why do you think there is such a desire by some transfeminists to rehabilitate radical feminism? and what do you think is the biggest issue with doing so? i also disagree with rad fem but was curious about your thoughts on the matter
its just one manifestation of the v. classic impulse to grasp at markers of legitimacy, esp. when one is trying to make a living selling books or substack or patreon subscriptions. same thing is common among tons of different ideological tendencies, invoking Established Figures and claiming to be their intellectual heirs to lay claim to a commonly accepted font of legitimacy. if there's a reason why radfems and dworkin in particular i think it's partially because--again, if you are trying to make a living off being a professional Theorist and you depend on social media reach to make rent--you want to do something Forbidden and Controversial to help distinguish your brand. i mean if you call your ideological project the heir to judith butler uyouer halfway to just dong queer theory whos gonna click on that u might as well publish at verso
as to the problem with radical feminism it comes down to the fact that even the "trans-inclusive" non-biologically determinist branches view gender and sex as fixed, ironclad, and transhistorical--the ground floor of the theory rejects any historicization or cultural, historical, material contignencies on the invention and imposition of womanhood. ie their understanding of gender is metaphysical rather than dialectical. furthemore the radical feminist doctrine that "the personal is political" is essentially an entire political dead end, the pallette-swap of the 'choice feminism' they often decry. this outlook, from the object they identify as 'womanhood' arising ex nihilo outwards, leads to tail-wagging-the-dog positions on e.g. pornography and sex work, as misogyny is comprehended primarily as an all-powerful Idea rather than analyzed as a series of contingent processes with a path of historical development
you want to do something Forbidden and Controversial to help distinguish your brand.
overall a very overtly cynical point of view to be working from to the point it prejudices the analysis. while it might get some clicks it's quite clear as someone inside this bubble that this does not get one more than clicks
the radfems are already too dedicated to hating us and the queers are already too dedicated to their Butler et Preciado et al. even some less postmodern-inclined as yourself dont like it!
Last week, we learned from the Associated Press that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) — the government agency which manages billions in overseas “humanitarian” aid programs — plotted to overthrow Cuba’s communist regime via a covertly-funded fake Twitter platform.
Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione.
USAID grew out of programs like the Marshall Plan, but the agency itself wasn’t established until 1961 under President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s reorganization, a police training program set up under President Eisenhower, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), was placed under USAID’s authority. The OPS had been set up in 1957 to train friendly overseas police forces how to be more professional, more democratic, less corrupt, more like us — but in reality, the OPS was essentially a CIA proxy, headed by an agent named Byron Engle, its ranks covertly sprinkled with CIA spooks in hotspots across the globe.
Former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth wrote that the “the two primary functions” of the USAID police training program were to allow the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world,” and to bring to the United States “prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees.” [“Police Program is Called CIA Cover,” New York Times, May 7, 1978]
Dan Mitrione wasn’t a CIA man himself. Mitrione was a small-town cop and a family man from Richmond, Indiana, who joined the FBI, and was sent to Brazil in the early 1960s under USAID’s Office of Public Safety to train the fledging democratic government’s police force. A few years later, in 1964, a US-backed coup overthrew Brazil’s democratically-elected president Joao Goulart, and installed a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled for the next two decades, with largesse from USAID’s coffers, and vital training and equipment supplied by USAID officials like Mitrione.
By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil’s police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.
Brazil’s military dictatorship murdered or disappeared hundreds of dissidents, and tortured and jailed thousands more. Among those tortured: a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, arrested in 1970 and subjected to beatings to her face that distorted her dental ridge, and electrical shocks from car batteries, resulting in the hemorrhaging of her uterus. Today, Rousseff is Brazil’s president — and she’s not too happy about the NSA tapping her phones.
The junta also murdered one ex-president in a staged car accident in 1976. Another ex-president who allegedly died of a heart attack in 1978 is now believed to have been poisoned.
Once satisfied, Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then — according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth — Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione’s human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman — according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil’s police.
