Rama

(blague piquée de façon éhontée à @prof_dragon )

Les connaisseurs auront tout de suite reconnu la frégate de classe A-kitten.https://twitter.com/giantcat9/status/1218621770686660610…

Je me dis qu'un critère politique puissant, c'est qui s'intéresse à la dignité humaine en dehors de sa base électorale. Les populistes qui flattent les classes laborieuses en se foutant des racisés, des LGBT, des femmes, des travailleurs étrangers →

28/ And to conclude, you see how a stance for human dignity will always put people on collision course with certain interests: the sensibilities that make you support the Syrian people and cross the regime will make you denounce patriarchy and oppose its enablers.

27/ And we see how the modern political landscape is full of rabbit holes: they will appeal to your sense of social justice with anti-bourgeois displays, only to make a cushy career and join a Parisian aristocracy of degenerate bullies. Feeding you Putin's propaganda if need be.

26/ And with this we close the circle: the bitterly sarcastic tweet that reanimated the corpse of an antifeminist shitstorm is not only the marker of a personal animosity and an attempt to please the Ligue-du-LOL demography, but also coherent with a view of international affairs.

25/ A political current that is ostensibly Left-wing in parroting Marxist themes of class struggle, but strangely indifferent to human dignity outside its electoral base. Neither antifascist, nor feminist, pro-LGBT, supportive of refugees, fighting islamophia and antisemitism...

24/ Somebody who quotes Todd, Lordon, Mélenchon — all markers of a certain Left so bitterly hostile to the liberal establishment that they are willing to ally with Putin and Xi Jinping, ignoring their victims, tolerant of xenophobia and sometimes even to LGBTphobia.

23/ And then, out of nowhere, the shitstorm was reactivated by some opportunistic journalist — a woman whom you'll find to support the left-wing Union CGT, but who turns out to also be supportive of the infamous "Ligue du LOL" bullying club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligue_du_LOL …

22/ This completely atypical activity lasted for two days, and reaching a point where Peltier started logging the worst of the insults and threats in order to take legal action. Then the bullying subsided. And then...

19/ Peltier's notification exploded. Peltier is an academic researcher, who takes an unfashionable stance on a difficult subject. She is not usually a focus of casual attention on Twitter. But with this single tweet, a shitstorm of considerable magnitude broke out.

18/ Peltier being an astute intellectual, there is little wonder that she would recognise a seeming compliment from a stranger for what it really is: an affirmation of male dominance — basically claiming her body exists for male satisfaction. But then something unusual happened.

17/ Something quite revealing along these lines has happened in the five last days. Contrasting with her usual academic political comments, Peltier published a tweet of a more personal nature: she complained about an upper-class sexist heckler.https://twitter.com/Marie_Peltier/status/1216745846097809408…

16/ Now, a funny thing with political positions is how they come in clusters. E.g. supporting personal guns, death penalty and abortion bans in the name of sanctity of life tend to come together. Odd on its face, but of course we know better and see where it really comes from.

15/ In the confusion of this naturally complex and purposedly complexified political landscape, the work @Marie_Peltier is a North Star: a solidly reliable mark that allows you to navigate even in traitorously shifting currents. There is much to praise about such rigour.

14/ It is an age of no more heroes, of moral posturing, of charismatic orators supporting the very opposite of what they imply. The young, brash intellectual of the 80s have turned into cynical, devious political creatures whose names mark the moral bankruptcy of their admirers.

13/ The great causes, the fundamental political oppositions of yore, become for some mere flavours to package their personal brands, or even more sinister ulterior motives. An ostensibly noble position may be nothing more than lure to sow dissension.

12/ And support for Assad makes for strange bedfellows indeed: American Christian millenarists come shoulder to shoulder with European pro-Russian far-Left unionists, who themselves find common ground with the nativist reactionaries they profess to oppose in national politics.

11/ We live in confusing times. A mark of this is that outrage at the crimes of our democracies has been turned into a lure to ignore the crimes of foreign tyrants. Syria has become a strange but powerful litmus test to tell apart true anticolonialism from expediency.

10/ this is a daunting, thankless, grievous task. Nevertheless, Peltier has stayed the course with remarkable rigour and tenacity, in spite of prevalent hostility and indifference.

9/ But Dall'Oglio's disappearance was not the end of it, because he had friends. One of these friends was his coworker @Marie_Peltier. Instead of grieving silently, she took over his work, challenging not only Assad's and Putin's narrative, but also the silence of our countries.

8/ In 2013, Paolo Dall'Oglio returned to Syria to try and negotiate the release of journalists taken hostage by ISIS. And then, he disappeared. To this day his fate remains mysterious — although it is presumed he was murdered by ISIS, the regime, or a combination of the two.

7/ this narrative of Assad's regime as the only "adult in the room" in Syria has been very prevalent. Support from Putin's Russia for a bestial repression of opposition has strengthen its hold on the country, and it now claims to "rebuild Syria".

6/ After the outbreak of the civil war, Paolo Dall'Oglio travelled to foster a democratic national unity for Syria. This had the effect of exposing the crimes and the regime, and of countering its narrative that its opponents were rabid Islamists that needed exterminating.

4/ Dall'Oglio was in Syria in 2012, and he opposed Bashar al-Assad's regime. Assad had been in power since 2000, after the death of his father Hafez al-Assad. Syria's Constitution had been amended to lower the minimum age for the office of President to that of Bashar.

2/ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And a while later, there was a Jesuit priest. I know, when you hear "Jesuit" you might think "jesuitic", or even "Counter-Reformation". But there is much more to Jesuits that that.

1/ A twitter shitstorm is taking me into a strange political journey to antifascism, Syria and feminism. In which bookish Catholics are good, and mouthy left-winger join forces with masculinist reactionaries. Follow me, reader!