while it is easy to place all the blame on Hannah Arendt’s 1950s political work, I do believe :porky-happy: would have come up with this little rhetorical trick with or without her writing The Origins of Totalitarianism

3rd world nations: Give us reparations for climate change

1st world nations: Actually it’s China’s fault because we leveraged our economic hegemony to make them manufacture all the stuff. :soypoint-1::some-controversy::soypoint-2:

I think on a long enough timeline it could be said Gorbachev killed more people than WW2. Because what he really did was he dismantled the nation best equipped to handle climate change, and to help others handle climate change. :doomjak:

Gorbachev said in an interview in Turkey in 2000 “My ambition was to liquidate Communism.” and establish a “Union of Independent Sovereign Republics” and to basically help America fight China. So he wanted a return of bourgeois nationalism, and a fully capitalist mode of production, but without dissolving the USSR, and with the addition of social democracy, which would rely on imperialism. It was a very naive in my opinion.

we’re doing aight :shrug-outta-hecks:

could be a lot worse. will probably get a lot worse soon. thanks for the well wishes

My grandfather was a sharecropper in North Carolina in the 1930s. He picked cotton as a child and was deprived of a proper education. He was barely literate in his 70s. He fought in Korea. He and his mother would both urinate in the bags of cotton at the end of their work shift to increase the weight of the yield.

there are men and women who are still alive today who worked as sharecroppers as children as late as the 1960s and 1970s, before the mass adoption of combine harvesters (go to 5:10)

um… lenin, that’s a little too low to be xi’s arm :hyperflush:

Earlier today I had a discussion on here where I linked to an anthropological research paper from 1985. On 4klan they just hurl racial slurs at each other and post “infographics” where they drew stars of david in MS paint over the entire CNN board of directors.

everyone and their dog knows that US media is dogshit propaganda, so they come to the (erroneous) conclusion that shitposts on white supremacists forums are “the real truth”

not only do we not guarantee staple foods for all, but supermarkets throw out millions of tons of (barely expired) foods every year and deliberately lock the dumpsters so the homeless can’t loot them. There are several foods, like plain yogurt, which have artificially low expiration dates and get thrown out long before they truly expire.

I’ll never forget when I worked for a supermarket when I was 20 and was made to throw out an entire garbage bag full of cookies that had been only slightly overcooked by the bakery. They tasted great and were NOT burned. I ate as many as I could on the way to the garbage disposal. Had I not been under the direct eye of management I would have found a way to sneak it to the homeless outside.

I liked the meditations on empathy, etc. I have no objections to the vast majority of the article… until it talks about current events, stripped of context. The article was perfectly good until it started talking about the present war in ukraine in a totally amaterial and unexamined way.

Quote:

The brutal British empire, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current Russian invasion of Ukraine—in each case, the perpetrators think of themselves as acting rightly against an evil enemy.

This is how the soldiers might be taught to think of themselves, but this is not how the leadership thinks of themselves. The leadership does not trouble themselves with morality, only strategy. Putin does not believe he is acting “rightly” against an “evil” enemy. He believes he is defending the Russian border from NATO expansion. Anything beyond that is rhetoric.

we are just as reluctant to apply serious self-scrutiny as Vladimir Putin is to question his bizarre fantasies about the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.

denazification of Ukraine might be a cynical rhetorical justification for Putin’s broader strategic goal of preventing NATO expansion… But the need to denazify Ukraine is not a “bizarre fantasy” for the people DPR/LPR when the USA has been in bed with Ukrainian nazis since WW2, and has been overtly using them as pawns in their geopolitical games since 2014. The need to denazify Ukraine is not a “bizarre fantasy” for the LGBTQ+, the Roma, the Jews, and the Proletarians of Ukraine, who are victims of far right violence just as much as the breakaway republics. Even Zelensky preferred peace to the present situation, but has had US-backed fascist guns to his head this whole time, preventing him from pursuing this the way he may have wanted to.

a time he and his wife went to see a movie in Boston in the early 1950s.

christ he’s soooooo old. my grandparents were born ~ 1950 and I’m ~ 30. sorry to be childish about this, but it’s astonishing that anyone can live that long. :chomsky-yes-honey:

i find it tragic that the propaganda is so powerful people were fooled into dying for NATO and neo nazis.