I’m mostly just going to disengage because I think we’re really on the same side here and I’m just being a pedant on a thread about an innocent man being murdered, but I think you’re kinda missing the point too. Social murder happens literally everywhere constantly, even socialist countries.
show me a state in the entire world that doesn’t exist because it has captured a monopoly over legitimate violence. The best the subjects of a state can hope for is that state violence is only ever implicit, but if there was no threat of being put to death or seriously harmed for individuals that threaten the continued existence of a state, that state would cease to be.
However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there’s a pretty obvious skew in terms of who’s getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn’t executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I’m not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim folks awfully often. Really makes you think, right?
I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don’t, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don’t trust what the courts say) and the isn’t really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we’re just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren’t ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. “Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.
It’s weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with “that’s not true socialism.” Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn’t would say that, but anyone who’s reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.
Which brings me to my next point: Socialism’s biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It’s the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants’ daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.
Kamala Harris comes out as a trans man. This clears the way for a Clinton presidency in 2028 to still be the first woman president.
The post I commented it under got deleted so I’ll just repost this here with no context
I think I’ve been in a perpetual state of not feeling bad for any notable period of time but also not really feeling fulfilled for, IDK, 6 years? I don’t know if that counts as going through it. It’s an incredibly privileged place to be emotionally, though, and considering COVID I think loneliness is unavoidable.
that’s blueshift
Yeah the movie certainly wouldn’t be the same without him. For me, the central idea that I got from the movie is that the strong ought to protect the weak, not dominate them; Kikuchiyo embodies both sides of that dialectic as a farmer turned samurai, the weakling who became strong. His speech about farmers being wily only as a defense mechanism against the samurai’s abuse is what tied the whole movie together thematically.
:kikuchiyo-befuddled:
:kikuchiyo-triumphant:
wtf I watched Seven Samurai last night, is Frank stalking me? 
I absolutely loved Bioshock 1 and somewhat enjoyed Bioshock Infinite’s DLC. I got part of the way through Bioshock 2’s second act before I called it quits because it was so seriously sauceless and uninspired. Even Bioshock Infinite’s main campaign had more flair and a very compelling hook, despite the bothsidesing of slavery and equating Christian nationalists with those who resist Christian nationalists.
I could never do this bit because I wouldn’t resist the temptation to make it about Laurel and Yanny.
I get the same high from Mr Show.
Lyndon B Johnson and George H. W. Bush killed JFK as part of a conspiracy to, along with David Lynch, David Cronenberg, John Waters, and Gaspar Noe (2 weeks old), make cinema horny.
DIVINE LIGHT SEVERED
YOU ARE A FLESH AUTOMATON ANIMATED BY NEUROTRANSMITTERS
Y les digo que tengo la certeza de que la semilla que hemos entregado a la conciencia digna de miles y miles de chilenos, no podrá ser segada definitivamente. Tienen la fuerza, podrán avasallarnos, pero no se detienen los procesos sociales ni con el crimen ni con la fuerza. La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos.
And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.
I don’t mean anything by this, but if we took the collective time spent trying to decipher the terms “rhizomes” and “bodies without organs” and instead used it to learn how to arm and disarm rifles, maybe we’d have more funko pops or whatever.
The common cold in question having killed about 200,000 Palestinians? I think I’ll pass.