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I don't answer anonymous political asks (see about)

It is always interesting to keep an eye on what the non-dominant fractions of imperialist capital have to say about current affairs. this magazine, founded by liberal industrial capital (Koch) and financial-speculative capital (Soros) with an interest in low state spending and diplomatic stability, posits that the US imperialist structure has worn out its metaphorical hammer and is in what one could call decadence:

The warnings against entanglements were never a doctrine of restraint. They were a doctrine of focus. Isolationism was selective.

We usually tell the story as a fall from grace. In the beginning, the founders kept us out of foreign quarrels. Washington's Farewell Address counseled against permanent alliances. Then, somewhere along the way, we went off the path, traded a republic for an empire, and became the restless armed power the world knows today. It is a comforting story. It is not true. The United States did not drift into intervention. It was born intervening.

[...]

Now consider what the founding generation did, as opposed to what it said. Between 1776 and 1864, the young republic undertook 64 military interventions. Almost none were in Europe, which is where the founders counseled staying out. They were close to home. Nearly half fell on Latin America and the Caribbean. Many more were waged across the continent itself, against sovereign Native nations, in the long campaigns we politely call the Frontier Wars. We do not usually count those as foreign policy. They happened on land that is now American, so we file them under settlement, or expansion, or national growth. But that land was foreign when the fighting began, and became domestic only because we won.

[...]

So the founders both warned and did. Adams himself, who cautioned against hunting “monsters,” helped author the Monroe Doctrine and pressed expansion into Florida. This is the founding pattern. Early America was not isolationist. It was selectively so. It stayed out of Europe, where war was costly and offered little, and was relentlessly forceful in its own neighborhood, where force was cheap and the rewards were land and standing. The warnings against entanglement were never a doctrine of restraint. They were a doctrine of focus. Seen this way, the rest of our history is not a fall but a pattern that scales, across the continent to the Caribbean and Pacific to Europe and Asia and, eventually, nearly everywhere else. The geography widened. The reflex held.

The evidence cuts deeper. As America escalated after the Cold War, other states did the opposite. They lowered their hostility toward us, and after 2001 they initiated fewer disputes than in any earlier era. We were also intervening over interests that mattered less. By our own measures, the unipolar decades combine the lowest stakes in our history with the highest rate of force. Our adversaries were backing down. We reached for the gun anyway. A rival disciplines a great power. Every use of force during the Cold War had to be weighed against the risk of confrontation with Moscow, and that weighing imposed a restraint that had nothing to do with virtue. Remove the rival and you remove the discipline. The threshold drops, and a country that once balanced force against diplomacy and trade begins to treat force as the answer to everything. This is the turn from statecraft to what I have called kinetic diplomacy: diplomacy conducted by armed force, with the secretary of state's old department starved while the Pentagon swells. It is how a superpower slides into the posture of a bully, reaching by reflex for the hammer because it has let its other tools rust. Here is the hardest part to write. The hammer mostly does not work today. Ivan Arreguín-Toft documented why strong states lose to weak ones, and his finding is plain: when a great power brings overwhelming force against an adversary who refuses to fight on its terms, it tends to bog down, alienate the population it claims to help, and lose over a time span that favors the weak. Force succeeds only when it is limited and tied to a concrete objective it can actually achieve. Unbounded, it fails. And then there is the water. Since last September, in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, American forces have destroyed scores of small boats allegedly carrying drugs, killing more than 200. Most victims of these strikes were never charged, never tried, never named. What began as a campaign against traffickers became a blockade, and then a war: in January we seized the president of Venezuela and flew him out of his own country. It is the oldest American habit: use force in the neighborhood, where it is cheap and the victims have no standing to object. And it is the easy victories close to home that breed the confidence to reach farther, to believe the same hammer will land on Iran. Jefferson indicted his king for “depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” We now deal death at sea with no trial at all, and call the dead unlawful combatants in a war we declared upon them. We are watching the hammer fail in real time. Last summer the United States struck Iran's nuclear facilities and declared the program “obliterated.” American intelligence later assessed that the strikes had delayed, not destroyed, Tehran's capabilities. Months later, American aircraft were returning to hit Iran again. Military force had achieved what it often does: a temporary setback mistaken for a permanent solution.

Misión cumplida - Regresa a Cuba el primer grupo de la brigada médica que prestó servicios en Guatemala

Durante casi tres décadas de labor, la brigada realizó más de 62 millones de consultas médicas, efectuó 625 000 intervenciones quirúrgicas, entre ellas 198 000 operaciones oftalmológicas, asistió más de 274 000 partos, aplicó más de un millón de dosis de vacunas y contribuyó a salvar más de 378 000 vidas. Asimismo, participó en programas de prevención y control de enfermedades transmisibles y no transmisibles, así como en el enfrentamiento a la pandemia de la COVID-19.

