The Noah Guy @i-noah-guy-9 - Tumblr Blog

the world's smallest carnivore is called the "least weasel" 😭😭 i'm dying but like if it's the smallest carnivore then it sure is the least amount of weasel you can have 😭😭😭

sator-the-wanderer

Look at him: this is absolutely the least amount of weasel you can have

daughterofsarenrae

To really put it in perspective

flootzavut

Immediately I love him

small-bambi

Harrison Wood Hsiang

banchie

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

loveridden1999

top 3 hobbies for young adults:

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

3. agonizing over the present

writers-solace

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world

angstyastro

These miis getting diagnosed today

toastyglow

(some guy on the internet voice) it's so unrealistic and forced when women win fights against men in stories. of course, when a young boy defeats a huge man I'm cheering and screaming because it is so badass, and when a frail old man defeats a cocky young warrior I feel nothing but satisfaction. I love these power fantasies about easily dispatching people who underestimate you, a thing I desire despite the fact that I will likely never have the skill to achieve it in real life, but I'm pretty sure women don't have that same desire, and even if they do, they shouldn't get to see it in media. because it's so unrealistic, you see. I mean I'm smart enough to know I can't take down a big man in a fight but the women, you know, they'll get ideas. I could probably do it if I trained hard enough, but the women??? for some reason I can't see it happening, and who can say why that is.

txttletale

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!)

theconcealedweapon

devoteddeer

That sickly feeling when you realize you don’t know how to love. You only know how to be devoted like a dog which has been abused all its life yet licks the hand which beats it.

wormsdyke

it would be so nice if you were allowed to start working on projects before you hit the 12 hour until deadline mark but sadly it’s not possible with our current technology. scientists are hard at work but for now this is one of the limitations we must face as a people

apatheticfluorescence

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

headspace-hotel

Shakespeare is like this

insufferablepirate

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

Have you seen this shit my liege? smh unreal

cuunos

being a kid and hearing adults say stuff like "woah 2011 was 4 years ago haha" didn't really convey the fucking horror of a youtube video crossing my recommended labelled "9 years ago" and it's from 2017. that's not true. 9 years ago is 2010 or something. don't lie.

captainjonnitkessler

So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"

Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.

homunculus-argument

Fun fact: if you, as an adult, tell miserable children that their youth is the best that life will ever be, and that it's all just downhill from there, there's a percentage of them who will hear this and think "well, I guess I better kill myself before that happens." And a certain percentage of those will proceed to do that and succeed.

Anyway what I'm saying is that any time you feel tempted to say that, you should instead consider shutting the fuck up. Just because you peaked at 16 doesn't mean anyone else did. Most peoples' lives get better than that.

atlantus

I got lunch with my uncle and my neice, who Fifteen(tm) and i was like How Are You?

And she was just like "school sucks, my mom sucks, being fifteen sucks, i just want to grow up"

and so me, a wise and wisened newly fresh thirty year old just replied "yeah it does fucken suck!"

And when i tell you the air physically lightened up and she laughed so hard! And she told me more about why it all sucks and how she feels like no one listened to her, and they tell her to just do it, just get it done, and this girl is tired! She has so much homework and she feels like shes not smart because shes inundated with homework and school and she feels like the people in her life are not hearing her!

Just agree with people when they say something sucks for them! Offer a little sympathy, have some empathy. It does fucking suck being Fifteen.

feaftlikeabeaft

I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”

grimeclown

I don't know which of you needs to hear this but "narc" is not short for "narcissist" when someone calls you a "narc" for snitching they are calling you a "narcotics officer"