r-ob-yn

[r-ob-yn]

i despise the makeup paradigm and the fact that someone we're supposed to see as attractive can literally never be seen with pimples or their natural complexion or with real skin really and like everything is like that now and has been forever its such shit we loathe the human body so much its really super sad and i just hate how ubiquitous it is like every day i have to look at a thousand pictures of models with cinched waists in so much makeup on every inch of their visible skin or w so much doctoring that i feel like im looking at "ai slop" or its illustrations of like anime chicks who are always drawn as homogenous as the models and no one ever puts a pimple or a welt or pox scars or lentigo on these characters and it would even be weird if they did and people would assume its like a fetish or a cope or some shit its so sickening and when I do see models with different bodies theyre complexion is still edited to be "unblemished" and uniform beyond realism and they all look not like adults but big babies and its just so wrong.. when I'm dictator it will be illegal to conceal ""blemishes"" with makeup in pictures and film and all the psa posters will have real people with real skin and fat and the propaganda characters too and cartoons too I don't give a shit we need a thousand years of real imagery of people to acclamate ourselves away from our distaste for our bodies

[r-ob-yn]

‘State of panic’ among locals as Israel expands occupation of south Syria

The Israeli army continues to bombard Syria and attack what is left of the former government’s military infrastructure

[r-ob-yn]

americans be like we gotta dismantle the international system that we designed to benefit us because it doesn't benefit us enough.

[r-ob-yn]

It is so fucking sinister that the only form of child abuse that society really cares about is sexual in nature. parents are free to control everything about their child's movement, presentation, eating, faith traditions, information exposure, socialization, and can restrict all of these things to an extreme degree as a form of punishment or in order to shape the child into whatever they want that child to be. and that's all considered completely normal, the parent's right! people don't even see the fact that a parent has the power to control so much about a child's life for damn near 20 years to be a problem. The only time they become concerned about child abuse is when the prospect of an outside stranger behaving in a sexual way toward a child is raised. and yeah a lot of really horrific sexual abuses are enacted unto children, but that's because they have zero control over their own lives and bodies in any other way as well. It is all about power and control. and typically the ones who are abusing children the most frequently are the ones who have the most control over them, the parents.

[r-ob-yn]

This was an interesting read. Surprisingly nonpreachy given the subject; and well worth the time.

[r-ob-yn]

So to catch you up to speed

Luigi Mangione is an innocent man who has not been confirmed to have been involved in any crime.

We have police documents confirming he was not DNA tested or fingerprinted, and confirmation no usable DNA or fingerprints were recovered at the crime scene due to incomplete prints and immense DNA contamination of New Yorks streets.

No evidence has linked him to the crime.

No facial recognition has even remotely come close to identifying the cctv suspects face as that of Luigi. His own family and friends do not see a resemblance. Most people agree the features in the cctv do not match the very well documented features of Luigi Mangione.

Luigi Mangione has no history of violence nor with firearms. He is a vegan pacifist with no history of mental illness and an aversion to killing even bugs.

He is still only a SUSPECT and all involvement in any crimes are merely ALLEGED at this time. Alleged by the most corrupt police force in the entire nation; the NYPD who do more organized crime than they've ever stopped.

Luigi Mangione's attorneys confirmed they have been shown absolutely nothing that even places Luigi at the scene of the crime.

People have repeatedly tried to recreate the entire timeline of events and found it is not physically possible to do what was alleged in the time frame police gave. Especially dubious for Luigi Mangione to have done given his recent, crippling back injury.

Luigi Mangione in his own words has said police planted evidence on him and are not being honest about his arrest or what he had on him at the time.

There is no body cam footage of Luigi's arrest.

There is no autopsy report for Brian Thompson.

Luigi has so far been:

Stripped of his hat, jacket and shoes and forced to walk in the cold in December wearing wet socks.

Forced to urinate on himself where police then took and published humiliation photos of him.

He was then stripped of his shirt pants and socks and put in a blue psychiatric gown and strapped to a chair inmates called "the torture chair" and left for prolonged periods of time. To the point the entire inmate population at the prison protested in anger.

He was slammed unto a brick wall, choked, and shoved by various police officers for no reason.

Was marched through nyc at gunpoint by officers with military firearms, forced to wear chains

Was called a murderer by the mayor of NYC on national television.

