#The Sweatshop President

[fanchonmoreau]

TEGAN JOVANKA IS JEWISH!

[nando161mando]

Republican (who owns multiple Smoothie King franchises) repeals law for mandatory lunch breaks for child workers

[robertreich]

From Robber Barons to Bezos: Is History Repeating Itself?

Ultra-wealthy elites…Political corruption…Vast inequality…

These problems aren’t new — in the late 1800s they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age.

We overcame these abuses back then, and we can do it again.

Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — which changed American life forever.

But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.

They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.

Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. And when lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.

The gap between the rich and poor in America reached astronomical levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.

Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. And voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote, was rampant.

The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

But Americans were fed up, and they demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest.

Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.

And a new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.

Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, who warned that, “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.

Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.

The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.

The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from directly giving money to politicians or political candidates.

And then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin — you may have heard of him — continued the work through his New Deal programs — creating Social Security, unemployment insurance, a 40-hour workweek, and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.

But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, when America was building the largest middle class the world had ever seen — we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age.

Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

It is also a time of extraordinary invention.

And a time when monopolies are taking over vast swathes of the economy, so we must renew antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

Now, another generation of robber barons is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.  

Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we need to protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

Voter suppression runs rampant in the states as during the first Gilded Age, making it harder for people of color to participate in what’s left of our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age. So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

The question now is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: Will we fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few?

We’ve done it before. We can — and must — do it again.

[kvetchlandia]

Time For...

One of My Occasional Rants.

So, we in the United States are on the verge of a presidential election. I'm sure all of you lovely people already know that. This particular election is beyond ghastly and grim in its implications. You have one candidate who is a representative of the long term status quo and another who is more dangerous not only to the people of the United States but to the people of the entire globe than my own meager command of words allows me to express.

I'm no particular fan of Kamala Harris. As a lifelong socialist, I see her as a candidate of capitalism, and a socially moderate one at that, essentially a Clinton Democrat, the sort of Dem who would have been a Republican 60 years ago. In other words, the sort of candidate that under normal circumstances I'd never consider for one moment voting for. However, her opponent is a veritable monster; a multiply convicted felon; a man found civilly liable for sexually assaulting a woman and then libeling her after his conviction; a serial liar of astronomical proportions; a man who is supported by open fascists and KKKers; a man whose own open racism and antisemitism is decades old; a man who bragged on television about assaulting women; a man who coddles autocrats and openly aspires to be one; a man who urged his brownshirt wannabe followers to commit a putsch against the legally elected government then referred to those putschists as "heroes" and has promised, if elected, to pardon those convicted of their violent crimes; a man so self-interested that the only thing he really accomplished during his previous presidency was to give himself (and, as an after effect, his fellow billionaires) a whopping tax cut, paid for by raising taxes on the working class; a man who bragged about depriving women of their right to control their own bodies; a man void of culture and knowledge and one so ego-damaged that his own aides admitted that they had to place his name in huge all caps in his daily briefing books to get him to even skim them, since the only thing he was interested in was himself; a man who completely botched the response of the United States to the COVID epidemic and who then recommended to his followers that they inject bleach and that they shine lights on their bodies to cure the virus while he, when he contracted it, of course got state of the art medical care; a man who will reshape the courts, as he's already done to the Supreme Court, so that they're little more than a voice of medieval religious obscurantism and political reaction and a man who has already promised to use the military to quash demonstrations against him and his policies and to go after those who have or who continue to oppose him. I could go on and on, but you get the point. If Trump is elected, which is a distinct possibility, that's the end of American bourgeois democracy, always a limited and partial thing at its best.

Trump has promised to drill for even more oil and to end this country's investment in alternative sources of energy, thereby all but ensuring that complete environmental collapse due to global climate change will take place in the next few decades, if not sooner. It's already an ongoing process.

If Trump is elected, he's promised to deport more than 10 million people. That, of course, is nearly impossible, but that won't stop him from trying. Should he really undertake that blind, racist endeavor, it would of course be politically and morally wrong, but it would also cost trillions of dollars to do (where would they be placed before they were loaded on trains and deported? Camps would have to be built. Who would guard those camps? Tens of thousands of people would have to be hired, trained and armed). And then, of course, the American economy would collapse, since it's those people who do so much of the work that keeps the economy running. I don't see many Americans lining up to harvest the fields or work in the garment sweatshops for starvation piece-work wages, nor do I see many Americans willing to work at the tough, usually non-union, low skill construction jobs that keep the economy rolling. Needless to say, those millions of deportees won't be buying any of the commodities they now purchase on a daily basis to support their families. Bye bye, profit.

All of this is well known. None of it takes any research to uncover. The voting age population has lived through it and everyone is aware of it. Nonetheless, and this just boggles my mind, the polls keep telling us that the race is a toss up. That means that tens of millions of people either don't care or support the horrors that Tump embodies and stands for. That is truly frightening. I'm not convinced that Trump is a fascist, for a number of historical and analytical reasons that I'm sure none of you are interested in, although a number of his supporters are members of fascist organizations. Fortunately, as of right now, the United States still doesn't have a mass fascist movement and I don't see one developing soon, for reasons related to why I don't consider Trump a fascist. He is, though, openly disdainful of the bourgeois democracy that is represented by the American status quo and he's both expressed his desire to be a dictator and has said he made a mistake by leaving office in 2020, despite losing the election (which he pretends was rigged, although he damn well knows it wasn't). If he's re-elected, the only way he'll leave the White House is when he's rolled out on a gurney. Yet this is all OK with millions of Americans. I don't like to draw inappropriate analogies with the catastrophe that befell Germany starting in 1933, but it's hard not to see similarities despite the very significant differences. One of those similarities is the passivity of that part of the population that might not be hardcore MAGA cultists and worshippers of their bloated demigod, but will nevertheless vote for Trump, for whatever reason they cite. That's how Hitler came to power and many of those passive non-nazis had no problem when the Nazis began the roundups of Jews and political opponents of the regime. As a person who has long been politically active, I don't think I'm being at all paranoid when I say that I fear, soon after a re-elected Trump took office, that we would quickly start having those midnight knocks at the door and disappearances into the night and fog.

