CW: Vegan meat

long off topic monologues

the sad thing is this is indistinguishable from something a wrecker or a cop would do, but I could also see it being completely sincere behavior. Perhaps institute some kind of time limit.

That’s true, space could be ruled by giant bats

Funny joke but consider:

thesis: I should organize and lead because the world needs a white savior

antithesis: I should grill because the world is tired of my kkkrakkka shit

synthesis: I should organize in a non-leadership role because the world is tired of my kkkrakkka shit

this is badposting and therefore i will not reveal whether the pun was intentional or i am bad at spelling

yeah, “workers of the world, unite” should not have fine print

CW: Discussion of transphobia

This is a very pop-cultural explanation that looks specifically at a few random bourgeois actors and their interactions with traditional and social media. I think a better explanation for why TERF island is so transphobic has less to do with New Atheism (i.e. Dawkins et al.) and JK Rowling (who are symptoms of the underlying problem rather than the source). It has to do with the fact that the UK is fundamentally a dethroned world superpower. The UK lost all its colonies and became a vassal of the United States, and for a while was just an appendage of the EU. The same thing that is behind British transphobia is the same thing behind Brexit. It’s the same old reactionary “we used to be a REAL country. We used to be an EMPIRE. But now we have FALLEN FROM GRACE and we need a nonconformist scapegoat to blame for our current geopolitical irrelevancy!” And what better scapegoat than trans people, who have been undergoing a civil rights struggle similar to the struggles of other marginalized groups. When a marginalized group is actively undergoing a civil rights struggle in a dethroned empire like the UK, they become a convenient scapegoat for why the country is no longer powerful. This is especially true of trans women, who are seen through a transphobic lens as “biological men who refused the call to be masculine revanchist imperialists.”

TL;DR transphobia is just another genre of “the west has fallen, billions must die”

EDIT: Not “just” since transphobia exists outside of empire, but it takes on that flavor in the imperial core

Fahrenheit or Celsius?

nip the problem in the butt

umm sweaty it’s “nip the problem in the bud”, it’s a florist analogy

she’s not someone who is ever going to stop using, because deep down she doesn’t have the desire to.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around this issue. addiction really alters your neurochemistry such that you behave and think in ways you otherwise might not. Some people say your “true self” is revealed when you’re on substances, i.e. if you become an asshole you were really just an asshole all along, unlikely to ever change, and not deserving of additional chances, while other people say you “become someone else” on substances, not liable for your actions, and fundamentally absent from reality for the duration of the substance’s effects, and I think neither of those ways of thinking is exactly correct for substance abuse, anymore than it is for medication, especially given the variety of substances and the different interactions they have with our brains and bodies, which aren’t even consistent each time we use them, but highly dependent on stuff like mood, food intake, etc… Fundamentally, it’s a shame that someone took advantage of a mutual aid community, thereby decreasing its effectiveness. That’s really the heart of it. Whether she’s capable of change is more of a philosophical issue. u/happybadger made a good post in this thread about the pitfalls anonymous online mutual aid. You either sacrifice privacy or you sacrifice stability. You either make your users vulnerable to doxxing, or you make your community vulnerable to sabotage by bad actors. I’m wondering if there’s a way to engineer a resolution to this so you can get the best of both options?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSnA2FdDYfk

skip to 5:51

Some commentary: Would a dyson sphere really appear “dark” and only be visible in infrared? Wouldn’t a civilization manipulating a dyson sphere still want to be able to see what they’re doing outside of the sphere? Wouldn’t they have tons of light pollution from their advanced civilization existing around their dyson sphere? Unless they’ve somehow evolved past the need to see things, it seems like a dyson sphere is an unlikely explanation for these 7 stars

scram imperialist

It’s another episode of Socialism is when the government does stuff

It’s another episode of confusing social democratic with democratic socialist

It’s another episode of Americans doing Great Man Theory of history harder than any “authoritarian tankie” ever could

Let me not spend an hour writing an effort posts on all the other critiques I could make of this image, such as the failure to understand that anti-trust just fetishizes competition between small producers and intends to reintroduce an earlier stage of capitalism rather than simply nationalizing the monopolies, or how FDR used social democracy to save Capitalism from collapsing and postpone revolutionary conditions by decades, or how Dwight Eisenhower felt about Cuba and DPRK, or how Lyndon “Forgorn Leghorn” Johnson said this or how Bernie bent the knee to Genocide Joe… I’m barely scratching the surface here.

Social Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. And I don’t care if Stalin retracted that quote. He was being polite.

The past week I uploaded a video of me hitting baseballs in my yard onto IG and literally got 3 women who slid into my DMs within a day

jacked guy humblebrag thread

stoner shower thought: everyone is conjoined twins, it’s just that most of us are perfectly joined at the middle so we look like one person

Quoting the great Eugene Debs:

The trade union, itself the product of industrial evolution, is subject to the laws of change, and the union that may have served some purpose a quarter of a century ago is now as completely out of date as the tools of industry that were then in use.

[…]

The old trade union is organized on the basis of the identity of interests of capitalists and wage workers, and spends its time and devotes its energies to harmonizing these two classes; and it is a vain and hopeless task. When these interests can be even temporarily harmonized it is always in the interest of the capitalist class, and at the expense of the working class.

Most capitalists heartily approve the old form of trade unionism and encourage and liberally support it, for the very reason that this outgrown unionism does not truly represent and cannot actually express the economic interests of the working class.

The simple fact is that industrial conditions have undergone such a complete change that now the trade union, instead of uniting the workers, divides them, incites craft jealousy, breeds dissension and promotes strife—the very things capitalists desire; for so long as the working class is divided, the capitalists will be secure in their dominion of the earth and the seas, and the millions of toilers will remain in subjection.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1905/classunionism.htm

Without the Communist Party, there would have been no New China

State your proposed alternative to direct action.

are strikes even effective anymore

Yes, workers organizing, forming unions, going on strikes, and making demands are effective. They’re not enough by themselves, but they are effective.

I haven’t seen one that succeeded in the way that the ones described in the 30s did.

Taft Hartley did a number on union activity