Wow, that’s some deep thought, there, R D Laing. What if we’re the crazy ones?

People close to me have schizophrenia. It’s as much a disease as cancer is. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never experienced it up close, or you have an inability to learn from direct experience.

He said “we are all culpable” not “I alone am culpable.”

And that’s stupid binary thinking and he was wrong.

You are in no position to determine my degree of culpability, or that of anyone who’s not pulling a trigger.

I’m encouraging others not to waste their lives, when they can accomplish far more by staying alive and engaging.

But if you want to torch yourself and refuse to get professional help, I can’t stop you. Just don’t encourage others to emulate your disordered thinking.

What, are you 16? Do you think this is some kind of life-changing insight?

Well, any act that actually accomplished something would be more effective than a futile gesture.

His goal was to die. Any benefit to the Palestinians was secondary, or more likely, an ad-hoc excuse.

Very few policies are determined by party platforms at election times. There were no pro-civil-rights-movement candidates from the major parties back in the 1960s either. Events drove them, and those events didn’t just randomly happen. There were decades of organizing, recruiting, training, planning, and hard debate that went into them, and people laid their lives on the line in furtherance of actual goals, not empty gestures.

Similarly, neither major party opposed the Vietnam war, or either of the Iraq wars, or the invasion of Afghanistan, or gay rights. That’s all just an excuse for inaction. Public opinion can be changed, even if it sometimes happens too late. But if you’re not willing to get out in the streets, nothing will happen at all.

this totally isn’t just your excuse/rationalization for attacking someone actually willing to take action against genocide

Not speaking for them, but someone committing ineffectual self-destruction isn’t something worthy of emulation.

Anyone who tacitly supports the genocide and doesn’t do everything in their power to bring an end to and oppose the genocide is culpable.

Nothing like a little binary thinking to capture the nuance of a situation.

Here’s a thought exercise: if everyone here in the US who cared even an iota about stopping the genocide were to self-immolate, what difference would it make besides leaving a trail of bereaved people and a small contribution to making climate change even worse? Do you honestly believe that, even if hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans set themselves on fire, the ethno-chauvinist goons in the Likud would give a shit, or American public opinion would be swayed even slightly from its lethargic apathy? Only organizing, engaging in the political process and continuing to publicize the situation, along with BDS, will make any difference. The rest is displacement activity that, at most, will make you feel good about your own righteousness, but which benefits nobody.

The 2-state solution was never viable. The power asymmetry is too great.

There have been more casualties in Ukraine this year than in Gaza.

Ukraine’s population is 36M. Gaza’s, a bit over 2M. So comparing rates rather than absolute numbers might be less bad.

But it’s also a bad idea to get into contests about which catastrophe is worse, when both are appalling crimes against humanity committed by imperialist/colonialist nationalist aggressors.

And what’s happening in Sudan is even larger-scale.

Some people think suicide is quite romantic.

This man is a martyr and a hero

He’s a man who, in a less dysfunctional society, might have gotten the mental-health treatment he needed. He’s neither a martyr nor a hero.

and he didn’t kill himself

Oh yes, he fucking did. And Netanyahu cares as little now as before this poor suffering fool offed himself. The grand gesture accomplished nothing.

People are “brave” enough to put a shotgun in their mouth and pull the trigger too. That’s not worthy of respect, it’s the symptom of a disease. And we’ll all rest the same way, since the afterlife is a bronze-age fairy tale.

Yes I do.

Then you’re letting sentiment drive you rather than reason.

And just to be really fucking clear: I’m against the genocide that is being inflicted on the people of Gaza. But I refuse to allow that someone’s opinion should be given more weight than mine just because they mutilate or kill themselves. Their mental disorder doesn’t confer moral superiority, it detracts from it.

It’s mindless and morally reprehensible to valorize someone’s suicide, regardless of the excuse they might have given.

One Big Union.

The problem is that all voting systems have undesirable corner cases and anomalies. The voting system isn’t really the main problem, it’s the political culture, corruption and the inconsistent application of rule of law.

Fascists don’t have the foresight to think of consequences of climate change. They’re also in denial that climate change is a thing at all, since one of their sources of funding is fossil-fuel extractors, including a certain large Eurasian nation-state.

Their real motivation for being anti-immigrant is that they are racist scum who are always looking for vulnerable populations to victimise.

I had a Japanese-American girlfriend for a couple of years who would gladly dispose of the prawn heads for me. I tried them (“how bad could they be?”) but it was a taste I could never acquire. And I’m open-minded about food-- tried natto and got to enjoy it, same with uni, even managed to have Taiwanese stinky tofu. The only other food I could never stomach was balut.