OK, rant over. Now I've managed to depress and terrify myself even more. I need a stiff drink.

[ndiebrioxhe]

Another Rambling post about Ascendance of a Bookworm:

BLUE - ORANGE MORALITY

(with minor digs at Harry Potter)

When I was younger I used to browse Tv Tropes and I really enjoyed looking at them describe things I noticed in media but didn’t have a name for. On a rare occasion, I would find a trope that I had no real reference for and one of those was “blue-orange morality”.

The concept of having a morality system completely divorced from our own that we can’t really judge it. Now it’s not like I have never seen like a series or text attempt to create a character or species that has different standards of morality but the issue I always had was, that the supposed “different moral standards” were always included as a contrast to a more recognisable real world standard - which meant it was framed from a real world standard anyways.

It is always seemed like one of two scenarios:

Scenario A:

Alien/Monster/Non-human: “Here is our horrifically barbaric practice that has no functional purpose to our society and entirely superstitious!”

Human/Humanoid 1: “That’s bad”

Human/Humanoid 2: “Oh that’s just their culture”

And its like no… the narrative framing still shows that is weird and barbaric and not at all a foreign concept which is it’s own morality system so divorced from our own. If we have to be advised not to judge it on our own standards, it can be judged by our standards.

Scenario B:

Olden Times!

Stories being set in a distant past/medieval times where there are different moral standards is not true blue-orange morality. They are just the worse models of current moral standards. We are not divorced from those at all. They are just uncomfortable to think about. Like, yes it is fucked for dudes to claim to be kings and murder thousands to maintain their power… but people weren’t super cool with massmurder back then either - it was just an inevitability due to the social economical problems. It’s like being a billionaire with hundreds of sweatshops now. Even with people who are cool with the system - we all know that shit isn’t our “moral standard” - it’s our uncomfortable reality. Pushing the setting back or forward a 1000 years doesn’t really change anything. Our countries’ leaders still go off to kill and exploit people to maintain power, they just don’t get crowns for it anymore.

And I don’t care if you chose to do this with fictional races and places, that is just set dressing. They still resemble human society as we know it.

So I just never really saw a series that really grabbed me as authentically blue-orange… just typically shades of grey.

But then I read AOAB… and I really saw the potential of blue-orange morality. And it was done well.

Now it might seem logical to treat Bookworm as a Scenario B.

After all, it’s literally nobles presiding over commonfolk and elizabethan era political drama… but heres the thing… the framing of Scenario B is based on understanding that some characters still fit our present mold of a good person:

caring

considerate

fair

just

humble

attractive (no literally)

would not murder babies

religious in the right way

And these characters are the ones we root for. The characters we aren’t rooting have qualities we do not desire

mean

selfish

powerhungry

bloodthirsty

unattractive

will murder babies

over zealous or cult-like

Like in a Scenario B you can’t show the main characters enslave children in a sweatshop and allow grown adult attendants put their hands on them - and still be the good guy. You can’t plan the purging of an entire faction and hold their children hostage under penalty of death - and be THE GOOD GUY . Can’t overtly tax a city to the bones and deny them the best possible harvest because the previous mayor annoyed YOU — AND EVER HOPE TO BE THE GOOD GUY.

Well you can in ascendance of a bookworm tho.

And the readers will agree with you.

And it’s NOT because readers can overly moralise the actions of main characters.

And it’s because unlike a Scenarios A and B which are just OUR WORLD where we are all AWARE that we don’t really need kings or billionaires and antiquated traditions that rely on human suffering for the world to work. AOAB is different

The world of AOAB is not our own. Nobles have more rights because the world explicitly requires their mana to function. Nobles are human plus. They are what rich people in the regular world pretend to be.

Remove the army, the wealth, the status of a king and he is commoner. AOAB Nobles are literally magic batteries that build cities, make harvests happen, keep the population safe from deadly magical creatures …like the yearly giant blizzard monster that won’t literally won’t let spring come unless you have an army of trained magical knights slay it. Without Nobles the world literally be a giant sandpit.

So right of the bat, the nobility are integral to society. You simply don’t live your life raised as a necessary part of the world functioning and not have a social structure that reflects that. Its our world turned on it’s head. All the commoners could die and all that means is the nobles have to do more work. Instead of rich needing the poor, the commoners need the nobles. Otherwise they rarely even interact. The commoners and nobles are almost different species.

And not like it’s particularly unfair on the commoners. Not having mana simply bars you from a lot of activities, duties and experiences. Hell, not having a lot of mana as someone born into a noble family arguably sucks more than being a commoner. Nobility is earned, not given. Being born into a noble family that doesn’t have the means to regulate your mana means you won’t even make it to age where you are considered a separate entity from your parents in that society. If you have enough mana to make it to the Royal Academy without getting sent to the temple and the ability to pass or even excel at the Royal Academy - congrats you are now an asset to your duchy and that includes the commoners inside it. Just make sure you don’t blunder and cause your own execution.

So if murder, classism, deception and greed aren’t necessarily immoral in AOAB, what is?

The only real way to be a labeled a bad person in AOAB noble society is to endanger your duchy and cause widespread problems. Which only means the real way to be immoral in AOAB is to be incompetent or to FAIL.

You might initially think The Veronica-Georgine faction are the antagonists because they try to murder a barely baptised child but the guardian trio literally admitted they had plans to kill her too. They are ones committing the most one sided mass murders in the series. Ferdinand being able to outmanoeuvre and manipulate his enemies in the ring of politics is considered a SEXY TRAIT.

