Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson @ simontherockjohnson @lemmy.ml Posts 3Comments 22Joined 5 days ago
Honestly, his post isn’t that far off from various Palestinians I’ve seen online. Their main thing is that anti-Zionist Jews can’t simultaneously complain about people conflating Judaism with Zionism while at the same time not taken up arms for the sake of saving Judaism from Zionism. If the IOF is Jewish ISIS, then where is Jewish Hezbollah or Jewish Ansarallah to send Jewish ISIS to hell and punish the Zionists for their shameless desecration of Judaism?
As a diasporist Jew, Palestinians have a moral standing to make that demand.
If a Palestinian says something questionable. I don't give a single fucking shit. The Zionist entity that is destroying their homes and their families is the source of their belief about Jews. The Zionist entity tells the world that its actions, it's interpretations of scripture and its decisions are representative of all Jews. The Zionist entity itself is a source of ethnonationalist supremacist garbage and I cannot fault the people it oppresses for believing what is written on the sides of its bombs. It's entirely correct that if we believe that it is a genocide, we should give them latitude in expressing their anger as it relates to their oppressors.
I am not going to give a Westoid the same latitude. You haven't earned it. Your cities aren't ash. You have never seen an Israeli bomb in your life unless you were signing it. You haven't known terror for your entire childhood, you haven't been deprived of education, health care, safety, food and family since birth. That is the reality for most Palestinians. So yeah, I'm not going to really take it too hard if they have some funny ideas about Jews. Westoids have no such excuse.
Likewise this doesn't explain the differences within Jewry. Beta Israel were oppressed by Israel itself. Not only did Israel originally refuse to allow them to make Aliyah, but after they did they were sterilized. We're not all just Ashkenazim (though I am).
A Westoid saying Jewish Supremacism after being accused of antisemitism is ZOG shit and I literally agree that Israel has created an extremely powerful outsized role for itself in the politics of many Western nations.
And I don’t agree with his assessment that Jewish people have been completely subsumed into whiteness. As a whole, Jewish people are white*. You have white people of Jewish ancestry who are otherwise completely indistinguishable from your average WASP at one end and you have Hasidic Jews at the other end.
This doesn't even encompass all European Jewry.
It's finally autistic people's turn to get a "I want an refund for my shitty kid" NYT OP-Ed.
I don't think Trump is capable of the Medvedev switch tbh.
If capital cannot profit off of you, it will kill you. Autistic people tend to be bad at the wage work capital demands of us - hence why so many of us are chronically unemployed.
This is an important point. We should remember that this means that the most realistic worse-case model they have to cleanse us en masse is corporate private prison contracting where some Trump friendly dipshit gets $25k/per body a month from the Fed to warehouse us in a concrete tomb.
They cannot kill us cheaply and we aren't actually a balance sheet problem because there is realistically social spending for the majority of us. They'll starve all disabled and poor people before they single us out in any effective way. We might be a trial balloon, but it's extremely unlikely that we'll get it nearly as bad as migrants.
Autism is just a political talking point for their shit for brains NT base who doesn't want to be shown anything on the TV except their own shallow world view, and for the people who they talk about the TV with in public to never tell them the TV is wrong. We're just a means to an end, effectively to get society to agree to the fact that kids should die of measles.
America in 2025 is utterly incapable of mega-projects like Japanese internment, the government has been too hollowed out. They spent $1.1 billion in 2025 dollars in the 1940's just to build the camps alone using the US Army Corps of Engineers, the CCA and WRA. They were mostly public works. Doing something of this size is going to be a major in-fight between oligarchs on who gets this money, and it won't be $1.1 b done over a year, it will balloon to hundreds of billions and be stuck in development hell because of all the inefficiencies.
A single prison today typically costs $1b. For example Indiana is currently building a new prison for $1.2 that holds 4,200 people. They started in 2023, they're expected to finish in 2027.
Don't get me wrong people will be hurt, but we are so laughably incapable of 20th century style population transfers.
Yeah he has. I am 50:50 on if he actually believes that or it's shoe horning stuff into Trump's policy agenda. I think he literally believes that we cannot work so how would labor camps even work? His whole "wellness farms" stuff was funny because bringing back RFK Jr. designed sanitoriums during a fascist austerity government after Regan happened is a nonstarter. I do not believe that RFK is going to be able to put together a network of camps and the mechanisms to round people up into them. ICE under Trump is less effective than under Biden/Obama but is more brazen. There's like several steps that here that aren't going to be easy, and it's a game of numbers not just if you'll get got by the RFK HHS but also if the RFK HHS will be able to get you at all.
