#democrats now socialism later

[sordidamok]

SCOTUS will probably put off making their decision until after the elections. If Trump wins, they could then rule in favor of presidential immunity. If Biden wins, they certainly wouldn't.

I don't think any POTUS should have a get out of jail free card for whatever they decide to do while in office, so I'm fine with Biden not having immunity.

Trump having immunity would be the end of democracy in the US.

SCOTUS should not have the power to determine whether or not democracy survives.

#corrupt scotus #reform the court #vote blue #vote democrat #vote blue to save democracy #vote biden #democracy #social democracy #democratic socialism #democrats now socialism later #vote blue 2024 #vote biden/harris #biden/harris 2024

[yourtongzhihazel]

You don't vote in fascism and you can't vote out fascism. hitler was appointed by Hindenburg, the SDP president. mussolini was appointed by a high council in service of the king. franco won a civil war with the support of other fascists. tojo was selected by the incumbent military dictatorship under supervision of the emperor. How many of these actions involved a ballot box?

Did the 4 million strong Red Army that entered berlin vote hitler out in 1945? Was it the ballot box that ended franco's government or his death? Did the carnation revolution end Portugal's fascist government and colonial policy or was it the carnation ballot box? Did the american and soviet offensives in the pacific and china end japan's military dictatorship or did they vote on it?

During the short days of the weimar republic, there was the nazi party, the social democrats, and the communists. Time and time again, the social democrats sided with the nazis to persecute and destroy the communists. Time and time again they would cry to "vote for the moderate candidate or the nazis would get in power" and "we can push the country left just not now because of the nazis" until they voted in Hindenburg and he put fascism in charge. This is what I mean when I say you are already voting in fascism. One day, sooner or later, you will cast the ballot that puts 21st century blue american Hindenburg in the white house. And suddenly, the lack of organizing and agitating will hit you all at once and the most vulnerable and/or left-wing people who warned you about this get shipped off to camps and all you can do is slowly wait your turn on the trains. Only this time, there will be no Red Army to end the fascism which you have abetted.

#death to the usa #i fucking hate liberals #mmp

[hedgehog-moss]

Update on May 1st protests and how the french goverment handled them?

^ The May 1st protests were pretty violent esp. in Paris; two cops were set on fire (they're ok, one has 2nd degree burns), lots of destruction in city streets, and hundreds of injured protesters. The French gov is sticking to its M.O. of denying any police violence against protesters, emphasising protesters' violence and portraying it as mindless anti-democratic savagery rather than the result of their own anti-democratic policies.

There were more people protesting in the streets on Monday than at any other May Day protest in the past 20 years (by a large margin—7 to 10x more people than usual.) And the numbers are still impressive in terms of this current social movement—there were about 1.2 million people at the first protest against the pension reform in January, 900K at one of the February protests, around 1.1M on March 7 and I think 1.2M on March 23rd... We're in May and there were 800K people in the streets on Monday (using the police's probably low estimate). The first marches earlier this year were peaceful; people started destroying shit in March after the 49.3 (=the gov not letting elected representatives vote on the reform); in the following weeks we saw a brutal escalation of police violence + suppression of just about any means of non-violent protest, which results in more violence.

The vast majority of protesters are still peaceful, but in terms of providing context for the increased violence, well—people protested peacefully, peaceful protests got banned. People banged pots and pans, pots and pans got banned and confiscated. People started a petition on the National Assembly website which got a record number of signatures, the petition was closed before its deadline and ignored. MPs asked (twice!) for a national referendum on the reform to be held, their requests were denied. Electricity unionists cut power in buildings Macron was visiting, now he travels around with a portable generator. Unions tried to distribute whistles and red cards (penalty cards) to football supporters before the French Cup finale last week, so the ones who wanted could use them if Macron showed up (he ended up hiding and greeting the footballers indoors rather than publicly on the stadium lawn); the police prefecture tried banning union members from gathering outside the stadium to distribute these items (although the ban was struck down by the judiciary as it was illegal, like most bans these days...)

Confiscating saucepans was already so absurd it felt like a gratuitous fuck you, but now they're trying to prevent the distribution of pieces of red paper. Cancelling petitions that would have had no real impact anyway. Prosecuting people for insulting Macron. Arbitrarily arresting hundreds of nonviolent protesters to intimidate them out of protesting (guess who's left then?). The French gov is systematically repressing democratic or nonviolent means of making your opinion heard, and when people get more violent they're like "This is unacceptable, don't these terrorists know there are other means of expressing dissent??" Where? This week a 77-year-old man was summoned to the police station and will be forced to take a "citizenship course" for having a banner outside his house that read "Macron fuck you" (Macron on t'emmerde). Note that he would have been arrested (like the woman who was arrested at her home and spent a night in police custody for calling Macron "garbage" on Facebook) but they decided not to only because of his age.

So that's where we're at; on Monday two cops caught on fire (well, their fireproof suit did) after protesters threw a Molotov cocktail at them. (The street medic who tried to help them with their burns ended up getting shot by a cop's riot gun a few seconds later—with French police no good deed goes unpunished!) The media talked a lot more about this incident than about the fact that the cop who got most severely injured on that day (broken vertebrae) was injured by an explosive grenade that a colleague of his meant to throw at protesters (you can see it at the end of the video below). If police with all their protective gear get so badly injured by their own weapons, no wonder the worst injuries have been on the protesters' side. (nearly 600 injured protesters on May 1st, 120 severely, according to street medics.) I'm not including images of these incidents in the video but on May 1st a protester had his hand mutilated by a police grenade + a 17 year old girl was hit in the eye by a grenade fragment, may end up losing it (during the Yellow Vests protests, Macron's first attempt at repressing a social movement, 38 protesters lost an eye or a hand).

