моря полярные, волна студёная

The thing about American "leftist" comedians is that they aren't actually leftist, they are the Imperial Court Jesters. They stand on a stage, point directly at the blood-soaked gears of the war machine, make a little tee-hee noise, and the crowd erupts. Not because they are critiquing the machine, but because the laughter is a pressure release valve for the people inside it. Take the video of that stand-up asking the defense contractor if she helped Trump bomb those 160 Iranian school girls, and everyone laughing, including the contractor herself. That laughter is ritual absolution. The contractor laughs because she knows she will never face a tribunal. The audience laughs because they get to feel "self-aware" without having to actually stop anything. The joke doesn't condemn the contractor; it humanizes her, turns her into a lovable scamp who just happens to have a job graphing the velocity of shrapnel through children's bodies. By making it a punchline, the comedian sanitizes the atrocity. The blood is scrubbed off the stage. The audience gets to say "wow, we are so edgy for talking about it" while the person who builds the bombs gets to chuckle and order another drink. It is not satire, it is a team-building exercise for the empire.

I learned a very long time ago that I could post in English on the Anglo internet about my experience as a sexual minority in the #middleeastandnorthafrica region. I could vent about every slight or slur, every indiscretion, all the doors that might not have closed in my face had I not been who I am. But that all it would do is earn me a seat at a table half the world away, a seat that I would lose the second I said “but my people are still human. But we are Arab women before we are queer women. But we are muslim before we are trans women. But we are imperialised subjects of the periphery before we are bisexuals. But we are ‘combat-aged males’ before we are gay men and boys.” A seat that I could only keep if I show a willingness to betray my people. And I will not. I do not want it. The price is too steep and the value too low.

how do you become so well read?