I’m an anthropologist, sometimes I occupy things & such.

I see anarchism as something you do not an identity...

...so don’t call me the anarchist anthropologist

Twitter was David’s public platform and tools for practicing a new language – clear and understandable for everyone, it was a space where he made friends and enemies.

Tweets 7,501 Replies 51,144 Retweets 24,559 Everything 83,204
Sun 26 May 2019 08:31

so German Jews are being told not to wear kippas for fear of being attacked on the streets. Here, Boris Johnson met Steve Bannon who advised him to appeal to white nationalism, which he did. Yet UK media insist it’s AN`TI-racist Corbyn is the problem. https://t.co/T0DmgXCCmF https://t.co/xeFIeCvhnu

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Sun 26 May 2019 07:57

yesterday I learned that copper, in the ancient Andes, was shaped into flat (useless) axes for external trade, but internally was used largely to repair the noses of ancestral mummies

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Fri 24 May 2019 19:56

Boris Johnson has no qualifications to be PM whatsoever aside from 1. He is born to the ruling class 2. He wants the job. Since there is no other person who fits both criteria it seems he will be our next Prime Minister https://t.co/SQp86AME02

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Fri 24 May 2019 10:19

Theresa May officially concedes defeat in her two-year struggle to be remembered by history as only the second-worst PM in British history, after David Cameron. Cameron wins.

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Tue 21 May 2019 20:32

Saw Casablanca again last night & it occurred to me it’s in many ways a perfect movie except for one unexplained mystery; what exactly did Elsa see in Rick anyway? I mean the guys awfully boring. A glorified bartender & crabby to boot.

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Sun 19 May 2019 11:47

when I was in New York some of my anarchist friends told me that there had been a whole string of arsons against synagogues that had gone completely unreported in the press. In NYC for crying out loud! So is AS only a concern when it’s politically convenient to someone? https://t.co/qF6R0v3GMs

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Sun 19 May 2019 09:46

so it’s outright conquest now: NATO Turkey invades, ethnically cleanses, then annexes the territory of another country. Isn’t that a violation of every single Nuremberg principle at once? Why is no one speaking of this as a NATO war crime? https://t.co/iNZi3WA1bw

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Thu 16 May 2019 09:29

Oh no! Please don’t let’s have to boycott Choco Leibniz! I love Choco Leibniz! (Well, how did Petit Ecolier do during the war?) https://t.co/RQj4snqtPZ

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Wed 15 May 2019 11:15

I find it fascinating, somehow, that both German and Japanese speakers actually do sometimes express surprise by saying “ah so!” I’m not sure if anyone else does.

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:42

15/ because they assumed that IF slaves in Zanzibar actually did suffer horrible exploitation & abuse, then it WOULD be justifiable for a country halfway around the world to invade to stop it. It’s the “anti-imperialist” Assad apologists who basically accept imperialist logic

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:40

14/ but what they are doing is the equivalent of a 19C “anti-imperialist” declaring that accounts of, say, Omani-run slave plantations in Zanzibar were clearly fabricated, or saying anyway wage slavery is just as bad so it was wrong to condemn slavery in particular

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:37

13/ the British empire expanded into a lot of Africa & SE Asia on the pretext of abolishing the slave trade & freeing slaves. Nowadays we have no problem saying that both imperialism and slavery were wrong.

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:35

12/ but what especially fascinates me is the underlying assumption that imperial intervention is not intrinsically wrong. Of course they say the opposite. But if they really believed imp intervention was always wrong they wouldn’t feel obliged to deny Syrian regime atrocities

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:30

11/ in fact there are plenty leftists who support Assad either explicitly, or effectively (by uncritically & aggressively repeating the Assad propaganda line of the moment: what torture? anyway everyone does it! anyway it was justified by imperial subversion…).

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:28

10/ another weird response was to pretend that saying “those who support Assad” should read about the torture is saying that anyone who opposes intervention supports Assad – i.e., that I think my own position is impossible

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:27

9/ states draw on each other’s experience & techniques, even those that are in theory (at the moment) opposed to one another, & imperial forces tend to be much more suspicious of popular movements than to any states, even those they describe as anathema right now

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:23

8/ this shifts the bar for what’s considered ok for states to do in the face of civil opposition everywhere, in just the same way Guantanamo did. Those that scream “but the US tortures too” don’t seem to understand their attitude is actually making it easier for the US to torture

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:17

7/ perhaps the main point I was making is that Syria seems to be deploying a new approach to dealing with a massive non-violent popular uprising: first militarise it, then use industrial scale rape, torture, & murder against huge swaths of the population.

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Wed 15 May 2019 08:04

6/ Chomsky also makes the lucid points that 1. even if a Syrian revolution resulted in an Islamic govt it would still be better than Assad, & 2. imperial powers (US, Israel) could easily have intervened in ways that helped the rebels & didn’t, suggesting they want Assad in place

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Wed 15 May 2019 07:59

5/ another suggested I read Chomsky, unaware that Chomsky’s actual position on Syria is almost identical to my own: Assad runs one of the most brutal regimes on earth, therefore principled people should support the revolutionaries & oppose imperial intervention in the conflict

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Wed 15 May 2019 07:51

4/ obviously the NYTimes is a biased source, but it’s not like it simply makes up stories of mass atrocities like this entirely, or massively fakes the scale, the propaganda lies in ignoring or writing subtle justifications for some & not others

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Wed 15 May 2019 07:47

3/ this response makes no sense, since Syria was notorious as perhaps the most brutal torture state on earth back when it was a US ally on the war on terror, & anyway completely fails to understand how media propaganda works.

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Wed 15 May 2019 07:43

2/ one was to insist that anything the NY Times says must be a lie, implying it wasn’t happening, though in fact the article was largely just adding individualised detail to what basically all HR orgs have been reporting for years

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Wed 15 May 2019 07:41

Yesterday I rt a NY Times story about the rise of mass government rape, torture & murder in Syria in areas now taken back by the regime, and suggested anyone who supports the regime should read & think about what they’re validating. The responses were fascinating.

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Tue 14 May 2019 09:43

the CIA actually had Al Qaeda suspects sent to Syria to be tortured. So are we supposed to believed that HR orgs claims vs Syria were true then, when Syria didn’t even have a mass internal opposition, but now it’s all lies & propaganda?

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Tue 14 May 2019 09:41

(oh & to those who take the “whatever the western press says about those W’rn govts dislike, the opposite must be true” position, you do realise that HR groups all said Syria applied rape, torture & murder on a mass scale EVEN BACK WHEN IT WAS A US ALLY ON THE WAR ON TERROR

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Tue 14 May 2019 08:09

what a lovely precedent it sets when large elements of the global “left” come to support something 10x worse than the Gulag, when there isn’t even a dream of socialist revolution to defend (in fact, almost the only revolutionaries on the scene are among the guys getting tortured)

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