I think RFK's average case success scenario for this is having some high profile arrests and claiming mission accomplished.
Remember that these systems were actually made effective or outright built by competent technocratic ghouls during the Democrat run government years. Bush's war in the middle east was a failure, Obama mechanized it and turned it into a success (politically speaking because he removed American troops from the political equation). Biden adopted Trump's border policy and made it work effectively and proved it out in the stats and Democrats were complaining that the evil fascists of the GOP weren't giving them credit for being good effective fascists.
What about the HHS classifications/work providing a basis for categorization for Federal LE action, ‘rounding up’?
My personal risk profile doesn't match this because there is no diagnosis. I think it can represent a real risk for others.
My opinion on this is that I think this is an RFK pet project that he's shoe horning into DJT's world view. I don't think RFK is long for being HHS secretary, because Trump doesn't like him and they are both guys who cannot share the spotlight.
There is real risk to real people from the Trump admin, but I think we have to temper the assessment of that risk with the political instability and the incompetence of a cartoonish fascist government. They are more effective with ICE and dissident management this time around because they had 4 years to plan, and they had several successful trial balloons between 2016-2020. I think creating pathological or technical criteria for the rounding up is something that is needed for a technocratic fascist positioning very much a Dem party thing (Think: You can't support Hamas they're terroristorinos!). Trump has been signaling that he's literally trying to fuck over those who simply disagree publicly. You do not need pathological criteria to rile up your base for that. Democrat, dissident, and anti-American are labels that can do that job just as effectively.
It's also not actually about the practical population transfer but imposing control. If they really wanted to get rid of autistic people esp. kids on the cheap they could do it through federal austerity faster/easier than putting us all in camps.
I can be wrong, but I just don't think RFK's agenda is going to be durable and mesh with the overall WH goals and this they have 6 of these types of pots on the stove so I'm not betting on RFK being a danger to me.
Also, idk if this comes off as risky to discuss publicly given everything, but do you mean having your passport for leaving later or that you already have and keeping it current is important (because obviously). And where are you considering for places to go other than the U.S.?
No I'm not leaving. I was naturalized as a child and the immigration law at the time did not provide children with their own naturalization documents. My proof of citizenship is my old collection of US passports, current passport / passport card. I can pay $5k for the INS to print me a certificate, but lol cmon.
This is my de jure defense of "I'm not fucking going to El Salvador", my de facto one is I keep that thing on me. My conditions for leaving the country are if it's not going to be possible for me and my partner to live here from an economic / personal safety POV. We aren't planning on children so I have it easier than most, and from the outside I can pass as "normal" from a ND/political POV. A lot of this stuff is very much "don't rock the boat" signal.
I have been at peace with the fact that I could be deported under US law since I was a teenager, so this isn't really anything new to me. This is just surviving. I'm doing my dailies.
Yeah I'd almost never disclose ND status regardless of what it is and to what bureaucracy, it's almost always bad, and it's almost always on me to fight for any kind remedy regardless of disclosure. The liberal rules around disclosure esp. in the work place are effectively meant to make ND people more vulnerable. The standards protect only those with visible physical disabilities to a extremely minimal degree.
The only things protecting us have been HIPAA. That's actually the worst part about RFK's database, given that the government just leaked Abrego Garcia's wife's address to their stochastic psycho contingent.
In fact, it would not surprise me if suddenly they start picking up random US citizens and just declare them autistic.
I have my doubts about this because they are already doing this through ICE and they have said they are going to do it for people who disagree with the President regardless of their citizenship status.
RFK's HHS is not going to out-compete ICE to create a general gestapo model, it already exists, has for a long time, in multiple different modes. It's just that it was much more polite before.
I'm much more scared about keeping my passport up to date, and being denaturalized than I am about RFK's goofy autism caregiver based genocidal ideas.
The old approach has a lot of downsides esp. for our more visible comrades who need support.
