Ragg It

Noor Hindi

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying

By Noor Hindi

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

He watches Al Jazeera all day.

I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft-my-people-are-dying

Banning Pleasure is a Brilliant Business Plan

Banning pleasure is a brilliant business plan. You feel sexuality as a natural part of being alive. Since (according to the priest, minister, rabbi, guru, independent counsel, or whoever) sexuality is very, very bad, you will naturally feel guilty and shameful. Therefore, you need religion or products to save you. And then you are under control, making regular donations, and spreading The Word rather than the revolution.

The formula is simple: If you want to control a person, control their sexuality. If you want to control a society, make sex a crime or a disease. If you're a modern business, such as a clothing, liquor, car or cigarette company, and you want to make a lot (I mean a lot) of money, tap into the endless well of deeply-ingrained religious repression, and sell people back an illusion of their sexuality. Use their insatiable desire, put a sexy woman next to the car or posing with the cigarette, and promise deep and total fulfillment. Then watch your stocks go up.

Advertising pumps out repetitive messages, called "memes." The one thing most memes have in common is the running theme, "You are not good enough the way you are. You are insecure. You suck. You are not popular / cool / hot / hip / beautiful enough. You smell, you're not sexy, you're really ugly and you should really hate yourself. But if you buy this product, you will be fine."

The product, by the way, is always death. Christianity is a death-cult, as evidenced by its logo (an execution). Corporations that sell illusions of sex are the same ones that exploit and destroy the biosphere for profit. Have you considered that one form of death-pollution led directly to the other? That sexual repression is the core issue in environmental destruction?

http://www.sexuality.org/authors/francis/mywtllaf.html (site no longer exists and no copy available in archive.org)

Addendum

In a silly yet repressive way, which is not unrelated with some the ideas above, this 2009 post was "put behind a warning for readers" by Google in March 2023. Google lets us know that:

Why was your blog post put behind a warning for readers?
Your content has been evaluated according to our Adult Content policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page (...)

What's remarkable is that this light form of censorship was probably done automatically by a Google algorithm, no humans involved.

What kind of a future are we silently sliding into?