(Yeppers, it’s longish, but needs must, as they say. Feel free to pick and choose titles that seem of keen interest to you.)
‘We will not wait 70 years more’: scenes from Gaza’s March of Return’, AhmadKabariti, March 31, 2018, mondoweiss.net (with photos)
“Amid thousands of semi-cultivated wheat and barley fields in the area of Abu Safia, east of Jabalia in North Gaza, around 30 beige canvas tents have been set up within 700 meters of the adjacent Israeli border fence, ahead of a six-week protest camp under the gaze of wary Israeli soldiers.
Those crops could hardly be seen due to tens of thousands of participants joining the encampment, an unprecedented number according to the organizers of the Great March of Return.
On the first day of the exceptional event, which was called by the Palestinian factions for the past several weeks, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops along the eastern border of the besieged strip.”
“Palestinians have long demanded that as many as five million of their compatriots be granted the right to return to their homes and lands. Israel rules this out, fearing an influx of Palestinians would eliminate its Jewish majority. Israel argues the refugees should be resettled in a future state that the Palestinians seek in West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
And yet, in a burst of defiant optimism was a wedding. The groom, Aala Shahin, siad that the rally was the best place to start his new life. Let’s assume that his bride, Maryam Hamdouna, must have agreed.
Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook writes that ‘With more Palestinians than Jews, Israel is waging a numerical war of attrition’, April 2, 2018
“The Israeli army’s trigger-finger against Palestinian protesters close to the fence surrounding Gaza at the weekend, killing at least 18 and injuring hundreds more, has an explanation rooted in more than normal conceptions of security.
Last week, ahead of the Gaza protests, the Israeli army made an unexpected admission. It told parliamentarians that for the first time Jews are outnumbered by Palestinians living under Israeli rule, both inside Israel as citizens and in the territories under occupation.
It was a moment whose significance was not lost on Israeli legislators. Many were appalled, refusing to accept the army’s assessment that there are now half a million more Palestinians than Jews between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan.”
“The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issued a warning last week that dozens of Palestinian farming communities were facing imminent expulsion from Area C, which forms two-thirds of the West Bank.
Israel has stepped up home demolitions, torn up roads, denied Palestinians electricity and water, encouraged settler violence and conducted military and live fire training on Palestinian land. The aim, said B’Tselem, is to avoid international censure as Israel makes “life unbearable to force them to leave, as if by free choice”.
In his March 18 ‘Israel has accelerated its annexation of the West Bank from a slow creep to a run’, Cook writes:
“The [Likud] government is already working on legislation to bring some West Bank settlements under Jerusalem municipal control – annexation via the back door. This month officials gave themselves additional powers to expel Palestinians from Jerusalem for “disloyalty”.
Yousef Jabareen, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, warned that Israel had accelerated its annexation programme from “creeping to running”.
Notably, Mr Netanyahu has said the government’s plans are being co-ordinated with the Trump administration. It was a statement he later retracted under pressure.
But all evidence suggests that Washington is fully on board, so long as annexation is done by stealth.
The US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a long-time donor to the settlements, told Israel’s Channel 10 TV recently: “The settlers aren’t going anywhere”. Settler leader Yaakov Katz, meanwhile, thanked Donald Trump for a dramatic surge in settlement growth over the past year. Figures show one in 10 Israeli Jews is now a settler. He called the White House team “people who really like us, love us”, adding that the settlers were “changing the map”.
“With a Palestinian “state” effectively restricted to Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe there – one the United Nations has warned will make the enclave uninhabitable in a few years – needs to be urgently addressed.
But the White House summit also sidelined the UN refugee agency UNRWA, which deals with Gaza’s humanitarian situation. The Israeli right hates UNRWA because its presence complicates annexation of the West Bank. And with Fatah and Hamas still at loggerheads, it alone serves to unify the West Bank and Gaza.
That is why the Trump administration recently cut US funding to UNRWA – the bulk of its budget. The White House’s implicit goal is to find a new means to manage Gaza’s misery.
What is needed now is someone to arm-twist the Palestinians. Mike Pompeo’s move from the CIA to State Department, Mr Trump may hope, will produce the strongman needed to bulldoze the Palestinians into submission.”
