Hard to think clearly with this tragedy unfolding before our eyes

but here are some thoughts anyway

1. I gave a talk for Theory Underground at Pomona College and in it I spoke of my analysis and arriving at a moment of agency, maybe the first of my life that tore me out of a masochistic fantasy world, if only for a minute. I resigned from my position at Minnesota. I wrote a letter to the Department where I worked, which was acknowledged by the way. An older professor in the audience said, “You’ve got to be careful about using terms like agency because you risk falling into the liberal individual subject humanism, etc. etc.” I can’t remember the exact words. But his “you’ve got to be careful” took me back forty years to my first job at Minnesota where I heard that phrase all the time “you’ve got to be careful” not to tread on any toes, etc. etc. Whenever I heard that phrase used I had a fight or flight reaction because there is a threat behind it. You've got to be careful or else….I’m old now so I said to him, I don’t want to be careful anymore. I am no post-structuralist, post-modernist, afraid of agency, or at least pretending to be afraid of agency as I ask for my keto salad, dressing on the side. We need more people to assume the agency denied them by a fully reified set of social relations. I have more to say about this issue, but Gaza and Israel are on my mind.

2. Caitlin Johnstone tweeted this "If I were an Israel supporter, I'd think very carefully about what I'm posting." as the destruction of Gaza unfolds. Johnstone is thinking about a historical vantage point that the world will take on the vengeance Netanyahu’s government is wreaking upon civilians in the Gaza strip. For every reason in the world, the open air prison for 2 million Palestinians would one day blow up: we just didn’t realized it was going to happen last weekend. The Israeli attitude toward Gaza right now is genocidal. But no MSM person is using that word. I think back to people huffing and puffing about the Uyghur “genocide” in China. Forensic evidence confirms that there were a million Uyghurs detained in re-education camps, but there is no evidence that there were murders that took place at those camps, most of which are closed. Of course the camps are horrible and the CCP doesn’t believe in habeus corpus. But if you look at the Western liberal of the term genocide since the breakup of Yugoslavia, you’ll see that genocide is now a word used by people like Anthony Blinken, lib successor to Henry Kissinger to rile us up for carpet bombing of an dehumanized enemy. But Israel is ‘our’ friend and ally, an Imperial outpost in a troubled part of the world. Oh and if you are waiting for this, yes, Hamas are monsters, monsters created by apartheid. Oh and this interview with Tarez Baconi, head of Al Shabaka, or the Palestinian Policy Netowrk is worth a read.

3. I’m just going to state this simply, I’m anti-war. There is a class war that we need to attend to. Military operations involve the US in all its might, putting its thumb on one side while people on both sides of whatever conflict we are in die absurd, tragic and meaningless deaths.