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soup de jour: soup of the day
soup de jure: soup the government wants you to eat
soup de facto: the soup everyone actually eats
soup de resistance: a very impressive and popular soup emerges...
soup d'etat: ousting the previous soup of the day and installing your own
soup de grace: execution of the deposed soup of the day
been doing some research on Lin Yinhe and it's interesting just how much her very existence clashes with popular narratives on china. consistently through her life Lin has been vocal about how she thinks china should legalize gay marriage, pornography, prostitution, and orgies, and has at various times petitioned the government on these issues. did the CPC execute her? arrest her? perhaps harass and torment her for criticizing them until she was bullied into silence?
no, she remained a member of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 1992 till her retirement in 2012, even becoming director of the Research Office of Family and Sexuality. certainly she attracted controversy and criticism, but at no point was her ability to voice her criticisms in real jeopardy- nor, indeed, was her job at a state-run research facility.
like it's just such a blatant demonstration that the narrative of china as a totalitarian dystopia where all dissent is brutally crushed isn't accurate, like very visibly you can spend your entire life criticizing the government's policies and be fine.
(note: nobody argue about pornography or sex work in the notes of this post, that's not what this post is about)
This is an imperfect "experiment" over a complex subject, but it's a thing I like to do to visualize the sheer gap between the dollar and the brazilian real, which is checking "how many federal minimum wage hours would take to buy a thing". It goes like this:
Under the US federal minimum wage of USD 7.25 per hour, a copy of Sid Meier's Civilization VI on Steam (priced at USD 59.99) would come around at 8.2 hours.
That same game is sold on Brazil at BRL 129.00. At the current federal minimum wage of BRL 6.90 per hour, that comes around at 18.6 hours.
That is, however, after the publisher has already applied Steam's dynamic pricing to lower the cost of the game for our region. At its full dollar price, the game would cost around BRL 350, being generous with the conversion rate. How many federal minimum wage hours do you think that is?
To further the "experiment", let's talk a bit more about how the money is distributed:
According to the last census, about 60% of the population doesn't even make minimum wage per household per capita.
So if you pick a Brazilian at random, the number of worked hours will probably balloon because of household expenses.
A STEM graduate (engineers, architects, programmers, etc.) fresh out of university is expected to make around 40 to 60% of US minimum wage in their first real job.
This is seen as a lot of money: enough for a person to comfortably live alone in a rented apartment; enough for a person to make a down payment on a house and pay all the installments of the mortage after two or so years of saving up.
That is to say, Brazilian Middle Class makes less than US minimum wage worker if we're talking in raw dollar amounts.
According to the last census, over 95% of the population make less money than US minimum wage (per household per capita).
Petrobras is the biggest Brazilian company - it injects billions of reais in the Brazilian economy via taxes and government payouts alone.
Petrobras workers also tend to make a shitton of money. The most a normal Petrobras worker (i.e.: not a CEO or a Director or other high level admin) can make is a little over 16 USD / hour.
There are minimum wage workers in Bumfuck, Connecticut making more money than literal Brazilian 1%ers
TRANS EXCLUSIONARY RADICAL FEMINISM
If you ask a TERF what the "radical" in "radical feminism" means, chances are she will tell you that it refers to locating the root cause of women's oppression in their belonging to a "sex class"* that is subjugated under patriarchy for the sake of controlling their reproductive capacity ("radical" being used in the sense of "pertaining to the root").
(*not all TERFs use "sex class" terminology, but the structure of the arguments being made is largely identical.)
The "trans exclusionary" part refers to trans women being excluded from the scope of the analysis that this kind of feminism offers on account of not belonging to the "sex class" whose reproductive capacity (i.e. the ability to bear children) is being controlled.
"Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism", for as long as that term has existed, has never "excluded" all trans people from its analysis. It has always "included" transmasculine people (whose gender is usually disregarded and disrespected by its proponents) as "belonging to the sex class" whose reproductive capacity is being controlled. TERFs have used the expression "You can't identify your way out of oppression" illustrating this idea to the point of it becoming a cliche.
