Sade Olutola
blake kathryn
i don't do bad sauce passes
cherry valley forever
Andulka
will byers stan first human second
tannertan36
Discoholic đȘ©
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
NASA
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Mike Driver
Janaina Medeiros
trying on a metaphor
@theartofmadeline
DEAR READER
titsay
dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
Three Goblin Art
seen from South Africa
seen from TĂŒrkiye
seen from TĂŒrkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from France
seen from Italy
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from TĂŒrkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
@x147
id: screenshot of a tweet by user baskingball1 that reads âthe bugs that live isnide me are not happy to dayâ end id
this is my blog where i type words and reblog long posts. i have less than 20 followers on purpose. i sometimes use this blog to have conversations with people i disagree with. please remember i am a human being and a stranger to you. i try my best to remain polite, so please treat me niceys.
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!)
also i am really annoyed at people thoughtlessly using the term crutch to refer to ai stuff because crutches are good actually and yet whenever someone uses the term they mean it in an apparently demeaning way. some people do in fact need crutches! idiot
i think if you call people you disagree with âdelusionalâ or otherwise insinuate that theyâre insane because you donât agree with their opinions psychotic people should have the right to attack you on sight
no i don't think so
aside from the fact that this is about as effective as saying "no you are," being psychotic does not make it ok for you to call people you disagree with delusional!
you can't just identify out of being ableist. you're still perpetuating harmful stereotypes about psychotic people. you also can't know for sure if the person you're using it against is non psychotic. other people with psychosis who see you doing this will be hurt by it.
think of it like reclaiming a slur. reclaiming a slur doesn't mean you get a free pass to use it as a slur against other people, it means you can use it for yourself if you find it empowering.
imo the term "walkable" in "walkable cities" should be understood to mean "wheelchair accessible" as well, not just literally "possible to walk in". the act of walking in a city doesn't automatically make it walkable
it's interesting bringing up some transfeminist theory to my drag race watching cis therapist thinking she'll disagree but then she just starts spitting incredible transfeminist truth that would cause 100 years discourse on tumblr.
she was telling me that all her transmasc clients have soared up through their careers and have private insurance, while all her transfem clients are financially struggling and are on state insurance
she was like "they transition into privilege and patriarchy is happy to accept them as men" and what's awesome is she said her transmasc clients generally understand this privilege and use it responsibly, including in support of trans women
like girl they would kill you dead on tumblr.com
and you know to be clear these aren't even things I would have said. I mean there's definitely Nuance at the very least. if I were to say the "transitioning into privilege" and "being accepted by patriarchy as men" things myself I'd want to be able to prove them out relatively rigorously, and I haven't done that, so don't take this as me doing a full cosign on these claims. but damn, she did just kind of say them
on the transitioning into privilege thing: I don't tend to say this one because I think it's at least probably not linearly true. my theory of this one is kind of in a fetal development stage but I tend to imagine that coming out as trans is a sharp drop in privilege not immediately outweighed by manhood, but then that passing as a man and performing masculinity start to up one's privilege again. #privilegemath
on the "being happily accepted into patriarchy" thing, my therapist was saying that men tend to be cool with it because it reaffirms that manhood is good and desirable. I hadn't really considered that angle in my own analysis. I usually operate under the assumption that an oppressor class will not be so happy to accept upward movement with open arms, but maybe your average man is not really concerned with gatekeeping manhood as a class, so long as the goodness of masculinity is being affirmed? definitely a thought that's influencing my theory a little
to further roll this spitball, this concept gives me new perspective on transmisogyny. because, even before we transition, I think a lot of us make it obvious, intentionally or otherwise, that masculinity isn't something we aspire to or have a particular interest in performing. through this lens, that would single us out for mistreatment because we embody a disinterest or discomfort with masculinity, which challenges the unquestionable goodness of manhood. and then, when we come out, it becomes a full on attack on the unquestionable goodness of manhood. we spurn the very core assumptions of male supremacy
Wow Mousey I canât believe your therapist is Transandrophobia smh
On a surely completely unrelated note, did you know that transmascs are 3x more likely to have a degree than transfemmes, and that almost half of trans people with no degree are unemployed, while only (âonlyâ) 16% of trans people with at least an associates degree are unemployed?
