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babaleshy · 3 years ago

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Why I'm Learning Russian

It's been a while since I was last here on this site, and since I seem to be back-back for good(?), I figured I'd update everyone following me on what's going on right now.

And I figured I'd make a separate post talking specifically on why I've chosen to learn Russian (instead of Serbian).

First off, I still wish I could learn Serbian due to family reasons, but there's a severe lack of sources for me to use. Duolingo ain't got shit regarding the language. I wouldn't have cared if it was listed simply as Croatian! I just wanna learn the language!

Thanks to the whole anti-communist propaganda in the states, many Americans (whether by ignorance alone, by design, or some combination thereof) would hear a Slavic language and get pissy. At least this is what I think is likely the reason behind why it can be so hard in some areas to find just books on a Slavic language. If you're lucky to find any, it's always Russian. The area I live in has plenty of Polish, Russian, and Serbian populations (albeit descendants of immigrants, but you get the idea). You're think they'd have a decent amount of books at the local library. The best I could find was a book meant to teach how to translate written Russian (apparently you have to have a ridiculous aptitude for high-difficulty languages or have to already be familiar a bit with it?) and a Polish For Dummies book. That's it.

There aren't any community colleges nearby that I can find that event teach foreign languages at all (this is a right-wing-heavy area, so surprise-surprise).

But in this country as a whole, the only Slavic language I can find that you will commonly find in colleges and universities if any Slavic language at all is supported is Russian.

So that's reason number one: accessibility.

Another reason is that there's quite a bit of stuff happening in the country that due to Americans not expecting to take on foreign languages on a regular basis, let alone a complex one, the ruling class could easily claim what Russians are saying whether it's a soundbyte, a video with audio, or signs and posters and such. They're relying on the American people to be completely ignorant of the language so they could spin whatever they wanna say however they need it to say. (This would largely be fux news' area of expertise, as they've been doing so recently with the protests in Cuba by not only showing protests that occurred in Florida and passing them off as Cuban protests in Cuba, but they straight-up blurred out posters because someone might know how to speak Spanish.)

On top of this, there's something boiling in Russia, so if the Russian people need help and ask Americans for advice, it would be nice if some Americans spoke their language, instead of relying on Russians (and anyone not American in general) to know English to some extent.

So there's reason number two: avoiding misinformation and misunderstandings.

I don't have to tell you twice that climate change is happening right now and that we may not see the climates of many regions go back to normal within our own lifetimes even if we did everything right.

However, worst case scenario, what if we were too late? Where in the would could remain habitable for humans? There's Greenland, Canada, Antarctica (which would be warred over for territory because of course it would), and then there's Russia. Russia is semi-landlocked thanks to the arctic ice on the northern coasts, but once that melts, they would easily be able to trade by sea. They also have a lot of currently uninhabited land that, in this worst case scenario, would be thawed out and quite fertile and suitable for agriculture, especially for the potential billions (remember, we're passed the 7 billion population point) that would emigrate just to be able to survive. This means that if you wanted to move to Russia, it's probably best to learn the language.

That's reason number three: it will be the largest habitable landmass on the planet if we cannot bring about a chance of reversal to climate change.

The last reason is due to the possibility that if I went back to school for what I ultimately want to be (paleoecologist), my interests (pleistocene ecology) may lead me to digging up frozen carcasses out of the Russian permafrost. There's also an attempt in a Pleistocene Park in the making right now (all that's missing is the mammoth which we will never successfully clone) to bring back fauna we still have that once existed there to help with the land's ecosystem in the Russian steppe. And so far, it's succeeding in its goals. And as a paleoecologist, this would be right up my alley. But knowing the language would be incredibly helpful, too!

Russian isn't actually hard for the reasons many "top x videos" claim it to be. The alphabet isn't that hard, to be honest. It's the cases, which is where I'm stuck at right now.

Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language, as they do not teach grammar or cultural context. The app has become a game that makes you rely on memory and hopes you'll catch on.

No other apps that I have found will teach the grammar in a beginner-friendly way for free, either. I'm poor, and can't afford this shit, so I'm hoping to borrow that library book I mentioned earlier (now that I've learned the alphabet quite nicely) might be able to give me a better idea in a way that I can best understand it.

For now, I'm focusing on keeping up my practice as well as building a nice vocabulary bank. That's going to make learning the cases much easier. The good news is my husband is also interested in learning the language and even he learned the alphabet without much of an issue. So I have someone to practice with.

