#Capitalism is inherently exploitative

[rainbowpopeworld]

[queer-wizard-dad]

Follow @chucktingleofficial 's example and make your own wizard franchise with queer rep and dinosaurs

[vulcanmaterialscompany]

Touting itself in PR social media as the greatest, most responsible, environmentally-friendly corporation when they are, in fact, the exact opposite of all those things.

They are terrorists who are damaging people's houses through massive blasts that travel a long distance, ignoring any and all complaints from neighbors (because they've bought the corrupt politicians who make the laws and regulations), destroying the environment by bulldozing trees surrounding the quarries they operate, all while furthering overdevelopment.

Furthermore, they are bribing lawmakers and politicians through campaign donations to continue having weak regulations governing the mining and construction industry.

Here is a link from OpenSecrets.org of the money Vulcan Materials has donated to lawmakers.

You don't just have for-profit corporations giving money away; they're receiving a return on their investment, and that's called bribery.

[gryffintheparrotcat]

Vegans are some of the most classist and especially ableist people I've ever met and it never fails to baffle me how one can extend so much empathy to every animal except the human.

That being said I'm also fully convinced it's no coincidence that vegetarians and vegans have been turned into these elitist groups, who are made to think of themselves as better than others while everyone else is made to think of them as obnoxious. It's just another way of vilifying climate activism while also pushing the entire issue back onto the individual rather than onto the corporations that actually cause it.

[coolcarabiner]

i love my fucking JOBBBBB i feel like i fell into an alternate universe where going to work sucks at least 60% less and the name of the alternate universe is 'having a job that's not in fucking food service/retail'

[kyouka-supremacy]

I connected the dots

[lobpoints]

The way Ayin is my favorite LC character but I literally can't talk about him except with my friends

[revindicatedbyhistory]

the reason i like utena so much is because its the most left wing anime ive seen.

[memento-mariii]

Why are so many NFT and AI "art" bros so into the cyberpunk aesthetic. Did they miss the entire point of the genre, or.

[platonic-cats]

I hate hospitality I hate work I hate my boss I hate capitalism I hate exams I have school.

I want to roll into a ball and hibernate

[kienansidhe]

so listen i fucking hate landlords but! i think we gotta stop making fun of landlords for "passive income" and stick to focusing on the way they, you know, get that income by exploiting people, by withholding the basic human right for shelter from others.

people love to be like oh landlords dont do any actual work like the rest of us, but like? a lot of disabled people cant do "actual work" either. people hate us because we collect ssi (if we can even get through those hoops) without working "real" jobs or creating any value that capitalism cares about. some of the stuff ppl say abt landlords sounds exactly the same. landlords DO suck but the way some of yall talk about them rlly shows that youre still stuck in a capitalist and christian and ableist mindset, where you think everyone should struggle to justify their existence, their right to food and shelter, their right to survive.

personally i think we should ALL get passive income (universal basic income <3) because we have inherent value regardless of how much we work. we just shouldnt impoverish our fellow people to do so!

[mentoscola]

i love people who say shit like this and obviously have absolutely zero clue about space exploration. this isn't a ""leftist"" position this is just cultural christianity

the irony of it all is that you're using the internet to post these takes. do you think that the internet would exist without space research?

there are thousands of valid critiques of nasa/the space industry. this is not one of them.

do you have any opinions of NASA being on Tumblr?

the whole nasa worship thing is fucked and the prima facie assumption that space exploration is some kind of humanitarian good is so insane for multiple reasons but the actual effect of any given tumblr account is fairly limited simply by the fact that this website is unpopular and not lucrative

[apas-95]

As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

[ahaura]

i saw someone point out the frequency with which liberals back social justice movements... how, for instance, when ferguson happened under obama it was not popular and there were many, many liberals who found the blm movement, in a sense, "in violation of [liberal] sensibilities" (when liberalism as a rule does not challenge the status quo, only maintains it and sees any call for revolution or real change as disruptive or 'bad for optics' and therefore not acceptable) but then when trump became president and he opposed blm a lot more liberals decided that the blm movement had merit because they viewed it from a team-sports perspective rather than a worldview based on morals and an understanding of the systems in place in the U.S. - that it was more comfortable for them to operate from a "trump bad" basis rather than "the american justice system and the police are inherently white supremacist, which are inherently, automatically, and always violent"

