Certified Opinion Haver

Forever work in progress. Unlimited vat to throw my opinion in the world. Vague political multimathematical hack. Local entity.

[lesbianfidelcastro]

A long time ago I got a book about stories of people "nostalgic for life under tyranny", basically just a chauvinistic mockery of people who speak positively about communism and especially their experience with Stalin or Fidel (two central targets of the author's anti-communist tirades)

But I took it anyway because I wanted to hear from the people the author was speaking to, and now I have been reading the Georgian women's recollections of communism, and it actually made me cry to see how miserable they had become after the capitalist restoration. The depth of love they have for socialism and Stalin and the Soviet Union is so beautiful

Some of my favourite quotes <3

"[Stalin] comes to me at night. He gazes at me, puffs on his pipe, and twirls his moustache. He smiles, and then heads for the door. Then I weep and cry for him to stay. But what guy could be bothered by a woman crying?" ... "...I have the mentality of a socialist hero of labor. When something needs to be done for society, I go and do it. I've produced a wall newspaper for the employees and classes for single mothers bringing up children on their own. In the Communist era, everyone would have respected me. But now that we have capitalism, they look at me as if I'm an idiot. So when I really can't manage anymore, I come to the museum to calm down. And I say, 'Mr. Stalin, I know you'd appreciate it.' And it helps." ... "When the war was on, they closed the museum, so I came to the park, to the statue, and I said, 'Mr. Stalin, you'd have got a firm grip on it all, and there'd be peace.' And sometimes I go and say to him, 'If you were alive, maybe we'd be together. You'd have a good time with me. I know how to cook, I'm a cheerful person, and I can sing well too.' And I fantasize about how nice it would be to be Stalin's wife. But later on I reject those thoughts, because I'm behaving like an idiot. Stalin is dead. Communism has collapsed. It's over. It's finished. Been and gone. If I dream about him when I'm feeling like that, I'm very cold and official toward him in my dream."

"When I was at college, we were still taught that Stalin was an outstanding statesman. But the system changed, the curriculum changed, and now I have to teach that he was a tyrant and a criminal. I don't think that's true. ... And before you start ranting, please let me finish. Are you feeling calmer now? All right, I'll tell you my personal opinion. I regard Stalin as a great man, but I can't say that, either to my students or to the tourists, so I say, 'Some regard him as a dictator, others as a tyrant, and others see him as a genius. What he really was, you can decide for yourselves.'"

"When I see what they've done to our beloved Stalin, my heart bleeds! How could they? How could they make such a good man into a monster, a cannibal, an ogre? Once upon a time, bus after bus came to our museum. People stood in lines several hundred yards long. I used to look at those people's faces, and I could see the goodness emanating from them. But nowadays? One would bite the other. That's capitalism for you." ... "In the morning I get up, cut a slice of bread, make the tea, sit down, and say to myself, 'O Christ, why did you let me live to see times like this? Why do they badmouth our darling Stalin?'" ... "What do we need all this capitalism for, all these American cheeses, juices, and chocolate? You can't even buy normal milk anymore—it has to be in a carton, because that's how it is in America. I think, 'O Christ, take me off to my dear Stalin. Take me away from this world, because I can't bear it here any longer.'"

"I used to work at a clothing factory. In the personnel department too. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the factory collapsed with it. And everything was looted—even the glass was stolen out of the window frames. In Stalin's day something like that wouldn't have been possible. The culprits would have been punished. So these days when I hear the stories they tell about him, I say, 'People, you've lost your minds. Remember the Soviet Union. Everyone had work. The children had a free education. From Tbilisi to Vladivostok.' If it weren't for Communism, I, for example, would still be living in the countryside. I would never have thought of occupying a managerial position, because only men had those jobs before then. No system has ever given women so much. Since its collapse, everything is worse." ... "And life gets worse and worse for women. In the USSR men had a good life. There were no wars. And if a man hit you, you could go and complain to the party committee. The committee informed the party cell at the factory, and the abuser could get into big trouble. These days the men have no work and they're frustrated. And when one of them hits you, you've no one to defend you." ... "Something of [Stalin's] charm remains to this day. Sometimes when I stop at his death mask, I only have to glance at it, and it sends such a shiver down my spine that I have to go outside into the fresh air for a while."

