#I thought this was America not a Communist Country

[gingerswagfreckles]

Not really loving how my post about the left's love affair with eugenics and blood and soil ideology framed as "decolonization" got coopted into another "wait it's all Christianity??" "It always has been" post." Y'all are sticking your heads in the sand if you think this is a problem with "cultural Christianity." This is the exact same pattern we saw play out in the 1979 Iranian revolution and much of this ideology was coopted from the Nazis by the Soviets and reframed as progressive. This is not an issue with Western "cultural Christianity" and it would be great if Jumblr could stop engaging in the same "there's actually one secret root cause of every problem in the world and if we get rid of it we will have utopia" thing that antisemites have been using against Jews for 2000 years.

[fozmeadows]

There's a lot of conversations to be had around the current influx of Americans to Xiaohongshu (RedNote/Little Red Book) ahead of the TikTok ban, many of which are better articulated by more knowledgeable people than me. And for all the fun various parties of both nationalities seem to having with memes and wholesome interactions, it's undoubtedly true that there's also some American entitlement and exoticization going on, which sucks. But a sentiment I've seen repeatedly online is that, if it's taken actually speaking to Chinese people and viewing Chinese content for Americans to understand that they've been propagandized to about China and its people, then that just proves how racist they are, and I want to push back on that, because it strikes me as being a singularly reductive and unhelpful framing of something far more complex.

Firstly: while there's frequently overlap between racism and xenophobia, the distinction between them matters in this instance, because the primary point of American propaganda about China is that Communism Is Fundamentally Evil And Unamerican And Never Ever Works, and thinking a country's government sucks is not the same as thinking the population is racially inferior. The way most Republicans in particular talk about China, you'd think it was functionally indistinguishable from North Korea, which it really isn't. Does this mean there's no critique to be made of either communism in general or the CCP? Absolutely not! But if you've been told your whole life that communist countries are impoverished, corrupt and dangerous because Communism Never Works, and you've only really encountered members of the Chinese diaspora - i.e., people whose families left China, often under traumatic circumstances, because they thought America would be better or safer - rather than Chinese nationals, then no: it's not automatically racist to be surprised that their daily lives and standard of living don't match up with what you'd assumed. Secondly: TikTok's userbase skews young. While there's certainly Americans in their 30s and older investigating Xiaohongshu, it seems very reasonable to assume that the vast majority are in their teens or twenties - young enough that, barring a gateway interest in something like C-dramas, danmei or other Chinese cultural products, and assuming they're not of Chinese descent themselves, there's no reason why they'd know anything about China beyond what they've heard in the news, or from politicians, or from their parents, which is likely not much, and very little firsthand. But even with an interest in China, there's a difference between reading about or watching movies from a place, and engaging firsthand, in real time, with people from that place, not just through text exchanges, but in a visual medium that lets you see what their houses, markets, shopping centers, public transport, schools, businesses, infrastructure and landmarks look like. Does this mean that what's being observed isn't a curated perspective on China as determined both by Xiaohongshu's TOU and the demographic skewing of its userbase? Of course not! But that doesn't mean it isn't still a representative glimpse of a part of China, which is certainly more than most young Americans have ever had before.

Thirdly: I really need people to stop framing propaganda as something that only stupid bigots fall for, as though it's possible to natively resist all the implicit cultural biases you're raised with and exist as a perfect moral being without ever having to actively challenge yourself. To cite the sacred texts:

Like. Would the world be a better place if everyone could just Tell when they're being lied to and act accordingly? Obviously! But that is extremely not how anything actually works, and as much as it clearly discomforts some to witness, the most common way of realizing you've been propagandized to about a particular group of people is to interact with them. Can this be cringe and awkward and embarrassing at times? Yes! Will some people inevitably say something shitty or rude during this process? Also yes! But the reality is that cultural exchange is pretty much always bumpy to some extent; the difficulties are a feature, not a bug, because the process is inherently one of learning and conversation, and as individual people both learn at different rates and have different opinions on that learning, there's really no way to iron all that out such that nobody ever feels weird or annoyed or offput. Even interactions between career diplomats aren't guaranteed smooth sailing, and you're mad that random teenagers interacting through a language barrier in their first flush of enthusiasm for something new aren't doing it perfectly? Come on now.

Fourthly: Back before AO3 was banned in China, there was a period where the site was hit with an influx of Chinese users who, IIRC, were hopping over when one of their own fansites got shut down, which sparked a similar conversation around differences in site etiquette and how to engage respectfully. Which is also one of the many things that makes the current moment so deeply ironic: the US has historically criticized China for exactly the sort of censorship and redaction of free speech that led to AO3 being banned, and yet is now doing the very same thing with TikTok. Which is why what's happening on Xiaohongshu is, IMO, such an incredible cultural moment: because while there are, as mentioned, absolutely relevant things to be said about (say) Chinese censorship, US-centrism, orientalism and so on, what's ultimately happening is that, despite - or in some sense because of - the recent surge in anti-Chinese rhetoric from US politicians, a significant number of Americans who might otherwise never have done so are interacting directly with Chinese citizens in a way that, whatever else can be said of it, is actively undermining government propaganda, and that matters.

What it all most puts me in mind of, in fact, is a quote from French-Iranian novelist and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, namely:

“The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

And at this particular moment in history, this strikes me as being a singularly powerful realization for Americans in particular to have.

[mesetacadre]

Is the belief at all valid that ultimately there is nothing much we in the imperial core can do for the global south (i.e palestine) and that liberation is largely in their hands only? Was there any time historically where that wasn't the case?

Maybe I am just doom and glooming but it really doesn't feel like there is much we can affect (though I still attend protest and do whatever my party tells me to, I don't air out these thoughts because I don't think they are productive)

Primarly I feel like building a base here for when shit goes south is the only thing we can do

My friend, we can't forget that, while imperialism is committed outside of our reach, it is fueled, supported, and justified in our countries. National liberation movements fight in their own frontlines, and we fight in the rearguard. If you have the impression that any real progress is impossible from our position, that is a product of the very limited development of the subjective conditions in your country. You and I have seen a myriad of protests and encampments this last year, which have had overwhelmingly no material effects on the genocide, but this is not inescapable.

In Greece, where the KKE is a legitimate communist party in the eyes of a significant portion of the Greek working class, their organization in and out of the workplace is very capable. In the 17th of October they, co-organizing with the relevant union and other entities (small note because when this happened some tumblr users seemed to misspeak, this action would have been impossible without the help and involvement of the KKE, take a look at the US to see what trade unions do without communist influence), blocked a shipment of bullets to Israel:

And merely a week ago, they blocked another shipment of ammunition meant to further fuel the imperialist war in Ukraine:

The differentiating factor in Greece that is not present arguably anywhere else in Europe and North America is their strong and established communist party, even their presence exerts an indirect influence in the broader working class, communist or not.