+ that, if trump was president while israel is carrying out its genocide, liberals would have NO problem denouncing israel and demanding for a ceasefire because they're comfortable operating from the 2-party system basis, NOT from a framework based on material conditions or factors or any acknowledgement or analysis of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism. but because biden is a democrat, and democrats are supposed to be "the decent party" "the lesser evil" "more respectable" when, in functionality - in real practice, they don't want to disrupt the status quo. (internally, maintaining systems of white supremacy and capitalism; externally, furthering U.S. imperialism by maintaining hegemony and continuing the practice of exploitation and extraction of labor+capital+resources from the global south)

which is why we're here, a month into a genocide, and liberals are so cowardly and gutless that, in the face of our democrat president allowing and funding the genocide of palestinians in order for the U.S. to maintain its military base in the middle east, liberals IMMEDIATELY jump to "well, you HAVE to vote for him still, because trump will be worse!" and go "well im powerless there's nothing i can do", immediately folding like a wet paper bag in the face of the american empire rearing its ugly head in the most blatant, naked way in years, instead of thinking "this is unacceptable, i should pressure my elected officials and do everything i can - be it combating propaganda, contacting my congresspeople or senators, protesting, or engaging in direct action - to ensure this stops as quickly as possible".

there are liberals STILL IN MY NOTIFICATIONS who go "well you'll be electing a fascist if you vote for trump" not realizing that YOU CAN'T SIMPLY VOTE FASCISM AWAY. (which is not to say you should vote for republicans; that's not what i'm saying. none of us have said it.) we're pretty much already there. it's 2003 all over again, with the patriot act and all. the american war machine is pumping out racist, orientalist, pro-colonial, pro-genocide propaganda on behalf of the ethno-state america and its allies have backed since the so-called state's inception. people are being doxxed, fired, harassed, and attacked for visibly supporting palestine/opposing israel. islamophobic hate crimes are on the rise; a 6 year old boy was murdered not one month ago, an arab doctor in texas was stabbed to death. antisemitism is on the rise as well, thanks to the conflation of antisemitism with anti-zionism (which nazis have and will attempt to co-op in order to 'justify' + then act on their antisemitism, racism, and genocidal worldviews). our government is silencing people, brutalizing protestors, and arming and funding an ethno-state committing genocide - everything that would have been called fascist if it was under trump. but because it's a *democrat* liberals place "vote blue no matter who" and "optics" over the extremely basic moral stance that "genocide is wrong and people have the right to self-determination, autonomy, and life". arabs and muslims are already so dehumanized in the west that liberals (whether they consider themselves liberals or not) consider it an inconvenience to talk about the ongoing genocide that is happening with the blessing of OUR government. in this they expose their selfishness, the shallowness of their morals, their chauvinism, and their racism/orientalism/islamophobia/et cetera.

for example, if you see israeli troops waving a gay pride flag and the israeli state touting its support of gay people while said iof soldiers are murdering men, women, and children en masse every single day and you somehow????? think that because gay people are the ones doing the killing or a state claims to support gay people is doing the killing is ok then 1) you have fallen for pinkwashing propaganda and 2) that you find the murder of palestinians, or any people, permissible by a colonial force that uses causes liberals may genuinely care about in order to disguise, whitewash, or "lessen" the severity of the injustices it does unto usually black and brown people outside of the U.S., then you are just as bloodthirsty and depraved as anyone you would personally assign those descriptors of.

once again, it goes back to resorting to a team-sport understanding of the world rather than approaching it from a material one.

[third-nature]

"Feminists made women more depressed by pushing them out of the home and getting them to partipate in the workforce!! How is it better to serve a boss than a husband??"

So you agree — that work under capitalism is often grueling, thankless, and exploitative, and that people become depressed and alienated when given no choice but to sell their labor in a system of inherent power imbalance between worker and boss? So you agree — people would be happier if they worked less and got to spend more time among loved ones? So you agree — your atrophied social imagination molded by eons of imperial civilization can only conceive of a world with domination-by-patriarch or a world with domination-by-plutocrat?

[foone]

Me: The thing is I'm not sure it's even possible to do a non-problematic "ethical" factory game at this point. Like, sure you can design it so that genocide and colonization aren't part of your particular game, but so many of the genre tropes are stained with them. There's a patina of colonialist thinking over everything: the idea of untouched nature as being useless except for raw material for your factory, or as a trash dump for pollution. Even if you try to avoid all the negative implications you're still building on a genre which is a fever dream of capitalism: you're playing a one-man colonization and industrialization of unspoiled nature. You're like an incarnation of Columbia, manifest destiny in human form.

And in many ways, Factorio dropping the ball so obviously (with the "watch out for the natives!" line) was probably a good thing for the discourse about factory games. Otherwise we could have had this entire genre, with all the same unfortunate implications and unaddressed biases, without the obvious pointer that this is a colonialist power fantasy, you know? Factorio said the quiet part out loud, making it impossible to ignore the inherent ethical issues of this genre.

Cali: good points, sure, but my factory game is about kidnapping men, feminizing then, and sexually exploiting them.

Me: uhh. Okay so while you may be trying (like all factory game creators, hopefully) to remove the obvious ethical issues with the genre, that's kinda overshadowed by the HUGE BUCKET OF NEW ONES you've dumped on it.