…
Mitrione took over the USAID police training program in Uruguay in 1969, and within months, the country was racked by allegations of widespread torture and police abuses. In 1970, Uruguay’s Senate opened an investigation and heard testimony from tortured men and women who’d been subjected to electrocutions, genital mutilation and psychological torture.
…
A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety:
— The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program — funding the failed “Land to the Tillers” program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it’s rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit.
– Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. Later, as the CIA-backed Hmong were under attack from Lao Marxist rebels and North Vietnamese forces, USAID forcibly resettled Hmong families in the line of their advance to protect the pro-US government in Vientaine.
—Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.
According to Victoria Sanford’s “Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala,” USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.
—El Salvador: According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992.
Further reading: Winning the Peace - USAID and the Demobilization of the Nicaraguan Contras, Hidden Terrors (excerpts) by A. J. Langguth, Counterinsurgency in Vietnam: lessons for today, The Last Mission
the leeway that people give social workers to facilitate systemic violence against the vulnerable simply because they're not cops is so fucking nasty. i kept getting this awful tboy social worker recommended on my tiktok for you and in one video he was bragging about giving a violation to a woman in a shelter he worked at for daring to have sex with another woman and speaking in this incredulous fucking "can you BELIEVE these people have the GALL to try and have intimacy with others as if they're normal human beings??" tone and all the comments were praising him for his saint-like patience and expressing disgust and dismay that someone experiencing homelessness would feel "entitled" to sleep with someone else, you know, like we let REAL people do
VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.
SHIVERS -- DEATH -- IT IS TERRIFYING. I NEED YOU TO PROTECT ME FROM DEATH. I CANNOT PERISH. LOOK AT ME. I CAN NOT END... I NEED YOU. YOU CAN KEEP ME ON THIS EARTH. BE VIGILANT. I LOVE YOU.
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!
tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)
Citations could be so awesome without copyright. Imagine just being able to click on a footnote and it takes you to the exact section of another book being quoted. Imagine how much that would do for stemming misinformation.
every time i watch some piece of media about how abused children need to put in the work to understand their poor put upon parents i think about the scene in the asoue netflix show where klaus is told his shitty boss had a terrible childhood and says "i'm having a very terrible childhood right now". like damn gottem pack it up we can stop doing this narrative in film and literature now
That's not even me complaining about my own income situation or anything. Just like. Thinking about the time someone speculated about the monetary incentives behind my comics, at a time when I had literally no online revenue stream at all.
Imagine looking at a class of people systemically shut out of stable employment whose options are often restricted to extremely precarious self ""employment"" at the margins of society paying a big portion of their earnings to huge platforms and thinking "yeah but they don't have a boss so they must have it pretty good actually."
We are dunking on you because you think "ownership of the means of production" refers to being able to type into a word processor and then submit the resulting documents to a massive corporate platform that is privately owned and holds all the power to terminate the author's source of income at a moment's notice.
You've fallen completely for capital owners obfuscating their methods of value extraction and making themselves invisible, and are now going around saying that the workers being exploited in this relationship are actually the ones whose class interests align with capital owners.
do you think me understanding the distinction of the petite bourgeoisie as a class that is comprised of a small-time artisans who possess the tools to create the very thing they end up selling, a dynamic which potentially incentivizes them to have bourgeois economic and political tendencies when it comes to maximizing profit and buying the labor value of others to expand production, means I think the the petite bourgeoisie run the world or something?
i am aware that marketplaces run by the haute bourgeoisie exist and include rent in them that goes to a much larger capitalist entity lmao why are you acting like the term "petite bourgeois" means one who faces zero economic exploitation by the haute bourgeois whatsoever lmao it just seems kinda dumb to me
idk it's hitting me now how much katherine doesn't see other human beings as people. Like, before she realized Nichole was a trans woman, Nichole was "man who needs to be gatekept entirely from HRT for his own safety." Rashmi was "annoying roommate who can't understand that doing chores is irrelevant to my journey, Ru was "pair of tits," Laura was "transfeminine goddess who can do no wrong," Emmy was "annoying henchman," and now we're on like.....Nichole is "a woman, but still needs to be controlled so that she can act right :)," Rashmi is "she abandoned me :(," Ru is "the one besides Nichole who is responsible for Rashmi abandoning me ://," Laura is "less than dirt piece of shit," Emmy is "irritating loser man." Like, no one is a proper human being to Katherine, the closest she got at one point was being invested in Rashmi's life and reciprocating doing the chores, I guess, but that should've been a starting point, not a high point. Other human beings have never been human beings to Katherine. Like, the idea that she can "prove" anything to Rashmi is so clearly a cope of all time. Babygirl, the best you can do for Rashmi is never talk to her again. You hurt her and her girlfriend pretty badly!