Hilariously, like with Spanish, I have a problem with a foreign language... I can read it fine, I can hear it okay, but writing it? Eh.. And speaking it from memory? Holy shit I struggle. But my husband hasn't had much of a chance to really practice thanks to his job, so maybe it's the lack of practice?

Regardless, learning independently is going to be a nice primer for when (maybe if, who knows) we can finally go back to college once we've moved with my parents (long story) because the university in the area they want to move to does offer Russian. If things go well, I plan to take more than 2 levels (the university requires all students to take at least 2 levels of a foreign language).

So yeah. That's why I'm learning Russian. It's actually really fun, and I do watch vlogs from Russians on YouTube so I get a better understanding of their culture, too. I'm jealous they don't have this fucked up concept of a "lawn" like America does. All it is with the houses and dachas is native plants and fruits and veggies they decide to grow. Lucky...

#russian #learning russian #that's it that's all the tags

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 4 years ago

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A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

It’s strange to think of now, with a decade of sneering about the “left coast” and “San Francisco liberals” and blah blah blah baked into political conventional wisdom, but it’s true. The reactionary modern conservatism which held the whip hand on the backlash to the great civil rights advances of the 1960s was born in California. California voted for Richard Nixon six times: once as their senator, twice as Eisenhower’s vice president, and then three times as the Republican presidential nominee. In between those elections, Nixon of course had to win primaries. In 1968, when he was the Republican front-runner, he faced an upstart challenger who wanted to make sure he’d be racist enough to keep conservative southerners in the tent. That person was not a southerner, but the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to be the next Republican elected after Nixon.

So what the fuck happened? Well, a lot of things, and I don’t want to pretend to do justice to the generations of righteous activism that pushed back against this disastrous regime. Democrats did occasionally win state-wide – notably, California elected two Democratic women to the Senate in 1992 – even though Orange County was practically a metonym for American conservatism right up until the 2018 midterms. But the turning point that seems to have gotten your average voter to turn on the Republican party for good was in 1994. Governor Pete Wilson, a kind of hard-right proto-Trump, threw his weight behind a hateful anti-immigrant ballot initiative. It passed, even though it was so deranged that it never went into effect because a federal court ruled it unconstitutional within days of the vote, because the California electorate really was that conservative. The electorate changed, almost on a dime. Mexican-American voters organized. Their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens realized that sitting back wasn’t an option. And now the Republican Party of California is a fucking joke.

This isn’t, like, the eternal winds of history blowing microscopic chips off the statue of Ozymandias. If you remember the Clinton presidency, this happened in your lifetime. If you’re a little bit younger than that, it happened in your big cousins’ lifetimes.

Part of what makes it hard to see changes like this is that the dim bulbs in our political media see everything through a horse race lens, where who gets one particular W is the only piece of information worth retaining. You win and you’re clever; you lose and you’re a dumb sucker who tried. Who gets power is really important! But if you only care about that, then you miss the really important trends.

Take the Georgia 6th, the district once represented by Newt fucking Gingrich. Its representative joined Trump’s cabinet in early 2017, at least in part because it was such a supposedly safe Republican seat, so there was a special election for his replacement. Traumatized Democrats and Women’s Marchers threw themselves into the steeply uphill campaign of former John Lewis intern Jon Ossoff. When he came up a few points short, our blue-check media betters tried to turn Ossoff into a punch line stand-in for silly #Resistance liberal losers coping with Trump by losing some more, SUCK IT, MOM! but the other, correct, interpretation is that Ossoff only came up a few points short in a district that was supposed to protect the kookiest of right-wing cranks. His campaign had functioned as kind of an ad hoc boot camp for novice organizers, canvassers, and future school board candidates who had previously been too discouraged and disorganized to take this kind of swing, and it showed Democratic party donors that the district was winnable. So when gun safety advocate and Mother of the Movement Lucy McBath stepped up to the plate in the 2018 midterms, her campaign had the infrastructure it needed, and now she’s well-positioned to be reelected because she’s doing a great job. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s organizing chops and the enthusiastic work his supporters did for Rep. McBath are a big part of why he’s in a dead heat against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue.

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the South this year. The presidential campaign there is interesting, but the real story is in those network effects. There’s a rising tide that threatens to make the blue wave of 2018 look like a light spring shower if things break the right way. Just look at the Democratic senate candidates. They’re a diverse group: men and women, Black and white, preacher and fighter pilot. Most are relative newcomers to national audiences, but only some of them are young. Jon Ossoff is just 33; when he was in grade school, Mike Espy of Mississippi was Secretary of Agriculture. What they do seem to have in common is that they are having the time of their fucking lives.

