#Sellout Culture

[thewordsman]

Reports Show Online Shopping Hinders Social Growth & Values

In today’s digital age, the convenience of online shopping has created a new normal where instant gratification reigns supreme. A few clicks, a confirmation email, and in no time, a package arrives at your doorstep. This ease and immediacy, however, have done more than revolutionize commerce. It’s altering social behavior and eroding the traditional working-class values of patience, hard work,…

[thevillainsfangirl]

I’m so fucking tired of the bullshit “[insert song or work of fiction] has aged badly” narrative. 🙄 Just because a piece of content doesn’t adhere to whatever popular modern social/political standards there are at the time (whether something from the past or something new), which are always changing anyway, does not mean it’s bad or isn’t good just the way it is! And with the way people are nowadays, raging about every little thing, “aged well” (or the variation of that if it’s new content) probably means it’s boring and one-dimensional.

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

fuck I might be some kinda alterhuman now that I think of it

[tvmblrsillyman]

head full of negativity right now but jesus christ We Really need to bring cringe culture back to oppress the potter heads

[tredawakandan]

This shit more true then ever now 😭

That's Hilarious

[antimnemonic]

i know we’re decades past caring about this but the whole “actually dave was abused” thing in homestuck has always been weird to me and i think that’s bc of how much of hs is built on 2000s internet edgelord culture. like you have racist jokes and jokes about sexual assault out the ass but we’re supposed to take this stuff about child abuse super serious.

[renthony]

It's truly fascinating to me that the American 1950s moral panic over TV never really went away. It's lessened, sure, but there is still a very strong, pervasive idea in mainstream American culture that TV is a "lesser" form of entertainment, that it is more likely to feed viewers dangerous ideas, and that it "rots" your mind in some way. TV still gets treated as a mindless form of entertainment without much artistic value--or, at least, not as much artistic value as other mediums.

I often wonder if that perception makes laypeople more inclined to ignore labor issues in the television industry. My personal experience is that it's very hard to get anyone outside of media and fandom spaces to give a shit about things like the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. I've routinely had trouble even getting other union organizers to give a shit about the struggles of the entertainment unions over the past couple years. There is such a strong perception that TV is not art and entertainment industry jobs aren't "real" labor, and anyone investing significant time or energy into the industry is either a sellout or a dumbass. And that makes me feel shrimp emotions.

[gatheringbones]

best books I read in 2023:

sophie strand, the flowering wand: rewilding the sacred masculine

alex iantaffi, gender trauma: healing cultural, social, and historical gendered trauma

matthew desmond, evicted: poverty and profit in the american city

betty dodson, sex for one: the joy of selfloving

ching-in chen, andrea smith, jai dulani, the revolution starts at home: confronting intimate partner violence within activist communities

robin stern, the gaslight effect: how to spot and survive the hidden manipulation others use to control your life

nick turse, kill anything that moves: the real american war in vietnam

lori fox, this has always been a war: the radicalization of a working class queer

arline t. geronimus, weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion

eyal press, dirty work: essential jobs and the hidden toll of inequality in america

rabbi danya ruttenberg, on repentence and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world

michelle dowd, forager: field notes for surviving a family cult

starhawk, the empowerment manual: a guide for collaborative groups

betty dodson, orgasms for two: the joy of partnersex

timothy snyder, black earth: the holocaust as history and warning

kidada e. williams, I saw death coming: a history of terror and survival in the war against reconstruction

judy grahn, another mother tongue: gay words, gay worlds

jennifer m. silva, coming up short: working-class adulthood in an age of uncertainty

susanna clarke, piranesi

megan asaka, seattle from the margins: exclusion, erasure, and the making of a pacific coast city

starhawk, truth or dare: encounters with power, authority, and mystery

laura jane grace, tranny: confessions of punk rock’s most infamous anarchist sellout

molly smith, revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex worker's rights

richard c. schwartz, you are the one you've been waiting for: applying internal family systems to intimate relationships

timothy snyder, our malady: lessons in liberty from a hospital diary

peter levine, trauma and memory: brain and body in search for the living past

kylie cheung, survivor injustice: state-sanctioned abuse, domestic violence, and the fight for bodily autonomy

timothy snyder, bloodlands: europe between hitler and stalin

joan larkin, a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories

cj cherryh, hammerfall

[drdemonprince]