What you see in the video: cops charging the front of a march to tear a banner off people's hands then retreating and drowning the street in tear gas when protesters throw paint bombs at them (protesters have umbrellas because of police drones); at 0:30, a journalist saying "They're not even arresting him, just kicking him when he's down—they kicked him right in the face!" then police spraying with tear gas protesters who try to fend them off; at 0:46 when a protester being arrested asks a journalist if he's filming and starts reading out loud a cop's ID number, another cop shoves the journalist and throws him to the ground; at 0:54, an Irish journalist runs away from the police tear gas grenades that you hear going off, at 01:08, the incident mentioned above when a cop drops a grenade he tried to throw, which explodes in his group, breaking another cop's vertebrae. There's a lot more I'm not including, like how CNN said "there's so much tear gas in Paris, our foreign correspondent can barely breathe", how another journalist was hit by a sting-ball grenade (he was also bludgeoned on the head so hard it broke his helmet—even though cops know the people wearing helmets are journalists...), and yet another journalist who was calling out a cop for aiming at people's heads with his riot gun (which is illegal) ended up having the guy aim the riot gun at his head from 2 metres away (getting shot with this "less lethal weapon" from that distance would be lethal.)

All of these videos are from May 1st (most of them from this account monitoring police violence.)

So yeah, nonviolent protests followed by violent police repression and bans of nonviolent means of protesting result in more violent protests. The French government responds by a) pikachu surpris, b) condemning violent protesters and praising violent police to the skies, c) continuing to ban everything they can think of. Confiscating saucepans didn't work but confiscating pieces of red paper will do the trick! Let's prosecute people for bashing or burning an effigy of Macron, because banning symbolic violence always works to prevent actual violence! And this week after the May 1st protests we learnt that the gov is thinking of making street barricades illegal, because that'll definitely solve everything. It's going to be interesting for history teachers to teach students about the 1789 revolution that allowed us to take down an absolutist regime and become a republic, under a government that banned barricades because they see them as terrorist anti-republican structures.

^ Statue symbolising the French Republic (on Place de la République in Paris) dressed with a 'Macron resign' shirt by protesters on May 1st.

#ask #frpol #left-wing MPs this week asked to hold a debate in the Assembly about the repression of this social movement #the Minister of the Interior (in charge of police) didn't come but sent his delegate instead #the delegate refused to admit to any problem with law enforcement and at some point walked out as a MP was asking a question #this happened 1 day after the UN Human Rights Council condemned the French gov's violent & racist law enforcement #god there's so much infuriating shit happening every single day

[wilwheaton]

Despite Rogan’s assertions otherwise, there are dozens of tangible and recent examples of Musk’s conservative shift. Just ahead of last year’s midterm elections, he told Twitter users that they should vote Republican (after sharing a Nazi meme). Musk later advocated for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. And during a recent trip to Capitol Hill, he only scheduled meetings with Republicans—and wished McCarthy a happy birthday—while ignoring congressional Democrats. Prior to his get-out-the-vote message, meanwhile, he spread a baseless conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi’s attack that originated in far-right circles. The billionaire edge lord has also openly embraced MAGA tropes, such as whining about the “woke mind virus” and mockingly joking that his preferred pronouns are “Prosecute/Fauci.” (That is, when he’s not tweaking the Twitter algorithm to artificially juice his own engagement and flood users’ feeds with his tweets.) Additionally, Republicans have expressed their ever-growing admiration for the tech giant, going so far as to openly “thank God” that he bought Twitter. Some GOP lawmakers, even as they investigate “government interference” and its “weaponization” of social media, have boasted about talking company strategy with Musk.

Joe Rogan Can’t Figure Out Why People Think Elon Musk Is a ‘Right-Winger’ Now

#if he respects joe rogan it's a red flag #fuck joe rogan #joe rogan is peak mediocre white man #fuck elon musk #elon musk is a fascist

[probablyasocialecologist]

While state socialism had its downsides, the sudden change of East European women’s fortunes after 1989 amply demonstrates how free markets quickly erode women’s potential for economic autonomy. In Central Europe, for instance, post-1989 governments pursued conscious policies of “refamilization” to support the transition from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. As state enterprises closed or were sold to private investors, unemployment rates skyrocketed. Too many workers competed for too few jobs. At the same time, the new democratic states reduced their public expenditures by defunding crèches and kindergartens. Public child care establishments closed, and new private facilities required substantial fees. Some governments made up for closing kindergartens by extending parental leaves for up to four years, but at far lower rates of wage compensation and without job protections.

These policies conspired to force women back into the home. Without state-funded child care or well-paid maternity leave, and in a new economic climate where employers had a large army of the unemployed from which to choose, many women were pushed out of the labor markets. From a macroeconomic perspective, this proved a boon to transitioning states. Unemployment rates dropped (and this the need for social benefits), and women now performed for free the care work the state had once subsidized in order to promote gender equality. Later, when deeper budget cuts hit pensioners and the health care system, women already at home looking after children could now care for the sick and the old —at great savings to the state budget.

Kristen Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism

#Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism #state socialism #cold war #work

[tanadrin]

What’s the case for an upper and lower chamber?

In my opinion, none.

The historical situation is that the upper chamber had more power and the lower was a sop to the common folk and petty nobility: this is why the House of Commons was formed (originally from knights of the shire and the representatives of cities that had been granted special rights by the Crown), and only later, after a very long process of constitutional evolution in Britain, did the Lords transform into a consultative body that was adjunct to the Commons, where the real power lay. For a while, even after you started to have something that looked like modern government in Britain, you still frequently had PMs drawn from the Lords--and still could, in theory, except that the convention is they come from the Commons.