So are the rest of us meant to sit in our milquetoast protests and watch on with envy at the Greeks? No, because these are subjective conditions, and we have control over them. Even if most actions we do don't achieve anything materially, we gain experience, and the base for a proper organization of our class is built up. It's not just building that base for when something goes wrong in our countries, it's building a better base for the very next mobilization, the next action, the next imperialist aggression. The student movement of the imperial core is better off now in terms of lessons to be learned after the encampments than if they hadn't done anything (and the utility of the encampments wasn't completely null anyway, some unis in Spain have ceased all economic and academic relations with Israel).

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Folkenflik at NPR:

Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to be told they had been locked out: Federal officials had embarked on indefinite mass suspensions. All full-time staffers at the Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martí, were affected — more than 1,000 employees. The move followed a late Friday night edict from President Trump that its parent agency, called the U.S. Agency for Global Media, must eliminate all activities that are not required by law. In addition, under the leadership of Trump appointees, the agency has severed all contracts for the privately incorporated international broadcasters it funds, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The termination notices for grants for the funded networks, two of which were reviewed by NPR, carried the signature of Trump's senior adviser Kari Lake, whom he placed at USAGM, not the agency's acting chief executive. Lake does not appear in her current job to have the statutory authority to carry out that termination. "I am deeply saddened that for the 1st time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced," the network's director, Michael Abramowitz, said in a statement posted on his personal Facebook account. "VOA needs thoughtful reform and we have made progress in that regard. But today's action will leave Voice of America unable to carry out its vital mission." He wrote that he was among those 1,300 journalists, producers and support staff put on leave. Grant Turner, the former chief financial officer at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, called it "Bloody Saturday" for the agency and its networks.

'Arsonists just set fire to it'

"From what I hear, this is shaping up to be a really sad day. USAGM networks share important news, information and American values around the world," Turner said. "It took decades to build this goodwill and an audience of hundreds of millions every week. Seeing arsonists just set fire to it all is awful." "The cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's grant agreement would be a massive gift to America's enemies," Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said in a statement today shared with NPR. "The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years. Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker. We've benefitted from strong bipartisan support throughout RFE/RL's storied history. Without us, the nearly 50 million people in closed societies who depend on us for accurate news and information each week won't have access to the truth about America and the world." Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz declined to comment but acknowledged he had been among those put on indefinite paid leave. This story is based on interviews with 16 current and former employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the networks it funds. Almost all spoke on condition they not be named due to fear of professional retribution. NPR has reviewed internal notifications about the suspensions and the killed contracts. Similar notices reviewed by NPR have been received by hundreds of contractors at the Voice of America as well today. USAGM and the White House did not reply to requests for comment. A deputy White House spokesperson tweeted "Goodbye" in 20 languages over a link to a story from 2023 over a controversy at the Voice of America about how to characterize Hamas. Taken together, the federally-funded broadcasters and their sister networks covering the Middle East and Cuba reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week, according to the agency. They are fully funded by federal dollars. The networks' mission is to deliver news coverage and cultural programming to places where a free press is threatened or doesn't exist. They are also designed as a form of soft diplomacy, modeling independent journalism that incorporates dissent from government policy.

Trump's friends in Moscow and Budapest aggrieved by network coverage

The Voice of America sparked Trump's ire in his first term in office over reporting on Covid-19. His appointee as chief executive for U.S. Agency for Global Media embarked on a series of suspensions, visa revocations and investigations that were found, in some instances, to violate the law and federal policy. This time, Trump's budget-slashing adviser, Elon Musk, and other administration officials have called for Voice of America and some of the sister networks to be shut down. The scope and legality of these acts are not yet in full focus, but they appear to be designed to gut them and place whatever coverage survives under tighter control of politically appointed officials. Trump placed Lake, a two-time unsuccessful MAGA candidate, as his senior adviser over USAGM. She did not reply to a detailed request for comment for this story. USAGM's media relations team has not replied to NPR's repeated and detailed requests for comment about developments at the networks in recent days, including today. Trump's pick to lead the agency permanently, the conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III, has not yet been scheduled for confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate.

Free press-hating Orange Führer’s regime orders mass cullings of journalists working at US Agency For Global Media-owned outlets such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

See Also:

The Guardian: Trump sharpens attacks on US media as Voice of America employees put on administrative leave

[sophie-frm-mars]

My wife was asking me about this this morning. This is pure political fanfic, but if I were Trump and I were going to try and make America a re-industrialised nation centred around the tech industry that keeps its supply lines as entirely in-house as possible, what I would do is start (obviously) with enormous central planning. You can't "free market incentives" your way back out of the export of industrial labour overseas.

You'd copy China and make enormous State-Owned Enterprises (assuming we care about the market and want to keep playing this stupid game instead of just becoming fully communist) that would process refined minerals into components, components into parts and parts into electronics. I'd recognise the scale of this as a multi-generational project and immediately start subsidising training for more engineers, especially for people who can set up automated factory lines but also engineers in new emerging tech fields like autonomous driving, software programmers, designers, even artists since the content economy is such a huge part of what people use tech for through social media and so much art is produced digitally now anyway.

From there you want to look at the markets globally that fucking, EaglePhone or whatever these overpriced Made In Murica devices can be sold into, and at this point, given that they will be crazy expensive compared to Chinese electronics literally no matter what you do, here would be a worthwhile place to try and flex America's muscles and threaten the UK, the EU, South America, Canada and so on with tariffs or other penalties if they don't adopt a hostile policy toward Chinese electronics.

Massive central planning would be essential for the kind of societal transformation that Trump is explicitly describing, in order to have a product to sell to the rest of the world before using imperialist bullying to make other countries buy things from America instead, but here we have to return yet again to the reality of Trump's plan. There is no end goal where America is in a stronger position. If he had implemented sweeping public programs reinvesting taxes into the health of the nation (never mind the health of its citizens) in his first term, he might have been in a powerful enough position to strongarm other countries into changing the flows of global trade, but America's world influence simply is declining, and more and more rapidly, so he's just trying to make moves that make him and his friends as much money as possible while they lock the doors, pack the country up into the box it came in and set the whole thing on fire. He describes these moves using the MAGA fantasy because it gives all his supporters in the media and the general population enough to talk about to buy him time, but I don't think anyone outside his base ever thought making America great was ever his plan, so why has everyone been critiquing the tariffs as if his sincere belief was that he would achieve his stated goals with them?

We all let our enemies set the topic of the conversation all day every day and it's shocking to me

[apas-95]

Hello, I'm sorry for bothering.

A lot of fellow comrades have been posting quite a bit about anarchists lately and I've noticed that they seem to be the majorly from North America (predominantly the US).

Do you think the heavy anti-communist propaganda in these countries is a big influence on, at least online, people's radicalization into anarchism and the aversion to us as "authoritarian takies"?

I've always felt like anarchism is not demonized as much (most anti anarchist propaganda, if you could even call it that, is the propagation of the rule-breaker rebel teen that cares for no one stereotype) because it simply isn't a threat to the capitalism like socialism and communism are. It feels like they'd prefer that people get radicalized into anarchism as it would be both improbable to have a revolution and if it did happen power would be easily taken back. Am I crazy, or does this make sense?

