my apologies if this has already been posted here but im sharing this. here is what someone said on twitter along w this image:
the central image text reads: “@everyone I HAVE BEEN RELIABLY INFORMED GUARDIAN JOURNALISTS ARE SNOOPING AROUND ASKING FOR TRANS PEOPLE TO TALK TO THEM ABOUT DIY HRT. THEY ARE PARTICULARLY LOOKING FOR UNDER-18S DOING DIY. SHOULDN'T NEED TO BE SAID, BUT DO. NOT. ENGAGE. SPREAD WIDELY. DO NOT ENGAGE. WE NEED THIS NOTICE SPREAD OUT VIA EVERY GRASSROOTS SUPPORT GROUP AND SOCIAL CIRCLE IN THE COUNTRY.
URGENT. IF THEY GET EVEN ONE TO TAKE PART IT BECOMES A NATIONAL CONVERSATION. TOP ALERT.
Guardian journos are apparently asking trans people about DIY. Trans followers: DO NOT SAY ANYTHING TO THEM. NOT A WORD.
I also know I’ve got cis mutuals who have written for the Guardian. Please know I’ve always thought less of you because of that.
"Hm, I've already established that this nation in my story has a lot of sunflowers as a background detail, I should take five minutes real quick to see what those can be used for."
🎶You can eat the stalks! You can eat the leaves! You can eat the petals! You can eat the seeds! You can eat the tubers! Turn 'em into booze! Go and plant some sunflowers! If you don't you lose! 🎶
As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.
The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.
This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.
Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.
listening to the columbia student radio show covering the ongoing situation around student arrests and protests, something easy to put on to feel less disconnected right now
do people even know the extent of sanctions on the iranian people? my mom's family can't afford fruit anymore. it's a state of psychological warfare; literally nobody living there has any sort of hope for the future. added sanctions from the EU are going to destroy the lives of 87 million innocent people