what an exhausting meme.

comrades who have addressed it point by point: I admire your patience and generosity

the earth is HEALING

all color categories are made up

and the only ones whose corresponding wavelength ranges are directly detected by our eyes are ~red, ~green, and ~blue

take it from someone who this year failed a color vision test so spectacularly that the doctor asked him ‘so do you just see in black and white?’: let people like things

even fake as fuck shades of color that we KNOW THEY’RE JUST MAKING UP to mess with us

wait what

The reason it doesn’t seem like I was arguing against your comment is that indeed, I wasn’t trying to refute your comment. Reconsider your defensiveness. And bear in mind that not all critiques aim to establish a kind of propositional negation of what they address.

Cures for otherwise blinding conditions do exist (e.g., cataract removal, some gene therapies for retinal diseases) and they’re good. I have a condition that will eventually render me blind and I would seek to be cured if a cure existed for it.

But pursuing/promoting cures for disabilities, including blindness, is not without problems. See, in the US for example, the politics of the National Federation of the Blind vs. the Foundation for Fighting Blindness. Cures also raise class issues and threaten to further marginalize people who won’t or can’t be cured, for whatever reason. In particular, imagining a world in which ‘everyone’ is cured is dangerous and even inherently harmful ideology.

Also, while I have some reservations about the rhetoric and what I think it likely really means, there are blind people out there who will tell you they don’t want to be cured because it’s part of who they are and they’re getting along just fine. Such people do exist. A similar sentiment exists for some within the deaf community as well.

Gene therapies for other genetic conditions often do, but then those aren’t neurodevelopmental.

I’m kinda fascinated by the question of how something like this would affect me. Like the way a psychedelic experience can teach us lessons we still retain (and want to hold onto), like the way formative experiences leave deep traces in us even when when we grow and change, what features of autism would always ‘stay with me’ on some level? If things changed perceptually for me, what old habits of mind would I retain? What would I miss most? What would I not miss?

In a lot of ways I think temporary windows into different neurotypes would be much more interesting than purported ‘cures’. People don’t usually want to undo their own personalities, including mental dimensions like neurotypes. But who wouldn’t want to play with that a bit, if they knew it were safe?

I guess I still don’t really see what your initial comment here is supposed to contribute in response to OP, which isn’t really about being for or against child soldiers, or whether some child soldiers are good and others are bad.

OP isn’t really even about child soldiers per se. It’s about media narratives associated with images of children handling weapons in the contexts of two conflicts, one of the differences between which being that in only one case does the commentary on the image venture as to suggest that the child pictured has been conscripted as a soldier. It’s also about, perhaps more crucially, how allegations of child soldierdom are being used to justify killing children generally, across a whole, captive, civilian population, and that, again, in only one of those two contexts.

(My question was searching for an interpretation that connects GGP back to either of those, which are what the OP is about.)

This kind of thing is really interesting for what it might teach us about autism and the human brain more generally, but when it comes to the practical applications I just don’t see a future where it doesn’t present a ton of problems. Even when you make it ‘voluntary’, eugenics is dangerous and closely allied with exterminationist sentiment, thinking, and practice.

And it seriously risks, at a minimum, deeply undermining struggles to accommodate rather than erase disabilities. Admittedly this is a step beyond the technical capability, but if a society develops an expectation that some major human variation (be that autism, deafness, blindness, or whatever) be cured rather than accommodated wherever it is a ‘problem’, where does that leave people (or parents) who refuse the cure for themselves (or for their children)? I can easily imagine arguments like ‘if you don’t want problems, just administer the cure! you’re being selfish’, ‘this creates an unnecessary burden’, etc.

Also, to be clear, there’s no accepted notion of ‘autism for mice’ (or any other non-human animal), even if describing animals as autistic can sometimes be arguably useful. So ‘works in mice’ is a phrase that does a lot of work here.

It might do something in humans, but the idea that autism is reducible to genes— and a single gene, at that— strikes me as laughable on its face.

Meaning

Child soldiers are children as well as soldiers

?

This is similar to Marx’s critique of freedom under liberalism as merely ‘formal’. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.

This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn’t unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase ‘equality of opportunity’, for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I’d say this a problem that has shaped liberal ‘privilege’ discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.

