Hey all you fired-up rabble rousers out there,
Among the thousands of Palestinians locked up in Israel’s jails is Marwan Barghouti, leader of the first and second intifadas. Barghouti survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 2001 only to be arrested and charged with terrorist violence. At his trial, he refused to present a defense in protest of the illegitimate charges brought against him by the Israeli authorities.
Detained in abusive conditions since 2002, Barghouti is serving five life sentences plus forty years.
Most Israelis see him as a terrorist, but on the Palestinian street, he is known as “the Palestinian Mandela.”
Like Mandela, Barghouti has fought against military occupation and apartheid by violent and non-violent means. He has advocated cooperation between neighboring peoples. And he has endured inhumane and degrading treatment at the hands of his jailers.
Mandela spent 27 years in prison. Barghouti has weathered 22.
In the name of justice and reconciliation, We the People of the world demand Israeli authorities release Barghouti.
Recent polls show he would beat Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an open election. He has what it takes to unite his people and lead them towards a state alongside Israel.
The circle of people calling for a #FreeBarghouti is expanding! Extinction Rebellion has jumped on board — whacking up FREE BARGHOUTI posters everywhere as part of their Global Week of Action. Now we need more activist groups to get this poster up in cities around the world.
Barghouti could be the secret sauce to a beautiful new reality in the Middle East.
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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 cities around the world, let’s whack this poster up on bus stops, lampposts, bank windows . . .
And share this Savior Meme far and wide.
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.
Hamas, at heart, are freedom fighters.
There, I said it. And now I'll probably pay for it.
Because there are boundaries around how we can talk about Oct 7. You can support the Palestinians: yes. But showing any sympathy at all for Hamas, is beyond the pale — you'll get doxxed, cancelled, vilified as an antisemite and worse.
But fuck it, I'll say it anyway: They're freedom fighters!
What these young men actually did on Oct 7 was brutal and barbaric and in many cases impossible to defend. But why they did it, that's easier to understand. When you put a certain kind of person in a chokehold for long enough, they go off in ways you're not going to like. Imagine you — and your people — are fenced in, caged up in an open-air prison for sixteen years. You have no hope, no dignity, no future. You're mowed down by remote-control machine guns if you wander too close to the razor-wire fence. Your daily caloric intake is restricted to near-starvation levels. Your children routinely have suicidal thoughts. And there's no light at the end of this — you're trapped like an animal.
So what do you do? You burst out of your cage with feral ferocity — you're a barbaric terrorist yes, yes, yes — but fuck it, you're a freedom fighter too.
— Kalle Lasn
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I knew right away that America’s noisy worshipping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies and extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American Dream.
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!
Every one of the 195 countries on earth is itself a living organism — an autonomous component within the larger biological unit. Every citizen is a cell within the body politic. Very likely Gaia herself is one of many living planets peppered throughout the universe.
If that sounds overly touchy-feely, it's only because our horizons have been squeezed so radically by hyper rationalism that we can no longer feel the deeper dimensions of being human. But now that we're entering the planetary endgame, we'd damn well better find a way to feel it again.
If you understand your country as a fragile, hypersensitive, living organism, the questions become very basic: How do you keep her fed and safe and self-sustaining? How do you keep the people happy? How do you encourage them to play fairly with each other? How do you empower them to make wise decisions?
Suddenly "politics" is no longer just a bloodless exercise that we can choose to dabble in or not. It isn't just about reading indicators (housing starts, polling integrity, polity scores) or tweaking the mixing board (electoral boundaries, reserve requirements, cabinet size). It isn't about crowding under the umbrella of your nation's military might or rallying around its sloganeering. It isn't even about being on the Left or the Right.
Instead, it's something else entirely, something personal and universal at once, an overarching concept that captures every aspect of being, staying alive and thriving on our fragile planet.
Call it biopolitics.
You wake up in the morning and think, "Hallelujah" my country is alive, and I am part of it. I'm going to nourish this organism: feed it, prune it, protect it. My involvement in politics is as natural as fish schooling up. I shed a portion of my self, my rights, my me-first instincts, to serve a greater good.
The personal payoff is that, as your politics expands and matures in this biocentric way, you feel less lonely, more involved. And a new personal mantra bubbles up.
I connect, therefore I am.
As Bruno Latour so poignantly pointed out before he died, bioconsciousness holds out the promise of a renaissance-like reset of the sciences, the arts, the law, and politics... it offers us hope for a new kind of civilization: one in which we put aside human mastery and learn the 'languages' of rivers, mountains, oil pipelines, baboons, voodoo dolls, and viruses. For these are the many murmurs of Earth itself, growing louder and louder.
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.
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