In the U.S. example, the goal was simply to split the difference between a popular chamber (the House) and a chamber representing state governments (the Senate, whose members could be chosen by any method provided for under state law, but originally were usually chosen by state legislatures). This is because the people who drafted the U.S. constitution hated and were suspicious of popular democracy, because they were rich landowners and slaveholders whose positions were untenable in the long run if everyone in the country could vote and was equally represented.

Obviously they didn't put it like that--they spoke of the hotheaded hoi polloi, the changeable will of the people--but they were massive Romeaboos, and all the populist leaders who whittled away at the Roman republic managed to do so because they were willing to centralize power, to take it away from the baronial elite of the Republic, and to use that power in service of people further down the org chart. In service of themselves too, of course--these were not altruists--but it was the particularly Roman instantiation of the crown-vs-barons struggle, where the common folk usually side with the Crown, because the barons are bastards who abuse them directly.

(Very many "tyrants" in history were "tyrants" only in that they gave a raw deal to the barons in their particular social order, and very many events which we now describe as movements toward a more equitable distribution of power were in fact a very shitty deal for the majority of the population--the peasants--because it gave the barons even more license to abuse their serfs.)

And the American founders knew all this, and they were all barons, and they didn't like the idea of a federal government that was too effective, so they sprinkled it with veto points and also totally failed to anticipate the rise of modern political parties. (Which weren't exactly what they had in mind when they warned against factionalism--that was more about sectional interests. But still, they did totally fail to anticipate how this system would work as party politics developed.)

In a system of democratic government like the U.S. has now, where it is widely acknowledged the rule should be "one adult citizen never convicted of a felony who can get the day off work to stand in line and has a photo ID = one vote" the U.S. Senate is an inexcusable anachronism. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that state senates modeled on the exact same principle as the U.S. senate (say, one county one senator, as the constitution of my home state Tennessee has it) are unconstitutional, because they violate the equal protection clause.

More recently, many countries have approached the idea of an upper chamber as a sort of "chamber of experts" meant to review and advise on legislation. This kind of makes sense in theory, I guess, but if voters want subject-matter experts to make policy, they can vote them in; in practice, any system of appointment or ex officio qualification is going to select for political lackeys without democratic mandates, and it's also just a bad idea to have people with significant power over the legislative process who do not have democratic accountability. The problem of creating legislation is never that we don't have enough smart people willing to offer their opinions; the problem is brokering functional compromises between interest groups and resolving incentives that push the process toward dysfunctional outcomes, which isn't really something you can fix just by fiddling with the composition of your upper house.

So in most modern parliamentary democracies, upper houses are reduced in power. Either they can't veto bills permanently (Lords), they can't originate money bills (Lords again), they only have input on certain matters (German Bundesrat), they're full of government appointees to ensure the government always has a majority in them (Irish Seanad), or the lower house can overrule them on most matters (Japanese House of Councillors). And the reason why is obvious: if your democratic mandate comes from the lower house, if that's where your government is being formed in a parliamentary system, if the whole principle of government is meant to be collective self-rule by the body of citizens, an upper house that is a check on that power is either definitionally redundant or a brake on democracy.

There are ways to ensure that a lower house is both representative and does not devolve into factional chaos. Proportional representation, four-year terms, constructive motions of no confidence (again, parliamentary systems only), etc. Plenty of countries and subnational entities have unicameral legislatures and are perfectly stable: Sweden, Norway, the Baltics, Portugal, Mongolia, South Korea, Peru [ok bad example nvm], all the states of Germany, all the provinces of Canada, most of the provinces of Argentina, Queensland, the vast majority of the states of India, and the three devolved legislatures in the United Kingdom.

Therefore in my opinion there is no good democratic case for an upper house. And all the undemocratic reasons why you'd want one are bad. Too much democracy is, in fact, a very rare problem for systems of government to have!

#thanks for the ask btw anon #i love getting to rant about the evils of bicameralism

[thepastisalreadywritten]

It was always going to end this way. The truth about Catherine Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested.

In a video recorded and broadcast by the BBC, the princess says she has cancer and that she had retreated from the public eye to deal with her condition, while attempting to shield her children from the spotlight.

Instead, she had to contend with the internet giggling about whether she’d had a Brazilian butt lift.

My colleague Helen Lewis summed it up succinctly this afternoon: “I Hope You All Feel Terrible Now.”

What is there to learn from such a sad situation? The internet is made up of people, yet its architecture abstracts this basic truth.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, at the center of this months-long story was essentially “a sea of people having fun online because it is unclear whether a famous person is well or not.”

Underneath the memes was always something a little bit gross and indefensible.

Perhaps humans are just wired this way — to gawk and gossip.

There’s nothing new about hounding a member of the royal family or invading the privacy of a celebrity to sell tabloids or go viral.

You don’t even have to be a scold about it: Famous people are wealthy and beloved at least in part because they’re fun to talk about.

Exactly what we do and don’t know about their internal lives is part of the allure — the discourse comes with the territory to a degree.

But Catherine Middleton, of course, is a human too.

During this saga, I kept thinking about the reappraisal of Britney Spears in 2021, as well as the backlash toward past media and tabloid coverage of her rise.

A New York Times documentary dredged up old coverage of Spears from the mid-aughts, showing a young woman clearly in distress, being picked apart by glossy magazines.

Her suffering became entertainment. The response to this film was swift.

Some of the people and institutions that had shamelessly delighted in her pain backtracked: Glamour publicly apologized to the pop star on its Instagram account, noting, “We are all to blame for what happened to Britney Spears.”

Contrast the Spears reckoning with the Middleton drama and, if you’re being generous, you can see some of that newfound attitude in the media.

I was struck by Lewis’s observation that “Britain’s tabloid papers have shown remarkable restraint” throughout this mess.