In general, yes, anarchism is significantly more popular in the imperial core; and during the cold war all sorts of 'anti-authoritarian' currents of thought were promoted by the west states as a means of countering Marxism-Leninism.

The most popular anticommunist works, like 1984, which was internationally published and adapted directly by the CIA and British intelligence, are ones that promote a supposedly 'leftist' opposition to socialism. The bourgeoisie would much prefer to deal with anarchists than Marxist-Leninists, which shouldn't come as anything of a surprise, given the last 100 years have been defined by their existential scramble to try to defeat Marxist-Leninist projects composed of hundreds of millions of politically-conscious workers armed with the most advanced weaponry and industrial bases - and the most successful anarchist projects have been, at best, small states formed in the power vacuums of civil wars led by Marxist-Leninist parties, or, more commonly, some sort of protest camp/community garden that gets destroyed as soon as a single cop walks into it.

Also posting the image to clown around a bit fhfhfh

[leyenra8]

I want to commend you on your posts they are exceptionally well thought and thank you for your patriotism. I am a 12th generation American, my family came to America in 1634 and we need more people like yourself to understand what patriotism is

Thank you

My fiancé and I are truly blessed to have met you. 

The ultimate goal of our life together is saving America by letting every American know who is destroying our beloved country by watching “Agenda: Grinding America Down”.��

“Agenda: Grinding America Down” Is An Eye-Opening Documentary Exposing The New Communist Scheme Killing Our Nation

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

fuck it, a post about how brazilian politics are dead and we can't resurrect them easily

edit: olá amigos e amigas e amigues e tal, eu só quero deixar bem claro que sou brasileiro, aparentemente isso não estava claro e falar inglês na internet pelo jeito é coisa de gringo. fique calmo e relaxe, saiba que escrevi tudo isso com uma tapioca com carne de sol numa mão e uma caipirinha na outra, num sol de matar com um cachorro caramelo latindo do lado de fora da casa.

So as hypothetical polls start coming out and people start talking about who they're gonna vote for, I'm reminiscing about a thousand years ago last week when I said I had a lot of thoughts about the death of Brazilian democracy and how it's turbo fucked to the point where there is really no good way out of either a collapse or a slow death by a thousand needles, either way leading to a complete overall; probably for the worse. I'm adding the break here just in case this isn't interesting to you, just know that I'm mad and this is a big rant.

Also, why am I not writing this for a Brazilian audience? Because I'm fucking tired of talking about this to Brazilians only to get a "yeah well it is what it is" response, and also because I'll be real most people I talk to here can't roll their Rs.

Look at this dude, his name is Lula. His name is Luiz, but people kept calling him Lula (Portuguese for squid, it sounds better than it translates as I swear) so he just added it legally to his name:

This dude has been the president of Brazil for two and a half mandates by now, albeit not all in a row. This shouldn't be legally possible, but there's some reasons why it's happening.

We had a pretty brutal dictatorship back in the 20th century, but it was a pretty unique dictatorship: we actually had political parties and elections, the brutal military regime just kept winning them (since they were all scams, as a dictatorship will ensure), and electing different military personnel to be the "president" every once in a while.

This meant that contrary to a lot of Latin America that unified around one single family or one single guy, we had a plethora of dictators all of which had unique approaches to appeasing the army and the population. Some were worse than others but overall it meant Brazilian politics in the 60s-80s were a rather unique, vibrant mixture of horrible, depressing abuses of human life and thriving counter-culture movements that aimed at destroying the oppressors.

From Soviet-sponsored yet frustrated communist coups to protest songs that are still sung to this day, we have a lot of big political personalities in our history. After the mid-80s when the dictatorship officially ended and democratic processes became the norm, we had several would-be politicians trying to grasp control over a very young, very fragile democracy.

Enter Lula. A radical, a socialist, a loud man who spoke about the plight of the proletariat, the rise of the working class and the dominant class, the oppression of the rich toward the poor, etc etc you know the drill. He never won an election like this. We instead kept electing demagogues and idiots-- we had our first impeachment almost right away against a loser and a thief who elected himself by appearing in political ads dressed like James Bond in jetskis, shooting guns at signs saying "INFLATION", it's.. it's a colorful democracy, is what I'm trying to establish.

(i unfortunately do not have any visuals of Collor in a stupid James Bond suit because those have apparently been scrapped off Youtube, just, please believe me, shit was wild)

So, Lula spends some time away from the limelight after his second or third defeat in a row, goes abroad a bit, learns some real politik tech from the French, and comes back a changed man. A calmer man, a nicer man, a man who speaks slowlier and who seems less concerned with aggressively dragging the country into a socialist utopia and more concerned with putting food into poor people's tables. This is a good objective to have and would bring Brazil into a level of unprecedented wealth and social comfort.

I'm talking lower and middle class going to Disneyland for vacations, I'm talking a complete overall of the concept of social class as we move from a 3-tiered pyramid system to using the entire alphabet to denote someone's social class-- with sociologists quickly realizing how fucking useless it is to say someone is in Class H as opposed to Class F. We're talking success the likes of which economists dream of. One real was nearly equivalent to a dollar at some point. Not exactly only because of him, but he definitely maintained it.

But then the systems began to become complacent, people in power started wanting more money than their salaries warranted them, and old habits came back into vogue. Mid-late aughts Brazilian politics were famously corrupt and Lula absolutely had a hand in maintaining it-- if not being an active accountant of dirty money, at the very least not stopping it when he definitely knew it was happening, and definitely knew who was behind it.

I'm not covering that for the purposes of this dumb little big rant, you can look up books about OPERATION CAR WASH for a police-sponsored, government-approved account of the biggest political trial in the history of the continent, as our judges and federal investigators managed to accrue enough evidence to persecute dozens if not hundreds of politicians for money laundering, stealing, thieving, extortion and overall being bad guys. And Lula was among them, which meant he went to jail for several years.

Enter dumbass number two. Here's this guy, he's called Bolsonaro.

If he looks like he's in pain in this picture, don't worry; it's because he's in the process of being stabbed in the intestines. Anyway, this enormous piece of shit fascist racist son of a bitch -- allegedly, of course -- has been a pain in the ass in the military for decades. He has at least one court martial against him because of one time he tried to bomb his superiors. The military judge ended up having to drop the charges due to lack of evidence, but not before making sure to add to the record: "Bolsonaro shouldn't even be in charge of a kitchen, much less any part of the military".

