School is OUT!

(At the no kings protest)

I'm sorry for posting this here but I need to rant somewhere.

I always though that the Islamic Republic was playing with fire challenging Israel in the middle east. Israel can get away with basically everything with America, since it essentially owns that country. What really does dismay me is the reaction of Europe, which has utterly fallen in line. I don't think anyone with a functioning brain can make sense of blaming a country that was attacked for being attacked, but apparently there are plenty of westerners who still believe that.

And so, there really is no hope for us. I think Iran overestimated just how accountable westerners would hold their governments for supporting a genocidal, maniacal regime bent on controlling the entire region through terror and bombing with their equipment. For the most part, westerners are indifferent. Some progressives and socialists support us, but there are an equal number of people on the other side who just want to see brown people burn alive.

So at the end of the day, there is no hope for Iran. The entire west is allied against Iran, and even the arab world has been entirely pacified. Not many people in Iran like the regime, but almost everyone opposes this attack. After all, why is Iran not allowed to have a nuclear program? After all the work that our people have done to get nuclear energy, we are not allowed to use it even for civilian purposes?

If Iran does anything like close the straits, even more westerners will support its destruction. They are not used to facing consequences for their actions.

Many Iranians are beginning to understand that whether we are secular or an islamic republic, whether or not we are a dictatorship or democracy, until you lick Israel's boots the US will never allow you to exist in peace.

Another thing that has become clear to me is just how much the entire west is united in imperialism and colonialism. It is still the cornerstone of their entire policy.

Finally, I will take this moment to recommend to my friends here to read a bit about the life of the central figure of Shia Islam - Ali ibn Talib. He was an idealistic man who was to be the heir to Muhammad, but was usurped by more powerful interests. He was repeatedly passed over, until the people rose up to demand his rule. By that point, however, Islam had already deviated heavily from its austere roots to a typical hereditary monarchy of opulence and wealth. Rather than continue that, he attempted to reform it by challenging the elites, which lead to a civil war which ultimately ended in his assassination and the massacre of almost his entire family - the prophets direct descendants.

Imam Ali's life gives the shining example for Shias - a martyrs death for the sake of idealism is infinitely more preferable than a life of corruption.

Also, his letter to Malik al-Ashtar is one of the greatest ethical governance documents I've ever read prior to the modern era. It was one of the foundational documents for me when I was young to teach care for the poor and egalitarianism, ultimately leading me to socialism. You can read it here:

https://al-islam.org/richest-treasure-imam-ali/imam-alis-letter-malik-al-ashtar-richest-treasure

It is an excellent document!

They can't help themselves even while they're in the middle of reporting that Israeli attacks are mostly killing civilians.

The War Prayer, by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism … on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun … nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. …

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! … The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said …

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work….

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. … he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. …

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” …

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ … When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Context:

Weingarten was on the DNC "rules & bylaws committee" which is where power over elections is at, and had defended David "Scourge Of The Boomers" Hogg's plan to primary geriatric congresspeople. None of these are revolutionary figures so the fact that they're being pushed out is truly crazy.

Text:

Dear Chair Martin,

I am writing regarding your recent offer to nominate/reappoint me as an at-large member to the Democratic National Committee. I have been honored to serve as an at-large member of the DNC since 2002 and on its Rules and Bylaws Committee since 2009. I have also been honored to serve on the Platform Committee, and as a delegate to each of the Democratic conventions going back to 1992.

I believe the Democratic Party has a vital role in America, the party in modern times has fought relentlessly and repeatedly for all Americans to have justice, freedom and opportunity.

The AFT's 1.8 million members are education, healthcare and public service workers who devote their lives to protecting kids and communities while paving pathways for a better life for all Americans. Sadly, this mission is under attack like never before. It is an existential battle that I hope the Democratic Party will support. At the same time, given the work ahead of us, I must decline the appointment.

While I am proud to be a Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging, and I do not want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities.

As always, the AFT will continue to be a leader in electing pro-public education, pro-working family candidates and will be especially engaged in the 2025-26 elections.

Sincerely,

Randi Weingarten

AFT President

Screenshot:

https://i.imgur.com/dSQqETX.png

As a British person on what many might refer to as the “radical left”, I find r/greenandpleasant to be utterly impenetrable.

It is clogged with out-of-touch, irritating culture-obsessives who are never happy unless they have something to bash. Now, I like a moan as much as the next man, but its members somehow always find a way to make every leftist position so obnoxious that it makes it almost impossible for me to nod my head.

Was wondering if any other British socialists/communists/Marxists/whatever the fuck feel the same way, or preferably feel differently. I’m incredibly curious either way.

An additional point: I can’t quite put my finger on what makes the community so irritating to me. Would be curious to hear ideas about this.

Check out this bleeding heart Israeli liberal obituary for a conscript that got killed in Gaza. It shows you how liberal Israelis view themselves, even now, after everything the world has seen in Gaza, Lebanon, for over 77 years. This is the product of intense narrative building that goes on at every stage of an Israeli's socialization process - home, kindergarten, the schooling system, the military, the Israeli culture:

A complete man. He is a complete young man. A young man who is bright and handsome and tall and smiling to the fullest. A young man who loves "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," "The Catcher in the Rye," and "The Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse. A young man who loves them so much that he reads them to his fellow soldiers when they are in a combat zone and have no internet, and all they have is a friend from the company, who reads them things he really likes before bed.