Why does being into mcm furniture feel so bourgeoisie

well, it's the romanticization of the period of American culture where anti-communist sentiment and imperialism were at their height that goes along with it, probably. Even many committed communists are enthralled by that time in history, having studied it so closely, and have developed an almost fandomish relationship to its aesthetics which can read as either ironic or completely straightfaced. Hatred is a kind of approach-motivated emotion and all that. That and a lot of the dudes who are into midcentury modern furniture are major douches and true antique furniture from the period is expensive. But hey, I've watched Mad Men more times through than any other TV series, love the midcentury modern style, and am a majorly douchey guy while also holding leftist ideals, so ya know, what are ya gonna do. I doubt I'll ever overcome my hillbilly cheapness and actually collect the stuff. If I do that's when it'll be time for the masses to cancel me in the hasan piker sellout accusations style

[thewordsman]

CBS News Scandal: News Shopping

CBS News Scandal, Exposed Blurring the Line Between Journalism and Shopping In an age where information is a vital currency, CBS News is engaging in a disturbing trend: selling products directly during their news broadcasts. The blending of journalism and commercial interests raises serious ethical questions, creating a clear conflict of interest. When did news programming turn into a televised…

[doctorphoenix]

I’ve seen too many people try to claim Kendrick is anti-mixed people being considered Black or some shit? Nah, Drake is sellout and puts on elements of Black culture for clout like a costume. This line is at Adonis, a kid who also mixed.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Union pensions are funding private equity attacks on workers

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

If end-stage capitalism has a motto, it's this: "Stop hitting yourself." The great failure of "voting with your wallet" is that you're casting ballots in a one party system (The Capitalism Party), and the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state would bill the families of executed dissidents for the ammunition used to execute their loved ones:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-the-Chinese-government-makes-the-families-of-executed-people-pay-for-the-cost-of-bullets

In end-stage capitalism, the dollars we spend to feed ourselves are used to capture the food supply and corrupt our political process:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And the dollars we save for retirement are flushed into the stock market casino, a game that is rigged against us, where we are always the suckers at the table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Everywhere and always, we are financing our own destruction. It's quite a Mr Gotcha moment:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Now, anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We are living through a broad, multi-front counter-revolution to Reaganomics and neoliberal Democratic Party sellouts. The FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division are dragging Big Tech and Big Meat and Big Publishing into court. We're seeing bans on noncompete clauses, and high-profile government enforcers are publicly pledging never to work for corporate law-firms when they quit public service:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/09/nein-nein/#everything-is-miscellaneous

And of course, there's the reinvigoration of the labor movement! Hot Labor Summer is now Perpetual Labor September, with 75,000 Kaiser workers walking out alongside the UAW, SAG-AFTRA and 2,350 other groups of workers picketing, striking or protesting:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

But capitalism still gets a lick in. Union pension plans are some of the most important investors in private equity funds. Your union pension dollars are probably funding the union-busting, child-labor-employing, civilization-destroying Gordon Gecko LARPers who are also evicting you from the rental they bought and turned into a slum, and will then murder you in a hospice that they bought and turned into a slaughterhouse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Writing for The American Prospect, Rachel Phua rounds up the past, present and future of union pension funds backing private equity monsters:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-10-04-workers-funding-misery-private-equity-pension-funds/

Private equity and hedge funds have destroyed 1.3 million US jobs:

https://united4respect.org/press-release/people-who-work-at-walmart-sears-amazon-formerly-toys-r-us-more-join-forces-together-as-united-for-respect-2-2-2-2-5-3/

They buy companies and then illegally staff them with children:

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1

They lobby against the minimum wage:

https://pestakeholder.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Insire-Brands-memo-on-15-wage.pdf

They illegally retaliate against workers seeking to unionize their jobsite:

https://www.hoteldive.com/news/dc-hotel-workers-enlist-us-representatives-to-fight-sofitel-union-busting/650396/

And they couldn't do it without union pension funds. Public service union pensions have invested $650 million with PE funds. In 2001, the share of public union pensions invested in PE was 3.5%; today, it's 13%:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B0vv26VEFmwtfw5ur6dSDMY8NftvZKij/

Giant public union funds like CalPERS are planning massive increases in their contributions to PE:

https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/newsroom/calpers-news/2023/calpers-preliminary-investment-return-fiscal-year-2022-23

This results in some ghastly and ironic situations. Aramark used funds from a custodian's union to bid against that union's members for contracts, in an attempt to break the union and force the workers to take a paycut to $11/hour:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-20/pension-fund-gains-mean-worker-pain-as-aramark-cuts-pay

Blackstone's investors include the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). The PE ghouls who sucked Toys R Us dry were funded by Texas teachers.