So this guy becomes president, right? He becomes president and he ruins everything that wasn't already ruined. I'm talking "Trump of the Tropics" type ruining everything; I'm talking tanking the real to the point where it never recovered, I'm talking buying 20 houses for himself with government cash and never having to give back a single one of them, I'm talking over half a million dead from COVID because he kept insisting people take fucking horse pills--

It is a genuine worst case scenario for a relatively young democracy. He was not running against Lula, who is, again, in jail by now, but he came after both Lula's impeached protégé and the guy who tanked the economy after we took her out of office (probably on fraudulent charges too, but, oh well). There is a definite feeling that the history of new millennium Brazilian democracy begins with Lula and ends with Bolsonaro, because we really, really didn't resolve this problem. We didn't come up with a way to make sure our democracy was free from clear bad faith actors who were in cahoots with foreign powers to undermine our processes. We didn't figure out shit.

What we did was we took Lula out of jail and made him president again. And like, was that the best thing we could do? No. Was that the best idea for the sake of the constitution? No. Did that irreparably destroy our democratic processes and set us back to an era of dangerous precedent that had previously been used to justify horrible abuses in similar democracies? Absolutely.

But, look, I gotta make sure you understand, Bolsonaro really sucks, and we were in a real bind. We have since made sure he can't legally run for election for a few years and we are in the process of persecuting him (post-failed impeachment, too, which mean it's already a kinda humiliating runback) so he dies in prison. But that doesn't matter as much as the fact that now Lula is halfway through an experimental, unprecedented, legally hitherto thought impossible third mandate as president.

And I woke up to Datafolha, one of our best polling and data publications, telling me that if he runs for a fourth, this should be the result.

And like, again, look.

Is this the worst case scenario? No.

Is this the worst chart I've ever seen? No.

Do I want Tarcísio, a previously unmentioned dumbass -- allegedly --, a feckless Bolsonaro minion who's complicit in genocide -- allegedly -- and doesn't seem to have a single thought that isn't related to the military and conservative values in his empty little head, to be president? Holy shit no.

But, so, like, okay, a fourth Lula term. Maybe one that he gets to with 50.2% of votes, again, like he did for the third time.

What the fuck, man?

These are much more accurate than your regular voting numbers. While in North America and several European countries only about 25% of the population vote, voting is mandatory in Brazil-- you have to at the very least legally justify why you didn't vote in any of our elections in order to stay in good standing with the law. That kind of is a good measure of the country's will, and god damn it shit fuck, a marginal error is no way to elect federal office.

We are in the nightmare that the United States like to pretend they are, in which while they pretend that there is a whole half of the country that adores Trump and fascism and oligarchy, we actually have tangible, reliable measures that this might be the case. That the actions of bad faith actors have degraded our education, maintenance and government apparatus to such an extent that it's not just a few 20% of the country who actually show up to vote that are making the world a worse place, it's, oh god, it's literally half, it's half on like a mathematical ideal of what half is.

And the more I think about it the more I realize that there is no way out of this situation. Lula is the single politician in the business who anyone cares about that isn't also a blatant nostalgia grab for the dictatorship era, and he's ailing and aging and weak. His third mandate has been marked by economical mistakes and a lack of will of seeing things halfway, because then they wouldn't be perfect. He's not the same guy he used to be back in the 80s, he's not even the same guy he used to be back in the 2000s, but he's the only one people give a shit about. Democracy has decided he wins the popularity contest.

And like, how could he not? The options are the son, wife, or any other protégé of a loser -- allegedly-- who wants to suck Trump's cock-- erotically-- and is deathly afraid of rotting in jail, giving interviews about how it isn't fair that the consequences of his actions landed him in the same place he used to mock Lula for being in. And I don't even need to add an "allegedly" to that one, because that's all matter of public record! He has begged for amnesty from the same dude he said he would bring back the death penalty so he could pull the trigger himself on! Begged!

This is not what democracy should be. We should not be immediately back to these populist false choices just because they're comfortable. Every aspect of political life has devolved into a Lula-core or Bolsonaro-core choice; every mayor, every governor, every god damn deputy aligns themselves with either of them. The Centrists align themselves with them. The neutrals align themselves with them. The fucking clowns and cosplayers, who are legally allowed to run as their characters (I'm talking literally Batman here) have aligned themselves with them.

In less than half a century we are stun-locked into a political tug of war between a man who can only stay in power if we completely ignore the Constitution and what it stands for, and a man who wants to rip the Constitution in several pieces so he can use them as napkins for a few weeks before relinquishing control to foreign powers. The population is utterly bored of politics and basically doesn't care. The walks and protests for and against either of these sides are marred by uninterested parties within and without, and both fake news media and conservative covers that make them all sound the same.

There's genuinely no way out of this through the tools we have been given. There is no third option, no attempt at getting at one, and no grassroots movement that is worth any salt acting anywhere. They have successfully made a 200-million-people strong country, one of the biggest in the world, utterly indifferent to what happens to it in the next five years.

And, yes, I understand what the US is going through is somewhat similar-- trust me, you people imported a lot of this situation to my place while I used to live there, I know it's similar-- but what you don't understand is that contrary to the US, we have suffered through a dictatorship. We know how bad it gets when people lose all faith in a government and leave it open to attack by organized bad faith actors. Fucking hell, you all have seen I'm Still Here! You celebrated those fucking Oscars with us! You've seen what our artists think of that time!

There is no real end to this rant. I just got thrown into the spiral when watching those numbers. We're gonna have a mediocre Lula presidency until he dies from a fall in his bathroom and then the military are taking over. It's so fucking busted and there's really nothing anyone can do about it because the government is so corrupt.

please feel free to share this post as something to laugh at and point to every source as to why the brazilian democracy is actually stronger than ever and not at all at the end of the process of destroying itself, i would adore to be convinced otherwise.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Today in Tottenham (North London)

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 12, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 13, 2025

Trump’s 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imported into the U.S. went into effect today, prompting retaliatory tariffs from the European Union and Canada. The E.U. announced tariffs on about $28 billion worth of products, including beef and whiskey, mostly produced by Republican-dominated states. “We deeply regret this measure,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. “Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business, and even worse for consumers. These tariffs are disrupting supply chains. They bring uncertainty for the economy.”

Canada also announced new tariffs on Wednesday on about $21 billion worth of U.S. products, in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. François-Philippe Champagne, Canada's minister of innovation, science, and industry, said: “The U.S. administration is once again inserting disruption and disorder into an incredibly successful trading partnership and raising the costs of everyday goods for Canadians and American households alike.”

With the stock market falling and business leaders begging Trump to stop the trade machinations that are creating the volatility that is wrenching the economy downward, Trump said yesterday to reporters: “[L]ong-term, what I’m doing is making our country strong again.”

In an interview on the CBS Evening News last night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financial executive, was asked whether Trump’s economic policies were “worth it” even if they cause a recession.

“These policies are the most important thing America has ever had,” Lutnick answered. “It is worth it.”

Former representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) reposted Lutnick’s assertion and said: “In my graduate thesis, I quoted a hardline communist official from Poland in the 1950s who was asked about terrible shortages of food and housing. He said people had to sacrifice and “if that’s what it takes to prove the superiority of socialism, it’s worth it.”