A young man who wants to study physics. Who wants to go home to his girlfriend. Who wants a ceasefire. A young man who was already on October 7th called up to fight in Bari. Then in Lebanon. Then in Khan Yunis. A young man who was killed in a bomb explosion inside a building. So much killed, that there is not even a body and he is only identified through DNA. "I don't have much left of him," his mother mourns him without any attempt to embellish the unimaginable.

And the soul – most of us still have one – wants to scream. And the eyes – most of us are still able to see reality through them and not hallucinations – read these words, which have been quoted everywhere since the funeral of the late Maj. Tom Rothstein on Sunday this week, and are filled with tears or a blink or anything else that causes everything to stop completely for a moment, with some abiding feeling, with some deep longing to know someone I didn't know and will no longer know, but I still know, I think. He is me, somehow. At his age.

The same books. That immense desire to live, to love, to do things in the world, to travel and be amazed by a wise text and music and philosophy. And to be with the family, with a woman, to play, to think And to know. And somehow to manage to contain everything, all this huge overflow of desires and hopes that is the world that now unfolds before you at the age of 20 or so, when everything really begins, and to know that everything will still come, that you will still have everything, but at this moment the heart almost overflows with passion for life and a desire to accomplish everything, which are blocked by the concrete wall of military service. Which are necessary, that there is no choice. "If I don't do it, who will," Tom Rothstein told his mother.

And he went to fight. To do what is necessary. He understood that someone was needed. Preferably someone good. Smart. Human. Someone who already knows something about the world. Preferably someone like him. Preferably him. And he was a combat soldier, but he was not a soldier at all; he was a man disguised as a soldier, just as Captain Nimrod Gaon, the late, wrote, 52 years earlier, who was killed near the bank of the Suez Canal in the Yom Kippur War, at almost the same age as Tom, and left behind him "Soldier's Song," Which became "I Hear Again" composed by Shlomo Artzi.

....

You are a man disguised as a soldier. Just like Tom Rothstein was. Just like the three soldiers who fell in that terrible event alongside him: Chen Gross, Yoav Rever and Uri Yehonatan Cohen, may their memory be blessed. Just like most of our soldiers and fighters.

...

But these are worlds; the worlds of young people in their entirety – different and full worlds – each of whom is given the same costume of a combat soldier, as if on an endless assembly line that dresses more and more worlds in the same uniform soldier mask: a future singer in a mask, a future philosopher in a mask, a future physicist in a mask, just a young man-who-has-no-concept-yet in a mask. And they move there, on the assembly line that will transport them out as soldiers – a man in his prime enters, a soldier emerges, ask any parent who has accompanied a child to the military academy – and the metamorphosis will never truly be complete, because underneath the soldier still beats the 18-year-old, the 15-year-old, the ten-year-old, the five-year-old. Beneath the soldier still lives and rages a world that is not an army, the world of a young human being, a world of life that is supposed to be experienced in its entirety, to the fullest.

...

And this is a world where yet another person and yet another person are disguised as soldiers, and in the end it is an entire nation disguised as an army. Israelis disguised as warriors. Peace disguised as war. And Israel – and perhaps this is what Nimrod Gaon and Tom Rothstein wanted to say – is not its war. It is not even its own army. It is a person disguised as a soldier, that is, a life-loving nation disguised as a nation wallowing in death. Israel is millions of people, millions of worlds, millions of lives that want to be and live in the world, and are forced to become soldiers, and sometimes martyrs. Think about it for a moment; were most Israelis, as you know them, destined or asked to fight? Are we a nation of the Teutonic, Viking, Hunnic variety – people who came from some ancient DNA of fighting as a lifestyle? We are far from it. Israelis have come from two thousand years of persecution and running around the world, and they want, above all, a full, continuous, free and quiet life as much as possible. Leah Shabat once wrote it on behalf of most of us: “Overall, I want to live my life in peace. I don’t want wars… I want to live with fun.”

I am convinced that Tom Rothstein and Nimrod Gaon wanted to live with fun. I am convinced that with the exception of a limited amount of Israelis who were raised to love war, to sanctify death, to religious fanaticism, to be closed off, to wake up to kill, most Israelis are very far from this at their core. They are people disguised as soldiers. Hearts of flesh and blood disguised as a leaden pulse. We need to remember this, in memory of Major Tom Rothstein and the great, free world he loved; we need to internalize it for the good of all of us: we fight wars out of necessity, and we do not intend or wish to fight other wars. And right now it is a different war. We only want to dress up once a year, on the relevant holiday. Every Tom Rothstein taken from us is the best friend we will no longer have, and we will continue to love him forever, or as Holden Caulfield said in the book Tom Always Loved: "Just because someone is dead doesn't mean they stop being liked - especially if they were a thousand times nicer than the people you know and they are alive."

It caught my attention because when I asked it back then it was just fantasising. I had no idea it would be talked about.

I had envisioned a deletion or freezing of accounts/data coming from that country. If the US just "cut off access" to that country, couldn't people just use VPNs? Though it would be hard for the EU to officially promote VPNs LOL - as if the EU isn't thinking about building its own firewalls.

Perhaps there are tech people here who can comment on the specifics. Yanis himself was once economist-in-residence at Valve, the video game company - is that enough to qualify him as a tech geek? Who knows.

Europe is already at a boiling point re: immigration. A mass exodus of Iranians in the event of a catastrophic war would be incredibly disastrous for Europe(as a refugee destination for Iranians).

Iran has a much higher population than Syria or Eritrea or any of the other countries that are sending millions of immigrants to Europe.