That isn't to say that TERFs necessarily like transmasculine people: The charge of pursuing an individual solution to a structural problem - that trans men are "members of the female sex class trying to escape their oppression" through misguided means, that trans men are simply trying to change their location from oppressed to oppressor while leaving the oppressive structure intact - has been frequently directed at transmasculine people.
This accusation, however, is only one of attempting to do so: TERFs do not believe that it's actually possible to escape "sex based oppression" by way of transitioning or any other individual action. They do not believe that transmasculine people are granted a position that allows them to benefit from "sex based oppression" as they do not believe patriarchy allows "women" to escape their "sex class".
The account that TERFs offer of transfems' plight under patriarchy is simply that they are facing a secondary oppression as "gender non conforming males" for subverting the gender roles assigned to them on the basis of their "sex class" as "males". According to TERF analysis, trans women are not oppressed on the basis of their womanhood because the oppression of women is "sex based oppression" aimed at controlling the reproductive capacity of the "female sex class".
The charge that TERFs make against trans women (which serves as the basis for excluding them from feminist organizing) is that they are infiltrating and derailing/subverting feminism. Trans women are thought to be "males" (biologically, physically, socially, psychologically etc.) whose interests are not aligned with those of the "female sex class" but with those of the "male sex class" and who will therefore divert the goals of feminism away from the liberation of the "female sex class" if granted the right to participate in the formulation of feminist agendas.
The actual interests of transmasculine people are thought by TERFs to align with the liberation of the "female sex class" so they see no reason to exclude them from feminist organizing. At most, transmasculine people are thought of as having a "false consciousness" and being mistaken about what is and isn't in their interest on account of identifying with an oppressor class they are not actually a part of.
Do TERFs hate men? That depends on what is meant by "hate" and "men". To TERFs "men" means "members of the male sex class" (cis men, transfems) and doesn't include trans men (whom they view as "women"/"members of the female sex class"). TERFs believe that "men" have structural power over "women" based on these sex classes. They believe that there are coherent class interests that unite the members of each "sex class". How they actually "feel" about "men" is somewhat variable and ranges from relatively neutral academic analyses viewing them as an oppressor class to ascribing them more or less demonic essential characteristics.
Trans women aren't seen like other "men" by TERFs though: They are conceptualized (in explicitly conspiratorial terms) as something like the storm troopers of patriarchy - an especially militant advance force (possibly giving up their humanity and becoming a kind of medically constructed monstrosity) to strike at the core of feminism with the goal of hollowing it out and clearing the path for "colonizing" and resorbing it into the patriarchal mainstream. Trans women are understood as an especially nefarious category of person because they are seen as posing a direct threat to the ability of "women as a sex class" to organize among themselves, to develop and use the language and theory they need to understand their own oppression and thereby resist patriarchy and bring about their liberation. Trans women are not just seen as attackers of "female safe spaces", they are seen as the attack itself. Their very existence is made out to be a stratagem devised against feminism and "women".
How and why the "sex class interests" of transfems supposedly align with those of "men" is never quite explained in materialist terms. In this point, TERFs invariably have to fall back on idealist concepts like biological determinism, spiritual essence, socialization, etc. Whereas transmasculine people are seen as having a "false consciousness" for mistaking where their material interests lie, the question of the material interests of transfems is never quite advanced. By some mechanism, by some unexplained (and sometimes metaphysical) force they benefit from "sex based oppression" in ways that e.g. an infertile cis woman would not. It essentially doesn't matter, it's an a priori assumption. "Belonging" to the "male sex class" itself is thought to grant access to structural power and the ability to benefit from "sex based oppression", even when no real world mechanism to that effect exists.
"Hating men" is neither a defining nor a unique feature of TERF ideology. There are some TERFs who arguably do hate men and there are others who do not. There are feminists who "hate men" in nearly every school of feminism. Even the most toothless iteration of liberal "girl power" feminism had its "male tears" mugs. The defining feature of TERF ideology is the exclusion of trans women from its conceptualization of women's oppression and from feminist organizing, justified with the supposed "class interests" of trans women being those of the "male sex class".
