I think this kind of meme is the best for lib agitation. Most don’t need to be convinced that people are more important than profits. Now we just need to find a way to insert the idea about just what kind of economic system prioritizes people over profits…

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prohibited the Russian Federation … from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, … "except in self-defence or …”

It was a slow process. It started when I worked as a server and was first exposed to the desperation of working people. I met people who had to work a dinner shift after spending the first 8 hours of the day sweltering at a brutal roofing job to make ends meet. People fighting over shifts because otherwise they couldn’t feed their families. Outside the restaurant I’d regularly see undocumented landscapers get chewed out and let go on the spot because the boss wasn’t happy with how the flowers looked that day. The icing on the cake was when the “owner” of the entire shopping complex showed up one day, fat and happy, worth 9 figures. It hadn’t dawned on me until that day that someone actually owned the property I worked in. After that experience I got a corporate job and was completely dumbfounded how different the working environment was. It started to sink in that something was deeply wrong.

My politics have always been heavily focused on the environment though. The real nail in the coffin has been waking up to the fact that capitalism will have us go extinct if it’s profitable to do so. I bought into the neoliberal ideal of trying to “shop green,” and that’s when the cracks started showing. I finally came to my sense and realized that I am at the mercy of whatever the markets want to produce, and most of the “green” companies are just trying to juice profits, further feeding the beast. I started reading up on energy company investment plans only to realize the energy transition under capitalism is a ruse because they will pump oil as long as it is most profitable to do so and neoliberal governments are incapable of putting forward the level of investment and market controls necessary to change that. As Luxemburg famously said: it’s “socialism or barbarism.”

feel better comrade

imo having a global lingua franca will be better for global solidarity more than it enables soft power projection in the long-run

ah yes, another “flourishing” democracy 🤡

You need human capital for a society to function. All of these necessities for someone to live a dignified life amount to investments in human capital. The economy cannot function without a workforce that is healthy, educated and housed. It’s like saying people who suffered under chattel slavery demanding to be fed made them entitled and lazy. To have a shortage of these necessities is tantamount to abandoning some subset of the population.

There are about 20 cities in China with at least 5 million people and each of them have specialty cuisines they are known for because the food culture has been developing for thousands of years. In the west, you only really get a handful of those available at Chinese restaurants. The western Chinese dishes (General Tso’s chicken, etc.) were created during brutal repression of Chinese communities in America after the Chinese exclusion act when Chinatowns were in survival mode building neighborhoods and modifying their food so that it would appeal to westerners so they were less likely to burn everything down and murder them. If you’re interested, one place to start is to try the Ten Great Noodles of China (中国十大面条). It’s a fun cooking adventure if nothing serves them in your area but you have access to a Chinese or maybe Pan-Asian grocer.

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probably color revolution in Russia followed by balkanization into western vassal states ripe for pillaging

climate change is literally a planet-sized problem. solving it will require nothing short of epic public investment in infrastructure, technology, and changing patterns of production and consumption. That’s not going to happen fast or fairly enough under a neoliberal, unipolar world order. Changing that will be a slow grind over the next 10-30 years, carried out by countries outside the imperial core. Building a mass movement to rally behind that change in the global order is probably a good path forward, like a radical anti-war movement in any NATO+ country.

Another idea specifically for america would be to radicalize urbanism and transit nerds to build a movement for dense public housing and transit to replace suburban sprawl. that idea could be extended to other things like veganism, biodiversity conservation, etc. where you help radicalize a left-ish movement that moves in the right direction for planetary longevity.

lol

An estimated 40% of Native American women (60,000–70,000 women) and 10% of Native American men in the United States underwent sterilization in the 1970s.

scanning chinese media and english and chinese wikipedia the tldr seems to be: there were state incentives for having just one child wrt healthcare, retirement, etc. After first child it’s mandated that the woman has an IUD or one of the partners is sterilized. After the second child, sterilization is mandatory, and there is a hefty fee (multiple years of rural income) for the second child for the state to support them.

There were a decent number of exceptions: rural populations could have 2 if the first was a girl, and in sparsely populated provinces, rural populations could have 2 no matter what. Critically, ethnic minorities were exempt, so it only applied to Han people. The enforcement was primarily in urban areas. There were other exceptions too and they changed throughout the course of the law.

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It’s nice to see traitors get what they deserve

Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a banger

The London and Paris metro stations are even older and don’t look half as bad. To be fair though, the picture is Chambers Street station, which is renowned as one of the worst in the system. There are some nice stations for rich people though, like in Hudson Yards

I can’t believe the Australian state exists, as in the “concept” of the Australian state. The idea that a bunch of people from a faraway archipelago in a completely different climate would come to annihilate the original people of an entire continent on the opposite side of the planet that could hardly be more different than their homeland is nuts. The whole thing just feels like some kind of fever dream of historic fiction, but yet it exists. What are they even doing down there? It’s like if Fordlandia in the Amazon rainforest actually worked out. So incongruent