the use of the word “farmer” to mean not just people doing actual, important farmwork, but also include the parasitic capitalists who simply profit from those people’s labour.. incredibly insidious. so many policies marketed as “helping farmers” are really aimed at supporting people who exploit farmers, furthering their misery
Farm subsidies overwhelmingly go to corporate farms, not the family farmer the government wants you to think they’re going to.
it’s so strange that there’s a macguyver episode of all things, where nazis are the bad guys and it feels like something that can’t be made today. a lot of macguyver is those Special Learning Moment episodes with messages like “Don’t do drugs”, “Keep your guns out of the reach of children” and like, i wish “Nazis were unforgivable cowards and their ideology should be stamped out before it can take a foothold in the US” was on that same level again, as something so obvious to your average child that it’s basically overdone. but no now it’s divisive. now it’s anti free speech to… write an episode critical about a racist ideology. now it’s unreasonably political. now it’s blatant virtue signalling. now it’s just this postmodern SJW bullshit, unlike Back In The Good Old Days where we just might not have been paying the slightest bit of attention
that post about who prisons should/shouldn’t be for is really surreal like I Do Not and Probably Will Never Have The Spoons To Get Into It as much as this topic deserves but. it’s wild how leftists on this site see very clearly how
police are corrupt, racist, ableist to their core, originally founded to capture escaped slaves and crush protests and riots
police only exist to protect capitalist interests and, i guess to give the illusion of safety to white upper and middle class people
criminalisation has always failed, always does more harm than good, and always targets marginalised groups. see the war on drugs, see how it hasn’t affected white people and our drug use in the slightest, see prohibition, see sex work
prisons are dehumanising by design and do not act as a deterrent to potential criminals
crime rates are a direct function of poverty and quality of life, and the presence of cops and Tough On Crime policies haven’t been proven to have any impact on crime at all
all judicial systems are imperfect, and risk people being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. this applies even in a perfect world to hypothetical courts free of all racism and biases, which we’re currently failing at
but we’re only up for prison abolition Until A Certain Point. i get why that is, the idea of rapists and unrepentent/unjustified/cold-blooded murderers On The Street where they’re ‘free to strike again’ is terrifying, on a close and personal level. but it’s amazing that i’m seeing people say they don’t trust cops, don’t trust prisons, don’t trust capitalist states to have our interests at heart, Except for when it scares us to go without those things. like if you’re for prison abolition at all, if you think in principle there’s nothing a human being could do to deserve their human rights being taken away by the government, then that needs to include the Scary Crimes done by Scary Bad People. because you’re falling for the illusion that the current system is protecting you from them already, and they’re not.
See, ideally the benefit of a capitalist society is that the solution for that is built in – things like Lyft, AirBNB, and other crowdsourced platforms take over traditional taxis and hotels because they’re less expensive alternatives. The system favors cheap alternatives because it’s what people prefer, which means that every industry where giant conglomerates are slowly collapsing due to their own greed is another industry in which a cheaper alternative can come in and benefit.
Gig economy services like Lyft & AirBnB aren’t innovative solutions to corporations or clever way to balance the playing field, it’s a method of exploiting extremely cheap labor & exploding profit by never having to actually give any benefits to the workers making money for you or never having to actually buy a car for your cab service (or just loan the driver a car at usury levels of interest and indebt them to you). And the more saturated the market comes, the cheaper you can make it while driving down your workers’ slice of the pie & keeping the same amount of profit. Gig economy isn’t a solution of the problems of capitalism—its an extension of it.
Building a model of “cheaper goods/services to the consumer than the competition” always comes with a backstory of exploitation. Walmart is able to sell cheaper goods because they exploit sweatshop labor and their American employees still have to be on government assistance to provide for their families because they’re not paid.
[ image description is tweet by @discomfiting that says, “all of these corporations that “Milennials killed” are actually just proof Karl Marx was right when he said capitalists are their own gravediggers; that they repress wages yet seek to maximize profits, eventually workers can’t buy whats produced & the system starts coming to a halt.” Dated 6/15/2018 ]
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.— James 5:1-6
At first I thought this was an angry Tumblr post but then it turned out to be the Literal Bible and it got 1000x better
As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since the second world war. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in such a remote part of the world.
Over the past two months though, I’ve been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration.
At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the internet for archived versions of our country’s most important polar policies.
I had no idea then that this disappearing act had just begun.
Since January, the surge has transformed into a slow, incessant march of deleting datasets, webpages and policies about the Arctic. I now come to expect a weekly email request to replace invalid citations, hoping that someone had the foresight to download statistics about Arctic permafrost thaw or renewable energy in advance of the purge.
You know how people always lament the burning of the library of Alexandria? All that lost knowledge? How much greater civilization could’ve been if such knowledge hadn’t been destroyed?
The thing about how horrifyingly, lethally hot this summer is (across basically the entire northern hemisphere) is that yes, it is, and yet if I live for another 60 years maybe 40 of them are going to be hotter than this one. Maybe even that’s optimistic. Any acknowledgement of how bad it is right now is inseparable from the realisation that it not only can be worse, but absolutely will be worse.
I’m not saying anyone should be panicking, but I am saying that as a society, as a planet, we ought to be pouring resources into finding ways to keep people alive under these unprecedented conditions; it’s going to be one of the major public health and civil engineering challenges of this century, and we can see it coming. Yet instead, because capitalism, what we are in effect doing is pouring resources into finding ways to make these conditions worse.
Mark Zuckerberg lost $119 Billion dollars on the stock market today (7/26/18). This is the largest loss of wealth in a single day in modern stock history.
This will literally not change his lifestyle or effect his livelihood at all. He is still a multi-billionaire.
If I worked every single day, for the rest of my life, at $15/hr – which is more than twice the national minimum wage – I would never make even 1/1000th the amount of just the money that Zuckerberg lost today.
If I worked every single day, for the entirety of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed (200,000 years) – at $15/hr – I would still not make one tenth of the amount of just the money he lost today.
And he is still a billionaire and will lose literally zero luxury or well-being from what happened today.
You want to know how absolutely grotesque modern wealth inequality is?
[id: a tweet by Canadian Pride @fox_fusion reads:
“Why do millennials hate the rich?” “Why do millennials pirate everything?” “Why do millennials drift towards socialism?” “Why are millennial furries?”
🍓🧀 (archive) 