[...]

Cruz Hernández lamentó que la decisión unilateral del Gobierno de Guatemala de poner fin a la colaboración médica afecte el acceso a los servicios de salud de miles de personas. Reiteró, no obstante, que Cuba mantendrá su compromiso histórico de solidaridad con el pueblo guatemalteco y agradeció a los colaboradores por defender, una vez más, los principios humanistas que distinguen a la medicina cubana.

website-enjoyer

i got the karls of marxpital all over my body

agricultcher

Gouache on paper

fus-mar-hoz

today at a table there were these two yanks talking business and one of them starts talking about he pays too much in income tax (48%) because of communists (?) but that he knows a "loophole" wherein by being employed as a consultant rather than an employee with a normal salary, and something about declaring 0 expenses. And with this he has been paying 10% despite having over 10 million in income. So I'm trying to figure out his name from the guestlist to maybe send a tip to the IRS

fus-mar-hoz

ahh you need to know the state and city to report tax fraud. shame

sataniccapitalist

fus-mar-hoz

continents are geographical entities only insofar as geography conditions politics

fus-mar-hoz

much like any regionalization at any other scale, these categories and hard lines drawn across land and sea are social categories. their content is social, too. Human communities and the closeness between communities are conditioned by geographical limits, to varying degrees, and therefore when these categories are created they can be pretended to be made from only geographic criteria even if they are predominantly social and political categories. The fact that South America is only attached to the other half of America by a thin isthmus both conditioned the development of pre-columbian societies (even though they weren't exactly disconnected) and later facilitated the creation of South America as a category "justified" by geography but with a decided political content in the context of European and US encroachment in it.

Is Europe a continent? yes, if you don't think that there is such a thing as a purely geographical continent. It is a continent in a political sense, which is the sense of every other continent, in form and in content.

fus-mar-hoz

Karl Ritter is taught as the founder of the modern (European) scientific discipline of Geography. He was a Pan-Germanist and originally a historian, and one of his interests was in finding in geography the universal laws of the historical development of societies, and in particular the origin of the German Nation. In Die Erdkunde, he carries out an attempt at finding such laws, using the continents as his primary unit for the compartmentalization and subsequent systematization of the understanding of the world as a whole (A century before the acceptance of plate tectonics!).

He was a proponent of a strict determinism, not by far the first but setting the tone for the origins of the modern geographical discipline, and argued that continents (broadly speaking large landmasses separated by water, ignoring isthmuses) had certain characteristics that determined the development and capacity of growth of human communities. He positioned Europe, "the ample prolongation of Middle Asia", as being a goldilocks zone between extreme compactness (Africa, most of Asia) and an extreme fragmentation of the surface (South East Asia's island chains). He compared the total lengths of rivers, coastlines, elevation, etc, to justify these claims. The much greater natural wealth of Asia was hindered by the extreme fragmentation of its islands and disconnectedness from the interior, Africa was too compact to stimulate individualized development, a "prisoner of inmobilsm".

In the contemporary notion of Geography, there is no separation to be made between the continentalization of natural features and the human societies settled within those features. Again, Karl Ritter looked for a justification for the greatness of the German Nation in the way the continents and their characteristics were set up by God. Europe's physical connection with Asia was understood by Ritter to be the way that northeastern Europe, with its "superior articulation", was meant to take the vast Asian riches to benefit itself. "Asia [...] was determined from its configuration to benefit with its riches the neighboring continents without impoverishing itself". "The Siberian plains have been tributaries of northeastern Europe in terms of progress and civilization".

There is no physical continentalization to rescue from the hands of European supremacists who sought to find in post-hoc methodologies laws that determined the superiority of certain nations or races over others. From a criticism of the notion of the physical continent of Europe, there must be an immediate realization that the very content of the category of continent is such that it will reflect, not cause, the rules that today govern the relations between broad areas of the earth; the rules of capitalism in its imperialist phase, inherited in form from past systems of economic organization. The reaction is neither to pretend Europe isn't a "proper" continent and lump it into Asia or Eurasia, nor to reject the category of continent altogether, but to use instruments of understanding the world that are rooted in the way the world is actually organized and its internal rules. And the reality today is that Europe is a separate continent from Asia, because the continent has never been just a description of how the large landmasses on the surface of the earth are organized.

fus-mar-hoz

And it's not like the continents today are conceived of in the same way as Karl Ritter understood them, both geography and geopolitics have developed a lot in the 150 years since. But the function of continentalization, and the legacy of these early determinists, have remained.