The days when the Republican Party were conservatives are long gone. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish politician and political thinker who began the process of articulating a conservative political philosophy, did so most famously in response to the French Revolution. In 1790, a year after the storming of the Bastille prison symbolized the rebellion of the people against the monarchy, Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Burke had supported the American Revolution that had ended less than a decade before largely because he believed that the American colonists were trying to restore their traditional rights. But the French Revolution, he thought, was an entirely different proposition. As revolutionaries in France replaced their country’s traditions with laws and systems based on their theory of an ideal government, Burke drew back.

He took a stand against radical change driven by people trying to make the government enforce a specific political ideology. Ideologically driven government was radical and dangerous, he thought: quickly, the ideology became more important than the complex reality of the way society—and people—actually worked.

In 1790, Burke argued that the role of government was not to impose a worldview, but rather to promote stability, and that lawmakers could achieve that stability most effectively by supporting the structures that had proven themselves effective in the past; in his time, that meant social hierarchies, the church, property, and the family. “Conservative” meant, literally, conserving what was already there, without reference to an ideology. Those in charge of government should make changes slowly, according to facts on the ground, in order to keep the country stable, he thought. If it behaved this way, the government, which in his time was usually seen as a negative force in society, could be a positive one.

In 2025 the Republicans in charge of the United States of America are not the conservatives they call themselves; they are the dangerous ideological radicals Burke feared. They are abruptly dismantling a government that has kept the United States relatively prosperous, secure, and healthy for the past 80 years. In its place, they are trying to impose a government based in the idea that a few men should rule.

The Trump administration’s hits to the economy have monopolized the news this week, but its swing away from Europe and toward Russia, antagonizing allies and partners while fawning over authoritarians like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is also a radical stand, and one that seems likely to destabilize American security. Former allies have expressed concern over sharing intelligence with the U.S. in the future, and yesterday, 34 army leaders from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, Japan, and Australia met in Paris without inviting the United States.

The wholesale destruction of the U.S.A.’s advanced medical research, especially cancer research, by firing scientists, canceling grants, banning communications and collaboration, and stopping travel is also radical and seems unlikely to leave Americans healthier than before.

Yesterday, news broke that the administration canceled $800 million worth of grants to Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation’s top research universities in science and medicine. Meanwhile, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has cast doubt on the safe, effective measles vaccine as the disease continues to spread across the Southwest.

Today, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin boasted that the administration is taking 31 actions to roll back environmental protections. Those include regulations about electric vehicles and pollution from coal-fired plants. The administration intends to rescind the EPA’s 2009 finding that the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change endanger public health. That finding is the legal argument for regulations governing car and truck emissions and power plants.

Also today, the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees supplemental food programs, announced it was cutting about $1 billion in funding that enables schools and food banks to buy directly from local farms and ranches. This will hit farmers and producers as well as children and food-insecure families.

In place of the system that has created relative stability for almost a century, Republicans under President Donald Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk are imposing a government that is based in the idea that a government that works to make people safe, prosperous, and healthy is simply ripping off wealthy people. Asked if he felt sorry for those losing their jobs in the government purges, Trump told NBC News, without evidence: “Sure I do. I feel very badly...but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

The administration promises that it is eliminating “waste, fraud, and corruption,” but Judd Legum of Popular Information today launched the “Musk Watch DOGE Tracker,” which shows that Musk has overstated the savings he claims by at least 92%, with the warning that since these identified cuts are illegal and unconstitutional—Congress appropriates money and writes the laws for how it’s spent, and courts have agreed that the executive branch has to execute the laws as they are written—the contracts might not be canceled at all.

That the administration knows it is not operating on the up-and-up seems clear from its attempts to hide what it is doing. It has taken weeks for courts to get the administration to say who is running the “Department of Government Efficiency” and what the body actually is. The White House has tried to characterize Musk as a senior advisor to the president to shield him from questioning.

But today, in response to a lawsuit by 14 attorneys general from Democratic-dominated states arguing that Musk is acting unconstitutionally, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered Musk and DOGE to turn over their records and answer questions, giving them three weeks to comply.

On Tuesday, remaining staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) received an email under the name of acting executive secretary Erica Carr at USAID telling them to shred or burn agency records, despite strict laws about the preservation of federal documents. “Haphazardly shredding and burning USAID documents and personnel files seems like a great way to get rid of evidence of wrongdoing when you’re illegally dismantling the agency,” said Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Two lawsuits are already challenging the order.

And the corruption in the administration was out in the open yesterday. After Trump advertised Elon Musk’s cars at the White House, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Musk “has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation.” This is separate from Musk’s own political action committee, which dropped almost $300 million into the 2024 election and which is now pouring money into next month’s election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The government that Trump and Musk are destroying, with the complicity of their party, is popular, and Republican members of Congress are apparently unwilling to have to vote on the policies that are putting their radical ideology into place. In an extraordinary move yesterday, House Republicans made it impossible for Congress to challenge Trump’s tariffs.

The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.

But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.

The Republicans’ legislation that a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[asterrrrion]

Okay I should definitely be sleeping rn but ! I need to say this : I've seen a lot of international (mainly American people) on the internet describing the general situation of the world as chaotic etc because of Syria and Korea and Brian fucking Thompson and France (which is what I'm going to talk about here).

First off, the current french situation isn't really that groundbreaking or anything new right now, the country has been in a political crisis for... a while now, at the very least since 2018-19 although in my opinion it started much earlier.

It has been really chaotic for now nearly five months, since Macron dissolved the Parliament and the acting government in June after the European elections (there was a political strategy at play here however it failed pathetically which is something I'll get to later) ; however this isn't something on the scale of what happened in Korea, not even mentioning Syria. The government and the people are just (much like in America) extremely polarised because of years of neoliberal political decisions and it's showing and slowing the government down.

Tale as old as time, I know.

However ! I ask of you to never say that the extreme left and the extreme right united among themselves to take the centrist government down. While the Rassemblement National is a far right party (who is currently being charged for stealing a shitload of cash btw, hope you like the taste of lawsuits Marine), our current President Emmanuel Macron and his party (I would give you the name but tbh they've rebranded so many times I can't remember what it is rn so let's just use the old one En Marche) are NOT a centrist party, and LFI, even more so the NFP are NOT a far left coalition/party.

Saying they were a centrist party was what carried them through the 2017 presidential election until it became abundantly clear if it wasn't already that they were in fact very right-wing.

Macron started out in the Socialist Party who is, these days, not very socialist anymore and who we can in fact barely call left-wing as they tend to have pretty much the same ideals as you guys' democrats (which are our centrists, basically, we have different political scales).

So, to summarise (I am warning you right now I have unmedicated adhd and am studying history with a deep love for political history this will be 5000 words long) nearly fifteen years of french politics to analyse what got us into this mess and why I'm asking you to not say these parties are far left parties, here's this :

There are a lot of different political parties in France. Anyone can create one, and so that means that the left's biggest problem for the past *checks notes* now a bit more than a century, has been division.

