Even though we had a little bit of warning about federation, I think we’re off to a rocky start. Maybe we should have compiled a list of things we think that may make other people very upset. That way they can quickly get to know what we’re about and go hide in a social media bubble if it scares them.

I figure I’d start with a good one. America deserved 9/11. I’m burying the lede a bit with that one. I don’t think random acts of violence really accomplish much and I don’t think randos, albeit imperial core randos, should die. But this wasn’t a random act of violence, was it?

There’s a little something called Foucault’s Boomerang. Basically it’s the tools, means, and experiments carried out by imperial countries tend to make their way back home one way or another. Military gear gets tried out on the battlefield then next thing you know cops at home have the same equipment. It also works for cause and effect. America did 9/11 to itself.

After WWII America courted the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, who had some really “interesting” religious ideas at the time, to ensure a source of oil. Oil was very important to American manufacturing and the war effort. Our domestic reserves helped us get through WWII. We needed more. So the US decided to look the other way on Saudi foreign policy while they ensured us first dibs on the oil. The UK also made deals on building their infrastructure and finance needs, to which the US eventually pushed them of the back rooms where such deals were made. But that’s another story.

The US also backed anti-Soviet/anti-Communist groups in the Middle-East as they had in other parts of the world. This meant giving aide and weapons and training to those groups. In exchange they would beat up all the communists and pro-soviet people in their country and keep the borders open for US trade.

Not to “yadda yadda yadda” through a lot of interesting history but the US made a lot of enemies and ruined former alliances in these places because we valued the exploitation of their resources more than the actual relationships formed. Once the Soviets were gone, we could just do what we wanted to them and there was nobody left to oppose us.

So our former (and some current) friends stabbed us in the back. The imperialism boomeranged back home and we got a terrorist attack on US soil.

The people who died didn’t particularly deserve it but people die when an imperial power does imperialism. That’s part of why it’s bad. Imperialism will never benefit the common person, it will only hurt us in the end. You best believe all this funding, weapons, and shit going into Ukraine will come back on us too.

What are some other real-ass takes for our visitors who need disillusioning?

  • halcyondays@midwest.socialEnglish
    121·
    1 年前

    The US also backed anti-Soviet/anti-Communist groups in the Middle-East as they had in other parts of the world.

    Let’s not gloss over South / Central America and the Caribbean. The US has backed regime changes/coups in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.

    Can you imagine the base of stable examples of leftist governments that could exist today if the CIA wasn’t dedicated to overthrowing any “threat to capitalism” (read: example of better ways of doing things).

    We used the head start on industrialization post WW2, and millions of years of stored energy in the form of fossil fuels (which have in turn killed us all), to enforce global hegemony of a brutal system of corporate profits above all else.

  • jabrd [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    84·
    1 年前

    This process of blowback is exactly why I think arming Ukraine is going to result in nightmare scenarios in the future, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the new reboot of 24 but about Slavs this time

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    71·
    1 年前

    Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.

    Capitalism requires endless growth, endless expansion: the economic engine that drives it is profit. It must constantly take more. But the world is not infinite. Once capital has nowhere else to expand, the only way it can increase profits is by intensifying exploitation within its territories: unions are busted, wages are depressed, costs of living rise. The working class must give more and get less. To facilitate this, capital funnels money into police, passes ever more draconian laws, restricts franchise, defunds public services, and redirects working class anger against suitable scapegoats - minorities who do not have the population, money, or political power to fight back. The result is widespread political persecution, pogroms, impoverishment, decay of infrastructure except the tools of oppression: features characteristic of imperial periphery countries arising in the imperial core.

    Aime Cesaire describes this process aptly in his brilliant work Discourse on Colonialism:

    CW for descriptions of colonial violence, including sexual violence

    Each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

    And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

    People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

    Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the [slur]s of India, and the [n-word]s of Africa.

    Michael Novick likewise explains this in Fascism And What Is Coming:

    In general, fascism can best be understood as bringing the methods of imperial rule in the colonies into the metropole. In the colonies, genocide has been the rule, not the exception, of imperial rule. Democracy is only for a select few of settlers; dictatorship and slave labor applies to the indigenous and other colonized people. The corporate model developed in colonial enterprise. The first corporations were the colonizing corporations—British East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, etc.— who could bear the costs and risks of colonization because of shared and limited liability, and exercised state power directly over the colonized territories and populations. The mass base of participation in colonial rule came via the settler population, who participated actively and often independently in land grabs and extermination without waiting for bourgeois legitimacy.