Progress, perhaps, but what’s also telling is that they didn’t really need to do the dirty work: Random people on the internet were doing it for them.

They recklessly speculated, memed, and used their amateur sleuthing and networked faux expertise to concoct elaborate, semi-plausible explanations for her absence.

Was Catherine’s face actually Photoshopped from a Vogue spread? It wasn’t, but the conspiratorial tweet got 51.1 million views anyhow.

Missing from much of the discourse was the idea that its main character was a person who was likely struggling.

In essence, the internet democratized the tabloid experience, turning the rest of us into paparazzi and addled editors workshopping headlines and cover images — not to sell magazines but to amass some kind of fleeting online popularity.

In my least charitable moments, I see this toxic dynamic as the lasting legacy of social media — a giant, metrics-infused experiment in connectivity that has had a flattening, pernicious effect.

In 2021, I interviewed Elle Hunt, a journalist who’d tweeted an innocuous opinion about horror movies one evening and woke up to find she was trending on Twitter, her feeds choked with thousands of furious replies and threats.

When I asked her to describe the experience of becoming Twitter’s main character for the day, she summed it up thusly:

“You’re repurposed as fodder for content generation in a way that’s just so dehumanizing.”

Three years later, these words resonate even stronger.

What Hunt described to me then as “a platform failure,” feels to me now like a learned behavior of the internet, where people, famous and not, are repurposed as fodder for content generation. The cycle repeats itself endlessly.

This afternoon, the memes about Middleton shifted — from jokes about her whereabouts to jokes about how awful it was that everyone had been making fun of a cancer patient.

Feeling bad about the memes tweets immediately became a meme unto themselves.

Despite the tone shift, the reason for these posts is the same: They’re a way to take a person and repurpose their life for entertainment and engagement.

If this sounds exhausting and depressing, it’s because it is.

But the internet is also too big to be one thing. Clicking through social media this afternoon, I saw dozens of heartfelt testimonials, apologies, and well-wishes for the princess.

For a moment, from my perspective, it felt like watching a collective of people come to their senses.

A recognition, perhaps, of the humanity of the person at the center of the maelstrom.

Then, only a few seconds later, I saw a different post. It was a screenshot from the blockchain platform Solana, where users can create their own cryptographic tokens for others to invest in.

The name of the token in the screenshot is “kate wif cancer,” and its logo is a still of the princess sitting on a bench, taken from this afternoon’s video.

The coin’s market cap briefly surpassed $120,000. Only six minutes later, the price had cratered — the result of a standard memecoin sell off.

An awful thing happened. Some people made a joke about it. Other people made some money. And then everyone moved on.

NOTE: Edited

#Princess of Wales #Catherine Princess of Wales #Catherine Middleton #Kate Middleton #British Royal Family #cancer #chemotherapy #internet #memes #fake news #disinformation #misinformation #platform failure #social media

[elbiotipo]

That’s so funny, I was speaking to a right-wing Peronist the other day. If you don’t mind answering, what about Peronism do you think makes it so versatile, and what about it do you like?

I'm so sorry for your experience, really.

Peronism has historically catched the support of the Argentine working class, and I believe it's because it's an organized, democratic movement that has actually succeeded into materially improving the lives of people. But also, it's a patriotic movement, and in Argentina, this is vital, because the Argentine right wing landowners and empresariado would sell us for 10 dollars if they had the chance and indeed they did and they still do. For first worlders, patriotism is often associated with fascism; for the third world, patriotism arises as a defense of the people against imperialism, and Peronism always saw itself as part of Latin American and third world liberation. Peronism, like I sometimes say, is not too far from other "national liberation" movements that arose during decolonization in the Third World in places such as Asia and Africa, because Argentina was (and indeed still is) an economic colony propped up by the local oligarchy, and Peronism started as the Argentine response to that, to achieve social justice (a more equal society) and economic independence (nationalization of industry). Perón might have intented to have a "guided" revolution, but the fact it that it was a revolutionary movement all the same as it led to a tectonic shift in Argentine society. For the Argentine workers, to sing "combatiendo al capital" did not went unnoticed.

While you would find, and this is true, that Peronism has a personalist bent with figures like Perón himself, Evita, and later Néstor and Cristina, I have an alternate view. It was the people who created peronism, not Perón. During the march on Plaza de Mayo in 17 October 1943, it was the people who wanted a Perón goverment because it represented their interests, and no matter the, in many cases contradictory, ideas of Perón, the movement was based on popular leadership; it was the people who made the movement. Yes, it is a populist movement, but I don't see it as an insult, it's a description.

The complicated thing about Peronism is that "Argentina needs to progress and get rid of foreign imperialism" is something that can be said by both left-wingers and right-wingers, and there are both in the Argentine working class, and the leadership has always had different ways to achieve this from communism to neoliberalism. Which has always resulted in a contradictory movement split in many currents, though this means flexibility, it also leads to "neither right wing or left wing" incoherence. However, I myself see it from a wider perspective: the various currents of Peronism (as well as other Argentine movements) represent the working class, against the established powers of Argentina; the rural oligarchy, the corporate class, the military. It is Peronism who historically advanced social and civil rights, it is peronist movements who have fought and accomplished all sorts of victories against the oligarchs since its creation.

From my own perspective, I think the ideas are clear; Peronism represents most of the Argentine working class historically, any left-wing movement must deal with this fact. Argentina was imposed right-wing dictatorships and they oppressed and impoverished our people, and then it attempted neoliberalism (for the 4th time now...) and it only ended in disaster (again) and impoverished our people. As much as some don't like it, the only option to accomplish the Peronist ideals of social justice and economic and political independence is through socialism, and given the nature of peronism as the democratic and popular movement that the Argentines feel most represented by, it should either lead to that or face extinction.