The socialist party and the communist party, which used to make up most of the left wing, separated in 1921 or 22 can't remember over the 3rd International and the Soviet Union. That created the historical division between far left and left : which one wanted to overthrow the government (in the 1920s the anarchists and communists which... to the left is still the same today actually) and which one thought elections were the best way to change things (the socialists).

The communists were big for a long time but they kinda got demonized after the Marshall Plan for obvious reasons, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, while they remained the French Communist Party (PCF for short) they kinda stopped actively having communist ideals and being a big party. Nowadays they still exist but are a pretty small party and aren't exactly big revolutionaries (nor, to be honest, big communists).

The socialists had their time of glory, the Front Populaire, in 1936. It was an alliance between all left-wing parties to forbid the far right from being elected basically, as they had just attempted a basically coup d'état but not really a few months earlier. The thirties were, for also obvious reasons, a pretty rocky time in Europe. They did very very good (i'm a leftist if you haven't noticed by now. Also, duh, this is Tumblr.) social policies for the first year but quickly had to stop due to various economical and military issues and resorted to a pretty default not doing much type of governing (I promise you, this WILL become the signature pattern of the PS or socialist party).

They were elected again in the 80s, and pretty much did the same thing, and then again in 2012, and by then they were hardly a left wing party anymore, mostly a bunch of at best left centrists politicians and at worst right wing opportunists. So a new party emerged called La France Insoumise (LFI) who is now the biggest french left wing party led by an extremely controversial figure who has a bit of an ego problem (they've also, objectively, made a bunch of shitty decisions on handling inner politics of the party but we won't get into that).

Forgot to mention this but there's also the Greens, Les Verts, an ecologist party with vaguely leftist ideologies. Their ecology program is pretty much the same as LFI's but it doesn't really hurt to vote for them except for the presidential election.

Now, the Republicans on the other hand (our Republicans. not yours. obviously.) used to be a left-centrist wing party but they slowly became a right wing one at the beginning of the 20th/end of the 19th century as the monarchists and imperialists got the fuck out of the Parliament and the socialists came in. This is a prime example of a political scale being tipped to one side (rarely seen this way around). What you need to know is that except for Mitterrand in the 80s and Hollande in 2012, the country has been exclusively led by these guys from 1959 onwards. Or, not necessarily these guys but similar parties (yes I'm looking at you De Gaulle). Nowadays they're extremely divided and the whole party is falling apart between far right and traditional conservative right.

The Rassemblement National which used to be called the Front National (so RN or anciently FN) is a far right party who was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and a few nazis. Yes, you did read that right. No, I'm not joking. Funnily enough Jean-Marie was in the Resistance, but I don't wanna know what goes on in that guy's mind. They're now led by his daughter (as the dude is on death's door now, but there has been some family drama there also), Marine Le Pen, who has worked very hard in the past few years to make the party go from outwardly racist, misogynistic and homophobic to covertly racist, misogynistic and homophobic.

This means that aaaall of the decisions that caused poverty and misery for french citizens, mainly the lack of funding that goes into public service and the abandonment of any and all rural areas has led a lot of people to turn to the now not as demonized as before RN.

On the other side the left wing has been eating itself alive since Hollande in 2012 because of rivalries between the Socialist Party and LFI, which has cost them several times the presidential election, and less and less people are voting since more and more people are losing hope in modern politics.

Which leads us to 2017 : the election of Emmanuel Macron as President. Macron was originally a banker and Minister of the Economy under Hollande, but he changed sides and left the Socialist Party in 2016 to create En Marche, a party that was supposed to be a centrist party but was quite obviously a right wing one.

As the left was divided, LFI's leader and the socialist leader were outvoted in favour of him and Marine Le Pen for a second vote to determine the President ; this was his strategy. As long as the left was divided, he would win the first round of voting, then the second, because he knew that left-wing people would ALWAYS vote for him against Le Pen.

A LOT of shit happened under his mandate (to name a few, COVID, the gilets jaunes etc) all of which were handled very badly, and all of his decisions were neoliberal shit as always which didn't help anything and made it actively worse. That wasn't helped by the guy's ego (I am not kidding most politicians are arrogant but this is like on another level this dude seriously, dead-ass thinks he's the smartest person in any room he walks in) and general condescending behaviour and statements (like when he said "I like train stations, because you meet both people who have succeeded and people who are nothing". yeah. turns out the nation he's supposed to be representing wasn't a big fan of that one. wonder why).

In 2022 most people hated his guts, but as the left was still divided because the fucking socialists can't admit they're not the biggest leftist party anymore and the threat of the far right in power was more present than ever, he got re-elected. The thing is, right afterwards the presidential elections is held the legislatives. They're the election of both the Senate and the National Assembly, so the Whole Parliament.

Normally, this would just be a formality, as a people who has elected a president literally four weeks ago is generally going to vote for his party. It's important to note here, than TRADITIONALLY (can you hear the anger in my voice yet ?) the President, when choosing a Prime Minister, is supposed to choose from the biggest political party represented in the National Assembly. When that party is from another party than the President's, we call this a cohabitation.

Cohabitations are always a messy but pretty fun time, as the Prime Minister, usually only a lackey of the President, is now a member from an opposing party and as he has, constitutionally, enormous legal power (that he, usually, as a lackey of the President, only uses to support the President's politics). The thing is we hadn't had a cohabitation in a long-ass time, because the amount of time presidents were elected was specifically changed to avoid them and put the legislatives right afterwards the presidential election. The other thing is, when the entire country is only voting for you because the only other alternative is the far right...

Now, in 2022, the biggest party elected was still the President's. However, it was only a relative majority instead of an absolute one, which meant that they had to have support should they want to pass any law. So, instead of finding allies, they chose to use a lovely article of the Constitution, the now infamous in France 49.3. This article means that on budget laws (and ONLY on budget laws which... is definitely going to be totally respected and not at all ambiguously used) the government (read : the Prime Minister) can make a text of law bypass the National Assembly and be automatically applied.

But the Assembly has then the choice to vote in order to demote the Parliament. They tried. It nearly went through. It didn't though, in the end, because the Republicans were too divided for it to go through. However both of the major opposing forces, the entire left wing and the far right party the RN, voted it if I remember correctly. And most of the past two years until summer 2024 were just the government fighting with the National Assembly. They used a metric ton of 49.3, it's now a meme (and also a widely antidemocratic tactic that everyone hates).

In the summer of 2024, there were the European elections. Each country votes, and ours voted for the far right. Like, a lot. I'm not kidding when I say that the situation with the RN is pretty fucking critical. What matters here is also that the President's Party had a ridiculously low score.

Now, Macron won't be re-elected. He can't. Like, physically. You can't be elected more than twice in France. But he wants someone of his party to take over after he leaves (which btw is going to be difficult, I'll be very surprised if en marche lasts three weeks without him since they're also divided as hell), so he needs it to be popular.