Then there's KKR, one of the most rapacious predators of the PE world. Half of the investors in KKR's Global Infrastructure Investors IV fund are public sector pension funds. Those workers' money were spent to buy up Refresco (Arizona Iced Tea, Tropicana juices, etc), a transaction that immediately precipitated a huge spike in on-the-job accidents as KKR cut safety and increased tempo:

https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.inspection_detail?id=1675674.015

Petsmart is the poster-child for PE predation. The company uses TRAPs ("TrainingRepaymentAgreementProvision") clauses to recreate indentured servitude, forcing workers to pay thousands of dollars to quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Why would a Petsmart employee want to quit? Petsmart's PE owner is BC Partners, and under BC's management, workers have been forced to work impossible hours while overseeing cruel animal abuse, including starving sick animals to death rather than euthanizing them, and then being made to sneak them into dumpsters on the way home from work so Petsmart doesn't have to pay for cremation. 24 of BC Partners' backers are public pension funds, including CalSTRS and the NYC Employees' Retirement System:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

PE buyouts are immediately followed by layoffs. One in five PE acquisitions goes bankrupt. Unions should not be investing in PE. But the managers of these funds defend the practice, saying they "facilitate dialog" with the PE bosses on workers' behalf.

This isn't total nonsense. Once upon a time, public pension fund managers put pressure on investees to force them to divest from Apartheid South Africa and tobacco companies. Even today, public pensions have successfully applied leverage to get fund managers to drop Russian investments after the invasion of Ukraine. And public pensions pulled out of the private prison sector, tanking the valuation of some of the largest players.

But there's no evidence that this leverage is being applied to pensions' PE billions. It's not like PE is a great deal for these pensions. PE funds don't reliably outperform the market, especially after PE bosses' sky-high fees are clawed back:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3623820

Pension funds could match or beat their PE returns by sticking the money in a low-load Vanguard index tracker. What's more, PE is getting worse, pioneering new scams like inflating the value of companies after they buy and strip-mine them, even though there's no reason to think anyone would buy these hollow companies at the price that the PE companies assign to them for bookkeeping purposes:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bstqfcskz9o72ospzlds/opinion/why-does-private-equity-get-to-play-make-believe-with-prices

To inject a little verisimilitude into this obvious fantasy, PE companies sell their portfolio companies to themselves at inflated prices, in a patently fraudulent shell-game:

https://www.ft.com/content/646d00f4-af5d-4267-a436-54fb3bc1697b

What's more, PE funds aren't just bad bosses, they're also bad landlords. PE-backed funds have scooped up an appreciable fraction of America's housing stock, transforming good rentals into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#wall-street-slumlords

PE is really pioneering a literal cradle-to-grave immiseration strategy. First, they gouge you on your kids' birth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Then, they slash your wages and steal from your paycheck:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3465723

Then, they evict you from your home:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/05/vulture-capitalism/#distressed-assets

And then they murder you as part of a scam they're running on Medicare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

As the labor movement flexes its muscle, it needs to break this connection. Workers should not be paying for the bullet that their bosses put through their skulls.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[qwilman]

for real though thanks for liking my cartoon i’m like the worst person on earth at promotion but it’s on youtube if you want an easier way to show people the link, plus i got a bunch more there and also on tiktok

what the fuck

[odinsblog]

Candace Owens is a con artist and a sellout, and she won’t ever have to worry about being a part of Black culture any more than Clarence Thomas does

👉🏿 https://www.thehour.com/norwalk/article/Schools-pay-37-500-to-Owens-family-8240741.php

👉🏿 https://www.theroot.com/your-girl-candace-owens-ran-a-trump-bashing-website-les-1826071683