There are other people who have analyzed this better than me, as well as many other Peronists who will abhor what I've said. I accept my condition in a contradictory, complex country, and I believe it's essential to build popular support both to resist the current right-wing wave and to eventually create the conditions for socialism, which for me will be our second and definitive independence.

[t-top-apologist]

At the end of the day the average civilian wishes to be catered to like an old money steel baron or perhaps one of those chaps from Downton Abbey. The entirety of modern society has come together to enable this, mass-producing cheap facsimiles of fortunes that should rightly either be built on child labor or perhaps serfdom.

Their lawns, taking up what could otherwise be used to grow crops or serve as "outdoor garage space," exist to ape the wide ranging estates meant for the nobility to chase down a fox while adorned in silly jackets. Their houses sport columns and stupid windows meant to imitate three different classical artforms at the same time because of something called "economies of scale." They even have male-centric social clubs meant for parlour games, discussing sports, and dining with friends, in this case franchised out under such names as "Buffalo Wild Wings."

This aping of the upper class continues to the hire of "artisans" to do relatively simple work deemed too complicated to warrant the time of the average citizen. It's not that the jobs are too taxing for your average person, but rather that the market has crystallized around the desire to live like budget royalty. Therefore they take their wafer-thin computers to artisans (now more commonly called "experts" or "Apple geniuses") for repair and have democratized the position of carriagemen to 22 year old dealership lube techs named Ryan who will turn a 15 minute job into a 30 minute endeavor thanks to frequent vape breaks and a brief brush with what the industry refers to as "a misplaced drain bolt."

The mid-40s project manager and mother of 3 is no less competent when changing oil than her grandfather before her who knew what "Valve Lash" is, but what separates the two is a series of wars in the 1900s that required an entire generation of men to become very familiar with operating and repairing machines better than the Germans and Japanese (an exercise that Chrysler would later abandon in favor of the phrase "if you can't beat em, join em").

This conflict ended with a surge of able-bodied men finding themselves returning to their project management jobs (like their granddaughters after them) but armed with captured German weapons and a comprehensive understanding of tubochargers. Just as a line can be drawn from troop drawdowns to political violence, there's a distinct correlations between GIs returning home and the violence with which Ford Flathead V8s were torn apart by inventive supercharging methods paired with landspeed record attempts.

Give a man a racecar and he'll crash it on the salt flats in a day. Teach a man to repair a racecar and it will sit in the garage of his suburban house for a few years in between complete engine rebuilds required by what can only be described as "vaporized piston rods."

Of course this hotrodder generation created the circumstances we live in today, as the market saw their fast cars cobbled together from old prewar hulks and simply stamped out new ones from factory, faster and more convenient for the next generation than building one from scratch. Now the project manager mother of 3 drives a 4wd barge with climate controlled seats boasting more computing power than the moon mission and an emissions-controlled powertrain with more horsepower than her grandfather's jalopy and her fathers factory muscle car combined. And she doesn't care at all.

Yet Amongst the average civilians there walks a rare breed: people who know how to change their own oil. We the chosen move among you silently, bucking the system, operating outside the cultural helplessness and trading in forbidden knowledge in almost-abandoned forum threads (flame wars over conventional vs synthetic).

While we do have a marked air of superiority about this, I can't say I haven't stooped to imitating the rich myself. I've been known to wear a silly jacket from time to time.

[lafemmemacabre]

I honestly wish that I didn't have to have an opinion on US politics the same way I don't have to have an opinion on Slovenian or Indonesian politics.

But, alas, I'm a filthy South American 3rd Worlder and the US has in living history decided they didn't like our democratically elected government and thus they worked to violently depose of it and installed a fascist military dictatorship for 17 years which left thousands dead and tens of thousands traumatized from military nazi tortures, not to mention the effects on poverty, inequality, loss of social safety nets and privatization of everything from which we're still suffering immensely 50 years later.

And they did the same to all my neighboring countries at around the same time, and then did it again to Bolivia 5 years ago, and have been trying non-stop to do it to Venezuela for ages now, to the point nothing going on historically, socially, politically or culturally in our area of the world can be fully divorced from that and at any time they can do it again and, much like before, we won't be able to stop it even if we're "warned" in any way.

Not to mention how US media dominates the world and influences our culture indirectly so even if the US government had never directly touched us we'd still be affected by US politics, or else pray tell why the fuck do Chilean fascists--I mean, right-wing libertarians, insist on using yellow "don't tread on me" flags? Why do they sometimes use confederate flags to signify their racism when they're not allowed to use nazi imagery? Sometimes they'll just use American flags like the cock-suckers that they are.

Trust me, I'd love it if I didn't have to care or have an opinion on US politics.

I guess the price American liberals and other right-wingers have to pay for our subjugation in their names is us having a fucking opinion and partaking in the conversation when it happens around us online or in person. Boohoo.

[sophiebernadotte]

Maybe I need to learn Swedish and immerse myself in all things SRF. Are they generally messy or boring?

Depends on how you define things. I would say they're boring 95% of the time, but then when there's a scandal, it's a scandal

Here are a few highlights:

In 1914, Gustaf V gave a speech to the people in which he opposed the government's politics & called for stronger Armed Forces (side note but it's a well-known fact that Gustaf was very worried about the growing tensions "on the continent" & I mean, the dude was right to be concerned). This led to a political crisis & the last political influence the monarch had was stripped. It's unclear who actually wrote the speech; some speculate it was Victoria since it was very well known that she was unhappy about the fact that she, as Queen, didn't have any real power.

