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

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.)

Meaning

Child soldiers are children as well as soldiers

?

You repeat the phrase ‘in good faith’ several times here but what you’re describing is still just entryism

It’s just another iteration of the Eternal September. Nothing too surprising imo

The crackerverse would holler otherwise, but the crackerverse would holler anyway.

This is also true in Israel. Due to the current state of the West Bank, a two-state solution would essentially require partition all over again, an opening of a new instance of the same kind of wound as 1948 constituted.

When the Israeli Jewish settlements were removed from Gaza, there was a huge uproar inside Israel. If the Israeli government did that in the West Bank today, it’d be a huge reversal and they’d have to contend with a very vocal, very armed, right-wing religious extremist faction going absolutely nuts over it.

Alternatively, if the Israeli government proposed to do land swaps instead (which they’d probably want to do since the West Bank is of special religious and historical significance to Jews, much more so than most of the territory the state of Israel now claims for itself), that could mean further mass displacement for Palestinians living in the West Bank, plus the same kind of domestic problem for the Israeli government in whatever territory they would give over to the Palestinians in exchange.

There’s no way to do a two-state solution that doesn’t require mass displacement by force, possibly for both sides. I don’t understand how that inflames things any less than decolonializatlon/reconstruction/reparations to transition to a single multinational state or a confederation with free movement across the whole territory or something like that.

Israeli Jews certainly cry out loudly today if anyone talks about a one state solution, but there would also be a massive outcry from them if steps were taken to actually realize a two-state solution, too.

(If, when they have a hand strong enough to actually meaningfully negotiate with Israel and hold them to account, Palestinians (including the Palestinian diaspora), should choose a ‘two-state solution’, you won’t find me opposing that. But I really struggle to see how that’s possible given current realities on the ground.)

In the ‘international community’ (i.e., among certain world leaders), this still seems to be the consensus. The idea is motivated not so much by a thought of what is most just, but what is (supposedly) most possible to get both parties to agree to. And China is here trying simply to echo that consensus.

I think at this point, though, it’s hard not to see that this ‘consensus’ is a zombie, and the territorial and political viability of such a solution is visibly, obviously dead. That does make renewed endorsements of a 'two-state solution’ untimely and even uncanny things to see, imo.

I agree that a single state covering the whole of mandatory Palestine seems more just. Palestinians deserve the right of return, full freedom of movement, and all national and civic rights, across the entire territory. I don’t see how a multi-state solution facilitates that.

I also don’t really know how to ‘help’ as an outsider, with a two-state solution. For a one-state solution, we have a model in the original anti-apartheid movement and an existing international movement in BDS. What would helping Palestinians ‘win’ a partitioned state even look like at this point?

Reaction videos are the lowest form of content imo. Far lazier and far less interesting than speedrunning, coding streams, reading/discussion streams, etc. (Not that I find Twitch streams generally compelling, either.)

And payments to streamers aren’t donations in the sense of charity and don’t claim to be. They’re tips paid to entertainers, like money tossed into the hat of a street musician. It’s a different model than wage work but it’s not like a scam or a trick or something.

Using those tips to employ the wage labor of others (e.g., video editors) is exploitation, though.

the gradual technical changes, from bullets to gas to bombs to depravation of water

I’d like to emphasize with you just how gradual that has been, comrade. Israel has been using criminal siege tactics against civilians, like we’re seeing today, including the deprivation of access to electricity, food, clean water, and medical supplies, since at least the 1982 invasion of Lebanon— over forty years ago. But unlike the 1982-2000 war in Lebanon, of course, each time Israel has ratcheted up these techniques against Gaza, the Gazans were already and continuously surrounded, penned in, and totally dependent on the IDF for all of their infrastructure needs. The Gazans were pre-invaded, occupied ahead of time, pre-besieged.

In the particular case of water, contaminated drinking water had already been a major source of disease in Gaza for years before this latest episode of escalating deprivation. There has been an astonishingly prolonged, unremitting march towards this point.

Interestingly to me, and aside from the positions of the IMT (do they support BDS today?), some dissident Israelis like Shlomo Sand used to oppose BDS on similar grounds, advocating instead for change from within. Sand has said he had to give that notion up in the face of reality, that Israeli society is simply too racist to change or be overturned except with massive pressure from without. (That’s perhaps an idealist reading of the reality, confusing symptom for cause.)

I think he says it at some point in this interview. Apologies if I’ve misremembered the source! If anyone watches, they can let me know. :)

Why are you opposed to studying something from the Quran?

I’m not. In fact, despite my atheism and anti-clericalism, all of this chatter increased my general curiosity about the Quran and I picked up a copy of a translation that now sits (digitally) alongside my Oxford Annotated Bible, my JPS Jewish Study Bible, and my JPS Jewish Annotated New Testament. (If you know of a modern, annotated, interfaith English translation of the Quran comparable to the above, please let me know. For now I’ve incidentally ended up reading only the same Study Quran that Hakim recommended.) I started reading it this morning!

What I’m opposed to is the notion that the post in the OP somehow constitutes Marxist analysis. I’m also opposed to the confusion of the dialectical interplay between base and superstructure with a confounding of the distinction between base and superstructure. I also think it’s dishonest and silly to characterize the recommendation of a reading list comprised exclusively of intrafaith texts as anything but proselytism.

