@farbel It's the whole system including the not-for-profit prisons:
"I have found that state legislatures controlled by Democrats from 1984 to 2004 were more likely to build prisons. A common dynamic when a prison is being built is that Republican-led legislatures afterward pass stricter laws ensuring there will be more incarcerated persons."
"the supply of prisons generates demand that states grow the population of incarcerated persons. In fact, our working paper suggests that prison demand is not only inelastic but drives incarceration, not the other way around. States that build more prisons incarcerate more people."
On repeat, pointing to the votes in Dutch Parliament of today, November 19, 2024:
Something to witness: how "the safety of Israel" is the weapon Western democracies use to dismantle civil rights and turn their own countries into more open authoritarian police and surveillance states. IMO, they really got bold after they managed to "dissappear" the still ongoing pandemic.
Reminds me of that fallacy: "Israel is a democracy, and a democracy works within international law," from Thornberry (another Labour human rights lawyer ...) as answer if Israel starving civilians was a war crime.
All Western democracy leaders want this kind of democracy for when the food riots start.
@EUCommission So stop experimenting with AI, which is making climate change much worse. And you might want to reconsider your unlawful, unconditional support to Israeli war crimes and genocide, which besides the immense Palestinian human rights abuses your war criminal ally has been committing, also contributes immensely to climate change. All our rights and lives are connected!
Too many people ignoring the fact that the Genocide Convention is about the 👉 Legal Obligation of States to Prevent Genocide👈 not about an "innocent until proven guilty" after the fact verdict.
"The question now becomes if the white women newly mobilized can expand their vision of feminism to include those devastated by American empire? Will #AnswertheCall2024 merely be a way to reinforce U.S. empire and the multiple genocides our government is funding, not only in Gaza, but also in Sudan and Congo? This remains to be seen."
"Where I come from we have an expression: “Dance with the one that brung ya.” It means if someone has invited you to something, you should show your appreciation by standing with them. The white women just getting in the fight should realize that the “one that brung ya” are all the pro-Palestinian activists." Dr. Jessie Daniels
For those who think genocidaires are a viable option just because they're "democrats" or "liberals"
"Here's something people don't seem to understand. If they're comfortable killing other people, eventually they'll be comfortable killing you. If they're comfortable acting genocide against one group of people, they'll eventually are comfortable acting genocide against you. You are not exempt from the rules of violence that they set."
"I find any solution will first have to start with the real story. We need to sit down around the same table and agree on the diagnostic. We need to agree on the genocide. We have to agree on the whole line of history that has been going on for more than 700 years. Otherwise there's no conversation possible. [...]
It's about acknowledging the past and the present because they are strongly connected. We already know enough. The problem is what we do with that knowledge."
"Exterminate All the Brutes”: Filmmaker Raoul Peck Explores Colonialism & Origins of White Supremacy, interview
Some years ago I tracked down the post where this quote of Frank Wilthoit on conservatisme comes from:
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
It wasn't by Wilthoit the political scientist, who died in 2010, but Wilthoit the composer who wrote it in 2018 as a reply to a Crooked Timber post. In the rest of his reply he gives this solution:
"So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone."
Here's an interview with him and a link to the blog post. His reply is number 26.
Germany uses anti-hate crime laws to silence free speech of Jews and Palestinians
‘We Jews are just arrested; Palestinians are beaten’: Protesters in Germany
"German-Israeli activist Iris Hefets was arrested for the first time in Berlin just a few weeks after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza last October – for holding a sign which read, “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza”. [...]
She was arrested a second time on November 10 for “inciting racial hatred” when she held the same sign – her charge was recently dropped. Her third arrest was for a sign warning that “Zionism kills”. Again, she was released soon after but, this time, her sign was confiscated."
"When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews."
"How, exactly, are the oppressed and colonised supposed to behave? If we’re to follow mainstream thought, that is defined by a white supremacist, Eurocentric worldview, Palestinians would be expected to just sit and take all the violence meted out against them: ethnic cleansing, imprisonment, blockade, theft of land and resources…the list goes on."
@ramonita These people do the same with "intelligence": trying to mock fascists not for their fascism but with ableist slurs. Fascist also don't care about being mocked, they only care about power. Mocking them is giving them free publicity.
"Fascism exsts at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries ... "Giving up free institutions," especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies ... seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national "enemies" is enough." Robert Paxton, the Anatomy of Fascism
"No one is free until we are all free." Fanny Lou Hamer
I'm now using #tusky , so I can see which images have an #altbipoc text and which don't. The only thing I haven't found yet is where I can see the toots on my own account.
Left is as left does - she/her - latlegger - pleb - CisWithTheT - sexworkers are workers - ableism = eugenics = fascism - read pinned toots - toots self-destruct - 👉 Niet Gezellig 👈ID header: North Sea waves with bit of sandy beach lower right. Blue sky with puffy clouds. ID avi: A queen of the Lewis chessmen, holding a small horn in left hand, right hand at cheek, giving a 'oh, no' impression. BM, London. Both pics by me.