    All this was translated to the metropole by Hitler, however he may have defined or proclaimed his system. Except that the mechanisms— dictatorship, slave labor, corporatization of the state and society, mass participation in militarism, looting and oppression independently of the bourgeoisie—were seen operating directly within the German population at large, including against its racially and ethnically defined minorities, and its European neighbors.

  • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    64·
    1 年前

    “Social democracy is objectively the left-wing of fascism.”

    I’m not going to elaborate too far into this, but this Stalin quote is timeless and really shows how much more he understood the processes of socio-economics and history than anyone around him. Time and again, Social Democrats prove themselves to be absolutely spineless in the face of capitalist opposition, with their only effective political purpose being punching to the left and preserving core imperialism. They have no internationalism, and they are a political dead-end, simply being the left-wing shepherds of the apocalypse. When Gorbachev wanted to bring Russia into a European social-democratic (euro-communism) model, all he ended up doing was absolutely blasting the Russian economy and setting up the tragedy of Yeltsin and Putin.

    I could go in further, really getting into the nitty-gritty of the racism and colonialism that powers the Nordic models, but that is another post for another day. It’s something to remember that Bernie was the compromise for many of us. Not a good compromise, but an acceptable one.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      36·
      1 年前

      Jumping in to add, the social democrats helped found the Freikorps, a paramilitary organization that engaged in the mass murder of European communists and later became Hitler’s SA.

  • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    57·
    1 年前

    If it weren’t for the Nazis, the British empire would have been the big baddies of history, because they did some real bad shit, just spread out over a much longer time period

  • the_itsb [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    54·
    1 年前

    Sex Work is Work

    Idk how truly controversial that is anymore though.

    I’ve got hot takes about ageism that upset a lot of my age-peers and people older; I think kids and teens should be empowered and consulted more, and I think we need age maximums for things just as surely as we need age minimums. Sure, not every 95yo is incapable of driving, but also some 13yo kids are and we still don’t let them have licenses. Fine, a 25yo shouldn’t be President, but also maybe neither should anyone over 65.

    • iridaniotter [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      39·
      1 年前

      Sex work stuff is controversial among communists because Marxist-Leninists have historically been for the abolition of the sex trade. That’s all I have to say though cause I don’t want an argument over this again. lukashenko-tired

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
        23·
        1 年前

        Here’s my spicy take on this: To be a sitting president or senator, you must be between 30 and 70. If you’re running at 66, you only get 4 years. If you’re 69? Yeah, you’ll get a few months. Might not be worth it.

        • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          19·
          1 年前

          Fun fact, that is how judgeships (?) work in Denmark. You’re forcibly retired after a maximum of 6 months after you turn 70. It has led to the Supreme Court having quite a lot of rotation, since judges rarely get appointed prior to turning 62.

        • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          17·
          1 年前

          I’ve know too many people that were very sharp in their 50s and 60s, and then afterward their brains just sorta start falling apart. It actually motivates me to read theory or other challenging stuff, to keep the brain muscles working. I genuinely think a lot of what causes boomers brains to be like that is that generation was raised on passively absorbing TV and not reading or doing other stuff that’s better for your brain.

        • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          16·
          1 年前

          Nah 18-65. 65 is retirement age, should be the limit for elected or appointed office. Pilots are forced to retire at 65, and pilots are responsible for less lives than senators. And to be honest I think we should have some very very young people, like haven’t even graduated college yet young, because they have to live with these decisions longer and their perspectives are never seen in politics.

        • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          9·
          1 年前

          Who has that quote about how Mao would have been unilaterally loved as a hero if he had died at 50

          That’s why it’s so easy to celebrate Lenin and Che.

    • SootyChimney [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      1 年前

      I agree it’s work, but I also assert that, under Capitalism at least, it’s exploitative work that targets and injures the vulnerable and poor even more than the majority of other work. You cannot buy enthusiastic consent.

      • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        23·
        1 年前

        All work under capitalism is exploitative. But yes, it is kind of unique in that the clients are all pieces of shit. Your last sentence is the important part to me

      • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        20·
        1 年前

        True, but that’s also true of wage labor generally. I support the assertion that sex work is work partly for that reason: it’s a good provocation for an argument against labor under capitalism being consensual.

