Anti-Capitalism Has Many Delicious Flavors

Ok but there really is a difference - unhoused is a subset of homeless. Couch surfers and long-term guests on someone's futon are homeless, but not unhoused. Tent City residents, shelter residents, people living in cars etc etc are a much more vulnerable group of homeless people than those who are housed, just not in their own permanent space.

Ftr anyone not on a lease is in a bureaucratic sense (i.e. the sense the cops and politicians mean by it) homeless. This post is correct that it's an important distinction and they're not just synonyms, unhoused = no permanent shelter, homeless = no legal claim to exist where you rest your head at night

If you're on an illegal sublet or couchsurfing or living with a partner off the lease, congrats, you're homeless

Something I'd like to hammer home is that people often think of homelessness & unhousedness as a condition that means no rent, but this is nearly never true long-term. Illegal carparks get you ticketed or shaken down by the cops, same with a tent under a bridge or by the railroad tracks, and "illegal sublet" is itself a tremendous category that often describes people paying more than the market rate due to a history of criminalization, bureaucratic fuckups, lack of citizenship, or all of the above

It drives me insane how many people dont realise how often they break the law and that if the full force of it was ever applied life would basically be unliveable. Like between traffic violations, petty workplace theft, account sharing and piracy alongside how common it is to have been in posession of some illegal drug at some point in your life. People still manage to get away with thinking "criminals" are people who commit crimes not just populations that are surveilled enough to be routinely prosecuted

*taps the glass* hey, y'all know that what you might want isn't necessarily what's best to legislate?

Explanation:

- You cannot be judge, jury and executioner because the division of powers was created for a reason; to remain impartial and try to keep corruption to a minimum.

- Every single living person has human rights. Including the most evil people you could ever meet. Those people have a right to live, to get healthcare, to eat and to have a job. YES, even evil people.

I've seen a lot of people talk about abolishing prison, because it's the cool, new hip thing that everyone is talking about. And instead of understand what it means, they think it's the liberation of wrongfully imprisoned minorities - which it is. But also:

Prison abolition means setting up a system of psychological and physical help for the people whom are deemed dangerous to society. Yes, that includes Evil Fucking People. Recovery and rehabilitation should be the goal, not incarceration. THAT is abolishing prison.

Of course I want that abusive piece of shit father who abused his children to die. I want him dead! DEAD. But it does not mean that that's what I want as an official law, because as much as I'd love to see him dead, the betterment of society and the rehabilitation and development of a human fucking being is important.

The benefits to prison abolition are ENDLESS. But it is also a struggle, and y'all can't keep going through life with a 5 year old's justice mentality. I swear, fandom has rotted your fucking brains off, because we NEED ACTIVISTS. We NEED TO KNOW WHY WE WANT WHAT WE WANT, AND WHAT IT ENTAILS.

You believe in something? Look up the activists who are doing work there. Read up on it. Look up videos. Follow them on their social media. Work in your communities, if you've the opportunity.

And stop being so fucking stupid about abolishing human rights. You're doing the work for the far right when you call on all pedophiles to be executed on sight. Not even twenty years ago, gay people were mostly thought of as PEDOPHILES.

You see how this shit goes? Yeah?

Then figure yourself the fuck out.

“I really want that fucker to suffer, but I don’t want a society run by my worst impulses” is a really important moral principle that more people need to learn.

And can we also learn to be more careful about how we say things, so that good ideas are not so easily twisted by the opposition? 

being poor is so weird bc you'll see some edgy nyt or vice article or whatever about rural poverty, and it's all the pictures that are supposed to be sad, and they're framed as that, but it's just like. that looks like my buddy's kitchen. that's what my cookout looks like, people standing barefoot in dirt, holding drinks and wearing tore-up clothes. that sad old house is my house with different trees out front. and it's this weird whiplash, you know? like I know I'm poor, it sucks, but I'm generally happy in my life. and then I open some article written by some fucker from the city, taking pictures of barbecues or homes and treating what I experience as happy moments as tragedy. and it's like,,, am I off for being happy, despite the shit circumstances? or are these people so alienated from me that they can't fathom the idea lives like mine have emotional complexity, that I don't look at my house and see the roof falling apart so much as I see my cats waiting inside, a full spice rack in the kitchen, my loved ones laughing at the table. like are people really so far removed that they think we have no joy or love? I think, when I read those articles, they think we're either sad and self-aware, or too dumb to be anything but content, when it's neither. It is fetishistic writing, and I'm sad because I'd love to see poverty discussed in the mainstream but we aren't humanized, or given depth, or asked about anything beyond tragedy. Their sympathy is a farce.

There is no sympathy.

