Hope you had a nice time
For today's main feature Rowan Glass reports on the 12th anniversary of the Rojava Revolution in northeast Syria. Paid subscribers can jump directly to it here.
Previously he reported from Chiapas, Mexico on the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising.
Sinéad has been gone one year this weekend. Read this great piece by Leila Brillson if you never did. It hits just as hard today.
"She was a woman who was failed again and again and again, by men, by her own health, by religion, by the music industry. And she kept getting up and getting angry."
I've still been dealing with these stomach problems I mentioned before and a lot of the symptoms suggest it could either be IBS or colon cancer. Obviously I hope it's only IBS and not cancer but it fucking sucks either way.
All of that is true but it's also a metaphor about voting.
My in-laws were visiting from Georgia earlier this week and M. and I went down to see them and spend time with the nieces and nephews on the beach and all of that. We got a hotel in Plymouth, MA and it was so strange vacationing in a place ten minutes from where I grew up. I meant to have come back from it with all manner of profound thoughts on mortality and the uncanniness of the familiar to turn into one of my sad little essays but instead the whole time I just sat there thinking my stomach fucking hurts.
The water was very nice to look at in any case. That's one of my only things. Looking at the water. I still have that.
Love to vacation in Plymouth, MA ten minutes from where I grew up. pic.twitter.com/MrxkZFBhBn
— luke (@lukeoneil47) July 24, 2024
Ever since Trump tapped the absolute juiceless freak JD Vance for his running mate there's been a lot of talk about his deranged thoughts on cat ladies and parenting and step parents and all of the usual right wing perverts are chiming in about how if you don't have children you shouldn't get to vote and normal stuff like that. They should keep that shit up average voters love to hear that kind of shit.
This is what I think about whenever I hear about how important it is to have children. Who do you think your hypothetical kid is actually going to turn into? Odds are just some fucking guy like you and me. Some pud.
From ACWF:
More so I think this from Lockdown in Hell World:
I hate doing it but I'll probably be putting more things behind the paywall for a while here since subscriptions have been in the shitter. If you can afford to please do subscribe it takes money to write and publish this stuff. Thank you as always for reading.
12 Years of Revolution in Rojava
by Rowan Glass
On July 19, 2012, as Syria spiraled into a bloody civil war that still rages today, a revolution was born in the country’s north. A militia called the People’s Defense Units, or YPG, seized a military base in the city of Kobanî. They blocked roads, mobilized a mass protest, and peacefully escorted soldiers through the gates and out of town. This moment marked the beginning of the Rojava Revolution, a radical transformation of politics and society in northern Syria.
In the intervening 12 years, the people of Rojava—officially, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or AANES—have built a unique system of regional autonomy based on pluralistic direct democracy, women’s liberation, and social ecology. Drawing on decades of transnational Kurdish activism—as well as the political philosophy of the American theorist Murray Bookchin—this eclectic revolutionary experiment, against the odds, achieved remarkable success, longevity, and renown as a rare bastion of libertarian socialism in practice. Five million people and a third of Syria’s land area exist within this radical new reality.
Like the Zapatistas of Mexico, Rojava represents a liberatory alternative to the globally dominant status quo—one of unfettered capitalism, farcical “representative” democracy (when not unabashed authoritarianism), rampant inequalities, and ubiquitous ecological devastation. The potential of the Rojava Revolution is to chart an alternate path forward, to set an example for the world to follow.