• 0 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • It is complex and yet it isn’t. There are understandable psychological and historical causes for the current state. It is not black and white. But nothing is. We just want to make things to fit nice boxes.

    If you want to understand it, you need to understand radicalization and how it applies to MENA including Israel. Actions do not come from the vacuum and people are messy. Every person has an agenda.

    At the same time, in this specific situation, there are what according to well-established parameters amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is terrorism committed by Palestinian groups, these crimes are largely committed by Israel. It might be that if the power imbalance were a little less we would see similar actions from the Palestinian state. But it is not.

    Just in the last week, we have seen apartheid, ethnic cleansing, what could be genocide, collective punishment, embargo and cutting vital supplies to the area you are occupying. This list is not exhaustive. This is univocally wrong.

    The most complex part is not understanding it. The most complex part is solving it.



  • There is another question on a micro level. How many people who are not about to kill you can you kill in self-defence to save how many people?

    While in theory, every human life is as important and valued as another we do often in practice allow some movement morally.

    The third question is immediacy. Are you allowed to kill someone in self-defence if you know they will kill you tomorrow? Is it just current action, and how far current stretches.

    But while those are simplified questions on the philosophy of ethics in these situations they don’t entirely apply to Israel and Palestine. That is because they ignore the power imbalance.


  • While Israel is part of the cause of Islamic terrorism in Europe, I think we should not pat too much on our backs. Yes, our countries’ positions taking sides on Israel is problematic as hell and so is us being tied to the US in the minds of many people outside Europe. But so is our own Islamophobia. I get where it comes from, but othering and sidelining people will lead to further radicalization. Which for people whose Islamophobia is rooted in current oppression in many Islamic societies, is entirely opposite of what they want.







  • While the number of wars is less than 20 years ago there is an uneven but increasing trend for the past decade. Last year casualties were also more than at least 89 apart from a huge spike in 94. Amount of refugees has also been increasing in the past decade a little bit faster than the world population has.

    Despite these facts, globally things are not at least yet out of hand. At the same time, there are many countries, especially in the West where current politicians are dismantling social security nets and human rights legislation. We are also increasingly seeing the effect of climate change on conflicts and displacement. Famine is thankfully rarer than ever before but we are so badly behind on any environmental action that it is pretty much guaranteed to happen more and more. I might be less pessimistic if the climate crisis weren’t staring us right at our faces. In general, historically things have gotten better and better with some lows. If we had time, we could probably sort ourselves out. There are also a lot of very smart people that could help with the existential threat but after the past decade, I don’t trust that they will be allowed to fix it.

    You can also only be almost completely anonymous if you know what you are doing. The majority of people don’t know how. While data gathered from default users might officially be anonymized, the amount of data collected will often make you pretty easily identified. Zero-click spyware that has already been used against political opponents while not relevant to most average Joes do exist.

    The world can’t be pulled up by your bootstraps. Most defeating is that you can do anything in your power and things still get worse. Yes, I might have more than a touch of secondary trauma but activism these days feels like hitting your head on the wall repeatedly. You can’t stop people from dying. You risk ending up in jail in too many countries that you once thought were civilized. And you are once again marching again Nazis when they sit in parliament in too many countries.