[cistgirlmaomao]

The process of communism requires destruction and construction. We break the old, broken world, a world hostile to our existence, and in its place we build a new world, a world friendly to our existence. Friendly things include animals, children, and you and I in our brokenness. Friendly things do not include any of the states, armies, prisons, cops, or plantations in the world today. Friendly things like friendly animals and friendly children and you and I in our brokenness will help us in the process. So come on little kitten, little comrade-kitten, little us-kitten, we can wait with our brokenness while the world is rebuilt into friendliness.

[fus-mar-hoz]

Gorki's The Russian Peasant begins with the following words: "People who have long held me in great esteem have asked me what I think of Russia. All that I think of my country, or to be more precise, of the Russian people and of the peasants who make up the majority of it, is very painful to me."

What is the origin of this hatred toward the Russian peasantry, of this resentment of which Gorki makes himself the spokesman? He was certainly the spokesman of a certain current of opinion, otherwise it is hard to imagine him publishing such a manifesto in 1922. Of course, as we have seen, there were immediate class interests at stake: the status of the intellectual was bound up with the protection of a cultural heritage threatened by the masses; the struggle over supplies between city and countryside left deep scars and the seeds of mutual resentment. But one senses something older in this hatred, something that would have had time to take hold: the result of a long brooding suddenly sharpened by circumstances. Where does this hatred come from? I asked a Soviet historian. He rejects the term "hatred" — how could he not, given that Gorki remains an officially venerated author? — In his view, it reflects the turn taken by a great number of Russian intellectuals of his generation who, carried along by the "populist" current, went to preach socialism in the most remote parts of the countryside, were rather badly received, and returned filled with bitterness toward the peasantry.

Having witnessed comparable phenomena, I readily believe in this reversal. Passing from mystical adoration to disgust, so to speak without transition, is a natural movement of exaltation on the part of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie. In France, shortly before or after 1968, I saw young intellectuals "establish" themselves among the workers and enter the factory with the religious fervour of men to whom absolute truth was at last about to be revealed, only to later, after a difficult or failed experience, abandon the "establishment" declaring that the workers were irremediably embourgeoisés, even rotten or fascist. It is true that this was not how the majority of "established" workers felt or acted, but that talkative minority of embittered men fed an entire anti-worker ideology in certain currents after 1968. Others followed the same path "à l'économie," that is, without the physical setting of the establishment: they simply passed from a mystically pro-worker rhetoric to a pathologically anti-worker one. Having seen this in France leads me to believe that something similar could have occurred in Russia, following the return of intellectual missionaries disappointed by their rural experience. Gorki refers to the way Russian literature reflected the reversal:

"The literature of the friends of the people was in the service of political agitation and of peasant idealism. But at the end of the nineteenth century, literature's attitude toward the countryside and the peasant changed radically, becoming less self-pitying and more truthful. This new attitude was established by Anton Chekhov in his stories In the Ravine and The Peasants."

Gorki suggests that he himself had undergone a similar journey:

"But where is that kind and reflective Russian peasant, that tireless seeker of truth and justice, of whom nineteenth-century Russian literature spoke to the world in such beautiful and persuasive terms? In my youth, I persevered in my search for such a man in the villages of Russia, and I did not find him. What I did find was a harsh and severe realist."

The disillusionments of intellectual youth tend to be vengeful. Is there any hatred worse than the one that follows a disappointed love? The success or failure of the union between young intellectuals and the working and peasant masses is, in periods of revolutionary expansion, a complex but crucial question: if these forces fail to find common ground, if the ideology of the young intellectuals (who play an important role in the production of cultural objects and superstructures) forms itself in opposition to the diffuse ideology of the deeper forces of the people, a decisive union is undermined from the outset.

The failure, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the attempt to fuse — through "populism" — the ideology of the people with a part of the Russian intellectual youth and the peasantry led, in the short term, to expressions of despair and attempts at nihilism. In the long term, this failure secreted the poison of a fiercely anti-peasant ideology across broad sectors of the socialist intelligentsia and among many of those who would become cadres of the Revolution.

This ideological legacy was an important element in the general objective situation of the class struggle in Russia throughout the early years of the twentieth century. The line of a political party can change, the decisions of Soviet central power can shift within hours, but the fundamental attitudes of classes and social groups toward one another do not change overnight. The many-sided conflict between city and countryside, which was constant from the beginning of the Revolution, also bears this mark.