Edit: see also my edit to the grandparent comment.

The first time I read this comment, I started to write a reply but then realized that I’m not totally sure what you mean in some places, and I figured it would be better to ask than just assume.

Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.

What do you have in mind with the notion of ‘entrenchment’ here?

It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education.

How does this distinguish the masjid from superstructural institutions generally, like schools or mass media?

It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.

What does this mean? That the masjid is an employer? That it’s a marketplace? Or just that it carries out the functions of the state in Islamic societies?

Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR?

To be clear here, ‘the’ ummah extends to everywhere Islam is believed or practiced? Or does it mean instead something more like ‘Muslim countries’?

Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.

To make sure I understand what you mean here, Is this a fair (equivalent) restatement or does it miss some things?

in the ummah, anti-imperialism takes the form of Islam

Anti-clerical (or outright suppressive policies) have been a real problem for some socialist regimes. But policies that suppress religious institutions or practices aren’t a matter of undertones.

I think in cases where religious institutions are actively organizing and encouraging people to engage in struggle, political or armed, to change their circumstances, it doesn’t make much sense to call it false consolation.

Even when religions assert a kind of cosmic justice outside the scope of individual earthly lives, it’s not always true that religion serves mainly to console, even in matters of personal psychology and belief. Christianity certainly falls into that pattern, but John Brown was not as consoled by the prospect that justice would be achieved in the afterlife as he was convicted by his religious morality that the earthly evil he saw in slavery had to be combatted by all means available, immediately.

I do think that desperate situations drive people to religious belief as a way of upholding the just world hypothesis in the face of powerful cognitive dissonance. But that’s just one factor among many in promoting religious belief, and as a general tendency, it doesn’t necessarily address what religion inspires or motivates people to do in particular circumstances.

I have a very strong negative reaction to this, admittedly only some of which is due to its dissemination through a channel supposedly focused on Marxist analysis.

There’s nothing in the screencapture that could be recognized as Marxist analysis. There’s no science here, just idealism and essentialism (Islam is about not just the culture but the ‘nature’ of the Palestinian people, really?).

Even the book recommendations seem dubious to me. Is biography really central enough to history for Marxists for the biography of one man to be a ‘great historical work’? The next title even sounds like it could have been AI-generated from a collection of apologetics tropes, from its fixation on the figure of the convert to the ‘this was supposed to be an anti-religious book’ move other grifters in the space use to enhance their credibility.

Yes, I think religious faith absolutely plays a role in organizations like Hamas (as well as in daily life, ‘resistance by existence’, for many) that is not reducible to material interests or other forces. Religion, like ideology, takes on a force of its own beyond the material conditions that shape both its initial formation and constrain its evolution. For that reason, superstructural forces like religion are worth analyzing in their own rights (alongside the material forces that are, as Marxism understands, ‘determinative, in the final instance’ in the unfolding of history). It can even be argued that particular religious institutions (as distinct from religious beliefs or doctrines) are material, are members of ‘concrete social relations’.

But an analysis which asserts that Islam is the driving force of the resistance movement in Palestine without any account of things like the fact that secular forces’ leadership were in exile, outside Palestine, when Hamas rose to prominence during the first intifada; or that there are nearby Islamist nation-states willing and able to smuggle arms to resistance groups in part to serve their own geopolitical interests, while there have not been any such Marxist-Leninist states for many decades… this is neither dialectical nor historical nor materialist.

Analysis of how religious institutions on the ground in Palestine organize, support or constitute anticolonial resistance is one thing. Exhortations to study the Quran are another: ordinary proselytizing.

Edit, a couple days later: I still think it’s true that the post pictured in the OP isn’t Marxist analysis. But I also think that my turning that observation into criticism was a mistake, and that my criticism was fundamentally misplaced.

Political education is a task, not an identity. It’s no one’s job to speak always and only in a Marxist idiom. Sometimes a reading recommendation is just a recommendation, not a thesis— and that’s fine.

My hostile reading of the individual book recommendations was also reductive and uncharitable. I glossed over the analogy Hakim asserts between the broader social context of the emergence of Islam and present-day Palestine. Because other aspects of its premise remind me of hackish Christian apologetics books that have been pushed on me in the past, I also discounted one good faith reason Hakim had (and stated!) for recommending von Klaveren’s book: namely that the author’s conversion journey involved overcoming common Islamophobic myths and stereotypes. Even if that book absolutely sucks, that’s a feature it couldn’t have in common with Christian conversion narratives situated in cultures where Christianity is dominant.

It may be true that as a writer, Hakim could have done something to frame his post in Marxist terms, or to ‘tag’ it as not really directly concerned with Marxism. But as a reader, I think I failed to recognize a lot of implicit framing that was already there, in the form of the Deprogram catalog itself, by considering pretty much only what was excerpted in the OP when I started commenting here.

A Maoist patsoc? lol

Jewish Marxist-Leninist podcast The Minyan did an episode on this text a few years ago, which I remember being pretty good.

you probably already know this, but if your password manager is also what you use to generate your passwords, you may be able to recover it from the generation history, which some password managers store locally

(this has saved me in the past)

I’m new here and it took me a while at first to figure out why I had a downvote on a post that literally didn’t even express any point of view!

Bizarre