Laws Against Feeding The Homeless Remind Me Of A Recent Conversation I Had About The "Nordic Model" Of

The US doesn't have much of a welfare state, but its privileged position on the world stage absolutely translates into benefits for its citizens. Government contracts to build ships, tanks, and nuclear weapons provide high-paying jobs to American workers. Arguably, the US welfare state takes the form of our military, which provides soldiers with socialized/subsidized housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. In the private sector, American firms benefit not only from unequal terms of exchange, but from America's actions overseas such as the destruction and looting of Iraq. I agree with your main point; most countries have welfare states and/or universal healthcare and aren't imperialist, but we shouldn't ignore the ways that Americans have genuine incentives (beyond the ideological) to support invasions and aggression.

Thank God the us doesn't have universal Healthcare otherwise we'd be an imperialist power

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.

I understand the point this person is trying to make, but Star Wars has always been mass-market safe entertainment. Tom Shone in his book Blockbuster described how A New Hope was largely successful because it appealed to so many people- the Germans could pretend the Empire was British, the British could pretend it was German, and the French pretended it was the Americans. Luke is an uncomplicated everyone that any viewer can relate to. Etc.

And the new Star Wars movies absolutely have an ideology, but its the (badly integrated) ideology of #Resistance liberalism instead of Lucas' milquetoast liberalism.

i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.

Against the Logic of the Guillotine

Fetishizing the guillotine is like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.

148 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an immense crowd. This was a popular action arising from the grassroots, not a spectacle coordinated by politicians. At the time, the Commune controlled Paris, which was still inhabited by people of all classes; the French and Prussian armies surrounded the city and were preparing to invade it in order to impose the conservative Republican government of Adolphe Thiers. In these conditions, burning the guillotine was a brave gesture repudiating the Reign of Terror and the idea that positive social change can be achieved by slaughtering people.

“What?” you say, in shock, “The Communards burned the guillotine? Why on earth would they do that? I thought the guillotine was a symbol of liberation!”

Why indeed? If the guillotine is not a symbol of liberation, then why has it become such a standard motif for the radical left over the past few years? Why is the internet replete with guillotine memes? Why does The Coup sing “We got the guillotine, you better run”? The most popular socialist periodical is named Jacobin, after the original proponents of the guillotine. Surely this can’t all be just an ironic sendup of lingering right-wing anxieties about the original French Revolution.

The guillotine has come to occupy our collective imagination. In a time when the rifts in our society are widening towards civil war, it represents uncompromising bloody revenge.

Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome.

‘This Will Be The End Of Late Stage Capitalism,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Communist For Seventh Time This Year

referring to “late” capitalism is a content-free vocal tic that only serves to mark the speaker as a muddled thinker

Hanania may have changed his mind on trans people, but he also tweeted "These people are all animals, whether they're harassing people on subways or walking around in suits" after Daniel Penny was arrested.

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

Aiming for the impossible

It seems like most of the leftist writing I see, from publications like Current Affairs or Jacobin to everyday posts on tumblr, abandon any attempts to imagine what a socialist society would look like in favor of arguing for a better welfare state, higher wages, unionizing, and so on. I understand that abolishing property may not be politically feasible in the immediate future, but fuck, why should we be afraid to openly call for the core of our political philosophy? Abolishing private property is literally the first and foremost (if not the singular) demand of Communists, and yet so many leftists apparently fall into the trap of arguing against income inequality/the market mechanism rather than against the fundamental injustice of private property itself. Fighting libertarians over income inequality is useful, to be sure, but what if income disparities in some circumstances are actually due to individual choice/outside factors unrelated to discrimination, and the market is working as fairly/efficiently as it could? Imagine if your only criticisms of feudalism focus on the actions of evil kings and exceptionally cruel farming conditions, rather than the roots of the system itself.

I chalk this tendency up to Freddie deBoer’s observation that most leftists “want to lose” and would rather live a safe, predictable life of endless struggle against capitalism rather than doing the hard, boring, unsexy work of envisioning and campaigning for alternatives. And I get it, change is hard and growth is painful, especially when it weakens your identity/self-perception. But fuck that, I want my kids to see snow days. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “Aim for the impossible and you’ll get everything that is possible thrown in. Aim for the possible and you’ll get neither.”

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

Perhaps it's time to resurrect the tradition of Soviet jokes, but retooled for modern cyber-capitalism.

"We pretend to pay them and they pretend to make us happy."

People make bones about the USSR’s project of creating a “new Soviet man” - how quaint! - without appreciating that the American-led development of the 20th century “demand economy,” culminating in (but by no means limited to) the creation of the “postwar middle class,” represented a human-engineering project of no less ambition and infinitely greater sophistication than the Soviet one. The new Soviet man is a joke, a failure; we are the new capitalist man. And we don’t even realise it!

What is the new capitalist man? It is a person that desires infinite houses quantities of things they cannot use. It’s a person constitutionally incapable of stopping to say “I have enough, I’m happy.” Can you imagine how threatening a contented mindset is to ever-expanding commodity circulation (in other words, to national GDP growth)? Can you conceive of the vast resources, private and public, that were and are being poured into permanently eliminating every hint of that mindset from the American psyche?

This is the essence of the advertising industry, the raison d'etre of Madison Avenue and its (historically overlooked) collaboration with the U.S. government: the manufacturing of demand to meet supply, and the manufacturing of an indefinitely increasing demand to meet a supply of comparable dimensions. It is, as a necessary stepping stone to the manufacturing of this demand, the wholesale reshaping of what it means to be a human being: not into a selfless, musclebound Superman, as the Soviets would have had it (and say of that what you will), but into a spiritually impoverished and pathetic wretch, a meat-vehicle for a ceaseless material appetite.

It’s not that it’s not commented on. Many people have observed the way that interfaces like YouTube and Facebook keep us trapped in miserable little cycles of consuming, clicking, consuming, clicking (and to what end, financially? Serving us advertisements! Yet more psychological conditioning!). But too often this is understood as something sui generis, a unique malady of Internet capitalism, rather than as an elaboration of and refinement upon a single, vast project that has been in the works for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The “loops” and tiny dopamine spurts of social media and video games are in fact just one more chisel in the hand of those sculptors attempting to fashion, from the soft stone of the human psyche, the type of person that can sustain global capitalism.

Is it cybernetic? Automatic and self-perpetuating? Certainly, to a degree. But it was planned, once. And for every clearly pathological and immiserating behavioral pattern that is discovered through new technology, there is a person whose job is to find out how to get more people to behave that way and use it to move product.

This Armistice Day, what better way to repay veterans than to ensure that none of them are ever made again?