So what’s the difference between the Florencia faction and the Veronica-Georgine faction? Easy. The V-G faction is DESTABILISING AN ENTIRE DUCHY WITH SHORTSIGHTED NOBLE BULLSHIT. And just escalates into the entire nation being in jeopardy… because the Ahrensbachian Archducal family keeps producing nobles that are profoundly worthless with no sense of noble duty. They are defective.

In the next paragraph, I’m just going to state something this legion of defective nobles did and the names of who did it/involved.

They don’t respect the authority or wisdom of nobles of higher rank so they disobey orders (Bezewanst, Veronica). They force already new brides on married nobles that ruin established marriages for no benefit besides sating their schoolyard fantasies on a whim (Gabriele). Their spitefulness and cruelty to one of the biggest archnoble families in the duchy has made the Ehnferestian faction politics a disaster (Veronica) and were forced to create an entire section of mednobles not even loyal to Ehnferest because archnobles rightfully disliked them (Shikikoza and Gloria). They’re such suck ups it endangered their own duchy’s stability to the point where their only options is an intermediate archducal candidate that was poorly raised by all metrics (Gieselfried). Ahrensbach archducal children are regularly raised to be puppeteered by the parents instead of independent thinkers (Detlinde). Which is a real fucking problem for duchies when you keep trying (and typically succeeding) in making these children the Aubs of duchies (Georgine).

Ultimately it comes down to the fact they believe in their ideological RIGHT as nobles over their ideological DUTY to prioritise their duchies running smoothly. And that leads them to overestimate their APTITUDE as nobles.

Which is REALLY telling when a little powerhouse is redefining what it means to be an accomplished noble and entire political career is to the benefit of Ehnferest. Which is why the Ehnferest archducal family and Florencia faction who prioritise the stability and growth of the own goddam duchy instead of their own personal grudges are the good guys.

Bad guys are bad because they are bad what they are supposed to be doing and the good guys are good because they focused on what they should be.

There’s even a moral gray zone which is “trying your best but not being enough” and the prime example of that is the current the royal family. The country is only in this sorry state because one prince allowed his ineptitude and thirst for power to spiral and cause the nation lose the most important tool, and now it has a king that was only ever raised as a vassal is struggling (impressively) to keep a nation that should have dried up to keep running… A shame his intel gathering is dogshit so he keeps making mistakes and even overlook things that could have solved the problem.

So the dynamic of magic and morality is baked in the worldbuilding and it’s doesn’t feel dumb that nobles have all this power but somehow DON’T really interfere the non magical inhabitants in the world on a grand scale. These features, not flaws.

It is so much better than making a magical world where wizards hide their shit IN non magical places but don’t interact with non magical humans and have poverty and slaves that do house chores despite HAVING MAGIC that handles that shit. And also celebrate non magical people’s holidays despite thinking non magical people are beneath them because despite the book apparently being about fascism being bad - it doesn’t address any of the core issues of it and even has extra issues layered on top!

AOAB doesn’t operate on regular morality so it’s not mind numbingly incongruent when bad things happen in the universe because the magic people choose to let it happen despite thinking it’s bad. Even tho nobles do not care about the commonfolk it would stupid if they hid magic from the non magical folk and even dumber if entire spinoffs were based in fighting to keep it secret. Having a series where the protagonists realise that a faction in their world is a problem and getting RID OF THEM? Imagine getting rid of people who are the problem instead of fighting them in a WAR and reading checking the epilogue and that faction caused the fascism is STILL THERE and children are scared to end up there?? WHY DOES SLYTHERIN STILL EXIST—

Anyways,,,

I haven’t had the pleasure of reading past the translated pre-pub myself, but from what I do know is the Ahrensbachian penchant for stupidity and shortsightedness in the pursuit of positions of power they couldn’t hope to manage effectively… while destabilising as much of the nation as possible continues and I can’t wait to read it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

#20yrsago Bradbury goes nuts over Fahrenheit 9/11 title https://web.archive.org/web/20051219090823/https://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38776

#15yrsago Ryanair serious about charging to use toilets in-flight, may charge extra “breathing fee” for inhaling during flight https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/jun/02/ryanair-airline-oleary-toilet-charge

#15yrsago Jo Walton on THE SPACE MERCHANTS https://web.archive.org/web/20090612060824/http://www.tor.com/index.php

#15yrsago Roald Dahl on vaccinating your kids https://web.archive.org/web/20090606123639/http://www.childalert.co.uk/absolutenm/templates/newstemplate.asp?articleid=291&zoneid=2

#15yrsago Canadian copyright lobbyists leaned on “independent” researchers to change report on file-sharing https://web.archive.org/web/20090605230056/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4025/125/

#10yrsago Russia’s army of paid astroturfers message-bomb western coverage of Ukraine https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america

#10yrsago A scarf woven from Jay Lake’s genome https://fishwrapper.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/jays-genome-project-part-3/

#10yrsago Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives”: photos of NYC slumlife in the Gilded Age https://web.archive.org/web/20140625121238/http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/2-progressivism/2-riis/index.html

#10yrsago The more your job helps people, the less you’re paid (and vice-versa) https://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/

#10yrsago It’s not Net Neutrality that’s at stake, it’s Cable Company Fuckery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

#10yrsago Critical thinking vs education: Teaching kids math without “correct” answers https://powersfulmath.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/who-or-what-broke-my-kids/

#10yrsago Piketty’s methods: parsing wealth inequality data and its critique https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/30/pikettys-errors-arent-mistakes-theyre-questions-and-he-answered-them/

#5yrsago That woman who got fired for comparing Michelle Obama to an ape is now going to jail for defrauding FEMA https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-who-called-michelle-obama-ape-sentenced-jail-defrauding-fema-n1012936

