the earth is HEALING

My father was recently diagnosed with a form of cancer that will probably kill him. For the past few weeks, pretty much the only things I’ve thought about have been my father’s looming death, my virtual estrangement from him, the genocidal siege of Gaza, and the past hundred years or so of the history of Palestine. Needless to say, I couldn’t keep that up. I had to make room for some lightness in my life and in my mind.

The past few days have been a relief.

I’ve reconciled with my father somewhat. He’s still often stressful to be around, especially in his own house, but I feel better equipped to handle and pass over tense moments with him than I’ve ever been in the past. It’s been good visiting him and my mom. I’m only now starting to look forward to going home.

I’m reading fiction again for the first time in a long time. I’d forgotten how easy it is compared to history or political theory; how effortless reading can be when you’re not trying to take notes, when you’re not stopping after nearly every sentence to make sure that you’re paying attention and understand well. What I’ve been ‘reading’ is actually an audiobook. My mom and I have been cozying ourselves up next to a shared Bluetooth speaker, sometimes with a bowl of popcorn or candy like we would for a movie. It’s been a delight! The novel itself has already been thrilling and intriguing for both of us, and we must only be like a third of the way through. (This October, my mom expressed interest in educating herself about what led up to current events, and so she agreed to read three books on the history of Palestine with me. We’re still committed to that, but good God is this novel so much easier!)

I’ve been playing a relaxing, delightful, and sometimes very difficult videogame for at least a couple hours each day. A lot of my attention has gone to music, to the cool weather (which I love), and to the young puppy who moved in here recently (although my own dog, who is visiting along with me, kinda hates him).

It’s good to have a break from all my ruminations, from current events, and from my job. I wish I could have another week off somehow, but this’ll do.

It’s especially weird that they did so rather vaguely. It’s not like they were like ‘fascist figure X was right about historical fact Y in context Z, and here’s why I think that matters’. They just favorably compare fascist ‘geopolitical analysis’ to your blog post, in general. That does seem like more or less just praising fascists to me.

Made curious by some of the other comments here connecting that Redditor’s abusive language and refusal to really say anything of substance beyond ‘I don’t like this’ and Maoism, I just spent kind of a long time looking back through that person’s comments trying to figure out what about their thinking is particularly Maoist, especially in the context of that series of insults they wrote on your post, which don’t, to me, reveal any particular way of thinking so much as a temperament.

I did eventually find some Maoist language across their comments. They probably do self-identify as a Maoist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, though I didn’t see a comment to that effect.

But what I noticed more was that pretty much their only mode of discussion was verbal combat, and maybe in some cases declarations on certain questions or definitions of terms. There wasn’t a lot I could recognize as instruction, exploration, or listening, although I imagine they’d consider some of their declarations educational.

I’m tired. I can’t think. I don’t have a thesis here. But OP, I’m sorry that someone took it upon themselves to shit on your work instead of offering you feedback or simply saying nothing.

The upvote/downvote numbers on platforms like this can be a powerful temptation to vanity, and addictive.

You have the right idea. Go spend time with people who love you.

Last week someone here called me a ‘fucking worm’ (repeatedly) and a ‘little baby’, and told me I should be ‘erased from existence’, along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.

I’ve been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.

Finding one’s way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There’s also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one’s own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, ‘conversion’ to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.

It’s perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that ‘terrorism’ is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.

Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.

The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don’t help here, either.

We had a post yesterday where someone posted a comment as bait, then made a post about how awful Lemmygrad is for upvoting it.

Missed this. Link?

Instead of mainstream social media, I’ve been directing the energy that ongoing events in Palestine stirs up in me into educating myself on related topics, and just engaging the topic in conversations with the people closest to me. Similarly, when I feel too tense or riled up about news coverage and commentary, I focus on long-form content not directly concerning the current bombing campaign, like history books or YouTube lectures.

What I probably need to do more of generally is just disengage altogether, but overall I do feel like it serves my mental health better when I avoid the punditry in favor of more substantial content.

Anyway I think that advocacy is important and valuable, but I think it’s absolutely your prerogative to limit that or pursue that in a way that supports your overall mental health.

And it’s not just you. Mainstream discourse on the ongoing slaughter of Gaza, and indeed the whole Palestinian struggle and situation, is fucking exhausting and infuriating here in the imperial core. And the facts of what’s happening, even aside from the way the situation is discussed, are just plain heavy and painful.

Bumping this because as someone new to this community, I’m feeling it too. I really appreciate the quality of discussion here. People put a lot of effort into their posts, and it shows. This is a good community for political education and moral support.

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)

Too many things at once! Right now:

• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
• Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson
• Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson
• Settlers by J. Sakai
• The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen
• Light in Gaza edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze (free at the publisher’s website, linked)

Plus a couple works of fiction, one sort of autobiographical piece, and some computer programming textbooks.