Trying the redefine the meaning of "TERF" in an attempt to obfuscate the specificity of this ideology's hostility towards transfems is dishonest and transmisogynistic on its own. Trying to do so while also claiming that transfems' material interests actually do align with those of cis men, the central distinguishing claim of TERF ideology, is such an unbelievably repulsive act of hypocrisy that it should disqualify anyone who does so from participating in the discourse surrounding trans women's oppression entirely.
I saw how you said that describing the PRC as capitalist betrays a lack of understanding of capitalism and I actually really liked how well you explained that being against capitalism isn't proper Marxism/communism so I was wondering if you could open that post on understanding capitalism a bit more! Only if you're okay with it, of course!
Eventually I should do a real proper Effortpost on this with all the graphs and figures to really drive home the point that I'm making, but very briefly since it's getting late here:
In Marx's time, capitalism was an emergent societal mode of production that was closely entertwined with the enclosure movement and the industrial revolution. On the level of labor, it saw the decline of peasant and artisan labor and the rise of proletarianization, and with it the tendencies of mechanization and rationalization of production (e.g. de-skilling of manufacturing and measurement of efficiency by the labor-hour)
On a consistent historical level, from Marx's time to ours, capitalism has been characterized by the role of liquidity holders (e.g. banks, joint stock companies, investment funds &c) in investigating growth industries and investing in them for the purpose of greater profit. Notably: the demand from financial actors for returns on their balance-sheets is constant, regardless of the state of the development in any given productive market. Meanwhile the nature of industrial development is that it happens in fits and starts, in great surging advances followed by relatively stagnant plateaus. The results of this mismatch are twofold:
First, as Lenin chronicled, it leads for a demand to engage in imperialist expansion to open new markets and seek new profits that way. The other, arguably larger and more important frontier however is that of speculation. Because the inflation of the value of an asset creates purchasing power in and of itself in the short term, which is maintained on balance sheets so long as the arrears on credit derived on it keeps getting paid on a notional path to amortizaiton.
The tendency in capitalism since Marx's time has been the ever-growing importance of these two dynamics and the gradual receding of the importance of low-elasticity economic activity like manufacturing goods.
The tendency of imperialist expansion within capitalism has created a networked global bourgeoisie throughout the financial capitals of the world who extract rentier profits from the various rural peripheries of the global south, and the speculative nature of investment capital in the late 20th and early 21st century defines the quality of the "capitalist develpment" we see in bourgeois states in the contemporary global south: namely, extremely uneven development between rural and urban, trapping of the labor force in a holding-pattern of low-pay low-skill work such as textile production or low-end manufacturing (e.g. Bangladesh and Malaysia) while their capitals enjoy wealth near that of the imperial core, with relatively very high-paying jobs in the knowledge industries (this should ring a bell with India lol). Any country that is actually ruled by its bourgeoisie will follow this pattern, because financialized paper profits are larger (in nominal terms) than the highly investment-intensive industrial development that has gone on in the PRC under the stewardship of the Party. However the result is that the PRC has relatively low inequality among middle-income countries and the technological benefits of the industrialization led by cities is beginning to flow to rural China, which is what allowed them to lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty, something that has yet to happen in actually capitalist bourgeis states like India.
So to catch you up to speed
Luigi Mangione is an innocent man who has not been confirmed to have been involved in any crime.
We have police documents confirming he was not DNA tested or fingerprinted, and confirmation no usable DNA or fingerprints were recovered at the crime scene due to incomplete prints and immense DNA contamination of New Yorks streets.
No evidence has linked him to the crime.
No facial recognition has even remotely come close to identifying the cctv suspects face as that of Luigi. His own family and friends do not see a resemblance. Most people agree the features in the cctv do not match the very well documented features of Luigi Mangione.
Luigi Mangione has no history of violence nor with firearms. He is a vegan pacifist with no history of mental illness and an aversion to killing even bugs.