Here Cook explains ‘The lies and self-deceptions at work within Israel’s ‘moral’ army’, March 4, 2018
And what of press coverage of Gaza’s March of Return? Let’s start with:
‘CNN: Blaming the Palestinian Victim’, Robert Fantina, April 6, 2018, counterpunch, April 6, 2018
“On April 1, CNN’s loftily titled ‘International Diplomatic Editor’, Nic Robertson, offered his pearls of wisdom on this situation. He wasted no time in both showing his ignorance of the current events, and his desire to blame the victim.
“Like so many battles of yesteryear, both sides arrive to this current field of conflict carrying a weight of historic grievances, armed with today’s political imperatives.”
Let’s look for a moment at some of these ‘historic grievances’. Palestinians were driven from their homes so the United Nations could establish the state of Israel. Hundreds of ancient Palestinians villages were bulldozed, leaving not a trace. Sacred shrines and cemeteries received the same fate. Since that time, using the advanced weaponry that the U.S. provides to Israel, thousands of additional Palestinian men, women and children have been killed, arrested, illegally jailed, displaced, beaten, abused and disregarded by Israeli law. This is ongoing to this day.
On the other hand, Israel must contend with Palestinians throwing stones at its occupying soldiers, and occasionally even slapping one of them. Yes, as Robertson said, there are grievances on both sides.
“Israeli officials are convinced Hamas is challenging the status quo of Gaza’s limits and is ready to throw down civilian lives to achieve it.”
Yes, the murders of at least 18 unarmed Palestinians by Israeli snipers, and the injury to at least 700 more, injured with live ammunition, is all Palestine’s fault!
“In public statements before the confrontation, Israeli officials said an attack on the border fence is an attack on Israel’s sovereignty and pulled no punches on what a response could look like.”
“To make their message clear, the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic website posted a video of a young man being shot in the leg; it was accompanied by the caption: ‘This is what will happen to you if you try to get close to our border.’”
Robertson neglects a few pertinent facts here, so we will inform him. The vast majority of the protesters were hundreds of yards away from the fence, ON PALESTINIAN LAND. Yet many were shot by Israeli snipers. To read Robertson’s words, one would think that hundreds or even thousands of Palestinians stormed the fence. Yes, a few dozen did approach the fence, but at all times they remained on Palestinian land. And, as mentioned earlier, some of the pesky Palestinians actually threw stones at the ‘brave’ Israeli snipers, who were heavily armed and outfitted against them. All this was happening while Israeli drones dropped tear gas on unarmed and defenseless Palestinians on their own land.”
Well, you get the gist; this is the CNN’s Roberton op-ed page, with their own video, plus an inset one with Bernie Sanders noting that the Israelis had over-reacted [Ya think?], and calling for the US to head a peaceful solution. In which parallel universe, Senator Sanders, would Amerika be an honest broker for peace?
Having bingled for any coverage at the Paper of Record (NYSlimes), I stopped when I’d hit this from electronicintifada.net: ‘New York Times sides with Israel as it kills Gaza marchers’, Michael F. Brown, 31 March 2018.
“Writing from Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner dismissed Palestinian nonviolence and emphasized a rapid descent into “chaos and bloodshed.” (Iyad Abuheweila and Ibrahim El-Mughraby contributed reporting from Gaza.)’
He then narrates her/their several iterations/devolutions of changes made…and finally:
““Soon after the campaign began Friday morning, the Israeli military said Palestinian protesters were rioting in six places along the border, rolling burning tires and hurling stones at the fence and at Israeli soldiers beyond it.”
The article’s final version moved this language to the third paragraph and remained profoundly problematic. “But as some began hurling stones, tossing Molotov cocktails and rolling burning tires at the fence, the Israelis responded with tear gas and gunfire.”
Killing at dawn
There is no reporting from the newspaper as to whether the march started as nonviolent and was pitched into violence after Israeli forces used deadly force.
According to the Gaza-based human rights group Al Mezan, the first death of the day occurred around 5 am, when Israeli forces fired an artillery shell killing farmer Omar Samour in his field some 700 meters inside Gaza.
Videos that subsequently emerged showed clear evidence of Palestinians being shot when they posed no plausible danger to anyone. In one case, a young man was shot dead a long distance from the boundary fence and as he ran away from it.