Was then placed in solitary confinement for weeks. Something extremely damaging psychologically to be exposed to for even just a few days. Something usually reserved for cannibals.

He is now being forced to sleep on the floor despite again, a crippling back injury.

Again, he has not even had trial yet. He is an innocent man by the very definition of the law. He has nothing tying him to any crime. And even the crime itself was a nobody being shot in a city where nobodies are shot everyday, seven days a week. And those shooters don't get this treatment. Cannibals don't get this treatment. Serial killers don't get this treatment. Why are they doing this? Because we entered an oligarchy and they want people who are rich to matter more than people who are not. The NO ONE, no name, insignificant person that Brian THOMPSON always was and WILL ALWAYS BE is more important because of his net worth, to the fascist oligarchy we've entered into, than the innocent man, data scientist and robotics engineer with a promising future that is Luigi Mangione.

The NYPD doesn't want him to be innocent. They are torturing him gleefully and postponing his trial because they know he's innocent. They just want to scare the public into understanding that the ultra rich, even those who's names will never be remembered as anything other than markings on a never visited tombstone, are the only persons who matter now. Not yours. Never yours. You're poor. They'll torture you without a trial too. Your life means nothing to them. Your children dying in school shootings means nothing to them. Pinning a crime on an innocent man they can beat to scare the public out of class consciousness is the only thing that matters to them now. Depose them.

[r-ob-yn]

the way that people post the publicly accessible home addresses of billionaires online as a vague threat is so corny and posturing. for 10 years I've seen people go "btw this is where this guy lives!" only for nothing to happen because they're hoping someone else will eventually take one for the team, or that they can magically will a coherant movement to combat these people into existence. nobody even mails poop anymore.

[r-ob-yn]

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

[r-ob-yn]

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

[r-ob-yn]

"In case anyone missed it, the tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas has now spread to Ohio.

[The Republican Administration] has ordered the CDC to not report on this"

[r-ob-yn]

this is like.......the core point of like every modern piece of political economic writing ever. but it's actually mindboggling how much unlimited access to cheap goods americans have.

like even compared to other imperial states and taking wages and conversions into account it's still a ridiculous level of access and affordability, and then compared to relatively wealthy non imperial nations it's just completely unfathomable.

[r-ob-yn]

January 28, 2025 - Palestine Action activists targeted Martin-Baker in Buckinghamshire, UK. The engineering firm supplies ejection seats for Israeli fighter jets and works closely with Israel's biggest weapons producer, Elbit Systems. [video]

[r-ob-yn]

[“The American soldiers in Vietnam discovered their own ignorance in an immediate way. The NLF guerrillas chose the night and the jungles to fight in, similarly, and they chose to work with that part of the population which was the most obscure to the Americans and to the Saigon government officials. For the Americans to discern the enemy within the world of the Vietnamese village was to attempt to make out figures within a landscape indefinite and vague — underwater, as it were.

Landing from helicopters in a village controlled by the NLF, the soldiers would at first see nothing, having no criteria with which to judge what they saw. As they searched the village, they would find only old men, women, and children, a collection of wooden tools whose purpose they did not know, altars with scrolls in Chinese characters, paths that led nowhere: an economy, a geography, an architecture totally alien to them. Searching for booby traps and enemy supplies, they would find only the matting over a root cellar and the great stone jars of rice. Clumsy as astronauts, they would bend under the eaves of the huts, knock over the cooking pots, and poke about at the smooth earth floor with their bayonets. How should they know whether the great stone jars held a year’s supply of rice for the family or a week’s supply for a company of troops?

With experience they would come to adopt a bearing quite foreign to them. They would dig in the root cellars, peer in the wells, and trace the faint paths out of the village — to search the village as the soldiers of the warlords had searched them centuries ago. Only then would they find the entrance to the tunnels, to the enemy’s first line of defense. To the American commanders who listened each day to the statistics on “tunnels destroyed” and “caches of rice found,” it must have appeared that in Vietnam the whole surface of the earth rested like a thin crust over a vast system of tunnels and underground rooms.