In 1936, a woman named Anna wanted to file for divorce from her husband, Kurt. The reason? Her motivation was that her husband had cheated on her with King Gustaf V. This was during a time when homosexuality was illegal & divorce papers were open to the public, so even the hint that the monarch himself might engage in "homosexual acts"? Unthinkable! Long story short, the Court tried to come to an agreement with Anna & Kurt, but the couple continued to blackmail the Court for more & more money. In 1947, Kurt published a book about the "injustices" he had faced, but the majority of the copies of the book were bought by police. In 1951, after Gustaf V had died, Kurt wrote to the Chancellor of Justice to complain, upon which the Chancellor started an investigation. The investigation found that Kurt's "accusations were largely unfounded, but it was also clear that the Royal Court paid out large sums and took other measures with the apparent aim of silencing him." One year later, the Prosecutor-General charged Kurt & he was sentenced to 8 years in prison for extortion of the Royal Court. The whole thing is now nicknamed The Haijby Affair (after Kurt & Anna's last name) & has even been made into a movie.

In 1945, Prince Carl Johan asked for permission to marry the divorced journalist Kerstin Wijkman. They had met in 1939 & the prince fell head-over-heels for Kerstin, who couldn't give a sh*t about him at first. Gustaf V denied his grandson's request & the Royal Court tried to prevent the wedding from taking place by revoking Wijkmark's passport. When that didn't work, they started pressuring the US embassy, which meant that Carl Johan's cousin Folke Bernadotte was dragged into the whole thing. In the end, the two got married in 1946 & that meant that the Prince from then on was known as Carl Johan Bernadotte.

In the late 1950s, Princess Birgitta did something as controversial (for Swedish royal standards) as continuing her education with upper secondary studies. She studied at the School of Sport and Health Sciences for two years, where she met hockey & football player Sven Tumba. They denied it then, but rumours of a romance between the two swirled. However, decades later, they both wrote about the romance (which lasted for about a year) in their memoirs & Princess Birgitta was interviewed in a documentary about Tumba. Among other things, she reminisced about one time when the tabloids rang the doorbell & she had to hide in the wardrobe for about 10 minutes before Tumba had managed to chase them away.

We have Carl Gustaf's younger years... That man loved & still loves to party. This caused concern during his time as Crown Prince & then at the beginning of his time as monarch. He was seen by many as an immature womanizer of a party prince who, therefore, was unfit to rule. The Social Democrat-led government famously threatened with "We're one penstroke away from a Republic!" (which, if you ask me, was more PR than an actual threat, but then again, this was like 10-20 years before I was born, so...)

Speaking of Carl Gustaf, in 1989, he made the Norwegians angry by criticising their PM & the fact that they allowed seal hunting. He commented: "If Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland cannot take care of the seal problem, how will she be able to take care of the Norwegian people?"

Then there was the praising of Sultan Hassanal Bolikiah in 2004 during a state visit to Brunei (which to be fair, he just did his job & repeated what the Foreign Office told him to say).

In 2008, he caused a national outcry because not only did Prince Carl Philip shoot an elk during the annual royal hunt, but the monarch also decided to voice his opinion on the very sensitive topic of wolf hunting (no, seriously, it's an incredibly sensitive topic & not one to bring up during family dinners). Apart from getting in trouble with the public, Carl Gustaf also got in trouble with his patronage, WWF.

Do I even need to bring up 2010 & "Have you ever visited a strip or sex club?" which caused him to hit a record low in popularity. At least it gave us this iconic meme.

Honourary mention goes to when Prince Daniel (then only Daniel Westling) needed kidney surgery, so Crown Princess Victoria called her "brothers", Crown Prince Haakon & Crown Prince Frederik & was like "Hey, can you guys help me with a thing? Oh yeah, nothing big, just tricking all of the Nordic press so my fiancée can get surgery in peace." So, to cause a distraction, the three went on a trip to the Arctic while Daniel was admitted to the hospital. However... he was spotted by someone; a journalist called up the Court & was like, "I know, I will publish this; just give me a comment." Their ruse was up, so instead of pretending everything was fine & distracting the press so they couldn't publish about what was happening in Stockholm, Victoria spoke about how difficult it was & that she (obviously) was worried but that Haakon & Frederik were very supportive of her & a big help during that trip.

In 2013, just like in 2023, he got into trouble for "not wanting Victoria as heir". During an interview, the reporter asked if he was still upset about the constitutional change, to which he answered: "Of course. I think it's simple. A constitutional law that works retrospectively, that's weird."

In 2014, Princess Madeleine's apartment was renovated. What was supposed to cost 2.5 million SEK ended up costing 6.8 million SEK. Then, in 2018-2019 renovation works started again, which ended up costing around 5 million SEK. A wall between Madeleine's apartment & the apartment next door was going to be taken down & the family wanted a walk-in closet, a new bedroom, a bathroom & a wardrobe (different one from the named walk-in closet, so two wardrobes were on the wishlist). This ended up creating an argument between the National Property Board & the Royal Court, where the former thought Madeleine had "too high standards". The Royal Family didn't end up paying from their own pockets & this story has now become known as the time the Swedish taxpayers paid for Madeleine's walk-in closet.

If you're still reading, thank you & I hope you enjoyed all of this tea!

#swedish royal family #king gustaf v #queen victoria #carl johan bernadotte #folke bernadotte #princess birgitta #sven tumba #king carl xvi gustaf #sultan hassanal bolkiah #prince carl philip #princess madeleine #prince daniel #crown princess victoria #crown prince haakon #crown prince frederik #royal reporting #saga.txt

[sordidamok]

#restore 1950s tax brackets #vote blue #vote biden #democrats #tax the rich #tax the 1% #tax the billionaires #billionaires should not exist #vote democrat #democracy #social democracy #vote blue to save democracy #vote blue 2024 #democratic socialism #democrats now socialism later #vote biden/harris #biden/harris 2024

[coochiequeens]

I'm usually opposed to the death penalty but this guy should face a firing squad.