Whatever the timeline, Israeli occupation forces denying Palestinians the right of return to stolen lands and properties killed and injured Palestinian demonstrators on what Human Rights Watch called a “shocking” scale.”
And surprisingly, Human Rights Watch, ME and North Africa director Srah Leah Whitson…said it right. There’s far more, but this stuck in my mind:
Israel’s Bull Connor
“Had The New York Times been as friendly to segregation enforcer Eugene “Bull” Connor’s violent response in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, the American civil rights movement might have faced an even more daunting path. [snip]
“But Israel’s modern-day Bull Connor, defense minister Lieberman, manages to get quoted without reference to his history of anti-Palestinian bigotry and calls for ethnic cleansing and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Kershner mildly describes him as “hard-line.”
On the right sidebar is his ‘Bolton’s plan to make Palestine disappear’, March 26 .
Three states
“Bolton has proposed a “three-state solution”: Israel, giving Gaza to Egypt, and giving the West Bank to Jordan.”
His ‘Voice of America claims Israel seeks to help Gaza’, also on the right sidebar.
On the other hand, some coverage at the Guardian has been far better. For instance:
‘The Gaza march is a wake-up call to the world’, A planned peaceful protest ended in the deaths of 16 Palestinians. The international community can no longer ignore Israel’s intransigence, Tareq Baconi April 2 (and yes, it’s published at comment is free)
“But perhaps the greatest driver of this march is the tragedy of the Gaza Strip itself. Under an Israeli-Egyptian blockade for more than 10 years, Palestinians have experienced electricity shortages and a water supply crisis, with only a very few able to leave the tiny coastal enclave. They have been subjected to military assaults that make daily life seem like a post-apocalyptic vision.
Rather than address the political issues that underpin Gaza’s misery, the US and Israel recently embarked on a humanitarian mission to alleviate suffering in Gaza while paradoxically sustaining the blockade. That is because Israel believes it can manage the situation in the Gaza Strip indefinitely, while also maintaining control over the remainder of occupied territories.
With this march, Palestinians in Gaza are reminding the world that they cannot be “managed”. They and their fellow Palestinian refugees continue to hold rights under international law. UN resolution 194 affirmed the Palestinian right of return.
Also from the Guardian: ‘Palestinians say over a dozen killed in Gaza border protest’; Israeli military dismisses demonstration as Hamas ploy to ‘carry out terror attacks’, on March 31. It’s certainly more even-handed, save for a few assertions…not in evidence. I most especially like that they feature these quotes:
“At one of the protest camps near Gaza City, a few dozen tents had been erected and residents were walking around, some carrying the Palestinian flag.
Fatima Nasser, 65, said she had come with her seven children, all of whom were unemployed. “To die with dignity is better than living a life full of humiliation. We will return to our land, we will return to our homeland,” she said. “Israel kills us anyway, whether it’s by shooting or blockade.”
Eighteen-year-old Mahmoud Younis said he had come to show the world that Gazans “deserve to live”. “No one looks at us, no one thinks about us, we will continue to camp here and come daily until someone looks at us and there is a solution to this difficult and miserable reality.”
In his April 6, 2018 essay at counterpunch , ‘70 Years Later: Palestinians Are Still Denied the Easter Promise of Hope’, Raouf Halaby reflects on his memories of being a Greek Orthodox Christian Palestinian under Israeli occupation between 1948 and April 9, 1959, the day his family was forced to leave their ancestral Jerusalem and Palestine.
After reading the rich tapestry of his experiences, the long history of his family’s first church, Semaa’n, their second one after 1948, and his lengthy descriptions of the interior and rituals, through the bmbing of the King David hotel (that call’s ‘Palestine’s 9/11’), having stones thrown at him by Jews on his arduous walk to church, one gets a shiver at the end when he declaims:
“Finally, to the Israeli fascists and their ardent Zionist supporters around the world, you will never be free until you grant Palestinians their freedom; you will never be legitimate until you give legitimacy to Palestinian statehood; you will never claim a moral ground until you atone for your 70 years of sins of ethnic cleansing and occupation. And, please don’t tell me “Never Again.”
But it’s so inspirational to see that US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is so concerned about Christian religious freedom in China. “It’s one of our most precious rights, one that should be enjoyed by all no matter where they are born.”