#5yrsago The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft

#5yrsago Rumor: DoJ is going to investigate Google for antitrust violations https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/31/doj-preparing-antitrust-probe-of-google---dow-jones.html

#5yrsago Stop saying “robots are coming for your job”; start saying “Your boss wants to replace you with a robot” https://gizmodo.com/robots-are-not-coming-for-your-job-management-is-1835127820

#5yrsago Ted Chiang’s “Op Ed From the Future”: socialized transhumanism vs American oligarchy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/opinion/ted-chiang-future-genetic-engineering.html

#5yrsago Report from the Fed reveals that “economic growth” is a highly localized phenomena, masking widespread financial desperation https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/06/st-louis-fed-study-shows-rising-level-of-financial-desperation-among-the-poor-hidden-by-aggregates.html

#5yrsago All weekend, California Democrats booed neoliberal would-be presidents who talked down the Green New Deal and Medicare for All https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/03/all-weekend-california-democrats-booed-neoliberal-would-be-presidents-who-talked-down-the-green-new-deal-and-medicare-for-all/

#5yrsago Speech Police: vital, critical look at the drive to force Big Tech to control who may speak and what they may say https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/03/speech-police-vital-critical-look-at-the-drive-to-force-big-tech-to-control-who-may-speak-and-what-they-may-say/

#1yrago Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

[darkmaga-returns]

By Mike McDaniel

Kamala Harris is the Border Czar. Her handlers and she vehemently deny it, and the media, including Google, have done their best to hide it, but prior to Google scrubbing, there were thousands of hits giving Harris that title, and there is video of Joe Biden giving her that title and responsibility. Most Americans, however, don’t know Harris is also the broadband czar and the electric school bus czar--she’d rather they didn’t--and as Deroy Murdock notes at Jewish World Review, she has been a spectacular failure at every one of those jobs.

How bad has she been as Border Czar?  This bad:

• Add 1,664,203 detected-but-uncaught "known gotaways" from Fiscal Year 2021 through FY 2023, and Kamala's illegals rise to at least 9,990,312. • Under Trump, 11 illegals on the terrorist-watch list were nabbed at the border. Kamala's tenure includes 382 such illegals — up an explosive 3,472%. • Tsarina Kamala lost 323,000 unaccompanied minors. Monsters, quite literally, are exploiting thousands of them as sweatshop slaves. Even worse, boys and girls are raped routinely as sex slaves.

In 2021 Biden bragged to Congress about making broadband Internet service available to rural America, saying: "I'm asking the vice president to lead this effort, because I know it will get done." As it turns out that was Biden’s dementia talking, and Harris has performed as well at giving Americans broadband as she has at securing our border.

At least $42.45 billion was allocated for rural broadband and not a single American has been connected to the Internet in nearly three years. By comparison, Pete Buttigieg oversaw $7.5 billion with which to build a half million electric vehicle charging stations across America. More than two years later, in a stunning display of governmental efficiency and can-do spirit, Buttigieg has managed to build eight. By any measure, Harris is the winner in the federal waste and incompetence sweepstakes.

[tittyinfinity]

You can sit and ignore imperialism and genocides happening in other countries as "collateral damage" for whoever we pick as president, but just know the revolution is happening with or without you.

The reason we have our comfort is because the US is exploiting people in other countries for us to have these things. Slave labor. Sweatshops. Torture. It's why we have our phones, why we have gas in our cars, why we have most of what we own – meanwhile, the people producing those resources for us see none of it/barely any of it. They're starving, living in squalor, losing their children, treated worse than pack animals, and we just....allow it to happen. Because we're too busy.

Except "we" are not all sitting in complacency. More people around the world are standing up against injustice than ever. Riots, strikes, protests, unions, mutual aid networks, and more. We hear news of climate protestors being murdered for rioting, and yet people ask the question "where's your glorious revolution?" Is it not believable until it's on tiktok or mainstream news, even knowing that recording yourself doing acts against the government will get you arrested?

There is no "lesser evil" when it comes to exploitation, imperialism, and genocide.

If the way our "democracy" is set up doesn't allow for us to put someone in power that would stop the worldly injustices, then our only option from that point is revolution.

With the existence of the electoral college, some people's votes are worth almost 4x as many votes as someone in another state. We have extremely gerrymandered districts in order to produce certain results. Our electoral system is absolutely rigged and we can't pretend like it's not.

The only way to use your vote as a voice would be to vote third party, not because we think they would win this election (what's the hurt in trying though?), but to show that we no longer give votes to those who want to hurt people, and they will have to change their policies if they want to move forward. THAT is our "damage control" when it comes to voting.

But we can't vote our way out of this. We can't use the system to get rid of the system. There is no way in hell this country would allow a president that wants to defund the police and military, heavily tax the billionaires, and stop the exploitation of people in other countries, because it's what our country is built on. And many people who tried have been murdered! For example, a member of the FBI killed Martin Luther King Jr., framed someone else for it, then attempted to bury his anti-capitalist agenda. There is public information about our country running coups and installing leaders in other countries. Those things alone show that we can't destroy capitalism from within. We will never be given the option to vote our way away from capitalism & imperialism.

Money being involved in politics is also why we'll never get anywhere with capitalism. There is no democracy if politicians can be bought out & bribed into passing laws that only benefit those at the top.

It's time to start forming mutual aid networks so that we have something to fall back on while we plan out our next actions. We can do this. We are GOING to do this. Will you join us, or do you prefer the comforts you have that are paid for by the lives of others?

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

Something is stirring this spring. People in the U.S. are becoming increasingly interested in what commentators once called ​“the labor question,” following recent organizing victories at Starbucks, Amazon and Apple stores; well-publicized strikes of teachers, nurses and railway workers; and the unionization of staff, graduate assistants and even faculty at scores of campuses, including the recent successful strike of nearly 50,000 academic workers on the campuses of the University of California.