đŹ 11  đ 1158  â€ïž 799 · IF YOURE TRANS READ/SHARE THIS POST · So I recently found a detailed study called Access Denied from 2015, a couple y
Oh whoops I tripped dropped a link all over the floor oh no
Hey so re: TME people facing hostility that dissipates as soon as we reveal we're not trans women, what do you think is a good way for a TME person to handle being in such a situation?
I wouldn't begrudge you for using a tool that you have to keep yourself safe just because I don't have it
that actually may well be one of the best imaginable opportunities for you to speak up for us. you could tell them that you didn't like seeing that side of them. you could tell them how it felt to be treated that way. you could tell them that you feel sad for the trans women they treat that way
they revealed to you what they think of an extremely marginalized demographic and how they treat them, and you have a chance to hold a mirror up to that, to face them with the truth of their actions. if they have any humanity and can see past their own ego, maybe it will stir something in them. or at the very least maybe they'll just feel ashamed enough to not exhibit said behavior anymore around people who might speak up about it
that's the power of your privilege. it's not something to be necessarily ashamed of, it's an incredible shield you can use to protect those of us who can't protect ourselves. nothing but love for those of you who use your privilege to uplift, rather than suppress
it's sad to me that cis people never apply their "loved one with a wanted-pregnancy" script to medical transition. like cis people often indicate they don't know how to react to hearing about medical transition, but a huge portion of that social script is directly applicable.
tell someone "congratulations!" tell them "I'm so happy for you. I know you've been trying for a really long time." ask them "do you need help with anything?" throw them a party with loved ones where you all give them some gifts in acknowledgement of how expensive it is. celebrate how far along they are. take photos with them so they have a record of being loved while their body changes. allow them to voice fears and doubts and anxieties about how it'll go, and reassure them that they'll get through the intense medical procedure coming up & you'll be there for support no matter what. let them tell you about the gross parts and laugh together. really listen to them when they talk about how amazing and profound it is that the human body can do this. share in their excitement for beginning a new stage of their life.
If there are complications, comfort them and help them navigate what's next. If they lose access suddenly due to finances or criminalization, treat it like a miscarriage and hold them while they grieve.
I donât think people realize what keeping the internet running and producing most tech they use entails like. Physically, labor-wise, energy-wise.
Purposefully included some older articles here so people can see how baked in this is:
Labor Conditions of Content Moderators (2021)
Inside AOL's "Cyber-Sweatshop" (1999)
Digital Labor and Imperialism (2016)
Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop (2012)
Gig Economy, Algorithmic Control, and Migrant Labor (2022)
The Rise of Cyber-Coolies (2003)
Ecological Impact of Computation and the Cloud (2022)
The Environmental Sustainability of Digital Content Consumption (2024)
Carbon Footprint of the Internet (2010)
I think a lot of times I see people talk about this stuff in relation to AI. It's right to talk about it, but I hate when people act like AI is the only tech that has these problems. What you see with AI now is a reflection of the broader tech and internet industry that has grown for the past 20-30 years.
it's incredibly fucked up that there is a group of disabled people (people with psychosis) who cannot even disclose their condition online or to others without a deluge of humourless losers deciding that their first reaction will be to try and trigger that psychosis with shitty "jokes". same category of people who will send flashing gifs as soon as someone says they have photosensitive epilepsy. these cunts would feed someone a known allergen just to be edgy. imagine being such a feckless dog-like bastard that disability is a funny thing to exploit for the sake of being edgy and not an act of incredible violence
every marginalized demographic that contains men has a men's rights movement and all of them will resentfully insist that any criticism for their misogynistic behavior is really just prejudice towards their marginalized group & say the evidence is that this criticism is only ever directed at their demographic. and it's literally not. even the insistence that it's unique is not unique.