It begs the question if Mother's parenting has played a role in this (at the very least, enabling her shit kid), or if Mom was the one imparting such lessons. I suppose 35 shall give us a clue, huh.
TLDR: love katherine as a character, i need to put her under a microscope. hate her as a person now, what a wretched individual. meowmeow gone sour gone absolutely rotten, but the signs were there from the beginning.
should i stop trying to scrape a living off of music and work at a call center instead is that like a bad thing i genuinely dont even understand again /gen
See, I'm not sure how genuine this is, because while I don't know which post or comment of mine this is in response to, I have tried to make it clear multiple times that I don't consider being an indie artist to be "a bad thing".
Not all artists are petit bourgeois or bourgeois. The petit bourgeoisie is not the bourgeoisie. And neither the petit bourgeoisie nor the bourgeoisie are composed of ontologically "bad" or "evil" people.
Communism is a proletarian political movement. This does not mean communists want to kill all non-proletarians or declare anything other than a proletarian existence to be evil or wrong. Communism in fact aims to abolish both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to abolish class entirely. But in order to do this, we must abolish private ownership, which includes ownership of intellectual property. If communism succeeds, then eventually all creative works will effectively be public domain the moment they are published.
How you make a living under capitalism is of no concern to me. Likewise, you can choose to be in favor of or against communism. I certainly don't have the means to prevent you from doing whatever you like. My only frustration is with the likes of people who insist on calling themselves progressive radical "leftists" who then go on to argue that it's totally leftist and socialist to defend intellectual property rights and the interests of petit bourgeois artists to make a living selling art. Not because I think it's bad to be an artist, but because I think it shows a complete lack of class consciousness and a poor understanding of social conditions.
Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they are part of a revolutionary class or that their class interests are progressive. The petit bourgeoisie are not bourgeois, but they are not proletarian either. You can be a revolutionary without being a proletarian, and you can be a proletarian without being a revolutionary, but only the proletariat are a revolutionary class under capitalism, and only proletarian interests are progressive class interests.
Someone should make a disco elysium spiritual successor that takes place in a maze and follows a protagonist who has to eat all the dots in the maze whilst avoiding several ghosts
I support my fellow left-handed people BUT it's important to keep the devil worshippers out of our community. We are already under attack and getting accused of worshipping the devil by fascists, now more than ever we need to keep our groups clean. If you claim to support left-handed but don't include that you reject devil worshippers I'm blocking you on the spot. People will claim to support left-handed but then reblog from well known devil worshippers that have hundreds of pages of proof gathered from years of monitering their activity, and they STILL claim *we* are the danger to left handed people. This is sickening, there are good Christian children out there whose souls are endangered by those people
this goes for the right-handed people too! we must take stand against the rampant dextropalmophobia in our community! we are all devil worshippers in the eye of the state
After centuries of debate between linguists and scholars on the etymology of the word “polyamory”, the general consensus between experts is that the term was named after the early 21st century philosopher Renako Amaori after she became the first person to ever come up with the concept of dating multiple girls at once who are also dating each other. Many detractors who previously stated that it makes much more sense for it to be a combination of the root words poly - many and amor - love, have since retracted their statements after reading the autobiographical works of Amaori. Despite this widely accepted consensus, as with Homer and Shakespeare before her, speculation and debate continues to this day on whether Amaori was ever a real person
areudirty
titsay
dailybridgerton
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