Evidence of this mood shift is unmistakable this spring as students, campus staff and faculty, together with unions and community allies, are coming together on or adjacent to more than 50 campuses nationwide — including ours — to engage in a remarkable national teach-in on worker rights and organizing called Labor Spring.

It has been a long while since we’ve felt this level of energy on our campuses around labor issues. The last such moment arguably crested in the second half of the 1990s. Following the election of John Sweeney to the presidency of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1995, a spirit of change swept the labor movement and attracted the attention of young people. Sweeney’s union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), had helped catalyze that spirit in the 1990s with its innovative Justice for Janitors campaign, which won significant victories for low-waged immigrants and workers of color through militant bridge blockades and similar acts of civil disobedience. Sweeney brought that spirit with him into the AFL-CIO’s leadership when he defeated Thomas R. Donahue in the first contested election in the labor federation’s history. His victory signaled a sea change in a movement that had suffered years of decline.

One of the most important features of Sweeney’s tenure was his effort to heal the lingering divisions that had developed between unions and student activists in the era of the Vietnam War. The healing of that decades-old schism paved the way for Union Summer, an effort to recruit young people to union organizing, which the AFL-CIO launched in the summer of 1996. That fall, another significant project took wing, a series of labor teach-ins at Columbia University, the University of Virginia and eight other campuses that helped electrify young people and attract them to the labor movement. Reporting on the overflow crowd that attended the Columbia teach-in, the New York Times likened its energy to that of a rock concert.

The 1996 teach-ins contributed to a remarkably fruitful period of labor activism. In their wake, an anti-sweatshop movement took shape on college campuses that gave rise to United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium to investigate and expose abuse and protect worker rights in factories around the globe. The teach-ins gave birth to campus living wage campaigns and to Scholars, Artists and Writers for Worker Justice (SAWSJ), which in turn paved the way for our organization, the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA), which was founded in 1998. Organizing on campuses also took off following the 1996 teach-ins. The United Auto Workers (UAW) won representation elections for graduate assistants at UCLA, Berkeley and six other University of California campuses in 1999, following a systemwide strike in December 1998. Then, in May 1999, the UAW filed a petition for a representation election for teaching assistants at New York University, inaugurating a long struggle to bring unionization to graduate assistants at private universities, a struggle which continues to the present day.

That period of activism was transformative. Among other things, it helped build the bridges between unions, environmentalists and critics of globalization that led to the ​“Teamsters and Turtles” alliance visible in the protests against the World Trade Organization during the ​“Battle of Seattle” in 1999 and the World Bank protests in Washington, D.C., in 2000. It also laid the groundwork for the AFL-CIO’s dramatic shift on immigration policy in 2000, when it embraced comprehensive immigration reform and began championing the cause of undocumented immigrant workers.

Unfortunately, this hopeful surge of creative, youthful energy was undercut by the events of Dec. 12, 2000 and Sept. 11, 2001, the first being the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision determining the outcome of the contested presidential election of 2000, and the second being the attacks undertaken by the followers of Osama bin Laden, which opened the door to a ​“War on Terror” that went on to dominate the national agenda for years. Nor would the energy of the late 1990s reemerge in the decade that followed. The housing bubble and financial crash of 2008, the subsequent Great Recession and the period of austerity that followed it created trying times for young people, educational institutions and the labor movement.

Now, however, a new and different moment is taking shape and we are seeing evidence of it on our campuses, in our students and co-workers, and among our community and labor allies. Even in the South, where most public workers lack collective bargaining rights, the United Campus Workers, a movement seeking to organize public university employees — graduate students, undergraduate employees, staff and faculty — in one wall-to-wall union, has been spreading from campus to campus.

This is why our organization, LAWCHA, has decided to promote the Labor Spring teach-ins and actions. We welcome other organizations to join with us in this effort.

(Continue Reading)

[csolarstorm]

Thoughts on Rick and Morty, Season 7, Episode 4: "That's Amorte". Why did the metaphor about capitalism have to be this?

Content warning for mention of s**cide.

Okay, so I hated this episode early on, because...why? Why tell this story?

Well, the episode says something pretty important about how we normalize the exploitation of people in a capitalist system by making them virtually anonymous so we can keep getting our popular consumer products.

It's like the dilemma in the show. There's actually a valuable lesson in this episode, it just comes from a scenario so uncomfortable it came with a suicide hotline bump twice.

They were clearly testing Adult Swim to find most uncomfortable, awful plotline they could get away with. I don't even think Deadpool tried to get away with this much.

I hated seeing the planet turn itself into a miserable dystopia to push more people to commit suicide, only to market canned intestine spaghetti. Who came up with the details of this plot? Are YOU okay?

It's ALMOST as bad as that last episode of The Boondocks, Season 4, where it tried to speak out against apology tours and ended up basically making fun of disabled people.

Except...this episode has a point. A necessary one. It's actually a good allegory for the way we try to forget the exploitation involved in consumer goods. There's no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, after all. So as the metaphor goes, anything Rick brings to the dinner table for the Smiths to literally consume is going to come from something horrific.

The key word here is "consume". The suicide spaghetti is an unethical consumer product that the characters literally unethically consume.

The difference is that it's people's intestines. Yeah, there's an easily solid difference, and I was just making a rhetorical argument to illustrate what the episode is trying to say. People normalize awful stuff all the time with irony and a lack of a context.

And because of this, it's unfortunately easy to figure out Rick's thought process. Since we eat exploitative food all the time, what's the difference between the Smiths eating that, or "sugar chicken" at Panda Express? Meatpacking is a savage, disease-spreading industry that exploits farmers.

The plot was really dumb early on, honestly. The president of this planet actually pays attention to what Morty says at some random funeral, then actually believes him, then doesn't get defensive, then somehow starts an company over it when presidents don't really start companies...?

And then NOBODY THINKS TO JUST GIVE THEM ACTUAL SPAGHETTI.