ai discourse is just fucking sad at this point. another scenario where you have the reactionary "anti" group that refuses to tolerate neutrality on the subject. you're making a complex issue into something 2 dimensional simply so you can position yourself as righteous for having the correct opinion...
if your ai stance doesn't leave room for being neutral and/or curious about ai i think you should really reconsider it! if you're grouping ppl who are ai neutral into "pro ai" you are just kind of making enemies where there aren't any.
transfeminists: "transandrophobia theory" is a direct pipeline to being a terf
terfs: "transandrophobia theory" is a direct pipeline to being a terf đđđ
I think more people need to remember and keep in mind that behind every single mass-produced plush that exists on this planet is a factory worker who has had to operate machinery in order to make these products. There is not a single factory out there that can make plushies entirely by machine, which is why it is so important to hold toy companies accountable for their workspace conditions.
No plush is worthy of existing if it is made from slave labour.
This goes for companies like Makeship and Youtooz, as well as Kickstarter projects too. I've supported some of these in the past, but I'm becoming wary of them over time because I don't know where many of these plushies are being produced.
Don't be afraid to ask questions. Where are they being made? Is the artist in contact with the factory making their products? What kind of conditions are the employees working under? Are they being paid fairly in comparison to the retail price of the product?
I don't think every indie Kickstarter project is inherently bad, but I do want artists to actually do their research and start being upfront and truthful about the conditions of the factories they're working with. Not all factories in the Global South/SEAsia are sweat shopsâfor example, Chinese factories have generally improved in their factory conditions and worker salary. But when you sign up for manufacturing anything, you have a responsibility to do your due-diligence and make sure you're not exploiting people.
I read an article once by a disabled man that was examining the strategies disabled men use to reclaim their manhood in the face of the feminisation of disability as an experience. and it was bleak because the author (I believe it was tom shakespeare) seemed to think that claiming manhood was itself a positive goal for these men to have. but what stuck with me was the number of cases where men would use sexual aggression as their primary strategy when they were feeling particularly feminised. they spoke about wanting to exhaust their girlfriends sexually, to prove that they were still the more sexually driven one in the relationship. I think itâs important to be able to point out how these intersections of socially feminised identity and âmanhoodâ create environments that are unsafe for women who exist in and around that same feminised category. particularly when you consider the racialised aspects of (under)paid care work. anyway. something to continue mulling over
so apparently the dsm 6 is being structured around bio-pathologizing mental illness specifically in the direction of biomarkersâŠif u arenât concerned about this maybe you should beâŠ
Psychiatry is hard at work crafting the newest edition of its diagnostic bible, DSM-6.
âŠso theyâre now trying to search for âbiomarkersâ- which are essentially genes, or circumstances of conception/birth/what have you, that can âincrease the riskâ of mental illnesses. how is this any different from people wondering if thereâs a âgay gene?â or autism speaks trying to find a genetic or reproductive âcure for autism?â
itâs not. this is barely disguised eugenics that they have ACKNOWLEDGED may (will) do more to harm than good for people with abnormal mental states. what else could the end result of finding a âmental illness geneâ be than a reason to further marginalize those who are already marginalized, already branded as more likely to be (or even inherently) âmentally illâ and eventually discourage them to reproduce, either by coercion or force?
itâs more obvious than ever now. everyone should be anti psych
Psychiatry as an institution functions to obfuscate the causes of mental and emotional disturbance (economic exploitation, abuse, lack of access to resources, etc) by describing mental illness as an individual pathology that needs to be recognized and treated by science.
Given where these hardships cluster most intensely, it is extremely useful to white supremacy and eugenics to have a "scientific" method of proving that pathology is more common among "degenerate" populations.
