Category: politics

Palestine is different.

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How Gaza Broke the Art World, David Velasco (Equator, December 2025)

“I don’t know why I thought we were an exception. Maybe because sometimes we were. Artforum, for many years, was about as leftist as an elite publication could get. We really did play a role in holding weapons manufacturers and the engineers of the opioid crisis to account. We really did give jobs and bylines to some singular and brilliant people. We really were a brainy refuge of weird glamour married to principle, and sometimes I wonder if mine is the last generation to grow up thinking of the art world as a place for ungovernable outsiders and talented eccentrics, which doesn’t hear the word ‘art’ and think immediately of commerce.

[…]

For years we had been signing petitions for all kinds of social causes, calls for liberation – feminism, queer rights, climate justice, abolition – that were often taken up by the institutions that housed us. Until 2025, nearly every museum had a gay pride celebration. When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, a parade of museums frantically marshalled committees of sacrificial minorities, staged unctuous exhibitions and asserted their commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.

Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives.

[…]

The writing can’t keep pace. Every minute there’s another atrocity tidily packaged as a sedate number in a headline. At least 70,000 Palestinians have been murdered, but these are the underreported official counts. Around 30 percent of these have been children, with an estimated average of 28 children killed each day since October 2023. More than 98 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged or made inaccessible, or both. It’s increasingly hard to hold in mind the scale of devastation.”

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/803783918435319808/felix-gonzalez-torres-forbidden-colors-1988

Free Palestine.

laser-focussed on the needs of ordinary people

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“If anything, it is a very effective form of antifascist economic policy. We are at a moment where the crisis of economic security, of affordability, that comes with basic questions of dignity and identity are being used by the far right in ways that fuel the return of fascist tendencies. I think that having an agenda that is laser-focussed on the needs of ordinary people is what we need, and that is basically where the Democrats fell flat last year. At the federal level and the global level, we are dealing with the consequences of that lack of vision right now.”

Isabella M. Weber, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on Zohran Mamdani electorial proposals. (New Yorker)

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I dissent the erosion of the imaginary

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Untitled (Drawing from Document080924; l’imaginaire de mon lieu .. [naturally] dans le grand camouflage) ii

I dissent the egregious display of power, poor governance, lack of empathy, little disregard for life and the living, the reluctance to help those in need, the militarization of public space, the inherent threat in the display of might and potentiality to cause great harm, the unnecessary and aggressive measures as claims of defending sovereignty, the regressive moves against our heterogeneous and complex communities, the erosion of the social, practices of community, justice, democracy, and civility.

at His Appointment for

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Birth, life, and death—each took place on the hidden side of a leaf. (TM).

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Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid. 2018.
Metropolitan Museum. Single-channel video, color, sound, 12 minutes 22 seconds.

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Columbia Student Activist Arrested by ICE at His Appointment for Citizenship

Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, has lived in the United States for 10 years and was arrested in Vermont. He has not been charged with a crime.

NYTimes.

might be allowed

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“The draft proposal also included an “orange” list of 10 countries for which travel would be restricted but not cut off. In those cases, affluent business travelers might be allowed to enter, but not people traveling on immigrant or tourist visas.

Citizens on that list would also be subjected to mandatory in-person interviews in order to receive a visa. It included Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Turkmenistan.” nytimes.

It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

Emily Dickinson

I protest Mahmoud Khalil’s detainment

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NEW YORK (AP) — Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian activist Saturday who played a prominent role in Columbia University’s protests against Israel, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s pledge to detain and deport student activists.

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

[…]

The Department of Homeland Security can initiate deportation proceedings against green card holders for a broad range of alleged criminal activity, including supporting a terror group. But the detention of a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marked an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation, according to immigration experts.

Jake OffenHartz, Associated Press, 031025

There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation.

Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, 031025

A plan for social transformation

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Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

Annette Gordon-Reed in NYR, 2018.

Figures like King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers. Stripped of their radicalism, they are welcomed as sources of inspiration in the curricula of almost every elementary school in the country.

[…]

King started to speak even more openly and insistently about the “second phase,” which would be a “struggle for ‘economic equality,’” with unions as the linchpin of this effort. King, along with his aide Bayard Rustin, had long thought that there should be a “‘convergence’ between unions and the civil rights movement.” Everything was at stake for King here: if the second phase of his plan for social transformation was successful, “everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing.”

He soon found, however, that “union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated.” The same racism that permeated American society also had a firm grip on the union movement. As had been true throughout American history, many poor and working-class whites had no interest in solidarity with blacks against white elites.

[…]

With the Poor People’s Campaign, King hoped to reprise his triumphant 1963 March on Washington by leading thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to demand a “radical redistribution of economic power.” The effort was fraught from the start, as his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to organize the huge event he envisioned. The task was not only physically draining, it was psychologically difficult. For as King crisscrossed the country to promote the effort, “the right-wing hate campaign against him escalated.” While in Miami to speak to a group of ministers, King remained in the conference hotel because the police could not ensure his safety.

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/773238894983512064/mlk
Marrakesh. Image grabbed on 012025, CO’s fb.

Signal, worthwhile and preferred–open source, end to end encryption, cryptographically secure.