It wasn't until the scene where they broadcast the man's life that I finally made some sense of the episode. Specifically Morty's quote:

"So it wasn't about dying, it was about the complexity of human life."

You see, unfortunately, a million lives is a statistic. We can imagine people suffering as they mine for lithium, and it won't stop us from using our phones. We can go about our lives understanding that some of our most sentimental possessions were made with blood and abuse, and, it's just part of life for us.

We can go about our day, going to restaurants, seeing movies, without thinking about the millions of lives we forfeited to COVID.

But all of that depends on the invisibility of the people exploited for these services. And moreso, it depends on the fact that these people are not personally connected to us. If we could somehow intimately watch the life of a sweatshop worker the same way Rick broadcasts the life of the last spaghetti-d guy, well...

...to be honest, we're more callous than that. If nothing else, COVID drove that home. It took out a generation of nurses just because people couldn't stay home.

So it would take a lot more connection than just watching their life. Because we already have documentaries showing these things. But if we could consistently remove the anonymity that this exploitation depends on, we might arrive at a scenario similar to the aliens giving up the spaghetti.

The aliens giving up the spaghetti. *facepalm* Gotta give it to the writers for making THIS be the episode.

Technically this episode does match up with Loki! A lot of people got spaghetti-fied...just...not in the same way...

[aphantpoet]

In the ATLA fandom there's been a lot of discussion about the new Azula Comic. personally, I haven't read it yet but I was inspired by some of the interpretations I've seen about the characters, interpretations that I believe to be in bad faith. That is not to say that there aren't criticisms you can have about Azula's actions but it is to say that the fandom often focuses on the wrong things in regards to her character. many of these interpretations paint her as bad not because of what she did but because she was angry and mean. So, in dishonour of this criticism I've compiled a list of girl characters that I think would get the same criticism if their shows of movies came out today.

General Leia Organa (Star Wars, OT): Princess Leia was fierce and not afraid to sass back, she was capable and, in some ways, ruthless. She was willing to let Han and Luke be gentlemen and open the door to her cell but she was an active participant in her rescue. If the OT came out to day I have no doubts that her comments like "Someone as to save out skins" and "I don't know where you get your delusions laser brain" would be whines about insistently by Toxic fan boys. Considering the amount of misogyny in the Star Wars fandom and the reaction to little Leia in Kenobi, this one's basically a freebie.

Brandy Silvers (Detentionaire): For a synopsis on the series just look at any of my posts under the Detentionaire tag. Brandy Silvers starts off as a comedic annoyance of a character. She claims lee Ping as her boyfriend after his newfound popularity. She's obsessed with status and materialistic. Despite this, Brandy is capable and attentive; being help on a few missions and remembering Lee Pings favourite dessert. Her character gets better after they "break up" , she gets together with his friend Cam and chooses not to break up with him after he's ousted from his presidency, her hidden vulnerabilities are shown and she becomes a pretty good person. Still, I think the kinds of fans I'm taking about here wouldn't care about those facts and would only focus on season 1 Brandy, who can be a mean girl and a drag as a character.

Sue Ping (Detentionaire): Lee Ping's scary and sweet mother. Sue Ping is a capable and mercurial. despite how harsh she can be with her son she genuinely loves him, this is seen in in moments like when she gives lee one night off from his year of grounding so he can go to the fair and where she gets into a clog gun fight with the new principal who was using a sweatshop as a detention. Once again. I do not think the kinds of people I'm critiquing would care about that nuance and would only focus on how she is loud and harsh with her son, like when heis sabotaged by a classmate with a pen that fades and it causes him to fail a math test.

Tina Kwee (Detentionaire):Tina Kwee is Lee Pings capable and idealistic love interest. When her little sister claims the fall for the big prank Kwee is quick to suspect that lee put her up to it and is very angry with him, she searches to prove her baby sister's innocence and is rude to Lee in the process. Tina is capable and not unwilling to ask hard questions. She gets mad at lee when he puts hi s foot in his mouth on several occasions but she's ultimately vital to stopping the conspiracy.

Angelina Demartinez (Detentionaire):Cam, lee's best friends, bratty little sister, Angelina is initially presented as a terror. Angelina has only three apperances; A background mention in the after math of one of her pranks, a photo of her punching her brother after he gets her a backpack and an actual episode. In the episode she is initially confirmed to be bratty and easily bored, she goads her older brother to watch a horror movie while he is babysitting her. Though the siblings to bond a little bit after after the horror becomes a reality. This one is also a freebie; fandom misogyny+ a kid acting like a kid.

Princess Ursa; Lets face it, looking at Ursa in the comics, if she wasn't Zuko's idealised mother she would be lambasted. Azula is basically a dark version of her mother. The only real difference is that Ursas parents were free to tell her that hitting people's not okay while Azula's weren't and didn't want to. My sympathies to Ursa for her abusive situation but, if she wasn't shown as Zuko's soft mother, she would be basically forgotten at best.