The DSM's various incarnations have corresponded to shifts in which part of this process have been considered more or less important to prioritize - the latest restructuring to focus on biomarkers is just a recalibration to better suit the needs of the imperial-capitalist white supremacist project.
my position on the Toby Fox Situation:
this is an interesting lens to analyze the production and distribution of video games and culture, especially with regard to the USA's language imperialism. but it is not special.
the reason it's "special" is because Toby Fox enjoys a reputation among "leftist" gamers and fandom that other gamedevs who are much more openly rancid U.S. right-wingers (like FNAF Guy) don't.
everyone feels like they are on friendly terms with Toby Fox (once you notice we call him "Toby", i.e. first-name basis, you can't unsee it) because he's creative, progressive, polite, funny and successful. but this is not a reason to trust/expect him to be politically conscious.
now, it's true that this also reveals a lot about fandom racism and people's ability to polarize themselves, often joining the side of the property-owning U.S. millionaire to "defend" him from the global south.
but on the other hand, the people who side "against" his translation decisions are either clearly elated to have a reason to hate on this beloved cinnamon roll (because he's too progressive or not enough). and importantly, to have a reason to indulge petty liberal discourse about individual product consumption/production choices. some of that discourse is openly racist and reactionary, but some is painted under the colors of anti-imperialism and anti-racism.
notably though, i think people with solid anti-imperialist politics made the mistake of extending them into a moral framework here, as if it's the U.S. American bourgeois artist's responsibility to make his (quality)slop available to the global south. this is not a very coherent position. in fact it would be less appealing, but equally coherent to argue we should prevent U.S. games and culture from dominating the world further, and the language barrier must remain to prevent this!
in the end it's nice to be able to participate in the dominant U.S. culture and consume their exports, yes. but that should be a personal struggle. to integrate this into the class struggle is to slip on the banana peel of assimilationism! (of course, blanket rejection of all U.S. cultural production would be a form of reaction, and a mistake as well.)
i think it's evident that Toby Fox's real position is "well i don't wanna! and you can't force me to make art the way you want!", which is his only coherent and defensible position. but he can't say that openly, he's a non-confrontational guy, he wants to be loved and forgiven by his fans in Latin America. so instead he makes mediocre factual claims about game translation and development, which (true or false) just so happen to align with the status quo of culture and language imperialism.
cue, of course, the sound of someone stepping on a rake.
so what now? (this leads to my main point and only real political position on this matter, which i mentioned in a previous post.)
we can argue about the artist's right to create how he wants or the consumer's right to have culture accessible to them, but in any case Toby Fox cannot choose without betraying either his values about "artistic integrity" or his values about "being niceys to fans".
the thing is, these are not opposite values. they are only in conflict for a very specific reason: because people who aren't Toby Fox are barred from making his cultural production accessible. because he reserves that right for himself, and no one else, in the first place. i am of course talking about a legal barrier and a legal right, made into tangible forces because they're backed by cops, lawyers, state violence: copyright law.
Toby Fox finds the responsibility of translating his games unbearable and crushing, but he will not relinquish his exclusive right to do so. he will not relinquish his power to destroy fan translators with a lawsuit the moment he stops feeling Niceys. say, for example... because they've started seeking a fair wage for this unpaid labor. getting paid for real work performed to transform his intellectual property.
the real issue at play is that fan translations are uncompensated work, and this work can never be fairly funded or compensated because of copyright. the fundamental inequality is the implicit threat of a C&D and lawsuit hanging over the head of anyone who might attempt this.
it took Toby a long time to rein in Materia Collective after they proved ruthlessly overprotective of his intellectual property. no one wants to try and see whether Toby could pull the equivalent of Nintendo condemning Gary Bowser to debt slavery for life. he certainly has the wealth and goodwill to get away with it, if he doesn't feel merciful.
he could change this and make it safe, for example by releasing Undertale/Deltarune's dialogue files under CC-BY-SA. but he won't. with that decision he has, knowingly or not, followed in the footsteps of every bourgeois artist before him, and manufactured this entire nonsense moral quandary and the various rakes he keeps stepping on!
this is the lesson we should be drawing from this situation, all in all. your artistic integrity, making your work accessible to fans, your class interests as a bourgeois millionaire: you can pick two and only two.
Mr. Fox, if you're reading this, i'm sure this situation is stressful to you. it doesn't have to be. relinquish this small part of your intellectual property rights, and you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower. <3