I had looked into autism diagnosis as an adult and there are basically no upsides. It's expensive and you'll have to fight doctors for it, and you'll be given a piece of paper that doesn't mean anything to anyone. There are no real resources (the ones gated by neoliberal austerity that require the paper) for autistic adults in the US from what I've seen. For adults it seems to be "just be thankful your support level is low".
Nobody is going to check your papers and kick you out of a support group or meeting for not having them.
Thanks! I'll message them!
Oh I disagree with this one anyone who says "I'm a progressive" means "I'm a good person". That one has been dispossessed of its original meaning and re-imbued with a very clear new one.
It's epithet context used by conservatives means "we don't think you're fascist enough".
maybe someone is going to come problematize those philosophical arguments in 4 hours
Wdym? In the history of the internet nobody has ever had posting wars about fuzzy concepts. Nobody has ever had posting wars about the concept of fuzzy concepts.
I was not trying to denigrate feminism. The West's mainstream feminism is extremely syncretic now that it's not even liberal / bourgeoisie feminism anymore. There's no real word for it. Naomi Wolf is a perfect example. In ideology the Naomi Wolf who wrote The Beauty Myth is not the Naomi Wolf who polices women's vocal fry. Both Naomi Wolfs are synthesized within the Western mainstream feminism in 2025. It's only practical effect on the world is reflected in things like Space Katy Perry, which are re-emergent forms of mid-century advertisement patriarchy.
We have gone from Mad Men controlling economic machinery to convince women they need to buy things to enforce a fake beauty standard. To the 90's and 2000's where women took on the roles of men in that system. To a systemic patriarchy (e.g. a social structure where patriarchy can exist without patriarchal attitudes) that sells things to women in a Schrodinger's feminism. Every idea is held in a superposition until society observes it, and society does not categorize it in a logical or consistent way. Society simply collapse the wave function and whether the idea ends up as "pro-women" or "anti-woman" is not deterministic based on the ideas of any specific strain of feminism or even the basic idea of equality between genders.
To explain it in complicated philosophy instead of complicated physics, mainstream feminism is a signifier without the signified or as Lacan put it a pure signifier. I hesitate to say this, but in layman's terms a pure signifier is "a label that doesn't mean anything". I hesitate to use that phrase because it is used in causal conversation that is meant to be simplistic and dismissive. Mainstream feminism isn't inherently meaningless, it's part of a dialectical process that has hollowed it of meaning. It's real meaning should be the history of how it became meaningless. Mainstream feminism is great example of the real social processes that govern how our world works.
To offer an analogy, the last name Carpenter has the same problem as mainstream feminism. Last names were given to people based on certain social meanings. There would be various systems like a literal lineage name like Johnson e.g. Son of John. Occupational names are also a thing like Smith, Miller, Carpenter would literally denote the person's trade. John Smith would be the guy in your town that makes nails, Tim Miller would be the guy in your town that makes flour, etc. You wouldn't even think to ask Sabrina Carpenter to make you kitchen cabinets because Carpenter has through dialectic social processes become just a label. So in effect "Sabrina Carpenter" sings, "John Carpenter" makes horror movies, and "mainstream feminism" sells things -- all of these labels have been imbued and dispossessed of significance from the same dialectic process of meaning making.
It's this.
The most hollowed out form of liberal feminism. Not even corpo feminism. Not even white corpo feminism. A feminism that is itself as a vehicle for marketing and driving consumption.
This is a losing game because like "freedom" in the West for normal people "feminism" is in practice a treat-based ideology. Now you can heap Islamophobia on top of that.
Hezbollah is the best out of all these groups to women. They allow women to participate in all parts of society. They have women-led politcal steering committees setting political positions based on Islamic feminism. Hezbollah has a unique risk because their primary benefactor Iran has a much more conservative political position on the issue.
However Islamic feminism is a tenuous balancing act. Like any other religion it Islam is not coherent or consistent in its texts and oral traditions. Coherence and consistency is made based on social views on choosing what passages to elevate and what passages to deprecate. As such Islamic feminism often has very rough edges and looks different based on different political contexts.
Hamas is lower than Hezbollah here but still not comparable to the Taliban or ISIS. The status of women in Hamas and by its governing principles are not equivalent to Hezbollah or the PLO. Hamas has been changing slowly by allowing more women into leadership and changing some of its views since 2021.