So he did something that he thought was smart : he dissolved the government and the Parliament. That meant we had to have a new legislative election. We were scared shirtless as we were all sure the RN would be elected and we'd have an RN prime minister, which we know now by some sources is what Macron intended to be able to prove that his party is the best alternative to the far right in order to continue to be elected in the next Presidential elections in 2027.

But the morning after the annunciation, then LFI MP Ruffin called for an union of the left wing parties, which was by the way done remarkably quickly for parties that have been at each others throats for the past ten years (forgot to mention this but it HAD to be done quickly as our rat bastard President put the election literally a month and a half after annunciation).

So now Macron needed something to discredit the left in order to be considered the only candidate against the RN. And he found his thing : he demonized them. Because of their public support for Palestine, they were suddenly antisemitic (this is particularly vicious as antisemitic hate crimes have in fact been an issue since the beginning of the Palestinian genocide in France and a lot of Jewish people here are scared of antisemitism for, yk, very good reasons) and a far left party who was basically anti republican and composed of revolutionaries.

And it worked ! It helped that LFI has been seen as such for a while for a variety of reasons, mostly baseless, and that everyone conveniently forgot that the leftist union was and is made up of four different parties. The far left does not exist in the National Assembly in France. Not in the communist party, not in LFI. I'm not the one saying this, official statements by the state council are. But every right wing politician forgets that because it gets them elected. And people believe them. So stop spreading that lie, please.

The first round of voting was led by the far right, so for the second, Macron and the left allied themselves : in every district of voting where a leftist candidate, a macronist candidate and a far right candidate were still competing against each other, the candidate of the two with the least votes would resign their candidature to be able to give as little votes to the far right as possible.

In truth this wasn't completely followed by Macronists especially, some refusing to resign when against an lfi candidate, which is completely ridiculous and personally disgusts me. But it worked, and the left-wing won the election with the far right coming in third place. I cried that day, actually, from relief, as embarrassing as it is.

So that meant that Macron had to name, TRADITIONALLY, a left wing prime minister. Several names were offered (which was difficult as the socialists and government would veto any lfi member and the communists and LFI would veto any socialist member) and Macron said that he wouldn't name any government who had members from lfi in it. So the lfi leader did a pretty beautiful move and pulled out all of the lfi members of any and all propositions of government (this being, I remind, the biggest left wing party in France).

Macron still named a right-wing prime minister, denying the elections' result and preferring to work with the far right than with the left, left which might I recall got him elected. Anyway. So we got a very right wing government, borderline far right to appease the RN, who only managed to stay in place because of that fact.

They had to make 49.3 for most laws they wanted to pass as the Assembly was heavily divided in the past months. The leftist union voted to demote the government every time, but the RN wouldn't. And then, a week or two ago, on one of the most restrictive budget propositions for public service this country has ever seen, they remembered they had to look like they care about poor people since that's, you know, their electorate, and since the budget was of course forced through with 49.3 voted also to demote the government.

So now we have a new prime minister, supposedly more to the left although still, obviously, a right-winger. Nothing much changed. Can't fucking wait for 2027... And please don't say that the leftist union is far left or that Macron is a centrist. Neither are true.

[mr-deep-downer]

it’s also just funny to me that all I said was “I wonder if this presidency will cause more people to turn to socialism” and people jumped on me for it. Like we all know the answer that the average American is too selfish to really put the needs of the many over the needs of the few or even one. Like you know that conspiracy theory that all teachers are secretly big marxists trying to brainwash our precious youth into being global homo communists? I wish even a fraction of that was true cause maybe then we’d start to see anything approaching the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that this country was supposedly founded on. Too many people have a “fuck you I’ll get/got mine” mentality and that’s why you got so many people who voted trump having buyer’s remorse cause they thought he would fix the economy when he in fact did the opposite. you really wanted the guy who went bankrupt multiple times to run America like a business and have a say on economic policy? Are you fucking stupid?

[mydogatemymotivation]

(I tend to ramble and this post ended up getting long so I apologize.) I know this is dumb and totally the wrong thing to focus on during all this but I'm crashing out and I need a distraction.

I feel like I understand Kallus better. Like as a character. I've always loved him but this whole tiktok/xiaohongshu thing has helped me understand him. I know that that's weird but hear me out:

I always knew China wasn't what the government said it was, I've always wanted to learn Mandarin, thought the traditional clothes were beautiful, yadda, yadda. I never understood the narrative about China, I just thought, "there's no way that's all true". But, and its probably because I'm white, I never realized just how deeply ingrained sinophobia really was in the US until I was watching people on tiktok react to what they were seeing on xhs. the "omg, i didn't know what Shanghai looked like", the "wow, Chinese people are, like, normal people" (bruh). But what's insane here and why I thought of Kallus, other than Rebels living in my mind permanently (help), is how quickly the veil lifted for everyone.

It took one (1) night of scrolling for decades of American propaganda to fall apart. Completely. I've always thought these stories about someone learning the truth behind the lie needed to be done over time and from that standpoint I always thought that someone like Zuko had the more realistic story because he took pretty much all of season 2 and half of season three to figure it out. None of this is an insult to Zuko, of course, I think his character arc was done exactly the way it needed to be done. But it felt more realistic because I figured someone who had been subjected to so much propaganda his whole life wouldn't be able to undo all of it in one night, so from that point of view, Kallus' arc felt too quick.

Not anymore. I never considered the "jenga" method. Instead of taking months of work and travel and seeing everything with his own two eyes (methodically removing the lies piece by piece), it took one night where the veil was not lifted, but shredded entirely (the tower toppling because one piece was removed), where there was no one around to stop Zeb from looking Kallus square in the eye and telling him exactly what he needed to hear and showing him what he needed to see. And one night later Kallus went back to the Empire and saw right through everything decades of propaganda had tried to sell him. Imagine you're in a dark room and you finally find a light switch, you flip it, only to realize the room you're in is a disaster. You can turn the light back off if you want but you know what the room looks like now.

Americans got on xhs and were asked if we actually had to pay for ambulances or if that was just communist propaganda, if we really needed two jobs to survive, we saw the price of groceries in China, the advanced technology that's banned in the US, Americans saw a man preparing feed for his pigs and the food was such high quality that we thought it was for someones lunch until we saw the pigs on camera, this week we learned the Chinese don't pay property tax which is why there's less homelessness. Not saying China is a utopia, of course, they're still a dictatorship and all, but the standard of living is so insane. Even as someone who could kind of see that China wasn't what the government said it was, I'm still just floored. Even I didn't realize the difference was that stark. I knew America was atrocious, but this is actually insane.

Apparently I'm processing everything happening in my country through the lens of Star Wars. Because today I'm thinking I understand Kallus like I never have. He didn't need to be convinced, he just had to see the difference for himself. Americans (or in this case citizens from the Core Systems) end up too complacent. At a certain point Kallus' youthful idealism (that he probably had at some point, it seemed like he really wanted the Empire to be what it promised) eventually would've given way to an almost corporate apathy where he clocked into his desk job every morning and went home at night and tried to forget his workday. Disillusioned, but not seeing any way out, and hoping that everything wasn't what he knew it to be deep down.

