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rocinante, i'm glad you've chimed in on this uncomfortable topic. JZ continues his slide into self-imposed irrelevance... sad that his interpersonal annoyances have turned into World Historical contradictions and conflicts. over the more than three decades that he and i were friends, we split twice before the final irrevocable split at the time of Occupy. i don't remember what the first two problems were, but i well remember the last reason. a small ad hoc group i was part of during Occupy objected to the way some identity politicians pushed to have the name of Occupy changed to Decolonize. not added to Occupy, but to displace Occupy. none of the dozen or so of us had a problem with bringing up and spreading the conscious awareness of our existence on stolen native land, especially in a context where the reclaiming of so-called public land was the central organizing principle. but all of us had serious problems with the mechanism of getting the proposal put forward for a vote at the General Assembly. racist-baiting was the order of the day, with the identity politicians (mostly Maoists whose presence had until then gone publicly unnoticed inside the context of refusing all politicians) putting forward a couple of alleged representatives of native people as their shields. my sense (still) is that a majority of people at the GA didn't object to the issue of making our presence on native land more central; however, almost nobody wanted to ditch the name Occupy because everybody felt (or at least wanted to continue to feel) connected to others Occupy encampments. rather than accepting a dual-name for the encampment, the identity politicians declared the rest of the GA white supremacists, and withdrew. what does this have to do with JZ? his long-time collaborator (formerly of Eugene, now in Tucson) had been working with the native folks in his area for many years, and he decided that our ad hoc group's refusal to accept the name change was indicative of our own racism and white supremacy. no explanation was adequate to explain what had actually occurred -- JZ's Tucson buddy was certain that we all hated indigenous people, otherwise we would have fully accepted the proposal (regardless of who proposed it, or how they proposed and argued for it, regardless of the counter-proposal for a dual name). he complained loud and long to JZ, who believed everything his buddy told him. Aragorn! was part of our ad hoc group, and this enhanced JZ's pre-existing animosity toward both of us. this is perhaps a little tangential to the larger issue of JZ's disgust at @news, but it does explain a little more about the personal animus.