        Some of my old coworkers would insist, to my frustration, that me and my fellow grumblers and agitators had nothing to complain about because we could leave at any time. My manager was especially fond of that line. And it’s like yeah, but I still need to eat and pay rent. I’m still forced to do something, against my inclination. If you can’t choose to do nothing without life altering consequences, then you aren’t free. (Edit: I should note that this wouldn’t change under socialism, but the differences would include much fairer compensation and actual democratic representation, i.e. you’ll actually get something for your work and you’ll have a real stake in society) The exchange of money, and the need to earn it, always undermines consent.

        Sex work is merely a more highly visible form of this kind of coercion, and I liked to use it as an example when explaining the above points to any of my coworkers who cared to listen. Being that we were warehouse workers, many of whom sustained minor injuries and risked major ones on a daily basis (and one of whom totally fucked up his back for life and was forced to quit), it was an easy point to make. We were selling our bodies as well. The difference, of course, is that our line of work is looked at as legitimate, whereas sex work often is not. Well clearly that’s wrong. As I’ve just outlined, there’s little difference between it and other forms of labor under capitalism. The view of sex work as illegitimate or less respectable or whatever is undoubtedly rooted in misogyny and patriarchy, but that’d be a whole post unto itself.

    • Serdan@lemm.eeEnglish
      6·
      1 年前

      The politics ageism thing is mostly US-centric nonsense. The actual issue you have is that your political system is complete and utter shit. Fix that so people don’t feel compelled to vote for literal mummies.

  • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    51·
    1 年前

    Everything bad the USSR was accused of doing, the United States and it’s allies actually did, and usually 1000x worse. And surprise! It wasn’t for the “good of democracy”, it was because some American business tyrant wants to build a mine somewhere.

    ACAB is another one libs don’t like but less offensive I think than the above.

    You actually need to have some deeply ingrained racism to accept at face value basically everything negative you hear about the DPRK from Western news media. I’ve had people irl relate to me that “you know the people of North Korea believe their leader doesn’t poop”, -buddy, who’s the fool here?

    • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      35·
      1 年前

      oh yeah, and my god the history of Ukraine did not start with the 2022 invasion by Russia - idk how many times I’ve heard irl and on this federated site “oh no, actually I’ve followed the conflict since 2014, actually! and here’s why we need to kill every ruzzian ork on site”

      and when asked about “ok, so what about the objective fact of ousting the elected president for a fair right wing candidate that immediately tries to make the russian language illegal? what about nazi marches in the streets, mysterious snipers that shot both protestors AND police, the RECORDED PHONE CALL OF US OFFICIALS PICKING THE NEW GOV, uh the nazis who boarded up the trade unionists and burned them alive, uh and on and on” and their response is just SILENCE or just picking a different (often single-line) response to comment on instead

    • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      1 年前

      ACAB is another one libs don’t like but less offensive I think than the above.

      You just have to mix this in a cocktail with police abolition and they spin up to full RPM

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    50·
    1 年前

    I don’t think randos, albeit imperial core randos

    I think it’s worth correcting this. The people of the WTC were not just randos. The tenants list of the towers was:

    WTC1(North)

    Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - Randos

    Marsh & McLennan Companies - Huge finance capitalist firm

    Bank of America

    Cantor Fitzgerald - Huge finance capitalist firm

    Dai-Ichi Kangyo Group - A japanese Keiretsu (monopoly group) (more bastards)

    Sidley Austin Brown & Wood - Law firm, primarily serving finance capitalists

    Restaurant “Windows on the World” - Randos

    WTC2(South)

    Verizon - Randos

    New York Stock Exchange - Finance capitalists

    Morgan Stanley - Finance capitalists

    Xerox Corporation - Randos

    Keefe, Bruyette & Woods - Finance capitalists

    Aon Corporation - Finance capitalist advisory firm

    Fiduciary Trust Company International - Finance capitalists

    WTC7

    Salomon Smith Barney - Finance capitalists

    U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission - Finance capitalist regulator

