The easy thing to do right now is pick a side. To let darkness get me all stirred up, convince me I know who’s right, put up my dukes and deny the humanity of the wrongdoer. But isn’t this line of thinking what leads to all bloodshed?
I’ve done too much wrong myself to be playing this game. How can I make these kind of judgments without weighing my own actions on the same scales?
I am trying to live a different way. One where, even if I find it difficult, I don’t just love my neighbors, I love my enemies, too.
Love is the ultimate revolutionary act — a beautiful paradox. Though it always protects, it does not dishonor others. Though it keeps no record of wrong, it also doesn’t delight in evil. Though it delights in truth, it is also slow to anger. Love is not the feeling TV, movies, or romance novels are selling. That’s just passion, and passion doesn’t last.
Who knows what will happen over the next few months and years in Israel/Palestine.
Will Bibi be tossed into the dustbin of history? Will Hamas be remembered as the group that finally broke the deadlock and gave the people of Palestine a state of their own? Will America and the West go down as the villains who fucked up the Middle East for a hundred years?
Anything and everything is possible. And the #FreeBarghouti meme may well emerge triumphant from the churn. Marwan Barghouti could turn out to be, for the Middle East, what Nelson Mandela was for Africa — the catalyst of a beautiful new dawn.
Slap this poster up on the nearest bus stop or lamp post. And tell your friends to do the same in their town. A simple act, spreading across the globe, gaining in strength, Friday after Friday after Friday. Until #FreeBarghouti becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Of all the problems facing humanity, there’s arguably only one that really matters: how do we achieve carbon-neutrality quickly enough to save our bacon?
People who haven’t just flat fucking given up (looking at you, Paul Kingsnorth) mostly count themselves as tech optimists; they believe we can science our way out of this mess – by pivoting to renewable energy, and tweaking our consumer behavior in the ways that matter most.
But more and more people whose opinions count say such measures are doomed to fail. They amount to tapping the brakes, when there’s just not enough runway left for that. We need to slam on the emergency brake, as the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito puts it – to avert environmental and social catastrophe.
We’re talking about a major, really unprecedented paradigm shift. Which exposes the question under the question: Can it even be done? Is material growth inevitable? Or is it, as Wendell Berry once put it, “evitable”?
Growth is a funny thing: it’s great until it isn’t. There comes a point, in every natural system on Earth, where growth triumphantly peaks. After that, more growth starts doing more harm than good. It becomes “malign, cancerous, obese and environmentally destructive,” as the Canadian research scientist Vaclav Smil said in his seminal book, Growth: from Microorganisms to Megacities. The curve of growth’s effects looks like an upside-down smile, and all the developed countries are now on the downslope, in the zone of what Smil calls “anthropogenic insults to ecosystems.” In other words: a shit storm on the horizon, about to make land.
In solidarity with Gaza and in protest of the American war machine, activists staged the largest-ever demonstration against the New York Times.
Over four hundred New Yorkers participated in coordinated actions across the city, interrupting the distribution of the Times’s paper at its College Point printing plant and occupying the lobby of its midtown headquarters during chairman A.G. Sulzberger’s annual “State of the Times” address. The New York Times Company responded to the peaceful protests by leveraging the repressive power of a militarized police state, calling in over 100 NYPD officers, including members of the Strategic Response Group, to arrest the protesters.
The organizers of today’s actions believe the Times to be a failed institution that cannot be reformed. In their speeches, members of Writers Against the War on Gaza and the Palestinian Youth Movement exhorted all who believe in a free Palestine to act accordingly, by boycotting, divesting, and unsubscribing from the NYT.
Free Palestine,
WAWOG Press Office
Adbusters #171 is:
"The most timely and timeless issue Adbusters has ever produced."
"Fiercely nuanced, deeply contextual."
"Weaves the thread of the current conflict in the Middle East into the knot of capitalism and colonialism."
"This issue can be summed up in the rallying cry of we who refuse to be complicit in genocide: Just stop killing people!"
You will be riveted to every page!
In cities around the world, let’s whack this poster up on bus stops, lampposts, bank windows . . .
And share this Savior Meme far and wide.
Scrolling (by Geo Law)
When consumer culture collided with the digital environment, something new emerged. Something new but ancient: a plague. Only this one isn’t attacking bodies. It’s attacking minds.
We are all addicts now, with devastating mental-health effects. The only way to break the cycle is by voluntarily taking on the pain of doing without.
Welcome to the New Asceticism.
[PSYCHO]
Smooth apes with brains still wired for scarcity are lurching around in a world of plenty.
[selfie-click]
And by plenty, we’re talking overabundance. Wishes instantly fulfilled. More calories within reach than our ancestors could have chased down in a month.
See, life is paradox, and the paradox of plenty is this: You’d think that instantly gratified desires would be a recipe for happiness. But the opposite is true.
Adbusters is looking for people to fight the good fight.
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