Some Interesting Things I Read Today (14 August)

related tags: #ShortReading

A barrister is being prosecuted in the UK for supporting their client, who is being charged as a terrorist for their solidarity with Palestine. You know, the Palestine that is enduring a fucking genocide that the UK is tacitly and explicitly supporting. Discusses all sorts of chilling effects happening.

Really unsurprising that where you find one abuser, you find more. (Which is very glib, I recognise, but it's exhausting how often these guys can be told on for a dozen other things... and everyone's like “yeah, they make mistakes.” And then we've got to deal with even more heinous bullshit because their behaviour goes entirely unchecked. Fuck that.)

More information about what's been happening in Western Sahara. Though the boycott is unlikely to be a success in terms of an actual boycott (sadly), it is a success in that a lot more people are far more aware of this situation today than they had been. Though... Awareness can only do so much, and it'd be nice to see collective action to stop any or all of these injustices in whatever ways possible. (I'm not naive; I know it's difficult to do.)

I think there are explicit avenues of analysis that were excluded from this that really need to be addressed (beyond more than a footnote). There is little conversation about the hierarchy within the Post Modern Times, which would've been an invaluable understanding of how they were operating. Were they continuing to operate under a standard service model? If so, why? Were they doing any other activities in the building, adding to the communal atmosphere? Or was it explicitly a restaurant? The latter means that people who come in are unlikely to talk to each other outside of their own groups. This isn't so much a post mortem as it is a speculation that is attempting to not “moralise” despite the fact that the very topic their addressing is primarily around class and race. (Also, what is wrong with moralising? If white people stop going to places because more Black people show up, there is still a component of racism even if those white people aren't doing it through explicit racism. The same is true of how people treat homeless people; there is a component of not wanting to occupy the same space as homeless people, even if it's not explicit anti-homeless behaviour. I think the framing of this is strange.)