Buy a genuine Palestinian kufiya and wear it to show solidarity with Palestinians while enraging any nearby Zionists.

This is the point where, if I was an organiser in the UK, I would start pushing really hard for raising awareness about how the watermelon is symbolic of support for Palestine and I’d start organising watermelon-based protests, including the strategic deployment of watermelons left at the entrances to Zionist organisations.

If they want to push demonstrations for Palestine underground, so be it. Getting arrested as a prisoner of conscience in the UK isn’t going to serve the interests of Palestinians.

But imagine how fragile and absurd the Zionists would look if they tried to suppress the celebration of watermelons and public watermelon eating events or if people started getting brought up on terrorism charges for “accidentally” leaving a shopping bag with a watermelon on the steps of buildings.

Not only would judges be virtually forced to throw out any charges laid against people for this stuff but it would be an absolute media coup to have big Zionist organisations playing victim by cowering in terror at a watermelon left on their steps.

This is based on nothing besides the fact that I recognise your username and I get the vibe that you’re in that 16-25yo bracket.

With that in mind and from what you’ve said here, which is admittedly very little info, I would recommend considering the possibility that you may be neurodivergent (specifically of the ADHD/autistic/AuDHD varieties.)

It’s just a wild hunch so I’m not going to go into the why of it but it’s just worth thinking about and especially trying a screening test or two over.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That’s really rough.

I’m sorry but I really can’t think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

I’m really white so I don’t have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It’s an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.

It’s no self-help book and it won’t be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you’re experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.

I’d recommend adding nettle to your diet to help with the arthritis.

You can drink it as a tea and it’s quite nice but tbh I think you get better mileage from using dried nettle leaves as a substitute for dried parsley and/or as an addition to where you would use spinach. It’s very nutritious too.

Basically, if you’re going to make something like spinach and ricotta lasagna then you can add a heaping pile of dried nettle leaves (anywhere from a tablespoon to a handful) and you won’t even notice it.

I think you need to be a little cautious about incorporating it into your diet early on because too much can cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets but once you’ve adjusted to it then you can go hard on it.

Nettles have been a subsistence food and peasant food for centuries, if not millennia. It’s prole af.

Lol this ain’t reddit, you don’t need to couch requests for sources like that. I’m not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There’s this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

So American-centric you’d think there’s barely any other country besides the US

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There’s so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It’s idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson’s was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson’s exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the “white liberal” (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they’ll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I’ll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don’t trust them, I don’t like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided

I, too, do not have a smartphone or an internet connection 😔

It’s like I’d color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.

It’s strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.

If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?

Probably not.

Would you say that the swastika isn’t a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?

Maybe. I can’t speak for you.

The origin of something doesn’t determine its usage.

I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.

The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.

You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren’t going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn’t done in service of fascism 99% of the time.

And on that matter, don’t let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn’t used by Nazis and isn’t representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:

https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4

It helps because it signals to the DNC that they will not simply automatically win by default with their shittiest, most rightwing nominees because the other option is slightly worse on a couple of fronts.

It shows that people do not see them as a viable alternative to the GOP unless they actually become an alternative to the GOP.

There’s a reason why Trump won last time and it’s this attitude of entitlement that you’ve embodied which is at the core of this.

If you’re so set upon preventing another Trump presidency then recent history is a lesson for you, or at least it should have been, and attempting to browbeat people into voting for detestable DNC nominees is a failed strategy when you should be pushing the DNC for compromise with people further to the left of you rather than demanding that people further to the left of you capitulate simply because you feel that they ought to because you have a false sense of moral righteousness.

You want my vote for the democratic nominee? Then uphold the values of bourgeois electoralism and earn it.

Not voting for Biden means that Biden is one vote further away from being president.

Now it’s your turn.

Not voting for the furthest right party is the same thing as voting for the furthest right party 🤓🤓

From a pragmatic point, what good does voting for Biden do?

Does ranked voting in other countries undermine their two-party system though?

I’m sorry but the math on this doesn’t check out.

You’re saying that we must join coalitions whose intent is to change the system or we must vote for the Democratic nominee, otherwise we are supporting the GOP?

If not voting for the Democratic nominee is support for the GOP then how isn’t joining a coalition to undermine DNC power support for the GOP?

I don’t understand this logic.

>mrw

(That’s Jin Xing btw)