Africa today is not discussed in imperial apologia circles in terms of its compactness and the relation between its coastline's length and its area. It is discussed in terms of the "resource curse", still mystifying the reason for Africa's underdevelopment despite its vast natural wealth. This is relevant to the criticism of continentalization because the category allows to flatten an enormous area with greatly differing attributes and history into a single unit. North Africa, Subsaharan Africa, South Africa and East Africa experienced quite differentiated histories and paths of developments, and occupy vastly different areas in terms of geological and biological attributes, until the European empires intervened in their history to subject them to the same underdevelopment. The name of Africa was originally used in antiquity to refer to only a portion of what today is North Africa. This is reflected today, for example, in how many European universities still have studies of "Africa and Asia", which were created at the same time that Africa and Asia acquired their definitive political meaning (e.g. the School of Oriental and African studies was founded in 1916, at the height of the British Empire's territorial configuration, and retains the name to this day)

fus-mar-hoz

need to finish this thing soon

Is Die Linke joining the anti-communist campaign against Soviet memorials?

A new controversy in Germany has once again exposed the increasingly problematic stance adopted by the so-called "Left" (Die Linke) on quest

tobermoriansass

red dit.c om/r/heated rivalryfanfics/comments/1uj ats8/megathread_claude_ ai_code_found_ in_fics/

watching this from afar but thought you might find this interesting...i personally don't use AI in fanfic bc well that's not the joy of it to me + environmental concerns but this is so fascinating to me - i didn't know how widespread ai use was in fic but also the fact that people feel like they need to use ai! and all the people in the comments who are either vindicated that they knew it was ai from the writing and the people who are very disappointed by it...i think this is going to result in witchhunting and fandom drama but i think we're going to see more of these posts sadly

god i'm sorry but i'm so sick of this shit. completely unnecessary and the endless disclaimers about "this is not for harrassment" and "we are just trying to help people make ethical choices" and the claim this is supposed to get people to tag their fics for having used ai combined with language about "ai corrupting fan spaces" is extremely fucking disingenuous lmao. you cannot in one breath use supercharged language about "corruption" and "real human connection" and then in the other claim you are not shaming people. the shame is baked into these moralised judgements about the "corruption" of fandom and "real" connection. this is exactly the sort of deeply slimy two-faced shit that i absolutely abhorr.

i am going to say several things now that i have been saying in private for months. i am going to sound judgemental, but frankly, if you're sitting on your moral high horse passing down judgements about people you can take it. you cannot talk shit without expecting to get hit (as i almost certainly expect to w this, tho obvs i am switching anon off in a couple of hours bc fuck that noise).

1) i genuinely and truly believe that call outs like this are far more corrosive to fandom than minding your own business or feeling sad because you got got by some mid claude generated prose. all this does is foster an atmosphere of paranoia, hypervigilance, increased scrutiny and systemised unpersoning & dehumanisation of "immoral" and "deceptive" others. in every single case i have seen where someone is deemed to have used ai to create a fanwork, i have only seen people gleeful that they actually finally have a "moral" target they can get mad about and rip to complete shreds sans consequence and sans repercussion.

2) this is the literally most counterproductive way to get people to tag their fics for ai use. once again, i point to the shrill insistence that fandom is about Real Human Connection and the language of "corruption" - do you think these are neutral terms? are you incredibly naive and foolish? these are words loaded with shame. the subtext of all these statements is: if you aren't putting your own real blood and sweat into this work of art, you are corrupting and poisoning fandom. in one breath you are invoking both the protestant work ethic and its moralisms and dirt/purity binaries in relation to literal humanness and being part of community. shaming has literally never worked in the history of anything to get people to adhere to something. if you want people to tag their ai fics, you, person who gets upset at the concept of being "tainted", have to manage your own big feelings and create a space where using ai is a morally neutral thing* and where engaging with ai created works does not make you a fandom outcast.

3) i do think some reflection is in order to contemplate why people even feel the need to turn to ai to create fic. what are the circumstances that produce such a feeling? let's think about this, for a moment, with some empathy. do people feel like they need to create something in order to participate in fandom? if so, why do they believe that? are there certain ideas that we entrench viz. artists and writers as "real" fandom and everyone else as "second class" members of fandom? (lbr, this statement is implicit in a lot of posts that go around about how authors deserve more comments. ask for feedback by all means; but the insistence that there is a "real" fandom and implicitly therefore, a fandom which does not matter, which is not productive, which does not contribute and therefore make fandom "real" are ideas which i simply think is point blank wrong. merely being in fandom IS fandom.) if people feel the need to create, why do they believe merely writing it out themselves is not enough? are they afraid of "failing" as writers? why? do they feel they're not good enough to make art? why? if they believe this is the only way they can make friends and have community? if so, why? the answers to all of these questions, in my opinion, at least partly indicts fandom culture at present and should call for some serious self-reflection!

