UN Schmoon...

When I first read that the Saudis were heading a UN body on human rights, I thought I was reading a parody. Saudi Arabia, isn't it the country where women can't even drive, and are just now being granted the right to vote in 2015? Saudi Arabia where people don't even bother registering female births so they can more easily kill them later if they get out of line? Saudi Arabia where they execute people by beheadings even for nonviolent crimes? Where they have a brand of Islam so extremists they gave us 9/11? Yes...
So it turns out all the Jewish conspiracy theorists are right? The UN is basically a big corrupt body bizarrely biased towards the Arab world...
I actually just feel sorry for anyone who had any faith in this sorry body of nonsense anymore. They can't handle refugees. They can't stop miserable wars. They can't fight for human rights...and they just sit around hating Israel all day long. Oh, but how could I forget 'him for her' a supposedly feminist campaign spearheaded by an actress and underwear model. Excuse me while I vomit.
Can someone please come up with an alternative body to help the world? This is a rather sad mess.

What to think of luck

In a world this sad

Does art even have a place

But in a world this sad

Is art the only hope?

In a world this sad

Does any thought matter anyways?

Slavery, murder, oppression

2015 brought back 1014

Child brides

Poverty

ISIS

American Capitalism

State sponsored murder

The failure of everything

But insanity and smiling

Smiling a little, ignoring the reality

Are we cruel? Are we crazy?

Are we colonists

Us in the candy box

Us in the white frothy crest of the world

We fought our way in, we think

Until something reminds us

It was all luck of birth

The Jerusalem Paradox

I'm a bit sad that the recent surge in refugees has been seen as a monumental and exceptional crisis. Africa and Asia have had more refugees for far longer; yet this was never a "crisis." Once again the world media and governing bodies are showing us that something only counts as a real problem if it affects white people. One truly aware of history would not be surprised. The savagery of the Western world has been on full display for centuries. Should anyone be surprised that the people who brought the world global colonialism are indifferent to the plight of supposedly lesser people?

The problems of the world seem eternally stuck. Equality, of the type dreamed of in the Haitian revolution or the French revolution, seems to be some pipe dream only a few pot smokers will cling to. The real question is how would equality even be enacted between very unequal populations. Are we, the non-Western, inherently savage, as savage as those who stomp on us? Has our lack of education and resources made us so idiotic that a psuedo-colonial rule is inevitable, if only to maintain some level of decency? Forgetting how we got into this situation, in which those above us are almost completely to blame, we should ask if we are better off running ourselves as a matter of practical survival.

Several of my acquintances are whimsically hopeful for the day the British will march back into the Levant and take over Israel again. For them as Israel born Jews, decades of liberation and self-rule have been somewhat disappointing. Yet they are sure there is one possibility even worse. They are deeply racist against Arabs...

From the Palestinian Arab perspective the original Zionists were a new sort of colonialist, even if in fact they were throwing off a type of colonialist opression themselves. And yet paradoxically, the more the supposedly colonial entity controls, the better the situation on the ground for many people. Haifa, a city of relative peace and near equality, is under full civil control of Israel. The polar opposite would be Gaza, where due to a combination of the Oslo accords and withdrawal, there is a fair amount of autonomy. There is also now a near total vacuum of human rights and dignity. Forgetting the question of blame- which lies with several parties including Israel- there is a more important question of how the madness will stop, how things can get better.

Paradoxically every "correct" move towards the autonomy and freedom of the people there seems to result in less freedom and autonomy. I am sure that if tomorrow Israel were to withdraw all interference from Gaza and grant it autonomy, we would welcome the world's 23rd or 24th Islamic dictatorship, with the requisite total death of hope for human rights, within less than two weeks.  What moves towards democracy and autonomy did, most notably the Oslo accords, was unfortunately to increase the misery of those supposedly being liberated. No one seemed to notice that in a practical sense the Oslo accords cut millions of people of from getting decent education and health care because of their ethnicity. A few decades later, a radical turn for the worst, towards fundamentalist, shouldn't surprise anyone.

The question of the future of Jerusalem is in some sense a miniature question of the issues in the entire world right now. As radicalized religious militants are allowed to turn the area into a religious conflict zone, sadly few will remember that underlying this mess were cold political calculations about populations. Such calculations happened for the population of Jerusalem, and they happened in terms of entire national populations in the middle East. Not all variables were taken into account by anyone.

In 2015 some cynicism about the future is required in any calculation. Gone are the days when the world could look upon brave new ideologies for salvation. Every revolutionary who did not become a tyrant became sad. Simon Bolivar said he had plowed into the sea. Emma Goldman admitted she was just plain wrong. All that is left for it's great trial and subsequent failure is anarchism. And yet inherent in mass rule, is us the savage masses...and the question of whether we are capable of anything good. The stage for the trial of anarchism will probably not be Jerusalem. Under the eyes of the UN, the international media, the PA, the Israeli government, the global interest, and so on, Jerusalem will be anything but a throwing off of rules. The first failures of anarchy will happen unnoticed on the very edge of empire in places like Kurdistan...but the failure will probably come larger for those at the very center of civilization. Yet slowly the failures may bring a certain limited kind of progress in some cases. Hope, like savagery and injustice, springs eternal.