There's one scene of him that no one ever talks about but it sticks out in my mind. I believe it's at the end of the episode (I don't remember the name) where Vader realizes Ahsoka is alive, he comes back to the Star Destroyer to contact the Emperor and Kallus is shooed away. As he's leaving he stops at the door and glares over his shoulder at Vader before the door shuts. I don't know why that one quick scene stands out to me so much but its one of his standout pre-fulcrum scenes to me and if you blink you miss it. I think it proves that he is disillusioned, that it shows there's a thought process in him that isn't "imperial approved", that he doesn't trust the people in power the same way we don't trust the people in our own government.

I really think Kallus is the best representation of American citizens right now. The thought process he has, the deconstruction, the disillusionment that has nowhere to go, the feeling you're doing something right, knowing deep down you're not, talking yourself into a knot to justify what you can't until eventually the dam breaks. Him leaving the Empire is so much wish fulfillment for a lot of people. Imagine there was an organized rebel movement in the United States right now that had backing, funding, militant organization, and a solid plan to take down the systems in place and tell me right now you wouldn't join the second you had a way in. Makes sense that at the end of the series he tells Pryce that he "stopped betraying himself". He knew, just like we all know.

Anyway. I lost tiktok tonight. Americans lost their first amendment rights tonight, even if you weren't on tiktok you should understand the gravity of this situation. I don't know why my brain has latched onto Star Wars to get me through this but you know what. Whatever.

I might be posting more here. I think I need a place where I can have interaction and discussion with people but we'll see. For now, have a directionless ramble.

[wolfertinger]

https://www.tumblr.com/wolfertinger/782006460678914048/wis-changing-it-to-i-hate-white-americans-is?source=share

For this anon I agree with everything you're saying but I can attest to someone who learnt about America and say that actually there has been a time in history and still to this day where polish or any Slavic person had been discriminated against because they were Slavic. It was called the red scare and basically this happened when communism in southern Europe started to hit off and Americans thought that Slavic people who were coming to America thought that they were going to be anarchist and destroy the government so they developed a reading and writing test.

(which did in fact still affected minorities I'm not taking that away and I don't want to come across and say this is as comparable as what poc experience at all no I just like Talking about history) it basically forced anyone who couldn't read and write English out of the country and because of the communist uprising a lot of southern European people started to flee and go to America but because most these people were poor they were denied access.

I also do remember learning that this had gotten a lot of Slavic people killed in America because they feared that they were some communist scum. I'm not saying this is comparable in the slightest in the long extensive history on what had happened to other races, ethnicities ect so don't take me as comparing as hell no it isn't at all I just wanted to correct something and for the other part of did polish people ever get enslaved by other white Europeans I can't say anything about that as I never touched or looked into polish history but with a quick search I did find out they were enslaved during 18th century and such but idk if that's true or not someone please correct me if so.

yeah. wis is about 85 years too late, to be racially oppressed by americans. and yes. america is a bastard country. but i simply find it ironic, when a european cries about "americans", as a way to complain about poc, without sounding racist.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 1, 2025

I do not much like the destruction of books. As a form of protest, it conjures sinister images from the past, most notably the Pathé news reels of brownshirts and students gathered around a pyre in Berlin’s Opernplatz under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis had raided libraries, universities and other private collections to harvest works by political dissidents, sexologists, “degenerate” artists and any others deemed to be “un-German”. Books by Left-wing authors such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Rosa Luxemburg were publicly incinerated, along with fictional works by the likes of Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. This was philistinism in its purest form.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalise his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lacklustre commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organisation devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalised religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behaviour is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will baulk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalisation of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalisation of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

--

==

"Why can't you just comply with our authoritarian religious codes?"

Because you want me to. Your religious codes are for you, not me.

This is literally terrorism. We are supposed to be afraid of what will happen to us if we don't submit to Islamic totalitarianism. That is reason enough to not just resist, but actively oppose and defy Islamic totalitarian demands.

[theyhavetakenovermylife]

Hiii! If you remember I'm your croatian follower, we talked about crazy balkan media and eurovision. I just switched accounts and deleted my old one. But that's besides the point because this USA vs European fans one shot made me laugh.

But I personally think the person who would give European reader the most shit about the differences would be Vern. I think he would just group all slavic accents as Russians or Europeans from bigger countries as fancy french folk etc. Or he would be kinda offended because we tend to be alot more blunt even if not with ill intentions

I also think master splinter would probably be most eager to learn and try the traditional foods and drinks.

Anyway I just wanted to share my thoughts and possibly talk to you. Unfortunately when I deleted my account I lost all the posts I liked from your blog but I'm sure I'll have more to like now on my new account. Hope you are doing well😊

Hello my favorite Croat!💚

I have a feeling that Splinter would just know a bunch of stuff about all sorts of countries, European or not. He will know a lot about traditions, and even if he has no idea what one is talking about, he will happily listen and ask questions, and even ask you to show him, how you cook certain foods.

Fucking, Vern is the time of guy that say "Europe, EU. What's the difference?", say that Slovenia and Slovakia is the same country, believe that Denmark and the Netherlands is the same country, yet somehow group Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein and the Netherlands as Germany. I have so many.

"Of course I know about Europe, (Y/N)! There's the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia and Russia!"

Andorra? He has never head of it. Luxembourg? Nope. Monaco? Hell no. San Marino? Doesn't ring a bell. The Vatican? - "That's just Rome".

"Isn't Ireland in the UK?"

"You know, Scandinavia. Just like Finland".

"What do you mean Yugoslavia isn't a country anymore?"

"Did that Brit really just say fag to me???"

"Greece, Italy, Spain, all the same. They are old".

"Georgia is not in Europe! It's a state, (Y/N)!"

"Speak slowly (Y/N). I don't speak European".

"Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? What is that?"

"Moldova? What's that?"

"Romania isn't in Russia???"

"WAIT PRUSSIA ISN'T JUST OLD RUSSIA?!"

Or some inspired by things actual Americans have asked me or told me and my mom (my mom lived a year in the US in a Bible Belt state):

"Do you have phones in your home country, (Y/N)?"

"How was your first experience on a high way? No, I've never heard of the Autobahn".

"Hey, Europe. In America we speak English".

"Walkable cities are a scam".

"Wait. If you're European, (Y/N), then are you a communist?"

"Don't lie to me, (Y/N). There's no black people in European. You are all too racist for that".

And the one that almost made me throw hands:

"Denmark doesn't exist. You live in the Netherlands".

BITCH VERN, WE MIGHT BOTH BE FLAT AS FUCK, BUT OUR WINDMILLS ARE NOTHING ALIKE!!! THEY HAVE GABBER! WE HAVE DAKKE! THEY HAVE STROOPWAFEL! WE HAVE BUTTER COOKIES!! WE'RE NOT THE SAME!!!

Yeah, I feel like Vern would get more than a few slaps from a European reader😂