I Begin Writing Today—For Palestine

Friends and comrades,

On this page, I intend to regale you with my unworthy writings. Kindly blame @CatsBeComrades for convincing me to do this. I hereby officially transcend Twitter and its 280 characters and become—God help us all—a blogger.

I will try to keep you informed, to the best of my knowledge and ability to investigate, as to the issues of Palestine and the Arab World. With much of the material about our region being untranslated and buried alongside the intellectual traditions that we lost in the 80s and 90s due to the wave of American- and Saudi-funded obscurantism¹, I believe I will be able to provide some perspective, or at least raw data for the use of better analysts than myself.

I chose this website—Mataroa—instead of Medium or Substack for several reasons: the website design is simple and straight-to-the-point (not unlike the arcane blogs of the computer-wizards of yore), the formatting is Markdown, the backend is open-source, AI spam is tightly moderated, and the RSS feed is solid. Also, I have absolutely no desire to monetize this work. I mean, I wonder if I should be paying you to read my ramblings.

Speaking of RSS, please do create an RSS feed for yourself, now. Cory Doctorow, that behemoth of the "blogosphere" (and, I'm glad to say, an explicit Jewish anti-Zionist) recently made a wonderful case for RSS vs. enshittification-racked social media algorithms:

Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order ... [platforms twiddled] the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements.

In simpler terms, the algorithm is hiding your stuff from you for various reasons. RSS doesn't do that: it's a simple non-algorithmic timeline of things you chose to subscribe to. It's astounding in its simplicity and a wonderful example of how less-is-more in computing. You only have to download an RSS reader such as Miniflux or Tiny Tiny RSS or any of a hundred billion RSS readers out there. It's very user-friendly. "Board the Ark, my son, and drown not with the disbelievers.” The enshittification is only going to get worse.

You can find guides all over the place to create an RSS feed. After you set it up (3 minutes), you just put the links of feeds you want to see. Here's the RSS feed link to this very blog. Here are some more RSS links from my personal collection to get you started:

• Red Sails: An excellent website dedicated to modern Marxist theory, run by Roderic Day and Nia Frome. I follow their uploads religiously.
• The Cradle: An anti-imperialist news source on Palestine and the Arab World.
• VenezuelaAnalysis: An anti-imperialist news source on Venezuela.
• FAIR: Exposing imperialist media.
• Granma: The official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba.
• Monthly Review: The age-old arcane Marxist magazine we all love.
• The Red Clarion: A Marxist online magazine.
• Caitlin Johnstone: A Marxist commentator and acerbic polemicist. Not heavy on theory, but quite a talented writer nonetheless.
• xkcd: World-famous smart-ass web-comic.
• SMBC: Also a world-famous smart-ass web-comic.

Now go, my child, and find new feeds, liberate yourself from the algorithm. Pro tip: if you're on a website and can't find the RSS icon, add "feed", thus: www.example.com/feed, and 9 times out of 10, the hidden RSS feed will show up.

There is no fixed schedule for releases. Hey, all the more reason to get an RSS feed. It'll tell you when I upload.

I make it no secret that I am not an experienced writer of any sort. I hope to learn through this: constructive criticism is welcome. I will also jump between topics—this strange ramble about RSS on an ostensibly Palestine-related blog is only an ill omen for what's to come.

In the meanwhile, keep your eyes on Palestine.

Basil