He is still only a SUSPECT and all involvement in any crimes are merely ALLEGED at this time. Alleged by the most corrupt police force in the entire nation; the NYPD who do more organized crime than they've ever stopped.
Luigi Mangione's attorneys confirmed they have been shown absolutely nothing that even places Luigi at the scene of the crime.
People have repeatedly tried to recreate the entire timeline of events and found it is not physically possible to do what was alleged in the time frame police gave. Especially dubious for Luigi Mangione to have done given his recent, crippling back injury.
Luigi Mangione in his own words has said police planted evidence on him and are not being honest about his arrest or what he had on him at the time.
There is no body cam footage of Luigi's arrest.
There is no autopsy report for Brian Thompson.
Luigi has so far been:
Stripped of his hat, jacket and shoes and forced to walk in the cold in December wearing wet socks.
Forced to urinate on himself where police then took and published humiliation photos of him.
He was then stripped of his shirt pants and socks and put in a blue psychiatric gown and strapped to a chair inmates called "the torture chair" and left for prolonged periods of time. To the point the entire inmate population at the prison protested in anger.
He was slammed unto a brick wall, choked, and shoved by various police officers for no reason.
Was marched through nyc at gunpoint by officers with military firearms, forced to wear chains
Was called a murderer by the mayor of NYC on national television.
Was then placed in solitary confinement for weeks. Something extremely damaging psychologically to be exposed to for even just a few days. Something usually reserved for cannibals.
He is now being forced to sleep on the floor despite again, a crippling back injury.
Again, he has not even had trial yet. He is an innocent man by the very definition of the law. He has nothing tying him to any crime. And even the crime itself was a nobody being shot in a city where nobodies are shot everyday, seven days a week. And those shooters don't get this treatment. Cannibals don't get this treatment. Serial killers don't get this treatment. Why are they doing this? Because we entered an oligarchy and they want people who are rich to matter more than people who are not. The NO ONE, no name, insignificant person that Brian THOMPSON always was and WILL ALWAYS BE is more important because of his net worth, to the fascist oligarchy we've entered into, than the innocent man, data scientist and robotics engineer with a promising future that is Luigi Mangione.
The NYPD doesn't want him to be innocent. They are torturing him gleefully and postponing his trial because they know he's innocent. They just want to scare the public into understanding that the ultra rich, even those who's names will never be remembered as anything other than markings on a never visited tombstone, are the only persons who matter now. Not yours. Never yours. You're poor. They'll torture you without a trial too. Your life means nothing to them. Your children dying in school shootings means nothing to them. Pinning a crime on an innocent man they can beat to scare the public out of class consciousness is the only thing that matters to them now. Depose them.
Our Italian comrades, if I am informed correctly, have raised the question of whether the fascist form of state power will be immediately followed by the proletarian dictatorship or whether it will be replaced by one or another form of bourgeois state power, for example a bourgeois-democratic parliamentary republic. The answer to this has already been given by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International. To the question as to whether the post-war crisis of capitalism must inevitably lead to the socialist revolution, Lenin replied, as is well known, that this could not be answered theoretically. That would be mere playing with words, scholastics. Only the real struggle could provide the answer. The task of the communist parties consisted in making the best possible preparations for it. The same answer applies to the end of Bonapartism. One or another form of the open dictatorship of capital in a fully developed bourgeois society will be the “final” or last form of bourgeois state power only if the working class of the country is strong enough as a leader of the other labouring classes to take advantage of the crisis of this regime and establish a lasting proletarian dictatorship. That will be decided in struggle. And this will be decided by a combination of objective and the subjective factors: the real power and maturity of the working class, its relationship to the other labouring classes, the state of the international class struggle and not least the strength, maturity and capacity for struggle of the communist party of the country in question.
Thalheimer, 1930. On Fascism. Italics ours.