You are absolutely wrong about Ansar'Allah. Ansar'Allah is not as organized as the Taliban but ultimately has the similar views and worse practices. Ansar'Allah does gendered child soldiers. Boys as young as 7 become soldiers. Girls as young as 13 become liaisons in the gendered traditional militaristic sense they do "women's work". They do intelligence, logistics, support, and involuntary sex work. Like female military liaisons in other traditionalist armies including in the West they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and are effectively prizes and play things for the officer class. Ansar'Allah has some women's units but there is actually disagreement about militarization of women both official (as soldiers) and unofficial (as liaisons) within Ansar'Allah on "social cohesion" grounds. The Zainabiyyat batallion (women's battalion) also sources the must vulnerable women in Yemeni society so the poor or groups like the Muhamasheen. The Zainabiyyat batallion's general is a man and it's not really a fighting force, it's a policing / occupation / intelligence force. Zainabinyyat has been accused of being given the duty to create the intelligence networks as a compromise and preventative measure but I haven't seen strong confirmation of that, nor have I seen any strong evidence that if it's happening that outcomes are changing for women and girls forced into these networks.
The US might miraculously find deposits of rare earth metals and then the war could get very long and very bloody.
If there was a realistic enormous certified deposit of every single rare earth mineral in the most Goldilocks location and the deck was stacked for this deus ex machina miracle, it wouldn't matter.
In mining a deposit of minerals is a concentration of minerals. Think Minecraft, in a 9x9x9 cube the vein takes up an 8x8x9 space and runs into the next 9x9x9 cube. That's what mining companies look for.
Rare earths are called rare earths not because there are few deposits, it's because they're more uniformly distributed in low quantities in mineral deposits. Again think Minecraft, but for every 9x9x9 cube there is a single block of antimony.
Rare earths cannot create mining economies of scale. The reason China has the most rare earth production is because they "use every part of the Buffallo" more than other country's mining companies do. Rare earths are usually not refined from minerals that contain them in America because the labor to do so is too expensive. America's access to rare earths has always been an economic question of cheap labor, not a question of locating the resources.
Biden was part of this. Trump's plan is a rootless generalization of what Biden had tried. But instead of "high tech manufacturing", "national security", and "sanctions", Trump's trade war is based in "manufacturing", "making America great", and "tariffs". This is just CHIPS without the subsidies and a more unrealistic plan that isn't backed by NatSec blob. CHIPS has been an absolute failure too. It's simply mystified by the technocratic ghouls of the DNC where if you question them you're "too stupid to get it".
Biden literally put all his chips in the Intel basket. Intel the company who had been riding on financialization and market dominance for so long its bean counters forced it to sleep walk into a complete production failure -- then it was revealed that the same bean counters had painted it into a corner by cutting R&D. They have no answers to the architectural problems in their chipsets.
TBH any time you see a "gun guy" video and the main character is a femme woman it's 9 times out of 10 going to be a dangerous setup and misogynistic.
The classic "we're gonna let the hot girl shoot the Desert Eagle as her first gun so she breaks her nose" comes to mind.
This is in Brazil. This shooting range is essentially a private club which is very much a tacticool/MMA/No Touch TKO/Warrior style place. https://www.instagram.com/gunfightoficial/
The primary red flag in these kinds of things is always what caliber gun they'll hand someone who's never shot before. If it's anything other than a 22LR it's often a bad sign. The Glock she's holding is at least a 9mm and she's clearly scared of it.
I'm not certified or anything but every time I've taught someone to shoot I've started them on a 22LR rifle. The first 40 minutes is literally going over how to use it multiple times. The last 20 is pumping out a couple of mags. If they like it then you move up to higher calibers. Often the worst is when you're teaching someone new/skittish in an indoor and someone's playing around with their "9mm doesn't have stopping power" compensator in the next stall.
Basic safety courses (the kind that states mandate as a bottom of the barrel minimum e.g. NRA basic) are taught on 22LR because it's a safer way to learn.
Also Weaver foot stance + Isosceles grip + open toe platform shoes + trigger squeeze is why she's swaying from recoil. Her center of gravity is fucked is so fucked. Looking through their insta they teach some incredibly bad shooting posture consistently. Very "we trained them wrong as a joke" vibes. This place blows so much.
This is what they use in their intro course. Fucking lol