4) genuinely WHAT harm is being done to you by the existence of an unlabelled ai fic? what actual harm? why does it hurt you so much? what are you feeling so deceived about? yes i get that you come to fandom for human connection, but what about a fic writer using an llm actually precludes there being a person behind the fic? what specifically is upsetting you? can you actually sit with your feelings and identify what specifically you're mad about?

5) now for my really mean and problematic opinion :) : i frankly believe half the "distressed" feelings about being "deceived" by ai use are because people have created a moral identity out of not reading or using ai which butts straight up against their tastes in fanfiction running heavily towards the kind of deeply ubiquitous ao3 house style fic which almost certainly underpins LLM data training sets. in making a whole moral personality out of something which directly implicates your taste, you fabricate an insecurity which must be excised: what better way than by turning it outwards to claim that you were deceived and taken in and therefore, that the deceiver has committed some unspecified crime against fandom and must be sent into the proverbial corner? there are exactly two solutions to this. either you become more confident about your taste and you own it and you also own the recognition that this kind of prose is pretty easy to generate using an llm; or you develop a taste for the difficult, which is currently more difficult to generate using an llm but most probably will not be in a couple of years (i'm not being a doomer here, but realistic. at some point llm capacity will cross the threshold of what even a canny reader will be able to identify).

6) i think we could all do with a good hefty dose of a) DON'T LIKE DON'T READ and b) MINDING OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS

*i am literally uninterested in debating whether or not ai is morally bad, i do not believe that anti-ai politics is a real or meaningful politics. if you care about its environmental impact please go out and do something about it instead of yelling at people on the internet. if you care about labour rights, please go and do something about it instead of yelling at individuals on the internet. i care about economic extractivism, exploitation and imperialism, all of which ai is implicated in yes - but which a lot of other industries (most industries, ngl) are implicated in as well. merely removing "ai" will not solve any of the problems that we are facing. if you want ai fics to be filterable, you have to deal with the fact that the correct strategy is to make it morally neutral and to some degree acceptable, much in the same way that the noncon and underage labels on ao3 are morally neutral statements about the content of a fic. the question is whether or not you strategically want something or if you want your moral jollies.

anton--rayne

One of my biggest video game inspirations is a 10 minutes long freeware platformer from 2016. And it's a better piece of political art than everything self proclaimed "anti-capitalist leftist"s or whateverpunks have released up to this date

anton--rayne

Liyla and the Shadows of War is a platformer choose your own adventure inspired game by Palestinian developer Rasheed Abueideh. You play as a Palestinian man at night as the city around you is being bombed, the platformer mechanic is jumping through the crumbling bombed infrastructure, and avoiding the bullets and missiles fired at you and other civilians. There's no music, only the sound of the night and everything fired at civilians. Your wife is hit and you have to leave her behind to run away with your daughter, not moving enough for any amount of time results in the deaths of both you and her. At the end of the game your daughter is injured and you are told the ambulance has the place for only one person. You prioritize your daughters health, the only choice given to you in the end, and they promise you they will take care of her, driving away in the ambulance- which is then bombed. That is the only ending.

When it released, Apple refused to list the game on the app store and refused to reverse the decision until severe public outcry

It is just more brave, political and inspirational to me than any cyberpunk game

deadbodyrave

seeing tumblr posting about something you know a lot about that is reductive and wrong about the thing but you cannot say anything because getting involved just means getting angry for no reason because it really does not matter in the grand scheme of things

#when people talk about continents

redstonedust

i feel like whenever people discuss hatsune mikus age its always either "hatsune miku is literally 16 you cant treat her like an adult" or "hatsune miku is a piece of software with no thoughts or feelings you can do whatever" but never the imo more interesting "hatsune miku is a marketing mascot designed to be a virtual idol, what does it say about the idol industry that the people involved considered 16 to be the perfect age to assign her. why do so many vtubers played by adult women have 16 on their profile. why are so many idol anime about highschoolers. can we talk about the contexts and implications please please please please-"

redstonedust

and this isnt a "japan bad lol" thing theres so many characters out there who are functionally treated as adults but designated to be in their late teens. i think the oldest (official) disney princess is like. 21. its a feature of how society at large treats 16-25 as the only viable window of attractiveness yknow. the dicaprio problem. its everywhere once you look for it unfortunately and even characters i love are not exempt from reflecting the bias.

adastrabbit

just because someone says something you agree with doesnt mean you should support them wholeheartedly. some of you people have very concerning opinions on the pope

bullmilf

It is not surprising but still disappointing that with insane heat killing people in Europe, Africa, and India, the fact that it's happening in Europe is what's mentioned the most

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