Like in other cases, I’d say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it’s better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it’s easy to conceive of them too ‘thinly’. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.

To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the ‘open-source’ perspective.

This interview feels like it ends abruptly halfway through!

arm the moderate gays

deleted by creator

I recently discovered (thanks to the recommendation the Jewish communist podcast The Minyan) this song from 1931 that perhaps captures some of the attitudes of the Yiddish-speaking community toward Zionism during that same period: https://youtu.be/tQMRwk8WDd4

I feel like the current Hamas charter, from 2017, makes it clear that their aims have changed and what their aims are, as do some statements in around 2005/2006 IIRC. Idk about them addressing ‘allegations’ per se.

This is really worth emphasizing against the caricature that leftists support absolutely any party which could be construed as a counterhegemonic force.

The many differences between Hamas and ISIS really couldn’t be clearer if you actually examine both groups. One problem is that the term ‘terrorist’, at least as commonly used, serves to conflate/equate them.

It’s one of the limits of mainstream ‘progressive’ politics in imperial countries that support Israel.

In some ways I think the whole ‘war on terror’, despite the fact that the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly widely regarded as failures and crimes even in imperial countries, has been like a red scare against all kinds of guerilla/resistance fighters across the world (but especially Muslims).

The labels ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ have become tools for short-circuiting thought and discussion, and that’s very deeply ingrained. The Israeli media strategy surrounding Operation Al-Aqsa Flood understands this well, and takes full advantage of the fact that mainstream journalists in the imperial core will never call Israel a terrorist state or the IDF a terrorist organization despite the fact that for many decades now, for multiple entire generations, their primary ‘opponents’ have been not the armies of other nations but civilian populations (sometimes in neighboring countries, like Lebanon, and sometimes in land that Israel claims for itself, like Gaza and the West Bank).

The goal is to paint ‘Hamas’ (really the al-Qassam Brigades, and practically speaking the whole armed resistance) as brutes with a monomaniacal obsession with their own brutality. That’s what the equation to ISIS is trying to effect. And it has succeeded pretty well, imo. Liberals aren’t condemning Hamas as an explicit scheme but because they feel like doing so is totally obligatory, even for those opposed to the horrors that we see now unfolding.

That’s all speaking, of course of ordinary liberals. Liberal propaganda functionaries on TV, and elected officials are certainly sometimes more cynical or self-serving, more actively invested in the false equivalency. But whether they’re speaking sincerely or cynically, when liberals condemn ‘both sides’ in Palestine, the ‘terrorist’ label is doing its job.

My father was recently diagnosed with a form of cancer that will probably kill him. For the past few weeks, pretty much the only things I’ve thought about have been my father’s looming death, my virtual estrangement from him, the genocidal siege of Gaza, and the past hundred years or so of the history of Palestine. Needless to say, I couldn’t keep that up. I had to make room for some lightness in my life and in my mind.

The past few days have been a relief.

I’ve reconciled with my father somewhat. He’s still often stressful to be around, especially in his own house, but I feel better equipped to handle and pass over tense moments with him than I’ve ever been in the past. It’s been good visiting him and my mom. I’m only now starting to look forward to going home.

I’m reading fiction again for the first time in a long time. I’d forgotten how easy it is compared to history or political theory; how effortless reading can be when you’re not trying to take notes, when you’re not stopping after nearly every sentence to make sure that you’re paying attention and understand well. What I’ve been ‘reading’ is actually an audiobook. My mom and I have been cozying ourselves up next to a shared Bluetooth speaker, sometimes with a bowl of popcorn or candy like we would for a movie. It’s been a delight! The novel itself has already been thrilling and intriguing for both of us, and we must only be like a third of the way through. (This October, my mom expressed interest in educating herself about what led up to current events, and so she agreed to read three books on the history of Palestine with me. We’re still committed to that, but good God is this novel so much easier!)

I’ve been playing a relaxing, delightful, and sometimes very difficult videogame for at least a couple hours each day. A lot of my attention has gone to music, to the cool weather (which I love), and to the young puppy who moved in here recently (although my own dog, who is visiting along with me, kinda hates him).

It’s good to have a break from all my ruminations, from current events, and from my job. I wish I could have another week off somehow, but this’ll do.