Nor is there empathy.

This is poverty pornography with a socially righteous gloss.  This is an aestheticized ideal of a “disadvantaged” life pitched to the wealthy and comfortable who need an affirmation of why they fight- not for you but to stay well-off enough they don’t have to see you.  They need a confirmation of why they toil pointlessly for abusive employers, why even when they bitch about long hours and commutes they don’t quit, why they shouldn’t ever challenge the system.

And if they’re like my mother- a rich woman with seven figures in her bank account who thinks it’s cute to call herself poor so she doesn’t ever need to help a single person but herself- it’s also so they can fantasize about what this poverty is supposed to mean.  It’s the same way she’d eat herself stupid on Schindler’s List and pretend to be Jewish.  She’d have a feed on Roots or The Color Purple and get all weepy about blacks as if she ever could touch that pain- or survive it, for that matter.

They want feelings they never touch in life, neatly compartmentalized.  And these exploiters of people America is comfortable hurting supply the means.

Pornography.  It is a fetish- it is no different than people who jerk off to women and men and children being hurt and abused and exploited because the subjects aren’t human to them but rather a product to be consumed.

Most of America’s privileged Liberals are the same industrial consumers of others’ misery as Conservatives.  They just have a well-rehearsed facade of benevolence they evince out of a sense of class shame because being like Trump is tacky- and there’s nothing worse than being tacky to them.

Except being poor.

It’s that simple.

People need to stop Discoursing in bad faith.

It's tedious. It's ugly. All it does is advance the new social media dogma that there's money in using the Algorithm to steer people into conflict because people will always get angry and people will always gape at a fifty-car pileup.

I'm sick of seeing it. There's no point in it.

You know you're saying something pointlessly tendentious or otherwise you'd advance a point in a fashion that does not need to be clinical or with total scholarly remove- these things are themselves part of a movement designed to rid the world of feelings under the belittling and routinely misogynistic rubric they are somehow inimical to intellect- but can be presented without explicitly insulting people to try to elicit a hostile reaction.

Is it really so hard just to express an opinion without blanket bigotry and frivolous negativity? Would you mind just trying it once?

There's a technique I've learned from studying the therapy world. It's called "I" dialogue- where instead of talking about what another person does and imputing (often chauvinistically) your beliefs about their motives, instead you're encouraged to communicate your reaction to things on terms that are as emotionally honest and free of confrontation as possible.

I will show you: It frustrates me to see potentially good ideas drowned under dogmatic anger and hatred. I feel as if all it does is engender bigotry and harden the alienation between people in a medium that already is impersonal and lends itself to easy confrontation without accountability.

Sometimes I want to punch people in the face for it.

Oh.

Well.

We can all stand to improve.

Good faith is the most important aspect of any person to person interaction.

India successfully lands on the moon

Chandrayaan-3 makes India the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon, joining the Soviet Union, the United States and China.

They call themselves "Moms For Liberty" while they try to ban everything they don't like.

They call themselves "Christian" while doing the exact opposite of what Jesus believed in.

They call themselves "Pro-Life" while opposing any effort to help poor people.

They call themselves supporters of "Small Government" while worshiping the military and police, obsessing about borders, and supporting the prison system.

Following that same pattern, it's actually very easy to understand how the Nazis called themselves socialist while being anything but.

No real news here. Just the guy in charge of the human rights of 390 million people bragging that he is corrupt as fuck, easily bribed and will continue to get away with it.

He may as well have gone into a Dr Evil pantomime laugh.

Okay, just brag you are about to nuke London and only Chris Hemsworth, The Rock, or Jason Statham can stop you.

There is more dignity in this, frankly.

 At least it is fun.

Hilarious, as no provision in the Constitution gives the Supreme Court the power to declare laws unconstitutional or legislate from the bench, and yet here we are.

The thing about killing an oil executive to lower carbon emissions, or similar ideas, feels fundamentally like dream logic. It's bizarre to me how common this kind of thinking is. Like the thing about how the planet isn't dying, it's being killed by people with names and addresses. It's like...sympathetic magic. That if you kill someone associated with a bad thing, it will stop the bad thing. Like climate change is the boss in a video game and you have to hit its weak points

this is silly and ignores centuries of history of militant action and its arguments. who actually thinks like this except for maybe like a handful of people sharing memes on tumblr to deflect from their self-responsibility? no one killing a corrupt politician thinks it will stop corruption, no one kidnapping a police chief thinks it will stop police brutality but the next person doing that job is going to think about how they go about it. its a demonstration of power. its war.