👉🏿 https://newsone.com/3848636/candace-owens-receipts-con-artist/amp/

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Corey Walker

The author of a book on Jewish American identity enjoyed a sellout crowd at a rescheduled event after the original discussion was canceled over the presence of a Zionist panelist.  Joshua Leifer, author of Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, spoke alongside Rabbi Andy Bachman at the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn on Monday. The original discussion, which was scheduled at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn last Tuesday, was canceled at the last minute by an employee who did not want the bookstore to platform a “Zionist” rabbi.  During Monday’s discussion, Leifer lambasted the cancellation as both “wrong and antisemitic” as well as “the dumbest strategic thing you can do.” The bookstore’s owner, Daniel Power, later clarified in an interview that Powerhouse Books does not maintain an official ban on Zionist authors and that the employee acted on her own. He revealed that the employee responsible for canceling the event quit on her own accord before he could fire her.  The bookstore issued an apology soon after the incident, writing, “litmus tests as a precondition for participation in public life are wrong. Rejections of dialogue, debate, and nuance are wrong.” Despite the inconvenience, the backlash over the viral incident seems to have benefited Leifer. Roughly 300 people attended the rescheduled discussion, as opposed to the estimated two dozen that showed up for the original event. Leifer’s book currently holds the number one spot in the “History of Judaism” section on Amazon. “In large part, this sanctuary is filled because of what happened,” Bachman stated at the event.  Leifer, a political progressive and writer, has issued blistering criticisms of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. He has called for a change in the “status quo” of Israeli policy and has encouraged the American Jewish community to reexamine its relationship with Israel.  In an essay published in The Atlantic, Leifer reflected on the decision to snub Bachman for being a Zionist, saying that it “exemplified the bind that many progressive American Jews face.” “We are caught between parts of an activist left demanding that we disavow our communities, even our families, as an entrance ticket, and a mainstream Jewish institutional world that has long marginalized critics of Israeli policy. Indeed, Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver,” Leifer wrote. “My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder,” Leifer added. “Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction.” 

Leifer still doesn't get it. Jew-hatred, in the guise of Israel hatred has become part of the progressive canon. "Critics of Israeli policy" are lionized, not marginalized among progressive Jews.

[blackpilljesus]

Can we not just stop birthing men like... women have to stop giving life to men.

I'm doing my part ✌️ and I agree but collectively most women wouldn't. I remember when there was discourse over a radfem having & celebrating giving birth to a baby boy. I've seen radfems praise lesbian couples adopting baby boys.

Tbh a lot of women are sellouts, they sellout other women & even betray themselves for love or having a slightly higher social status in society. When forced to cohabit with predators that have more power & essentially want to reproduce a copy of themselves, women giving them that could elevate or secure their status in society - it's an incentive & many would go for it.

Another thing to consider is that many women birth maIes to spare their lives, there's been cases where maIes would kill their partners & daughters for the woman not having a son (even though the sperm determines the sex). Part of me considers maternal instincts of women not being able to kill their maIe offspring bc that's still their child but then I think of post partum psychosis & cultures where daughters are routinely killed when they're born. If these instincts applied to maIe & female children I dont think things would've gotten this bad. Also a lot of women treat their sons much better than their daughters.

In a patriarchial society, birthing sons lets boymoms live out their power fantasies through their sons. They 'borrow' power from their sons or use their sons as a proxy for power. Like toxic mother in-laws treating their daughter in-laws like shit bc it's through the association that this woman is married to their son, women that cover up their sons sex crimes, in some cultures; boymoms look for women who've undergone FGM for their sons.

Bear in mind so many women still have faith in maIes as a collective, they think they'll raise the "good ones". This notion is popular in feminist spaces, women think they'll magically train & raise maIe allies. There's a saying of how several boymoms have emotional incest with their sons, they see there aren't good maIes in society so they want to create their own one(s).

However I think the biggest issue is that women are never going to be sociopathic or apathetic enough to moids. It would take a high level of apathy to abort maIe fetuses & refuse to birth another xy solely on the basis of their sex, to get to this point you'd need to have this feeling towards maIes generally and most women dont have this. MaIe survival is contentigent on female subjugation, women dont need to subjugate maIes to survive, we carry life, we can also provide for ourselves & maIes know it which is why they've set up societies the way they are and they're brutal about it because they and their bloodlines would be dead anyways if they dont have a system forcing women to rely on them to survive. That said; In the end despite everything, many women still want to partner with maIes, many women still love & believe in maIes. Most women wont disassociate with maIes collectively, catherine mckinnon goes into this in her book "the second sex" where she speaks about how women are scattered everywhere & identify with the tribes maIes put them into as opposed to seeing themselves as a sovereign group.

I personally dont think birthing another oppressor is worth it but people are different. Of course this can (& does) backfire against women but by the time the damage is realised it's too late. Ultimately for a shift in gender ratio & for women to refuse to birth maIes at any cost, they need to think bigger than themselves individually. Think of womankind instead of maIe supremacy & its structures but this will never happen & I wont kid myself otherwise.