[el-smacko]

What’s really frustrating about history is that factually socialism works better even by capitalistic standards… but in the world we live in there’s a 300 million person sweatshop so convinced of its own superiority that it has the highest GDP but the twelfth worst debt-to-GDP ratio simply by spending all its money sabotaging socialism—the only thing proven to keep people safe from America while it lasts. It’s people are so propagandized that they think 9/11 was a petty act of jealousy by cultists. They targeted the White House (currently committing a genocide), Congress (currently allowing a genocide), and the World TRADE Center. What should have been a wake up call was turned into another Pearl Harbor, and characterized by at least as much collective punishment. Black Hawk Down is the genre standard, a movie that somehow fails to mention that its inspiring events were preceded by a United States massacre of a peace conference BY HELICOPTER ruining a peace process for a conflict still ongoing 30 years later? Just research any country’s history with the United States. Even its allies! 100k South Koreans were murdered because they were “leftists” but the majority of them simply to fill a quota. Regardless of whether the Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred, American warboats were there in the first place to assist Vietnam’s colonizers. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were in US-built concentration camps in their own territory BEFORE the Vietnam War. The vast majority of American commanders from the Second World War said that Japan was surrendering before it was hit by the atomic bombs. Nazis got off charges in the Nuremberg Trials because the U.S. did the same thing, like unrestricted submarine warfare, a crime so heinous it was the reason the US finally joined the First World War. Hundreds of indigenous nations are literally destroyed or not independent at best because of the United States, why is that not the defining fact of its history? Iraq did 9/11 is the only thing most Americans “know” about it, why isn’t genocide the American fact. It’s doing another genocide right now and trying to convince everyone its imperial lackey doing the killing is literally synonymous with Judaism—how is that not the most vile, depraved thing you’ve ever heard? It’s really not that complicated, there are not two sides, and it’s not inevitable or accidental. Everywhere the world sucks right now in any way is directly because of the United States fucking it up on purpose on behalf of people with money the majority of whose own countrymen live the most miserable lives in history in proportion to their wealth. And these rich men are the stupidest fucking people, the absolute dumbest people on the fucking planet and only getting stupider, but they have so much money and the system is so rigged in their favor that there isn’t even anybody at the fucking wheel anymore it’s just rich dumbasses oiling a machine they don’t understand, the automated process of making things worse for everybody on either end of the political spectrum. “I’m a capitalist,” the genocidaire said in his State of the Union. Without hyperbole the waterlogged corpse of Osama Bin Laden would make a better president than Joe Fucking Biden you can take your Vote Blue No Matter Who and shove it up your ass I stay uncommitted.

[nando161mando]

No more lunch breaks for child workers

[my1styearofgirl-blogging]

Fast fashion is un-feminist and hurts women

word count:927

When one thinks of fast fashion they think about places like Primark and Shein, which predominantly cater to women so you might be thinking hey that's totally feminist they are targeting women! but no that's not a good thing one could even say that makes it worse as the men who are in charge of these big brands are profiting off of mainly women exp the president of Shein is a man, Chris Xu, and the president of Primark is paul marchent.

About Chris Xu and his fast fashion empire-

Chris Xu the founder and CEO of Shein, one of the biggest fast fashion retailers in the world is described as a mysterious billionaire. Xu has a net worth of about $10.5b*

Xu makes most if not all of his money from his fast fashion giant known as SHIEN. Shein is known for having affordable clothing and lacklustre quality. shien like many clothing companies outsources its labour to places like India and Bangladesh they also produce in China. their reason? Lax labour laws allow them to not only pay unlivable wages but have awful working conditions many an article have complained about the child labour that occurs in these factories children under most laws cannot work until teenage hood and then they don’t get paid the same as adults in their same field one could argue that this is an issue in of itself, but imagine you're a child working in a 3rd world country and you're below teenagehood so you not only get paid less than teens you also get paid less than adults in your same field furthermore many clothing factories have machinery that can injure small children using them. but who else works in these sweatshops, women! Women for generations have been making clothing for their families and these factories are an extension of these patriarchal standards. As I previously stated these factories are usually situated in 3rd-word countries or LICs**where patriarchal standards are way more enforced than they are here in the West meaning while here we have equal pay(in theory) in these LICs their women won't be getting equal pay so big brands sourcing there labour from these countries is not only for the general lower pay standards but also the low pay of the women.

In these countries, the majority of the people the brands hire are women because they are able to pay them less for more work.

Labor conditions of the fast fashion giants-

You might think the general mistreatment of women and children is bad but the fact is that not only is the pay bad but the general working conditions are atrocious! factories are known to have bad hygiene and are not up to building standards making them likely to collapse as we saw in the Rana Plaza collapse which was caused by mismanagement and insufficient renovations the collapse caused 1,134 deaths. Breaks are often not mandatory and days off are few and far between meaning that some only get a few days off a year. Recently some tiktok influencers were taken on a PR trip to a ‘Shein factory’ this was later proved to be a false factory put up in order to make them seem like a good company that does violate multiple human rights a day, the influencers went through the ‘factory’ filming what is now a very infamous tiktok where one stated that the workers were ”shocked that people thought they were treated badly” the influencer also showed the viewers the factory and it was pristine with the most recent technology and clean environment the influencer showed the machines not producing any clothing later this was used as proof of the factory being a sham as it would mean that they would be losing money, why would they be losing money? Because if all of Sheinds factories were like this one which shien has said they are that would mean they would all have these state-of-the-art machines which in turn would cost them millions to not only buy but power meaning that for their machines to be financially viable They would have to be constantly producing to create a profit, this further proves that this influencer trip was a purely a sham.

Why is buying from shien and other fast fashion brands so un-feminist and bad for your wallet?

One reason it's unfeminist is that it perpetuates patriarchal standards I've already stated that the women in these factories get hired more which is a good thing but they also get paid less. because capitalism

Why is it bad for your wallet? Because the quality is awful in order to keep costs down not only do they not pay their workers living wages but they also skimp on things like fabric quality they're also hardly ever made well because if a child is making your clothes you cant expect them to be good, but here's the thing it's been reported that if a worker messes up I piece of clothing they have their pay restricted!

A little feminist add on- I believe that if as a culture we decided it was father nature instead of mother nature we wouldn't be treating our planet so badly

In conclusion, shopping fast fashion is contributing to the financial abuse of women and children in LICs

*source Forbes

**LIC= low-income country

All my love please follow and reblog if you agree, feel free to add more points to your reblog, asks are open I would love some more mutuals with the same viewpoints

<3

[mariacallous]

Last week, one of the stories that most caught my attention in the sort of random but uniquely fulfilling way one can get from browsing newspapers was an item from Italy that said, with more than 7 million of the country’s 60 million people over age 75, some are turning to small, cute-looking robots to attend to older adults. Looking forward to coming breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, some experts there are already predicting that this will produce a revolution in caring for this cohort.