you're talking into the void, liberals do not care for anything about systemic, power or class analysis, they do not care for how slogans and appeals to violence help structure a movement in such a way that it might one day start to prepare for the inevitability of violence, they do not care for the history of violent resistance, they do not care for long term plans

when you are a liberal you operate in three broad steps to interact with ideas :

1, does the idea feel/look nice, does it confirm your existing esthetics of how change should look like, if so it is good, otherwise it's bad

2, justify the result : you have two options either you can link progressive words and imagery to your position, or you look into how it can further the goals that you already set to be pragmatic and possible : make more people vote for the resident socdem party, make more people vote for the resident socdem party, or if you're feeling spicy, make more people vote for the resident socdem party

3, when someone disagrees with you, there is nothing to learn from their opinion, you can only learn by examining why they are wrong, what makes them such a bad person that would cause them to get such a wrong opinion, maybe they're just hypocritical ! or maybe they're just comforting themselves with dream solutions that aren't pragmatic because they don't work in the real world ! or maybe they are actually privileged ! (it does not matter that you don't know the person, just say they are privileged)

logical errors and biases are welcome at every stage of the process !

this is a post about being right about capitalism. would that, if it were true, make him not right about capitalism

but also uh.

The "Marx hated Jews" thing comes from the fact that he wrote an essay titled "On The Jewish Question."

That phrasing raises alarm bells because we associate the term "The Jewish Question" with Nazis, but it was just the way issues like this were phrased within these philosophical circles. And honestly even beyond that it's more of a translation convention than anything else. You could just as easily have translated that title as "Regarding the Matter of Jews."

The essay is actually a response to another philosopher named Bauer, who claimed that Jews would only be liberated if they stopped being Jewish, because true emancipation requires secularism. The essays Marx is responding to are blatantly antisemitic, even by late-19th century standards. Bauer was arguing that Jews who wanted liberation from oppression were basically asking for "special privileges," (in an argument that bears some similarity to modern concepts of "reverse racism") and implying that Jews aren't even oppressed because they control the economy.

Marx's "On The Jewish Question" is basically him saying Bauer is dumb and wrong and antisemitic, and he's being deeply sarcastic for most of the essay.

He does so by throwing Bauer's antisemitism back in his face, by using a series of antisemitic arguments about how the real religion of the Jew is money and huckstering, and so if you want to abolish Judaism, you'd have to abolish economic exploitation. He's responding directly to Bauer's use of antisemitic tropes about how Jews control the economy. He's using Bauer's own antisemitic framework to prove Bauer wrong.

This also goes back to the conflict between Marx and the rest of the Young Hegelians (which Bauer was). He was constantly criticizing them for being too idealistic and abstract, rather than focusing on material realities. His argument here was "You're framing 'the Jewish Question' as if it's a theological problem, but it's not. It's a political and economic one." Because he was Karl Marx and that was his whole thing.

I really don't understand how anyone reads this essay as anything but sarcasm. I get that some of it is probably lost in translation, but the context makes it really clear that Marx is making fun of Bauer. The idea of Jews giving up their religion would have been deeply personal to Marx. He would have understood exactly what it meant for Jews to give up their religion, and how that was an act of oppression rather than liberation from it. Also, Marx and Bauer had already split by the time this essay was written, and they kind of hated each other. Marx wrote a lot of responses to/criticisms of Bauer, and he called Bauer a "right wing fanatic" multiple times.

Like, what's actually more likely here?

Option 1: Karl Marx, a Jewish man, wrote one essay that is totally at odds with all his other analysis on the nature of oppression to be rabidly antisemitic and then basically never discussed the subject again?

Option 2: Karl Marx, a Jewish man and a well-known lover of pettiness and drama, wrote an incredibly sarcastic essay making fun of a raging antisemite that he already he didn't like?

I like this addition. Funny how capitalism, antisemitism and right to exist just hasn’t changed in the last 200 years since this German economist’s time.

It *is* being monetized already, by Raytheon, Lockheed, and thousands of other capitalists lining their pockets as they procure promises of "security" written in the blood of those too poor and powerless to withstand the combined might of nature and technology turned against them.

There’s even more money in entities like the Pinkertons, G4S, Constellis, Dyncorp, and other m̶e̶r̶c̶e̶n̶a̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ private security contractors.  Hiring right now for tactical training, readiness, organization, and twisted scaremongering evangelism is enormous.  They’re taking people from just about anywhere, pretty much no questions asked as long as you can back up your claims.

Technology only goes so far as an asset.  They really need bodies who are (a)morally willing and able to serve on the front lines of what- away from all the public incantations of responsibility and passivity- everyone really describes privately as being a war.

