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Cake day: January 20th, 2024

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  • There was that Islamophobic Buddhist monk who self-immolated in Sri Lanka in 2013 to protest Muslim butchers. People across the spectrum weighed in on the idea of burning yourself alive to protect cattle. I don’t recall anyone calling it crazy then. At most, reprehensible, misguided, etc. But the idea you’d kill yourself to protest the treatment of cattle/Muslim butchers wasn’t considered “crazy” at the time.

    The line seems to be when you’d do it not just for cattle, but also for Palestinians? Is that the conclusion I’m supposed to draw? That’s when self-immolation starts becoming “crazy?”


















  • This strategy presumes that the authorities are concerned with the protester’s well-being in the first place.

    Actually, it presumes access to media outlets/social media who will help build pressure on authorities. It’s a pressure campaign tactic whose success or failure relies on building outside, non-state civil society support. By failing to engage with why people resort to tactics like hunger striking or self-immolation and just making shit up, the piece fails to really make its case.

    While I don’t support self-immolation as a tactic, the mentality this critique relies on enables the abuses that lead people to self-immolate or go on hunger strike to start with.

    BTW about 98% of everything CrimethInc publishes is exactly this off-base and unhelpful.



  • Not an economist per se, but what my econ prof in college put on the test is, more or less, that workers’ penury will eventually force them to take action to raise wages. This includes everything from strike actions to workers in general simply refusing to take the lowest-paid jobs anymore. The fact that employers will delay this process as long as possible and keep the raises as small as possible and workers will have to fight like hell to get even pitiful raises is also part of the theory. It’s a story of gIvE aNd tAKe that ignores the government took massive action last year to prevent the labor market from responding to the new market conditions and routinely acts to prevent wages from rising “too fast.” The price of everything can inflate to hell, but if the price of labor goes up in direct response just like every other commodity, whoa now, stop the presses, that’s an economic problem.