Notices by wet forest moon folklorist (seachanger@alaskan.social), page 8

i don't have strong enough words to condemn what the US has chosen to do with its resources. slums are multiplying around our cities; housing, healthcare and childcare are catastrophically unaffordable; higher education is under attack. with no functional political opposition to unchecked militarism, we continue to invest enormous sums in our ability to kill and subjugate in increasingly dystopian ways, even as the line between foreign wars and domestic law enforcement grows thinner and thinner

"Something horrible ripped through the mountains of N Carolina last Friday. We won’t know how many people were killed for at least another week; efforts to find and check on people in remote areas are still ongoing. We’re just beginning to count what’s gone and what’s lost. All this week I’ve been trying to take in the scale of it, and I can’t. But I wanted to tell you about one of the places and some of the people..."

Carrie Frye writing for @flaminghydra

https://flaminghydra.com/issue-173/

Back in 2022, contractor Jiren Parikh dismissed concerns about his robot dogs capacity to carry AI powered weapons

"Parikh says that he supports Ghost Robotics’ defense customers to outfit the robots as they see fit to keep people safe. Further, he says, the robot dogs with weapons are more akin to drones since they... require a remote human operator to make any decision to fire... “The idea that these robots are sentient beings and have AI to do whatever is silly.”"

https://archive.ph/Rlj9h#selection-3183.0-3183.614

Two years later, Parikh's firm has been purchased by a Korean contractor who is more than happy to supply the US military with AI-guided automatic weapons on its robot dogs, and the US military is more than happy to "test" them in the Middle East

https://futurism.com/the-byte/army-robot-dogs-guns-middle-east

the US military has also been testing similar AI-powered machine gun robot dogs from a different contractor recently

https://thedefensepost.com/2024/05/09/us-marines-robot-dogs/

and yet

I feel so stuck in the husk of all that has come before

I want to branch off myself and somehow let the other forks of my potential selves continue working to make money and fulfilling their volunteer commitments while my new fork can just actually finish personal projects and put them out to the world

the burnt out activist urge to change your name and start over somewhere else

Petersburg Arts Council rented the Elks club and held a dance fundraiser last night with local musicians and local swing and line dance instructors and i know it was a success because a 13 yr old kid unironically was all “this was soooooooo fun when can we do it again”

Beirut is a beautiful, historic city, full of galleries, beaches, farmers markets, etc

Today, Israel dropped 5000 lbs US "bunker buster" bombs on residential areas in Beirut, completely destroying 6 apartment towers. This while also bombing tents and schools today in Gaza

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/9/27/israel-attacks-lebanon-israeli-bombings-kill-more-than-700-in-lebanon

"you ask “Why is capitalism so often abstracted from its wider geopolitical contexts?” Part of the answer is it’s “a way of avoiding the real ‘nastiness’” that lies behind it. There’s the well-known saying—that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism—which you say is patently untrue, and you argue that what is really harder to imagine than the end of the world is “the end of the absolute geopolitical dominance of the West.”

https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/beings-seen-and-unseen/

building power to end corruption in US politics, especially in our congress, may in fact be the most effective thing Americans can do to help Palestinians. it’s unglamorous and hard af, but as long as we have a nominal democracy, i personally think it’s an obligation & opportunity https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/113188711907490926

@AdrianRiskin @scott the (over) reliance on the n-word comparison is kinda icky, but maybe speaks to the authors desire for solidarity among people who suffer violent oppressions

of course another way into this kind of solidarity of the oppressed is a willingness to find common pattern among the big oppressions

@scott also its just a very difficult line in the sand to defend because there are so many ways to say what the author says cannot be said. and like you say, many great thinkers do say these things, and certainly not as calculated attempts to invoke trauma, as with use of the N-word (so in a way, they are minimizing n-word use here, which i've learned we really shouldn't do via comparisons like this)

@scott what's interesting is how many Jews just don't take this position, but how this particular person is acting as if they/we all feel the same way. so this tells me the analogy doesn't work, because we all understand universally not to say the N word, there is no debate among normal people about that one.

just seems like a forced attempt to silence a way of talking that also happens to allow us to talk about Israel's genocide of Palestinians

@scott @mivox i didn't see that but i'm curious if they discussed intent. anyone comparing oppressions with the intent to prevent oppression is obviously doing the opposite of using the N-word, which really seems like an intellectually lazy and inappropriate metaphor to me

its fair to discuss unintentional antisemitism (and racism, misogyny, transphobia etc.) and i'm all for those discussions.

but admins unilaterally deleting people and ideas from audiences is very different -- that has a chilling effect on speech wherein people see the punishment and are then unsure what can or cannot be said, are afraid of being wrong, maybe question their own ideas or feelings on a given topic. it precludes critical thinking rather than engage in it

here's a report made on some older posts of mine to my admin team last night. the contention is "holocaust inversion" and its not the first such report our admin team has to process on me. of course i'm not the one inverting holocaust on anyone, I'm just pointing out similarities in logic and tactics, which many other people smarter than me are also pointing out

there is no way you could read through all my posts and construe any kind of genocidal intent, or denial of the Holocaust, or support for fascism, or antisemitism. you will find me grappling with the horror of genocide, thinking out loud about what "never again" should mean in 2024, and using clear and direct language to talk about my thought processes and experiences.

is that the kind of speech we should be banning on the fediverse? is that the kind of speech we should be reporting?

we're in a precarious situation in regard to free speech in the US. in practice, there is bipartisan political agreement across our federal government that Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli lives. our journalists do not accurately report on Israel's war on Palestinian journalists, let alone on the contours of the genocide. people who protest are unevenly brutalized, fired, silenced.

this is a refraction of reality that allows one people to kill another people. sound familiar?