Like the people who've seized the reigns of power are not making choices based on what's best for the US as a whole or even the entirety of the US proletariat, they're acting based on what will enrich them personally, even if it undermines the whole institution of the US state. Such situations are far from unprecedented in history
I've said it before and I'll say it again: vigilance is nice and all but the idea that governing classes don't and cannot make mistakes that work at cross-purposes with their overall goals is Simply Not Wise
every time a supposed communist decides that whatever political upheaval they're currently in is finally the one historical event entirely inexplicable from material interests and due to the crazy idiocy of the people in charge, a cia agent gets a promotion
brexit wasn't random self-sabotage, it was the UK aligning with the US axis, against the EU axis, in the growing NATO split. the US blowing up Nordstream wasn't random insanity, it was forcing the EU to distance itself from the RF, which it had an almost better trade relationship with than the US. the US firing off sanctions against supposed allies and cutting off soft power isn't suicide, it's taking off the gloves.
empires have no allies, and while they may share out plunder in times of wealth, in times of crisis they apportion losses. the US is in a decline, and there is no path where it genuinely gains, only paths where it reduces its losses, and shoves them off onto someone else. alienating allies is not foolish, it is cashing in on a century of building up these economies as junior partners. the US is not acting like an undisputed world hegemon, because it no longer is one, it is reverting to the cutthroat behaviour that got it into that position in the first place. being the undisputed ruler of the globe allows for a softer hand, a more gentle control through propaganda.
if global politics all suddenly became inexplicable and ruled by the random whims of great morons at a given year to you, it's a sign of nothing more than that you need to continue working on your political education
Gonna be so real if a 12 year old traced my art and put it on their school binder I would be so fucking honored
i would levy a lawsuit against them that would leave their family in ruins
I'm sorry but the notion that soft power develops After hard power as some sort of Optional soft-hand in dealing with matters of empire is completely and totally ahistorical. In every single empire in history its soft power has always grown alongside its hard power, and soft power accomplishes what hard power alone cannot. Sacrificing soft power dominance is simply giving up on a great deal of power, it is not any kind of "return" to anything, it's just part of the process of collapse.
Indeed, it is in the case of a declining imperial power like the US that soft power becomes More important, not less, because as the empire's capacity to execute its affairs of state through coercive means decreases (and it is in fact decreasing) leaning cultural influence, international reputation, and long-standing perceptions of legitimacy are usually crucial in softening the descent from empire-hood (look at the postwar UK for example)
In fact, an imperial ruling class increasingly ignorant of the strength and influence of their newfound peer-competitors making the decision, drunk on fantasies of superiority purveyed to them by the national ideology, that they don't need legitimacy or a positive image and can somehow get all of the material goods through financial and military coercion, is Exactly part of the process that I refer to as "the decline of empires".
this is what happens when you lack a comprehensive, materialist analytical base. you get surprised when a capitalist exerts control over the capitalist state.
your mom is a basic task and i was able to do her in a few days
throwback to my favorite image ive ever seen on this site. a perfect little melange of racism. i could write entire novels deconstructing this thing. its so bad it looped back around into absurdist comedy for me. thats my friend the floating buffalo shaman who has no religion
nothing is more frustrating than when I’m leading a serious discussion about the importance of learning how to properly research folklore & cultural stories from reliable sources and someone pipes in like “why does it matter if it’s all made up anyway?”
yeah dude vampires are made up and the whole “vampires couldn’t see their reflections in antique mirrors because of the silver backing” is made up so you can combine those however you want for fun.
but you can’t say “the Victorians believed vampires couldn’t see themselves in mirrors because of the silver backing, which is why Dracula has no reflection,”
because the author of Dracula was a real man who never said that and the Victorians were real people of a real era and you can’t just make up things about real people because it’s important historically for us to understand what people believed about the world and why.
Making up facts about vampires is folklore & literature. Claiming random people in the past believed that, with no evidence, is just lying.
Am I making sense??
“What if eye of newt is code for mustard seed and witches used strange ingredient names to conceal their spells’ true, more mundane contents?”
Fun, modern take on witches in classic literature.
“In the 16th century, eye of newt was code for mustard seed, and witches used it to disguise their spells. Shakespeare knew this code and used it in Macbeth.”
That’s a lie. Now we’re just lying.