Lenin, los campesinos y Taylor, by R. Linhart (Ed. Dos Cuadrados)

[segamascott]

erika kirk being handed the golden opportunity to be the face of conservatives for the rest of her life and then fumbling it instantly by being genuinely unlikable and off-putting will always be funny to me almost as funny as remembering that charlie kirk got shot in the neck and died

[lagonegirl]

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/what_state_prisoners_get_to_wo.html

OMG 

[pinehutch]

Things that I knew about: that the mass incarceration of people in the USA , particularly black men, has direct ties to/is an extension of slavery. Things I did not know: this specific shit about Louisiana HOLY FUCK this is evil.

[i-hate-you3000]

OH MY GOSH????

'Modern-Day Slavery': Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governor's Mansions and Capitol Buildings - Human Trafficking Sear

When activist Sam Sinyangwe was awaiting a meeting with the governor’s office at the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, he not

At Least Seven States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governors' Mansions and Capitol Buildings

The 13th Amendment provides a loophole that allows for the legality of unpaid prison labor, which is sometimes called "modern-day slavery."

[joy-haver]

Grew up next to Angola. It’s much worse than you think

[sisterreisaid]

I wonder how many people are imprisoned for weed

[kaccvcate]

I’m from Mississippi and it’s like this in my home town. Enslaved prisoners clean roadways, pick cotton, everything they’ve done since before slavery was supposedly ended. What they teach in schools is nothing but propaganda.

[estrellasrojas]

Some of my friends and I are reading through Capital together, we're still very early into volume I, but the discussions of money have us thinking: what about money in the current world we live in with fiat currency predominating? Do you have any recommendations for further reading on that?

Instead of just commodity money (gold or silver), money today mostly takes the form of IOU claims on existing or (speculated) future wealth in products. Marx talks about this more in vol 2 and 3 of Capital. Rather than being a goldbug as some people assume he actually states repeatedly throughout all 3 volumes that he sees this speculative and symbolic money as the fulfillment of the function that commodity money was performing in the first place as the universal equivalent leveling all values into one measure and, in the form of price, a relative measure for the total value of all commodities.

You can also read more about it in Harry Cleaver’s analysis of money-as-command and the role of debt in class struggles. It’s also important to historicize the current form of the international money system to the Cold War and the rise of the petrodollar (also pegged to real estate) in its later phases. I think a good source for this is The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

[egregore-engine]

I don’t believe in great man theory but Neil Cicierega really did do All That

[egregore-engine]

history is made and turned by the nameless and faceless masses, but sometimes you homeschool a neurodivergent kid and give them access to macromedia flash and they become what is basically an avatar of the internet

[englishgradinrepair]

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

there's literally nothing more radical in 2026 than believing that humanity can become good news for each other and the only world we'll ever share.

[liminalbeauty]

Saving the tags.

[escuerzoresucitado]

The time has come for France to own up to the massacre of its own troops in Senegal

One of the darkest moments of France’s colonial history has never been properly acknowledged. That could be about to change.

[dyslexic-asexual]

More info:

Thiaroye massacre - Wikipedia

[psychic-waffles]

We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.

[silvermoon424]

Bro absolutely COOKED with this.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.

[libertineangel]

Thinking about the present reactionary wave, the tradwife movement and associated elements, and like obviously we can describe it ideologically as following from concerted feminist efforts, the rise of pop feminism etc but I'm thinking about it from a material perspective, like it's not researched or anything and chances are it's nothing new but whatever

We know patriarchy and the family unit evolved as the vehicles of inheritance, maintaining class distinctions via the continuation of property ownership, but we live in a period where many, if not most, have less and less to inherit - current generations are worse off than their parents and grandparents, independent living is increasingly achieved not through marriage and home-ownership but through group renting, and certainly ever fewer people have any sort of economic property (tools, workable land etc) to inherit; and, inseparable from these facts, is the simple reality that raising a child is increasingly unaffordable.

What, then, is the material purpose of the family as traditionally defined? Capitalism digs its own grave and it buries itself piecemeal, it is a system built on foundations which its own existence steadily erodes, and this particular aspect seems to me to be approaching its obsolescence for all but the bourgeoisie.

It's no surprise that the reactionaries fighting tooth & nail to preserve and encourage the family form are usually wealthy, not just because the bourgeoisie generally benefit from reactionary positions of all stripes but because in this case they are the only ones left to benefit. Of course the wealthy want to promote the traditional family and encourage women to be their child-bearing domestic servants, their class position is partially dependent on having heirs! They need to perpetuate their class, maintain the division upon which their status rests, and that means maintaining the structure which preserves it at an individual level as well as societal. The conflation made by Andrew Tate and his ilk between extravagant wealth and domination of women is the same phenomenon, just appealing to a slightly different demographic.