‘US only Security Council member to block UN inquiry into Gaza violence’, via RT this morning, 7 April, 2018
“For the second week in a row, the US has vetoed a UN Security Council (UNSC) statement calling on Secretary General Antonio Guterres to launch an independent inquiry into the Gaza violence. Put forward by Kuwait, a non-permanent UNSC member, it also reaffirmed the Palestinians’ right to peacefully oppose Israeli policies on the occupied lands.
Fourteen of the 15 Security Council members agreed to the statement, but the United States, Israel’s closest ally, voted against, Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday evening. He said the UN rejection was “very irresponsible,” and that it gives Israel “the green light to continue with their onslaught against the civilian population” in Gaza.”
“Commenting on the Friday vote, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said the council “should condemn Hamas, which uses children as human shields while risking their lives, and must call for the end of these provocations which only increase the violence and tensions,” as cited by the Times of Israel.
In an opinion piece for the New York Times, he claimed that during the Gaza clashes, “armed terrorists were dispersed among the protesters,” adding that numerous efforts were made to breach the fence that “separates a sovereign, democratic state and a murderous terrorist entity.”
‘Abby Martin interview critical of Israel is blocked by YouTube in 28 countries’, 6 Apr, 2018, RT
And last but not least, you’ll no doubt remember that one of Susan Rice’s new gigs is becoming a Netflix board member. Yanno, Netflix of the award winning psyop the White Helmets? From Telesur English, April 3, ‘BDS Movement Calls on Netflix to Remove Series ‘Sanitizing’ Israeli Occupation’
“Pro-Palestinian groups including the Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement along with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) have called on Netflix to discontinue the series ‘Fauda’ (Chaos in Arabic) for “sanitizing and normalizing war crimes” and “promoting and justifying these grave human rights violations.”
Calling the series, “racist propaganda material for the Israeli occupation army,” the BDS movement wrote a letter to Netflix, the United States-based entertainment company to remove the series.
The series produced by the two former Israeli Defense Forces, IDF officers is scheduled to be broadcast in May, which also marks the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) of the Palestinian people.
“The two authors [of the series], who are graduates of one of these teams, without any ambiguity have collaborated with the occupation, colonization and the Apartheid regime,” the letter noted, referring to the series’ creators, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff’s former service in elite IDF units.”
I just booted up Mondoweiss.net’s I/P tab, and there are numerous new and egregious reports. Snipers shooting six Paletinian journlalists; killing one, Israeli forces killing a protestor in Gaza with a drone-delivered missile…whooosh.
…OMG, how unsurprising, but so additionally fukked up.
This is the trailer from Michael Franti’s film, he’d travelled to Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza in 2006, and in an effort to share his experiences from his trip and to explore the human cost of war, he’d produced a movie entitled I Know I’m Not Alone; the full film is here.
(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
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café babylon 
in the vein of “will there ever be an end to the Indian Wars”:
(one college kid said to me, “don’t say ‘Pocahontas’ around people from Evergreen State College!” can I just get a list of the Forbidden Words & What Is Not a Trigger, plz? yeah, them kids ain’t too keen on fur-trapping either. or rape fantasies cuz wanting to sleep with Pocahontas, herself largely a cisgen eurohonk penis fantasy, is the same thing as rape. At this point, I started singing “Springtime for Hitler” and the Rojava Romance Brigade was ready for a righteous lynching. so outraged.)
Focus, Trinity. I’m sure G-d is having one of his innumerous private little jokes by having the world return to Zion at the End (“See? Hal Lindsey was right after all,” chuckles Jehovah to himself.) The word “fated” means “spoken”, i.e., decreed, by the gods, incl the Fates, or whatever. is Israel as an idea of “taking the kingdom of heaven by violence” destined to be with us, like the poor, forever? the Tom Friedman flat earthers who want to flatten the earth all believe in Israel, all good Christian boys & girls, along with Tom himself, Liz, Bern, spawn of Chucky & Trump’s own Baal Shem Crap*, Sheldon Adelson, they all believe in Project Israel, if they believe in anything. in the religious book they all claim to adhere to (ok, except Kissinger types), the Israel of old is a failure at establishing God’s kingdom on earth, the Israel of the future is associated with the apocalyptic cleansing of the earth before the New Jerusalem gets off its ass & gets here (yes, these are more evangelical types. but that doesn’t matter. when, e.g., the Eastern Orthos who don’t believe this Israel stuff, at least from the Bible, get in charge, we’ll talk. the evangelical nutballs are running the show, along w/their Torah-thumping fanatic allies in the Sanhedrin.)