The villages of both the “government” and “Viet Cong” zones were pitted with holes, trenches, and bunkers where the people slept at night in fear of the bombing. In the “Viet Cong” zones the holes were simply deeper, the tunnels longer — some of them running for kilometers out of a village to debouch in another village or a secret place in the jungle. Carved just to the size of a Vietnamese body, they were too small for an American to enter and too long to follow and destroy in total. Only when directed by a prisoner or informer could the Americans dig down to discover the underground storerooms. Within these storerooms lay the whole industry of the guerrilla: sacks of rice, bolts of black cloth, salt fish and fish sauce, small machines made of scrap metal and bound up in sacking. Brown as the earth itself, the cache would look as much like a part of the earth as if it had originated there — the bulbous root of which the palm-leaf huts of the village were the external stem and foliage. And yet, once they were unwrapped, named, and counted, the stores would turn out to be surprisingly sophisticated, including, perhaps, a land mine made with high explosives, a small printing press with leaflets and textbook materials, surgical instruments, Chinese herbal medicines, and the latest antibiotics from Saigon.

The industry clearly came from a civilization far more technically advanced than that which had made the external world of thatched huts, straw mats, and wooden plows. And yet there was an intimate relation between the two, for the anonymous artisans of the storerooms had used the materials of the village not only as camouflage but as an integral part of their technology. In raiding the NLF villages, the American soldiers had actually walked over the political and economic design of the Vietnamese revolution. They had looked at it, but they could not see it, for it was doubly invisible: invisible within the ground and then again invisible within their own perspective as Americans. The revolution could only be seen against the background of the traditional village and in the perspective of Vietnamese history.”]

frances fitzgerald, from fire in the lake: the vietnamese and the americans in vietnam, 1972

[r-ob-yn]

were at a weird point where us imperialists are dismantling their own institutions for building soft power and maintaining us hegemony abroad (like USAID) because the people in charge are so drunk on racist hatred of anyone who isnt american and owning the libs they dont realize (or dont care) that these are the things that keep the US in a position of imperial power lmao

[r-ob-yn]

in the figure of “just a little guy, just a little birthday boy” is the image of 21st century ethics. everyone is constantly trying to like position themselves as uniquely non-agentic, to defer or deny what power they have or can have over others, to self-absolve by adopting an affect of ignorance or victimhood or perpetual adolescence that can be transmuted into moral righteousness

[r-ob-yn]

just saw a really stupid post on tumblr where someone showed the prices of vegetables in china and how, when converted to US dollars, only costs a couple of cents, and the post was like, "ugh why must us americans suffer such high prices when the rest of the world doesn't !!!" and it's like. you are aware that you come from a country with an extremely strong currency, yes ? and that, just bc a loaf of bread costs R20 (or 1.06 USD) here in south africa, that doesn't make it affordable to the average working class south african, just bc it seems cheap to you, yes ? u are aware that many ppl around the world make wayyyyy less than even the minimum wage american, yes ? that, even though you may be struggling financially in ur country, ur dollar still has significant power over the majority of the currencies around the world. yes ?

[r-ob-yn]

the pistachio food trend is soooo interesting because it's like. i've been following the californian pistachio water politics for years, as a californian with personal connections to agricultural workers but! basically there's been a big push in california agriculture over the last decade to pressure farmers to produce pistachios, because iran has dominated the global market in pistachios for decades, and the US government has been trying to weaken iran economically, so they want to make california pistachios a competitor. which is ridiculous, because california's agricultural infrastructure is suffering under a drought, and pistachios take insane amounts of water. so a ton of water is being redirected from the people in order to engage in a trade war with iran over fucking. pistachios.

anyway now that the US (i.e. california) is producing more pistachios than iran, the next step is to drive consumption of pistachios, so that the farmers who are producing these pistachios can continue to make money on them. ergo all the fancy pistachio coffees at starbucks and similar shit like suddenly being able to find pistachio butter in grocery stores when five years ago it was exclusively available at specialty stores and online, and the huge boom in pistachios foods in instagram and tiktok recipe content. like i watch a lot of instagram foodie reels (cooking/baking is one of my hobbies) and these get thrown onto everyone's feeds, to promote the purchasing of pistachios, so that the US can stick it to iran. it's. kind of incredible to watch this happen in real time, because it sounds like deranged conspiracy thought, but like. i've been watching this trend for the past decade and it's fucking real.

anyway one of the vegan recipe accounts i follow just posted like five pistachio-based recipes in a row and it makes me feel some kind of fucking way