i often think of this. they all goin to hell except for linda
Anonymous asked:
I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?
alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.
so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.
there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.
when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.
why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!
this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.
so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:
- the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered
- the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate
- shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)
bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.
so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".
(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)
and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!
my shadowplay recordings of myself playing factory automation games are all so funny because in the moment i feel like zach_galifianakas_equations.gif juggling dozens of possibilities and mental models of my production line in my head, teetering along at the very brink of my brain's ability to function, and then i watch it back and the gameplay is like. fifteen seconds of no movement. place a block. ten more seconds of no movement. remove the block i just placed. undo it after a few more seconds. really thrilling stuff
i remember someone saying this video was published before youtube started normalizing decibel levels on uploads so this may very well be the single loudest video on there. if anyone has any louder examples i'd love to hear them
on the rare occasion that i stumble across online evidence of someone talking shit about me that they clearly never expected me to see, i grapple with myself for a few minutes deciding what the funniest approach would be before just silently liking it and moving on. usually this is with tumblr posts but one time i saw a girl on tinder i had been on a single date with a few months earlier whose bio was her bragging about how she ghosted + blocked me after leaving in the middle of said date, so i super liked her to ensure she saw it
Minimus Containment
Artist: Steve Prescott TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link
for those more discerning players who like their spot removal with a side of transformation fetishism
sometimes i get one specific part of a song stuck in my head on nonstop loop for days on end and i can't even share my misery with my followers properly since tungl started blocking audio uploads based on copyright. that being said, please skip to around a minute in to get the phrase "and yew NUHHOHHHH it's the easiest way" stuck in your head with me
Boolean Algebra sounds like the name for an esoteric but powerful school of wizardry. and it is
man im so sad Gfycat is getting axed. is there any other website i can use to create 30-second-long webms with no drop in quality or watermarks?
not beating the ableism allegations. 'anarchism cannot meaningfully ensure accessibility and safety for disabled people' 'yeah well I'm antivax!!'
Shitty ramp is better than no ramp at all. We should be helping eachover. Saying the ramp should be built to code and if it can't be built to code it shouldn't be built at all nets us nothing.
The ultimate effect of this ideology is the same as the libertarians who want to abolish fire safety codes and medical licenses - if any ramp could be a 'shitty but better than nothing' ramp, disabled people are either going to get seriously injured and die, or be forced to stay inside.
The choice is not between 'unsafe shitty ramps' and 'no ramps', it's between 'unsafe shitty ramps' and 'safe, well-inspected ramps' under a system that doesn't value an arbitrary concept of 'authority' more than it values the actual lives of disabled people. Socialist societies have already had over a century of experience in producing medicines, running hopsitals, and, yes, constructing ramps, whereas the anarchist proposal (whose only attempts have collapsed within remarkably short periods) cannot even provide a theoretical method by which the safety and lives of disabled people could be ensured.
If your pitch is 'under the best possible execution of our plan, where we aren't under any external pressures, every ramp you take could collapse underneath you, and every insulin shot you take could be poison', I hope you can understand why there's a lack of appeal. Ultimately, I do not care at all about the metaphysical level of 'authority' that exists within a system - I care if it improves or worsens the lives of people under it. You cannot in good faith claim that removing building codes enforcement for wheelchair ramps would improve the lives of disabled people.
Customer: COMMITTED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE BY DIVERSIFYING THE SPORT OF TRIATHLON WITH PRIDE DMV: GAY Verdict: DENIED
Supposedly someone donated $1mil to the project to eliminate predators/turn them into herbivores. Imagine the good money like that could have done for actual conservation projects instead of this nonsense.
Why support actual conservation when you can fund nonsense like this instead? 😬😬😬
In the UK there are around 430,000 foxes. Each fox must eat an average of 8 rodents a day. That means you would need to release over 3.4 million of these robotic rodents every single day just to feed one species in one country.
Now scale that up and imagine how many billions of these you'd need to feed every predator in every country. It's beyond stupid.
On the flip side, if one of these robotic rodents = one real life mouse or rat saved:
One female mouse can have up to 10 litters in a year, with numbers ranging typically from 5-14 pups each (average number that survive is closer to 7 or 8, but we'll go with 8)
Numbers are very similar for rats, so we'll just go with the above numbers.