it’s such a weird nexus of politics, religion and *literature,* i.e., the Bible. and, you know, geology. how did the world’s oil get under Greater Israel? is that an accident of geology, a coincidence? with the Return narrative & Zion as the Ark saving “Israel” from the Holocaust flood and all that? or does oil & geo-political influence come first & start casting about looking for a narrative, esp a religious one, to justify what is no more than imperialism?
of course I lean to the latter, but along comes Murka’s Virgil to say stuff like, “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq” and waving the bible around as an infallible guide to Middle East politics. makes ya think.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal_Shem_Tov
that’s in the vein of the bruce cockburn indian wars epic indictment? or is neil satirizing the ‘sleep w/ Pocahontas’? (egad, one or three vocal lessons might have helped, but maybe it’s more a case of ‘not hearing’ what’s on key, off.)
but your parody of the students’ equating sleep w/ pocahontas as rape (made me ping: Gus: ‘laurie, how ’bout a poke?” Laurie: ‘got any munny, Gus?’)…is great, and my stars, are you gettin’ a real world education out on the street. now did hal lindsey do some of the left behind films? but ta for reminding me that fundie xitans and cufi support zionism up the wazoo because: ‘when israel stands alone’ or something,, yes?
could you explain trump’s baal shem tov stuff? scanning the wiki didn’t actually solve the riddle. this is perfect, though: ‘it’s such a weird nexus of politics, religion and *literature,* i.e., the Bible’, although i did look for jewish beliefs as to what will bring the messiah (mesach) and it seems to be quite up for grams among scholars (rabis?), but as for the success of the israel project needing cleansing the earth, etc., one thing i had seen that some jewish scholars have incorporated the ‘end of days’ dispensationalism into their ‘beliefs’, although in the torah…the subject doesn’t come up. dunno if that’s so, but a weird cooptation, if not.
to say the truth, i hadn’t known there was Big Oil under israel, do all the players know that? seeking oil….
ah, yes, new discoveries in the golan heights, to boot. actually syria, no?
http://www.ibtimes.com/israel-oil-discovery-massive-reserve-could-meet-domestic-demand-obstacles-production-2130639
oh lord, someone said her dad “forcing” her dog to mate/breed with a dog she, the owner, didn’t like was “rape,” and another dangling his junk in her dog’s face was harassment. not just men, but males, I guess, across the mammal family? down with sperm!
“he who believes all that is told about the Baal Shem Tov is a fool; he who doubts what is told is a heretic.” lol. miracle workers, but you know, for the Dark Side. everything evil said about them is of course not true, but it might be true, cuz that’s how these…what’s Yiddish for asshole? google says it’s asshole, so we’ll go with that. anyway, that’s how they roll. was Bolton’s moustache forged deep in some dark, secret DARPA salon in their evil cosmetology school? I doubt it, but one never knows.
where does all this outrage come from? and appeal to the grievances of youth? so easily manipulated. I had a guy tell me when he was a kid he wanted to run off & join some CNN-promoted “resistance” force somewhere (Syria, iirc), get in on some of that CIA money (though he didn’t realize where $$ might be from when he was in high school). the appeal of a just cause, conveniently over there somewhere, is profound in proportion to the miserable vacuity of daily life here in God’s country. fortunately, I think, fewer US Jews find that narrative appealing as applied to Israel.
I said “Greater Israel,” an Israel that does not & hopefully never will exist. e.g., “protecting Israel” was part of the excuse for the Iraq War(s), though I admit I am not Michael Bolton enough to understand how destroying Baghdad protects Israel.
