Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc
Notice how removing seating doesnt actually prevent people from sitting it just makes them uncomfortable and makes public spaces more hostile it doesnt actually work at controlling their behavior not till a pig comes along anyways and they'll harass a homeless person/teen whatever they're sitting on.
if you often find it difficult to understand how i (or any other communist) could have arrived at a position that flies so flagrantly in the face of common sense -- remember "ruthless criticism of all that exists!" to be a communist is to accept nothing as neutral, to realize that there is no constant or baseline to human existence, only the present set of conditions, all of which without exception came from somewhere and will lead to somewhere else.
"common sense", "obvious truths", etc. are all obfuscatory moves to paint social facts as timeless and neutral, basic laws of existence like gravity, when in reality they are manufactured and upheld in a thousand different ways as the direct result of a thousand years of history
things that are "just the way they are" were not that way much more recently than people seem too think! there are oak trees older than the idea of nationhood! when you are a communist with the whole study of history before you, "time immemorial" no longer butters any parsnips!
getting rid of family vlog channels one state at a time let's gooo
HUGE!
as i write my silly little family abolition post i keep thinking of the segment in wage labour & capital where marx argues that capitalism as a system of production serves to enforce both production and non-production--i.e., when a factory is not profitable, even though it might produce something necessary, even if people might be willing to work there, they are actively prevented by private property--private property enforces the disuse of land, machinery, etc just as much as it regulates its use. and i think considering the family in those terms is really useful--because you can break away from just understanding the family as providing care (and therefore obviously a good thing, how could we abolish the family!) but also conversely as one of foreclosing care--if nobody will care for the child, or the senior, or the sick, or disabled, within the confines of the family, then the boundaries of the family serve to prevent anyone else from providing that care. much like industry is not a 'provider' of work, but a regimenter of it, so is the family best understood as a regimenter of care.
do you think that the US committed a genocide against enslaved people? the US was built on the premise of inequality and racism, and has enshrined slavery into its constitution, a country where 1/3 of the male descendants of enslaved people are disenfranchised from liberal democratic participation. how is that not fascistic?
because 'inequality' and 'racism' and 'slavery' are not unique characteristics of fascism. i mean slavery for one is much older than capitalism. but more to the point, electoral disenfranchisement is just another feature of liberal democracy! liberal democracies commit atrocities all the time. liberal democracies are racist, including constitutionally, legally racist, all the time. the US has committed many genocides--genocide is not a uniquely fascist phenomenon! genocides have of course been perpetrated by fascist states but they've also been perpetrated by liberal (such as the usa) and even feudal-autocratic (such as the ottoman empire) states.
fascism is not 'when atrocities' happen, it is a specific economic and social model structured upon corporatism, aiming to 'unite' the proletariat and bourgeoisie (really subordinating the proletariat) by positioning ethnic/racial nationhood as the true dividing force of the world. it is a specific response of capital to a crisis of capitalism that arises in the face of threatened socialist revolution, embarking upon a militaristic/ethnonationalist project of mostly aesthetic 'renewal' as well as directed ethnic, anticommunist, and military violence in order to capture the mass imagination and crush the seeds of socialism
although obviously i understand why it is used and that it can have a great deal of pragmatic use when applied towards the goal of extracting concessions from settler-colonial governments i v. v. strongly disagree with the rhetoric of calling US/Canadian tribal treaties 'illegitimate', or arguing that tribal land was never 'legally ceded', simply because it implicitly accepts the framing that there is some sort of theoretical 'legitimate' way in which settler colonialism and the appropriation of indigenous land could have been conducted, or that there is some specific legal formulation which had it been mutually agreed upon would have justified colonialism. i feel v. similarly about people calling the iraq war 'illegal', emphasizing that the US 'violates international law', or calling sanctions 'criminal'. bourgeois law exists to justify & legitimize the economic domination of the bourgeoisie--it's not a useful framework to buy into--it is unstable and hostile epistemological ground to work from.
calling the cops on a drug user is 10000x more evil and wretched than almost any Problematic Behaviour Online could ever manage
fully believe that if you call the cops for any reason other than 'being in immediate physical danger' you should be made a persona non grata wherever you go
What do you think of state atheism? You rightly mentioned the poison of Christian theology, and of course religious institutions serve as a moral distraction to the proletariat too… do you think it would be more justified in a Marxist state to have something more like what was done under Stalin or Mao (obv not in exactly the same way) where there’s a state secularism?
like many theoretical questions, the correct answer was already arrived at a century ago by one vladimir ilyich
Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become absolutely free associations of like-minded citizens, associations independent of the state.
—Lenin, Socialism & Religion
Charles Jeffery Loverboy via spotlighttime on Instagram
Banana Boots - 3x walking speed but you do a slippery slide when you stop walking
i can see through the eyes of every goku figurine
This post made me promptly put my db figurines in a drawer and im not sure why
its so dark
a fun statistical fact is that if you run a survey that asks people "do you support trans people" you are not in fact collecting information on whether the respondents support trans people but whether they will tick a little box that says "i support trans people" on a survey & these two things are in fact quite different and the latter is not a very strong predictor of the firner
in reference to that last post i reblogged, i should also mention:
PLEASE LOOK OUT FOR ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA IN ANTI COP ART/POSTS. PLEASE PLEASE LOOK.
right now, being anti-cop is NECESSARY, but some people use “anti cop” art to actually depict EXTREMELY ANTISEMITIC, DANGEROUS propaganda
look for:
i totally, 100% understand the temptation to rb all the anti cop stuff you see. it’s a good instinct. but goyim NEED to look out for these dogwhistles. IT IS NEVER INNOCENT. IF YOU SEE THESE THINGS, IT IS NOT TRULY ANTI COP, IT IS ANTISEMITIC. IT IS COMPARING JEWISH PEOPLE TO POLICE.
just make sure the message you’re spreading is a good one. be safe, and keep your community safe (including the jewish ones).
Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"
Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."
People keep saying, "Oh, everyone thinks they're neurodivergent now!" or they'll say it's the foods or chemicals or whatever other nonsense they've fallen for, but to me the answer is so obvious?
We've gotten to a point that more and more people are being left behind by the system, making it so that neurodivergent parents who could get by fine *enough* in decades/centuries past are bringing children into a world that cannot and will not attempt to accommodate them. There's nothing in the water and people aren't faking, it's just that this is no longer sustainable or livable and of course people with disabilities will be hit first and hit the hardest. There aren't more people with it, it's just harder to go through life without being aware that you're not functioning the way your peers seem to be able to.
kill the rhetoric that americans are so lazy that they won't take farm jobs. americans take labor intensive jobs all the time. the reason no americans will take farm jobs is because agricultural work is exempt from the vast majority of labor laws and labor protections, including the use of child labor. so only immigrants - people who have little to no protection from the law or other options for work - take most of these jobs. we have created a permanent underclass of labor and then say that americans are just lazy for not volunteering to be part of the underclass.
there are actually good discussions to be had about how alienated many americans are from food production (hi hello that's what my only popular post is about), but the real solution to this problem is to protect agricultural workers, citizens or not. ban child labor in its entirety. punish corporations and farm owners that abuse and poison their workers. reform the immigration process so that these people aren't barred from legal protection and recourse.
agricultural workers have been exploited since the dawn of civilization, but the US in specific has been doing this since slavery, and it evolved in the 30s when FDR's labor laws excluded them specifically because most agricultural workers at the time were black. now it's mostly latino immigrants.
food doesn't fucking pick or slaughter itself. but citizens aren't going to take these jobs when the entire industry is rife with abuse - both legal and illegal - and horrific wages and working conditions.
the advanced faggot can crossdress without the need for a single item of clothing
you said that religion is actions and relations, not beliefs- would you be willing to elaborate and/or point to some reading? or like at least defining what "beliefs" means here?
sure. now i'm sure there's some much more recent scholarship on this but everything i think of this is fundamentally drawing on/extrapolating on the german ideology and gramsci's work--but the gist of it is that there is no (let us take an example) 'islam' that exists independent of its practicioners. this is a materialist (as opposed to idealist) stance on religion (& ideology more generally).
so what this means is that--sure, everything that comes under the umbrella of 'islam' does in fact share a few core concepts (the quran, the indivisbility of god, mohammad as a prophet)--but that attempts to make any sweeping generalized statement about the ideological content of islam are bound to fail because ultimately the islam of the iranian state apparatus & the islam of the taliban & the islam of muslim feminists in indonesia & the islam of the PLO & the islam of liberal arab-americans are all fundamentally different ideologically because they are shaped not by some eternal essence of islam but by the social circumstances and communities within which each of these groups is practing.
(want to be super clear that i am just using islam as an example here, the same can be applied to any religion in any place--christianity, for example, is not uniquely genocidal & colonial due to some inherent ideological content, which is why going through the bible to point out violence & slavery and being like 'see, this is what's wrong with christianity' is a futile exercise--christianity has been the religion of a genocidal & colonial ruling class across much of the globe, and so that practice of it of course takes on that character)
hence, for example, there's absolutely no contradiction between, say, the judaism of diaspora reform jews & that of the israeli state--the stark difference makes sense when you realize that they are not both informed ideologically by some inherent essence of judaism but by the historical context of centuries of persecution vs. decades of genocidal state building. no religion has an innate inextricable character--all character that a religion has is given to it when it becomes a social fact, and comes from the people who practice it and their material and power relations.
the idealist view of religion is v. v. popular and leads to a lot of putting the cart before the horse and other nonsensical positions and interpretations of history, even from people who are otherwise 'leftists'. a major one is the idea that the 'protestant work ethic' is somehow responsible for capitalism, as if it did not develop concurrently with the epoch of primitive accumulation, as if it was not informed and conditioned by the development of capitalism itself! or similarly, the idea that christianity is somehow responsible for colonialism rather than an instrument of it--that the kingdoms of europe said 'well, god has willed us to go and do some colonizing' and sent off the conquistadors rather than being in a material position to economically exploit other peoples & developing a rationalization within the frameworks available to them for why doing so was morally permissible
An important message to heterosexuals, listen carefully: you do not, and I repeat do NOT, have to marry someone you actively dislike, don't enjoy spending time with and/or whose hobbies you despise. You do not have to do that!! stop doing that!!!
"hahaha I hate my wife and made an entire room of the house dedicated to evading her company"
"hahaha I hate my husband and I drink industrial quantities of wine to cope with having had kids with him"
MAYBE STOP?
you people will reblog anything
voiced it <3