Communists strive eventually for the abolition of the family as collective ownership of property renders it obsolete, but I would suggest perhaps that we are already seeing capitalist concentration of property into ever fewer hands render it increasingly obsolete for the vast majority, and the apparent push against that is the result of those few trying to ensure they hold on to what they have.

[jothb]

It's so awesome cool and progressive that the second result of looking up a trans woman on this site is a dedicated hate blog that specifically states "DNI if you defend this trans woman"

But it's okay guys, they put a sign saying "don't harass the tranny! Just let me collect all the reasons that she is unforgivable in one place :)"

[jothb]

It is incredibly telling that there isnt a massive anti-oneyplays fandom despite Smiling Friends being an equally popular show among tumblr queers and those guys actually doing everything gooseworx has been accused of and more "She joked about being the next Shadman!" wow that's crazy. Chris O'Neil housed Shadman and actively defended all the vile shit he did on twitter, including lolicon of real actual children. Why is nobody talking about this. Where is the anti oneyplays fan club. Or anti GameGrumps. Or (and this is a hot one) anti Dropout. Why is there only a hate club for the tranny. Why are the hate clubs only ever for the trannies? But of course, "DNI if you make it about her being trans, thats totally not why she became our target"

[jothb]

[jothb]

I would appreciate it if people reblogged this version that specifically calls out that none of the cis men in the same industry are held to the same standard even when they've done worse, continue to do worse and have not shown any sign of changing or regretting their past actions besides "I stopped saying the n word because people would get mad at me" and not because it's racist.

For god's sake the same people that deride Gooseworx on every social media site will sometimes straight up have Max "hotdiggitydemon" "Steven Jewniverse" "Steven N***averse" "Sans from Undertale calls Papyrus the nword" "Still actively racist" Gilardy profile pics with zero self reflection. And I'm supposed to take anything ever said about "holding trans women accountable " seriously? Gimme a break

[our-lady-of-haymakers]

It's really awesome how a vast majority of self-identified liberals conceive of liberalism as this smol bean birthday boy ideology of Let's All Get Along Together and frame it as this brave and kind yet tragically neglected voice of empathy and reason rather than, y'know, the dominant ideology of the capitalist world system that has caused countless wars, overseen colonialism and settler colonialism and neocolonialism, eviscerated state systems to create free market carnage, toppled countless popular governments through interventions on trumped-up charges of illegitimacy, and produced a climate catastrophe of near-apocalyptic proportions by putting its hands up while corporations torch the world.

And in the face of all this, and the inevitable rise of fascism from the material conditions created by the liberal world order, the liberal can say with complete earnestness that what we Really Need is a return to the good old days of liberalism where everyone was niceys and the slaughter and cruelty and meanness was confined to the global periphery and the slums and the villages rather than interfering with our sacred rituals of treat consumption.

[yossyislandd]

racism literally bleeds through the cracks of everything and if you dare to even barely point it out everyone will kill you

[yossyislandd]

racism runs so deeply in people that if you call it out you are calling out them, and instead of sitting down and examining their own racism they lash out at you for being sooo meansies to them. you don't even have to be talking about anyone's racist behavior in particular because it makes racists so uncomfortable they will come forward themselves and act like you're targeting them specifically. it's okay when they do it because they're doing it in the correct way, in the nice way! they don't mean it like that. in fact they're actually being progressive. you're the cruel one for acting like their racist behavior is racist. you're the problem if you're bothered by their comfort racism. you're the bitchy colored person who makes eeeverything about racism when it so clearly isn't. i'm fucking sick of this.

[mousidy]

why do TMEs think I want to have sex with them 😭

[mousidy]

you better build an insane amount of trust with me if you think I'm gonna so much as let you touch me lmao. you think I'm gonna just consent to sex with someone who has an incredible amount of systemic and social power over me on a whim? lmao

[mousidy]

you come up to me and tell me you find ME unfuckable as if I was hoping you'd want to fuck me in the first place 😭

[mousidy]

"oh boy I hope the demographic teeming with people who rape trannies wants to fuck me" get serious

[mousidy]

oh fuck yeah someone who can murder me and cite the trans panic defense to legally get away with it! I'm just sooooo wet right now ☺️ pleeeeease oh please have sex with me ☺️

[mousidy]

can't WAIT till we get to the bedroom only for you to expect me to top so I can say "actually I don't do that I don't even fully undress during sex I have dysphoria" and then you leave because that was all you wanted out of me. fuck yeah I love sex with TMEs you're so good at it ☺️