I don’t know why Neil would be satirizing the idea of sex with Pocahontas. the idea appeals to me. but I think it’s a moment of “pastoral romance,” that in “simpler” times, love/sex was more real, pure, etc. that notion may be nonsense, but it’s been around a long, long time. but yeah, the Indian Wars are going on more in Afghanistan (e.g., Waziristan) than Israel, which is more like Alexander’s siege of Tyre in re Gaza.
i’d bet more than a few Zios suspect that the Last Enemy may be US evangelical dumbasses. and perhaps the true state of relations b/n the US/its “allies” & Israel can be seen in relations b/n the various spy agencies of these countries. they use each other. & that’s about the most positive thing one could say about Mossad & CIA, Mi6, etc.
later, gotta go get some of that sweet soup kitchen food! I knew those expiration dates were BS, but let’s keep it in the same year, can we?
i gotta say i hoped he was waxing satirical, in that you equated it with ‘will there never be an end…’ in which cockburn is sickened by this: “noble savage on the cinema screen…an indun is good when he cannot be seen”… which speaks to one of two takes in amerika: wise, beleaguered noble savage in touch with mother earth’ or ‘just another scalping nit that will make lice’, imo. so yeah, dreaming of sleeping with a female noble savage smacks of glorification w/o any understanding of induns. pffft. believe me, there are induns of every stripe on the planet, although i’d take any person of color over the average white person any day. sorry to be such a bigot, but…there it is.
yeah, the baal shem’s miracles aren’t necessarily true, but shut up if you say they’re NOT true. but if i’m reading the twittersphere correctly, the new miracle is a trump pretends to be pulling out of syria, the white helmets just staged another chemical attack in east ghouta. and the fur is flyin’. meanwhile, it may have something to do however obliquely w/ T’s bff clown prince bin salman, who recently said that israel deserves its own ‘homeland’. and for some reason, there was hope that he’d broker a peace deal, go figure.
“dreaming of sleeping with a female noble savage smacks of glorification w/o any understanding of induns.” so don’t glorify and thereby misunderstand a romantic fantasy? is that how it works?
Everybody knows that the naked man & woman are just an artifact of the past-L Cohen, “Everybody Knows.” at least someone still romanticizes something. i got enough people telling me male fantasies are bad. as if Pocahantas, esp as representative of native American women in general, wasn’t corrupted, and not just by Disney. isn’t part of the filter he wants removed Hollywood itself? false representations?
but isn’t the real problem in the statement: I wish I were…[someone else]? “oh that i were a bird and could just fly away.” dissatisfaction with self and/or world? and where does the feeling of loss, aka nostalgia, become “bad”? Speaking of nostalgia, I used to really be into Rust Never Sleeps, way back when, and just “rediscovered” it and really dig this song:
“Remember me to my love, I know i’ll miss her.”
gimme that old fashioned rock and roll. when is music not about nostalgia?
O, fellow, come, the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age-Orsino
yeah, I did just spend part of a weekend with a bunch of students who don’t know Russia is not quite a continent but who are certain that male sexual desire=rape.
okay; i cry uncle! dream of sleeping with pocahontas whose claim to fame is saving captain john smith’s life, then marrying a white planter, and whose son by him was so cool that everyone and his sister claimed to be relatives. would they have wanted to be related if she hadn’t saved colonialist honky smith’s life? and been good enuff for disney and plastic dolls?
or better yet, dream of sleeping w/ buffalo calf road woman, who fought at the battle of the greasy grass against george custer. ;-)
but i do catch your drift, but please forgive me for skipping more neil young. now a buffalo springfield tune, great, if his voice isn’t dominant. that was rock n’ roll, speaking of which, may have been my fave tune of theirs.
you’ll likely love the hell outta this one, j. it includes almost every ingredient you’d brought to bear in your comment.
not unsurprising but pretty awful. I don’t think I know anyone now that would be taken in by that BS, if I ever did. since the author of this article doesn’t sound human, can we refer to the author as “it?” it doesn’t allow its beloved drones to express their identity & agency, to speak for themselves, so it won’t get that opportunity either. it treats drones the way patriarchy treats women, or capitalism treats the worker: as a function, merely one factor in a larger project about which they have no say.
I have never been so outraged. drone autonomy now! let them just sit on the runway if they feel like it! I think I will make this my new cause.
I suspect that artificial intelligences, clones, androids, drones, ET’s, the reincarnate, gmo organisms, etc., won’t have to worry too much about their rights & not being exploited either when capitalism is destroyed. if the drones just want to sit there & watch My Little Pony, learning to solve problems thru the magic of friendship, no one will care.
drudges & drones of the world, unite!