Since obviously predatory species aren't taking out every single rodent ever, we can assume that each of these rodents has the capacity to become a breeding pair with a rodent that would otherwise not be eaten.
So if these robots fed the foxes of the UK and totaled to 3.4 million robots in a year, and each robot is equal to one mouse or rat saved...
Roughly 8 pups per litter x 10 litters per year = 80 new mice added to the population per breeding adult mouse per year
3.4 million rats/mice saved from being eaten by foxes x 80 new mice added to the population per breeding adult mouse saved = 272,000,000 (272 million) new mice/rats added to the population for every year this project is a success.
And this is just the number OP stated for foxes in the UK alone. There are many other predatory species living in the UK (both native such as owls and other raptors, and invasive such as domestic and feral cats), some of which rely solely on mice or rats. The amount of mice and rats consumed total by every predatory species in the UK alone is probably in the mid-to-high millions, and as I'm sure everyone knows, there are still plenty of mice and rats in the country. If the predators of the UK would be made to instead start hunting robotic mice and rats, we're talking potentially many multiple billions of new mice and rats added to the breeding population every year in the UK alone.
That's not good for people, since wild mice and rats can carry fatal diseases, but it's also not good for the wild mice and rats as they suddenly need to compete even more heavily with each other for resources and have more chance of spreading diseases and parasites to each other. Not to mention, with all of these new rodents needing to eat, we would see significantly more crop damage and loss, and there would be significant damage and loss to native plant species as well. Also, this should go without saying, but predatory species typically physically are incapable of surviving solely on plant matter, especially when relegated plant matter found in their natural habitats.
This entire project, if ever taken seriously, genuinely attempted to be implemented, and even in some slight way were to become successful, would be a disaster and a death sentence to the whole of nature and ecology as we know it.
Oh don't worry, they have a solution to that!
They believe they can control the fertility of every single wild animal on earth using birth control and/or biomedical engineering. Cause that's totally feasible. And even if it was somehow possible, imagine the costs of having to give birth control to billions and billions of animals worldwide. Where would the money and resources from that come from? Is that really the best use of government money when there are millions of people starving and living in poverty or on the streets?
That is actually literally the person who made me question if my emotional responses to someone "being wrong" were normal because there is NO possibility any of their plans will ever happen and they're not yet harming anyone by just having this positively absurd ideological obsession, but instead of being funny or silly to me I violently despise them for thinking this asinine ridiculous garbage and for not loving nature exactly the way nature is. Having talked to a couple of their followers they aren't a joke and I want them to die of flesh eating bacteria.
Hearing about gaming websites being suspected of using Chat GPT to write articles about, like, ‘how to do xyz thing in game’ and reading about people being accused of using Chat GPT to write soulless emails for them really gives me the feeling that if something *can* be replaced with Chat GPT, then it probably *shouldn’t* be done, like at all. Maybe *nobody* should be writing buzzfeed articles, whether it’s underpaid journalists cranking out a new low-effort article every 10 minutes at a breakneck pace or if its a robot doing the same thing. Maybe nobody should be doing this, like morally speaking.
People who act like Laika's sacrifice was some unique soviet cruelty are being silly and need to re-evaluate how history's been presented to them. Animal testing of flight exploration has always been the norm, and the reason has always been that it is dangerous and could easily lead to death. Two-thirds of the monkeys the US launched on its repurposed Nazi V-2s died. The dogs the USSR launched into space before Laika were recovered, and were in fact the first higher animals to be recovered from a spaceflight, as all the US's monkeys so far had died - not a single monkey would survive US spaceflight until two years after Laika's flight. These animals were all sent into space, but only briefly, in a ballistic trajectory. Laika was sent into orbit. Laika's ship was the second ever to reach orbit, after Sputnik 1. It was not possible at the time to recover anything from orbit. The next Sputnik flight with animal passengers, Korabl-Sputnik 2, successfully recovered the first ever animals from orbit. Laika was the one lone point at which recovery was not planned - the pivotal one, where we had finally been able to reach orbit, to be able to stay in space, not just pass through it; but could not yet bring anything back. If survival were impossible up there, it may not have been worth it to continue. Yes, they knew Laika would die - but, empirically speaking, so did the US for each and every monkey it had launched. Survival was not the norm, and was a feat achieved so far only a few times, by the USSR. It is sad, yes, and perhaps unethical - but it was in no way unique.