By Anna Slatz December 5, 2023

CONTENT NOTICE: This article contains a graphic description of child sexual abuse involving an infant. Reader discretion is appreciated.

A trans-identified male in McCracken County, Kentucky is facing charges of child sexual abuse after reportedly molesting a baby in his care. Maria Childres, 25, had been employed as a daycare worker in Paducah, Kentucky when the abuse is said to have occurred.

Childres was arrested in February of this year after the Department of Community Based Services (DCBS) received an anonymous tip detailing an alleged incident of abuse that had occurred in November of 2022. The tip, reportedly written by one of Childres’ co-workers, accused him of making inappropriate comments towards an infant while changing the child’s diaper, and touching the baby inappropriately.

Maria Childres. Photo Source: FACEBOOK

Following the receipt of the DCBS report, Paducah Police went down to Explore Learning Academy, Childres’ place of employment, to investigate. They spoke with a witness who corroborated the details of the anonymous report, and spoke with the director of the Academy, who appeared to have been aware of Childers’ behavior with the baby. Despite knowing what had occurred, the director had only given him a “write up.”

Reduxx has obtained the citation from the Paducah Police Department detailing the complaint, in which Childres is referred to using “she/her” pronouns despite his legal sex being male.

According to the citation, Childres was confronted by another co-worker while he was changing the infant, who was concerned he was hurting her while wiping her genital area.

In response, Childres reportedly said “that was her clit area and she likes it. It just made her day.”

The witness police spoke with also stated that she saw Childres rub the baby’s vaginal area with his fingers while making the sickening remark.

Courtesy Paducah Police Department.

After being taken to the police station for questioning, Childres initially claimed he had not changed the infant’s diaper at all. He later admitted to having done so after an officer presented him with evidence in the form of a text that he had sent to the daycare’s director confirming the baby’s diaper had been changed.

Childres maintained that he had not made inappropriate comments or touched the baby sexually, and that he “often says things that are taken out of context.”

Childres was charged with first-degree sexual abuse of a victim under the age of 12, and has been housed in the McCracken County Jail since. There has been some confusion over the spelling of his last name, with the courts, police, and his social feeds having different spellings alternating between “Childers” and “Childres.” The Kentucky Court of Justice has the name spelled “Childres.”

According to his now-delated Facebook, Childres claims to have studied child development at The University of Arizona Global Campus, an online college which has come under accreditation concerns in recent years. A separate Facebook account also belonging to Childres has his gender listed as “female.”

After speaking with a clerk at the McCracken County Court of Justice, Reduxx has confirmed that Childres has privately retained a prominent transgender lawyer to defend him during upcoming hearings.

Leach holding the transgender pride flag.

Madison Leach, a male who began identifying as a “woman” six years ago, was the first openly transgender candidate to seek public office in western Kentucky when he ran as a Democrat for the Calloway County attorney seat. Leach recently decided to leave Kentucky over Senate Bill 150, which would make it optional for public school teachers to use a student’s preferred pronouns.

“This is kind of the cherry on top for me. The quality of life in New York is going to be better for me, and I think that a lot of parents of trans youth or other trans people are debating this in their head,” Leach said in March, stating that he was intending to eventually move his practice to New York.

Childres is scheduled for a pretrial conference this week, at which point he and Leach will enter a plea or negotiate a potential resolution with the prosecutors.

#usa #Kentucky #McCracken County #Paducah #Maria Childres is an abusive male #Department of Community Based Services (DCBS) #Dude hasn't even legally changed his sex and the pigs still call him her #NotOurCrimes

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.1.3 Why is anarchism also called libertarian socialism?

Many anarchists, seeing the negative nature of the definition of “anarchism,” have used other terms to emphasise the inherently positive and constructive aspect of their ideas. The most common terms used are “free socialism,” “free communism,” “libertarian socialism,” and “libertarian communism.” For anarchists, libertarian socialism, libertarian communism, and anarchism are virtually interchangeable. As Vanzetti put it:

“After all we are socialists as the social-democrats, the socialists, the communists, and the I.W.W. are all Socialists. The difference — the fundamental one — between us and all the other is that they are authoritarian while we are libertarian; they believe in a State or Government of their own; we believe in no State or Government.” [Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, p. 274]

But is this correct? Considering definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary, we find:

LIBERTARIAN: one who believes in freedom of action and thought; one who believes in free will. SOCIALISM: a social system in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods.

Just taking those two first definitions and fusing them yields:

LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM: a social system which believes in freedom of action and thought and free will, in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods.

(Although we must add that our usual comments on the lack of political sophistication of dictionaries still holds. We only use these definitions to show that “libertarian” does not imply “free market” capitalism nor “socialism” state ownership. Other dictionaries, obviously, will have different definitions — particularly for socialism. Those wanting to debate dictionary definitions are free to pursue this unending and politically useless hobby but we will not).

However, due to the creation of the Libertarian Party in the USA, many people now consider the idea of “libertarian socialism” to be a contradiction in terms. Indeed, many “Libertarians” think anarchists are just attempting to associate the “anti-libertarian” ideas of “socialism” (as Libertarians conceive it) with Libertarian ideology in order to make those “socialist” ideas more “acceptable” — in other words, trying to steal the “libertarian” label from its rightful possessors.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists have been using the term “libertarian” to describe themselves and their ideas since the 1850’s. According to anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the revolutionary anarchist Joseph Dejacque published Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York between 1858 and 1861 while the use of the term “libertarian communism” dates from November, 1880 when a French anarchist congress adopted it. [Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, p. 75 and p. 145] The use of the term “Libertarian” by anarchists became more popular from the 1890s onward after it was used in France in an attempt to get round anti-anarchist laws and to avoid the negative associations of the word “anarchy” in the popular mind (Sebastien Faure and Louise Michel published the paper Le Libertaire — The Libertarian — in France in 1895, for example). Since then, particularly outside America, it has always been associated with anarchist ideas and movements. Taking a more recent example, in the USA, anarchists organised “The Libertarian League” in July 1954, which had staunch anarcho-syndicalist principles and lasted until 1965. The US-based “Libertarian” Party, on the other hand has only existed since the early 1970’s, well over 100 years after anarchists first used the term to describe their political ideas (and 90 years after the expression “libertarian communism” was first adopted). It is that party, not the anarchists, who have “stolen” the word. Later, in Section B, we will discuss why the idea of a “libertarian” capitalism (as desired by the Libertarian Party) is a contradiction in terms.

