Barx [none/use name]

The status quo is the liberal solution

“what’re you doing this weekend” means “would you like to make plans?” 🤦

Bad news: sometimes this is just small talk and the only way to tell the difference is tone of voice and context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E5MegoW2pA

Say what you will about Teamsters, they fought this shot at UPS

Critical support to capitalism’s contradictions in the imperial core.

I point and laugh at every cybertruck I see

I have many words but would you believe it they’re all in Minecraft!

Sorry you had to deal with that! I’m sure you processed it the only way you knew how. I hope you’re doing better now.

White supremacy and misogyny are part of the same reactionary circles and feed into one another in many different ways. Sometimes it is just as simple as rejecting all ideas of social progress and thereby embracing your new ingroup more thoroughly. Though these groups are not self-consistent, so you eventually reach absurdities. For example, that guy had some east Asian heritage that would have excluded him from ever being truly accepted in the circles he coveted.

The specific details and paths can vary, though. I knew a woman whose family heritage was basically half French and half Chinese (she was herself American). Within the family, there was a ton of white supremacy that favored the French half and looked down on the Chinese half and this peemeated her upbringing. She felt shame at anything that made her feel Chinese in any way and exclusively dated white guys (though she never stated she had a rule about this). So even though this aligns pretty well with my generalizations, in her case there were very specific fucked up family dynamics and her upbringing to blame.

This is the usual way things are, really. The larger social forces echo down through our immediate personal relations, how we are raised, who we interact with, what media we are exposed to, etc, and it is possible to miss that forest for the trees.

Wrong. The Spaniards, and particularly priests, methodically gathered and destroyed the “heathens’” works and destroyed them. They engaged in cultural genocide long before that was a term.

The exceptions are what us actually noteworthy. When there were priests that opposed these practices and tried to preserve culture and knowledge from wholesale destruction and substitution. They were a fringe minority and usually lacked power and were punished for their actions.

That is not my experience. It is much easier to convince people that cops are just organized crime for capital than to achieve anything worthwhile by pretending they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

American cops are terrible at the alleged parts of their jobs that involve actually helping people. The only parts they are “good” at are using violence to protect private property, acting like a gang, and being racist.

This is why key demands when defunding cops is to keep these alleged functions but make them civilian jobs by social services professionals. Having a way to identify and care for children in tough situations is a good thing to do. Cops are possibly the worst people to give that responsibility to.

Socialism is placing control of your country in the hands of organs of the working class, e.g. a socialist party, and by necessity using this control to oppress the capitalist class and thereby direct production for the needs of the people rather than the chaos of profit-driven production. So there are two ways to think about socialism and your country.

The first is what socialism may do within your country, as in what would happen if your country was run by a socialist party, could organize production for people’s needs, oppress the capitakist class, etc. Looking at your country in isolation, this would mean you could take what you do produce and funnel the proceeds to what your people need. It sure sounds like having a large reserve of nonperishable food and vitamins would be a smart way to provide security for the people there and I bet there isn’t yet proper centrally coordinated stockpiles. In addition, you mention Caribbean countries so I assume it may be one. Caribbean countries also suffer from extreme weather, particularly hurricanes, and you could direct your state resources to building resistant housing and shelters, drainage strategies, power systems robust to storms, clean water robust to storms, etc. Socialist governments tend to focus on public infrastructure like this, things that help everyone and improve security and stability. They also tend to promote education and healthcare.

But we should think beyond your country as well. As someone else mentioned, it is arguable that your country is not sovereign, and part of that is not having food sovereignty. If it is not possible for your country to be good sovereign due to a lack of land, you will only be able to have sovereignty as part of other countries’ interests. This might look like a confederation with neighboring countries or it might look like a country like China making it so that when the US inevitably tries to destroy any people-serving project you create (e.g. sanctioning you like it does Venezuela), you will have a trading partner and can therefore survive. It is mostly capitalism and its nation-states that itself undermines your autonomy. The more that other countries are run by socialists, the more you will be able to make decisions independent of Washington.

Re: depending on capitalism, this same kind if scenario actually exists for all socialist countries. They exist within a capitalist world and interact with it on the basis of doing steps similar to capitalism in order to develop. Some, like China, even allow capitalism itself to explicitly exist for large segments of the country as part of a larger development strategy, where the plan is to reign it in on the regular, like it is a caged beast. But really, countries are nearly all dependent on trade and are not able to be sovereign through full self-sufficiency and the threat of US sanctions would be quite devastating just like it would be for your country. A given country might have food sovereignty, or something close to it, but US sanctions still hit it hard. So what I’m saying is that your country is not so different despite having some unique circumstances.

Finally, you may be thinking of what it would mean to lose the financial services (presumably tax haven) income to your country. If you tried to assert sovereignty, the US would indeed probably pull the rug out from under you there. So this “industry” is not so much a boon for your economy so much as it makes you a dependency with a distorted economy that serves primarily to hide companies’ money rather than create goods or services. This makes your country vulnerable, not subsidized. This puts you in the same situation as colonies and neo-colonies that have been forced to build their whole countries around exporting just a few things, usually at a technological disadvantage (e.g. Venezuela exporting oil). And in those scenarios, socialists have recognized this as a vulnerability and tried to build out more of a real productive economy that makes them less vulnerable, even though the US / The British marked them for death. The exact way you would want to develop would depend on knowing much more about your country’s demographics and possible material bases and whether you would be able to align with e.g. Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, and China. That would be a project best suited to someone like yourself based on extensive research and familiarity with the needs of your island nation by doing the work of organizing and seeing first-hand what is needed, what is missing, what cottage industries could be improved and scaled, where schools are needed, etc etc.

Video has a clickbait title, then

Ah, I had been avoiding that one due to the grsphic content, but I can give it another chance if they use NSFW tsgs. Thanks!

Rabbits eat their own feces as part of a double-digestion process. They don’t eat other animals’ poo.

The primary issue where religiom becomes an issue is when it acts as an agent of state interests against the interests of revolution. It was part of the old guard against liberalism and in favor of colonialism and feudalism and has a many-faced character nowadays, Being leverageable both for recolutiin and against revlolution.

Abstractly, it is not an issue re: revolution. It only becomes relevant in terms of real world on-the-ground impacts that are best resolved by local revolutionaries that ask the right questions and do the right work.

100% Ottoman. Death to all settlers.

Diatomaceous earth is a very effective barrier if they move from outside to inside the house.

Many people are saying this.