrimination even though the former is still like. rude. body fat in general = unrefined, uncivilised, again racialised terms because this is a discourse of racialisation & with breasts theres a specific configuration from delicate maiden femininity when small to sexualised object when large. women who work as haute couture models with 15 bmi and women who act in porn wearing a 28ff are all women subject to body judgment misogyny but you're insane if you think theres not a clear answer as to which has the more enviable social position lol
the thing is I just don't think intellectual labour is a special class of labour. I just don't think someone who created an intellectual product like a manuscript deserves the rights to extracting rent forever from physical copies of it more than the person who maintains the printers. I will just never be convinced of this.
and yeah h/t to @phenakistoskope there's already many types of creative intellectual labour that do not give you entry into the bourgeois class regardless of how independent and rich you are like what makes "creation" more inherently valuable than editing or typesetting or being a sound recording engineer. why is that not accepted as intellectual work with rentier benefits?
btw planting season is underway in asia. the climate is already bad with heatwaves and strange monsoon behaviour. we will see declining yields in 6 months, much like when sri lanka cut fertiliser imports due to balance of payments crises. very few strategic food or fertiliser reserves these days. they're not evenly distributed and most of the food reserves are in india and china due to institutional memory of famine + the us has globally encouraged the decline of food reserves as a matter of WTO free trade / anti protectionism policy.
FAO experts map where crops and pasturelands are most vulnerable to drought
stronger than usual el nino will also simultaneously stress drought anticipation programs. in 23/24 something like 8 million people experienced food insecurity in southern africa alone.
Louis Allday’s introduction to the newly reissued biography of Ghassan Kanafani outlines the choice Kanafani made between being an organic p
[...] The Martyrs of Palestine Cemetery next to the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, is a unique place – a non-confessional burial ground, in which people of different religions, nationalities, ethnicities and political orientations lie in rest together, united by the ultimate sacrifice they paid as martyrs in service of the Palestinian cause. The cemetery is effectively an open-air museum illustrating the intertwined stories, geographies and struggles of the Palestinian revolution and those who have fought and died for it – a physical manifestation of Ghassan Kanafani’s declaration that Palestine is “a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is … a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses.” Short of being buried in the soil of his beloved Palestine – where he was born on April 9, 1936 – it is fitting that it was here that Kanafani was laid to rest following his murder by Israeli agents on July 8, 1972. [...]
Kanafani was many things at the time of his death, including a celebrated author, a Marxist-Leninist, a Pan-Arabist, a comrade, a refugee, an artist, a husband, an uncle, and a father. As such, his murder constituted different things to different people, and one of the most remarkable aspects of Anni’s tribute to him is the way it draws from her own memories, as well as from letters of condolence, photographs, extracts from Kanafani’s writing, and artwork by him and others, to convey intimately what a profound and multi-faceted loss his death was. In doing so, it places his death in the context of an ongoing revolutionary struggle, and sends a defiant message to those responsible for it.
At its core, Kanafani’s murder was a family tragedy, one compounded by the fact that his sister’s daughter, Lamis Nijem, whom he and the whole family adored, was killed alongside him aged only seventeen years old. Simultaneously, it was a crushing blow, personally and politically, to Kanafani’s comrades in the PFLP and beyond. Foremost amongst those affected in this manner was his close friend, mentor, and fellow PFLP member, George Habash, who Kanafani had first met over two decades earlier as a teenager in Damascus, where he and his family settled as refugees after the Nakba. In his autobiography, Habash describes the day Kanafani was killed as one of the most painful of his life and recounts the difficulty he experienced writing a letter of condolence to Anni that would convey the magnitude of the loss he felt. He need not have worried because his letter, published in full in Anni’s tribute, is a masterpiece of understated yet heartfelt affection and revolutionary steadfastness. Pained by his inability to attend his dear friend’s funeral and console Anni in person, Habash writes: “Anni – I know very well what Ghassan’s loss means to you, but please remember that you have Fayez, Laila, and thousands of brothers and sisters who are members of the P.F.L.P., and above all you have the cause Ghassan was fighting for.” For Anni, Kanafani’s death was the loss of “an exceptional human being,” her husband, comrade, and teacher, and the loving father of their two young children. “Your good and beautiful hands and mind were always creating, giving to us – to the people,” she writes in her poignant letter of farewell to him.
[...] The issue of armed resistance is central when discussing Kanafani and his legacy. As The Daily Star proclaimed in its obituary, he was “the commando who never fired a gun,” yet he was explicit in his belief that armed struggle – for the Palestinians and all oppressed peoples – was legitimate and necessary. He did not distance himself from the revolutionary violence of the PFLP or other Palestinian factions engaged in armed struggle. Rejecting “bourgeois moralism,” Kanafani proudly asserted that armed struggle was the Palestinians’ moral right as an occupied and oppressed people fighting for their land and dignity. He also argued that it was the “ideal form of propaganda,” and that in spite of the “gigantic propaganda system of the United States,” it was through people fighting to liberate themselves in armed struggle “that things are ultimately decided.”
So certain was Kanafani’s belief in the centrality of armed struggle that, upon returning from a visit to Gaza in 1966, he felt:
… more than any time in the past, that the sole value of my words is that they are a meager and insufficient substitute for the absence of weapons and that they pale now before the emergence of real men who die every day in pursuit of something I respect.
Half a century later, there is little doubt Kanafani would be heartened by the increasingly unified and effective Palestinian armed resistance – of which the PFLP is a member and continues to fight in his name. In May 2021, and again as I write this in May 2023, this resistance – centered around the unified factions in Gaza, but increasingly involving acts of coordinated resistance throughout historical Palestine, and with the direct cooperation of Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon – has withstood Israeli military onslaughts and dictated the terms of ceasefire. This is fundamentally undermining Israel’s deterrence capability and rewriting the military balance to its detriment. [...]
Ghassan has not been forgotten, nor will he ever be – and his memory will live longer than the entity that sought to silence him and his people. The republication of the evocative tribute that follows this introduction will help to ensure that is so.
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