As we will also explain in Section I, only a libertarian-socialist system of ownership can maximise individual freedom. Needless to say, state ownership — what is commonly called “socialism” — is, for anarchists, not socialism at all. In fact, as we will elaborate in Section H, state “socialism” is just a form of capitalism, with no socialist content whatever. As Rudolf Rocker noted, for anarchists, socialism is “not a simple question of a full belly, but a question of culture that would have to enlist the sense of personality and the free initiative of the individual; without freedom it would lead only to a dismal state capitalism which would sacrifice all individual thought and feeling to a fictitious collective interest.” [quoted by Colin Ward, “Introduction”, Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, p. 1]

Given the anarchist pedigree of the word “libertarian,” few anarchists are happy to see it stolen by an ideology which shares little with our ideas. In the United States, as Murray Bookchin noted, the “term ‘libertarian’ itself, to be sure, raises a problem, notably, the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for ‘pure capitalism’ and ‘free trade.’ This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians … who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit.” Thus anarchists in America should “restore in practice a tradition that has been denatured by” the free-market right. [The Modern Crisis, pp. 154–5] And as we do that, we will continue to call our ideas libertarian socialism.

#faq #anarchy faq #revolution #anarchism #daily posts #communism #anti capitalist #anti capitalism #late stage capitalism #organization #grassroots #grass roots #anarchists #libraries #leftism #social issues #economy #economics #climate change #climate crisis #climate #ecology #anarchy works #environmentalism #environment #solarpunk #anti colonialism #mutual aid #cops #police

[probablyasocialecologist]

Journalist Gary Younge has warned that the narrow range of most British journalists’ backgrounds means it takes “a seismic event” for journalists to take an interest in problems that are for many people everyday realities. Delivering the inaugural Rosemary Hollis Memorial lecture at City University he said “now more than ever we need reporters and commentators who can engage with the sources of discontent and alienation which fuel the assaults on our democratic space. “But instead we have a commentariat, overwhelmingly from the same social class both as each other and the politicians they cover. Their reference points are limited, their comfort zone is narrow. “Much as they may mock millennials for seeking safe spaces, that is entirely where they operate.”

[...]

Noting a finding of the 2019 Sutton Trust and Social Mobility report that suggested journalism has one of the most privileged workforces of any British industry, Younge said that “when the media class is drawn from the same social strata as the political class, the spectrum of views is narrow, and the atmosphere in which they are aired, foetid”. Later in the lecture Younge said there are people for whom journalism “is their life – this is all they’ve ever wanted to do, this is what their parents did, this is what their friends do. To occupy this space means everything to them. “And they shuffle, almost literally, between the media class and the political class. Boris Johnson just got a [job] on GB News. He was a journalist and then prime minister, now he’s going to be a journalist again… George Osborne pauperises a significant section of the population, goes to the Evening Standard, runs a Christmas campaign for food banks.” He added: “It’s a group of people talking to themselves. They used to call broadsheet journalism the internal memos of the middle class, but increasingly it’s the internal memos of the upper class.”

#Gary Younge #journalism #uk politics #class

[tanadrin]

In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. In December 2022, German police foiled a coup attempt by Reichsbürger, an extremist group with more than twenty thousand members, which was planning an assault on the Bundestag. Alternative für Deutschland, which has neo-Nazi affiliations, has become the country’s second most popular party, partly in response to economic mismanagement by the coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’. ...

Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany’s postwar efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews. Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine. He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their valiant struggle against antisemitism. (Efraim Zuroff, a historian who has helped bring many former Nazis to trial, compared this to ‘praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South’.) More recently, Netanyahu accompanied Elon Musk to one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, just days after Musk tweeted in support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Since 7 October, he has seemed to be reading from the Eichmann trial script. He regularly announces that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists keep up a supporting chorus. The people of Gaza are ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’, ‘Nazis’. ...

In a more unnerving illustration of the postwar German-Israeli symbiosis, the German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which Douglas Murray, a mouthpiece of the English far right, claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. ‘Watch and listen,’ retweeted Karin Prien, deputy chair of the Christian Democratic Union and education minister for Schleswig-Holstein. ‘This is great,’ Jan Fleischhauer, a former contributing editor at Der Spiegel, wrote. ‘Really great,’ echoed Veronika Grimm, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in 2021 ‘outed’ five Lebanese and Palestinian journalists at Deutsche Welle as antisemites, with equally flimsy evidence exposed the Indian poet and art historian Ranjit Hoskote as a calumniator of Jews for comparing Zionism with Hindu nationalism. Die Zeit alerted German readers to another moral outrage: ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians.’ An open letter from Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn and other academics criticising Jürgen Habermas’s statement in support of Israel’s actions provoked an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to claim that Jews have an ‘enemy’ at universities in the form of postcolonial studies. Der Spiegel ran a cover picture of Scholz alongside his claim that ‘we need to deport on a grand scale again.’ ... Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ In Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, which examines the German response to mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their ‘otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.’

(source)

#german politics #deutschland #israel #palestine