    Standard Chartered Bank - Finance capitalists

    U.S. Secret Service - Ghouls

    My point here is that these were not “randos” that were attacked. This was a direct and targeted attack on the bourgeoisie. This was targeted directly at the ruling class of america and the response that occurred posing it as an “attack on america” was because the bourgeoisie consider themselves to be america and that any attack on them is an attack on the nation. Had this been a bombing against randos it would have been largely ignored, as you see with most bombings of random shopping centres etc. It was because it was an attack on the ruling class that it created such an extensive response from them.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      40·
      1 年前

      Xerox Corporation

      Tech companies, especially tech companies that are as old as Xerox, definitely are at least finance capital adjacent. Old school mainframes were almost exclusively catered towards financial institutions like banks because they’re the only place where you would simultaneously need computers and could afford computers, in this case for number-crunching financial transactions. Mainframes were also used by the military and the feds as a counter-insurgent weapon, in this case as a means of handling massive amounts of data gathered by informants and general surveillance. The origins of tech as an industry that caters to the military and finance explains the general reactionary character of subcultures that have origins in tech like gaming as well as entirely predict how social media companies would be entirely incorporated within the surveillance apparatus.

    • worker_bear [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      1 年前

      Was the WTC where the actual execs and shit were working though? From what I understood I thought it was mostly middle management and lower type employees in those buildings. This makes a lot of sense, though - I never really connected the contents of the WTC building with its selection as a target for the attack. Still, as much as we collectively deserved 9/11, it’s hard for me to lean in and say ‘those guys ESPECIALLY deserved it’ if they were just middle of the rung 9-5ers. If that was the case, they’re like… a degree or two closer to the imperial core, but this country basically forces you to work for those assholes if you want to be even lower-middle class. Unless I’m totally wrong, in which case forget everything I just said. But I prefer to think along the lines of how Chomsky described our collective guilt via our indifference during the Vietnam war era, namely that we were all equally culpable for not doing everything in our power to stop this project. Every American (us included) should be doing more.

  • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    46·
    1 年前

    Recycling this from a recent post of mine but: structural violence is still violence. Colonialism and slavery never ended. Your treats are funded with murder.

    There’s no such thing as a good capitalist / landlord / business owner.

    Democracy has never existed in the USA, at least where euros were in control.

    Because the Democrats embrace imperialism and privatization, they would be considered a far-right party in any other country. This includes progressive Democrats and local Democrats (who almost universally pretend to care about LGBTQ+ issues while dumping endless piles of money onto the police).

    All the land in the USA should be returned to indigenous sovereignty. Workers who are onboard with this should work with indigenous people and descendants of slaves to make it happen. This might be a hot take for some of my fellow hexbears but colonialism is the primary contradiction, capitalism cannot exist without colonialism, it never would have gotten off the ground in England without Columbus’s “discovery” of “America” and the subsequent runaway inflation that occurred with regard to the 16th century’s religious wars. Higher prices = it’s more profitable to raise sheep = capitalism takes over the planet.

    China should find a way to disable amerikkka’s entire nuclear arsenal ASAP.

    One day the concept of private property will look as absurd and barbaric as the concept of chattel slavery.

    2/3 of covid deaths in the USA took place under Biden. Biden has signed more drilling permits than Trump, and continues to cage children. He is also attempting to start a nuclear war with Russia, and is 100% responsible for recent tensions regarding Taiwan. He is not just Blue Trump; Biden is the more competent fascist that many people were warning us about.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      1 年前

      Recycling this from a recent post of mine but: structural violence is still violence.

      For others, the main term for this in classical Marxism is “Social Murder,” coined by Engels to describe the creation of conditions (mainly working conditions) in which some number of deaths was statistically inevitable even if the individual deaths were “accidents”.

      When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

      US covid policy is the perfect example of social murder.

    • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      1 年前

      Biden ignited a land war in Europe.

      That alone is worthy of trial and execution. The man has reverted us back to the era of World Wars and fed hundreds of thousands into a meat grinder for the sake of lines on a map.

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    44·
    1 年前

    That’s way too many words.

    9/11 was used as a justification for wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people. We’ve had days where more people were dying every day from covid than from 9/11. The US armed and supported Al Qaida, Rambo II said “This film is dedicated to the brave mujaheddin of Afghanistan.”

    We, like a lot of people, got sick and tired of it being blown out of proportion so we joke about it.

    Like how did you stretch it out that far, adding that much text just makes it weird.