“We all have to look for all the possible solutions, in this case technological,” Loredana Ligabue, the president of Not Only Elderly, an Italian advocacy group for family caregivers, told the New York Times.

Another story that seized my interest in this same unexpected manner a week or so before was the news out of the U.S. state of Arkansas that lawmakers there, as in a few other states, were rolling back child labor protections to make it easier to employ children under age 16.

Later, as I wondered what could connect such seemingly disparate topics—the one about a socially costly and hard-to-manage surfeit of older adults and the other, the urgent need felt by some to employ minors, even in dangerous industrial settings—an answer arrived in the name of a country that has been much in the news itself lately due to mass street demonstrations against changes in government policy toward people whose age places them between the extremes of young and old: France.

This European nation, which has long been admired as something of a lifestyle superpower, has been locked in an explosive social and political crisis over a modest adjustment to its retirement age, from 62 to 64—a figure still to the envy of many others, notably including Americans. For decades, the trend in France had moved in the other direction, meaning devoting less time to work, starting with the push decades ago by former President François Mitterrand to whittle away at the 40-hour workweek, which culminated with the voluntary adoption of a 35-hour workweek in 1988.

So what does France have to do with the desperate turn to robots in Italy or children in sweatshops in the United States? Like almost all wealthy Western countries (and not a few rich, non-Western ones, too), France is suddenly being forced to come to terms with brutal new demographic realities that are placing enormous stress on social security and retirement systems and calling into question basic assumptions about the comforts that a long period of prosperity once seemed to guarantee them.

Part of the problem in France is that its people are living longer and longer. This is a blessing shared by growing numbers of highly developed countries—but not the United States, where average life expectancy is experiencing a stark decline. In France, people can expect to live approximately 25 years after they retire, the most of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

For most people, living longer will mean needing to rely on the financial support of the state longer, and this creates steadily increasing fiscal pressures. This difficulty is compounded by another trend that has been unfolding alongside it: people wanting to have fewer and fewer children on average. In Italy, which ranks near the bottom of the scale in the European Union, only 1.29 children were born per woman in 2022. In France, close to the high end, that figure stood at 1.79. The bad news for people who have to plan state budgets and future outlays for national retirement and health care systems is that even that number is far below the average number of children per woman that can sustain a population without shrinkage, known as the population replacement rate, which is usually put at 2.1.

Having enough children to stave off population decline has nothing to do with bragging rights or old-fashioned nationalism. Rather, its importance lies in what demographers call population structure and, most specifically, making sure that there are always enough young people entering the workplace to sustain a social compact built around guaranteed support for older adults in retirement.

France’s ongoing showdown among street demonstrators, opposition parties, and President Emmanuel Macron can be looked at in countless ways, from the democratic deficiencies some have denounced in a constitution that concentrates excessive power in an almost monarchical presidency to the shocking violence employed by the police as they try to restore order in the streets and suppress the protests. However one looks at things, though, one unavoidable reality stands out: France simply needs more working-age people or to have people work longer in order to finance the kinds of benefits in retirement that its citizens have long come to regard as their birthright.

And although the surface manifestations and political and social tensions will play out differently in each rich Western society where fertility rates are in retreat and people are already living far longer than when today’s retirement systems were drawn up, here and there throughout this economically privileged part of the world, the basic problem—of needing more workers or for people to work more—is much the same.

Notwithstanding the statement of the Italian advocate quoted at the top of this column about everyone needing to search for possible solutions, in most of the rich countries that are starting to experience the gravity of their demographic conundrum, few are looking to the most obvious places for relief from the looming fiscal problems that drastic shifts in population structure will bring. Indeed, that is the common message one can distill from stories about care robots and 14-year-old factory workers: People in rich Western societies will go to almost any length to avoid the readiest and most humane solution available, which involves steady but substantial increases in immigration from parts of the world where young people are eager to learn and work, with decades of productive life ahead of them.

Immigration, in fact, kills two birds with one stone: Bringing billions of humans more deeply into the global economy, with the possibility of building economic security and uplift for themselves while also contributing to the financial stability and overall prosperity of the places they migrate to.

An ugly paradox comes into play here. The part of the world that offers the greatest reserves of such young, energetic, and ambitious labor—Africa—is the same part of the world that arouses the strongest aversion among the rich. The continent situated immediately to Europe’s south, and the source of over one-tenth of the U.S. population, has a median age of a mere 19.7 years, meaning that it is utterly dominated by precisely what the old rich world increasingly lacks: youth.

During a visit to Brussels last spring, though, a liberal Belgian intellectual told me: “I fear that the threat of immigration from Africa will drive people here to extremism. They will do anything and everything to avoid being inundated by Africans, and even though I oppose extremism, I completely understand them.”

But in a world where an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of young people are African, the question that will increasingly confront Europeans—and, indeed, all Westerners—is whether clinging to self-identities deeply bound up in race (or, to be more explicit, whiteness) is more important than economic growth; prosperity; competing with the obsession of the day, China; being able to retire with a pension; or, ultimately, maybe even economic survival? Scarcely polite today, sooner or later, questions like these will become unavoidable.

There is another way to frame them, though, that may be helpful. During the four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, mass commerce in people brought in chains from Africa had been justified on the basis that they were not fully human. In the United States, the era when people of African descent were legally treated as less than fully human is still well within living memory. Going forward, will rich Europeans and Americans be able to overcome their aversion toward Africans, who may hold the key to their economic salvation, and embrace them as their fully human equals? As I told my Belgian friend, their future will depend on it.

[courtana]

Lmao it seems like Activision-Blizzard treats their developers like sweatshop workers