And it is a war.  All wars are eventually over resources and the political conflict around who’s entitled to them.  The world’s economic elites know they’ve stolen and hoarded and that makes them a natural target.  They’re building up their forces now so they don’t get caught off-guard.

Every time there’s been a disaster- natural or otherwise- there have been our brothers and sisters in S̶a̶t̶a̶n̶ private security the media judiciously hide away from the cameras because they are a part of the same complex.

These are not rent-a-cops with badges and cheap 9s and hand-me-down flak jackets.  These are hardcore killers from America’s forever wars who know their pension ain’t enough and CIA work is beneath them, ex-IDF who know the cachet (mostly undeserved) their colonial rep buys them, psychos from brushfire wars.

They have some incredible resources at their disposal.  I mean- if you told most people with those bankable skills they either can flip burgers for sub-$15 or pull down sometimes mid-to-high six figures (high five figures is about the floor), retire to a beach house and a long sweet-smelling blonde, it’s no choice at all.  These are armies.

And just like there’s no firewall between governments and corporate establishments, so too is there no sure dichotomy between state and private military forces.  People got a little taste because of how flamboyantly shitty Blackwater was in Iraq, but that’s penny ante stuff.

Think Executive Outcomes at their strongest.  Think Wagner.  That’s what the declining P5 and G8 and NATO powers are counting on.

I know, it's terrifying.

It *is* being monetized already, by Raytheon, Lockheed, and thousands of other capitalists lining their pockets as they procure promises of "security" written in the blood of those too poor and powerless to withstand the combined might of nature and technology turned against them.

Bādgir/ Iran's ancient windcatcher/ Iran

Ideas for a future dream house

Every editor who writes headlines like this should be returned to writing duties ASAP, because they clearly are unqualified to do supervision or quality control.

Also, some people think the government is secretly corrupt when they're openly allowing the police to get away with murder and passing laws against victimless actions in order to fill prisons so corporations can profit off of the resulting slave labor.

incredibly funny to realise the US supports single-family zoning so much on the exact same material basis as the Wehrbauer system

okay, so, to preface: the wehrbauer system was a project of settler-colonialism conducted by fascist germany against eastern europe, wherein, after the nazi war machine had rolled through, and the population had been eradicated through genocide, german 'soldier-builder' settlers would occupy the land and form a specific type of settlement: one where everyone was a small-business owner, mainly farmers and other small-producers, and maintained a small, local economy. this was desirable both because it alleviated the collapse of capitalist finance in germany, but also because these wehrbauers would act as a bulwark against communism - both physically, and economically. because they weren't proletarian, they were, rather, middle-class peasantry, they had personal stakes in maintaining the economy (due to their small business) and were less susceptible to revolutionary politics, as they were comfortable individuals operating in a market, rather than workers under exploitation. this was explicitly based on the project of settler-colonialism carried out in north america.

then, in the US and UK, notably postwar in the US, but in both especially during the neoliberal period, a strong push towards private home ownership was made for largely this same reason - siphoning off some of the superprofits of exploitation, to give workers, who could otherwise achieve some level of class solidarity, a personal stake in the capitalist system. a car and a picket fence was not only presented, ideologically, as the pinnacle of stability and safety, but was also pushed economically, through programs like right to buy, and through zoning and tax laws that incentivised the building of massive numbers of single-family houses that people could be pushed into. homeownership increased drastically under thatcher, and even workers who didn't get to own a house started to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed middle class homeowners - striving, as individuals, to achieve that dream of, essentially, getting the middle-class life and leaving the working class behind - rather than fighting for better conditions for the class they were actually a part of. this coincided with the destruction of welfare systems and public housing, very strongly cementing the movement towards 'give up your class consciousness, become an individual family in a suburb, else die'

in both cases the deprivation and destruction of one section of the global working class is used to dangle an economic incentive in front of the imperial core's working class. one that, if received, provides an economic basis to oppose progressive politics, and that, even for those who don't receive it, still completely atomises and fractures the working class

Not really super excited about what's happening with Trump and the capital rioters tbh.

In my opinion, the charges of "insurrection" are totally played up. When it comes to questioning the validity of votes or trying to overturn an election, the democrats aren't any different when it suits their purposes. The capital rioters were let into the capitol building by the cops, milled around for a while taking selfies, and then left. There was never any real danger to the election, "our democracy," or the government.

The BLM protests involved nationwide disruptions, battles with the cops, calls for systemic change, and the creation of at least two Autonomous Zones in Seattle and Portland.

Protesting is already being criminalized in many states, with protestors of the Dakota Access Pipeline getting hit with felony charges.

Right now the boot is being used to kick Donald Trump, but it's really going to stomp on the Left when the time comes.