Here’s Espy:

Moving and grooving in McComb. pic.twitter.com/RANCRGGpX7

— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS)

October 31, 2020

Ossoff:

The people of Georgia are tired of having a spineless, disgraced politician serve as their Senator. pic.twitter.com/OdaYwFKzmz

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff)

October 30, 2020

Senator Doug Jones of Alabama:

I know you’ve heard us say it before, but when you see this clip, it bears reappearing: This guy really is clueless. https://t.co/w9YOUHegCW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones)

October 22, 2020

Jamie Harrison of South Carolina:

It's debate night and y'all know I'm going to walk it like I talk it. Let's see if @LindseyGrahamSC can do the same. pic.twitter.com/TNABxsaTEO

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime)

October 30, 2020

And the bad bitch with her eye on the big prize, MJ Hegar of Texas:

It's about time Texans had a senator as tough as we are. https://t.co/8MQ8Tykmyt pic.twitter.com/bgPr5vtgdh

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 16, 2020

Clutch those pearls, John! https://t.co/iWej8MrhtV

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 22, 2020

The spineless bootlicker Hegar is challenging, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, is currently resting his dainty patoot in the seat once held by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. As president, LBJ would aggressively push for some of the greatest human rights legislation in American history in pursuit of what he called the Great Society. That meant Medicare and Medicaid. It meant a revolution in environmental protections. It meant PBS. And it meant telling the one-party authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow south that America was done with their bullshit, they were going to have real democracy, they were going to do it now, and if they didn’t like it they could eat his ass.

Johnson was a complicated guy and left a complicated legacy. His project required an unusual leader of courage, conviction, and unmitigated savvy, cut with streaks of megalomania and dubious mental health. No architect but Lyndon Johnson would have built the Great Society, and no place but Texas could have built Lyndon Johnson.

Then again, Texas also gave us the Bushes in the late twentieth century. It gave us a terrorist attack on a Biden campaign bus just this weekend.

That darkness is real. So is the long, grinding slog to turn on the light. Like the GA-06 silliness, Democratic efforts in Texas get laughed at as some quixotic waste of resources by arrogant flops. In fact, the past few years of high-profile statewide elections in Texas have been on a pretty clear trajectory. In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth who captured widespread progressive attention with her heroic filibuster of a 2013 state abortion ban, ran for governor. She lost by the ~20-point margin you’d expect in a year where Republicans everywhere did really well, but it was a vitamin B-12 shot to a perpetually overwhelmed state Democratic party. The 2016 Clinton campaign, when it was (correctly!) on the offensive before FBI Director Comey decided he would really prefer a Trump presidency, invested heavily in its Texas ground game. It was always a long shot, but even after the Comey letter and the Texas-specific sabotage by the Russian Internet Research Agency, Texas Democrats cut Trump’s margin there down to single digits. That is to say, they recruited the volunteers and taught the skills and raised the cash and registered the voters to carry the ball way down the field. And in the 2018 midterms, El Paso representative Beto O’Rourke built on all that energy to fight Senator Ted Cruz to a near draw. O’Rourke didn’t quite make it, but he did help a lot of downballot Democrats over the finish line and forced Republicans to light a few oil drums of cash on fire to save a seat that they had always assumed would be safe.

That growth has been possible because of a ton of hard work and persuasion, but it’s also been possible because there was so much untapped potential. As progressives have argued for years, Texas was less of a “red state” than a non-voting state. I’m not a person that usually has a lot of patience for people not bothering to vote, because the people who get to be loud about that are whiny, privileged assholes who can afford to be flip about the right to vote. But there are a lot of people who find it hard because they absolutely do know the weight and importance of voting, because they or their mothers or their grandfathers were beaten and terrorized to keep them away from the polls. They might make the same mouth-noises as the selfish dilettantes about how it doesn’t matter and they’re all corrupt and blah blah blah. But a vote is a tiny little leap of faith. It’s at least a skip of hope. And it hurts to know the weight and importance of that and to keep feeling that disappointment over and over again.

A key thing that Republicans in the South managed to do for a while, but California Republicans didn’t, was to let their misrule seem almost tolerable day to day. As outrageous as the overall trends were, as catastrophic the results were for a lot of people’s lives, it didn’t necessarily feel entirely irrational for lots of people to avoid the inconvenience and disappointment of trying to stop them. But if you’re just going to be a constant, unwavering shit show of incompetence and evil, infuriating people every waking minute of every fucking day for years on end, they’re not going to be deterred by inconvenience and disappointment. They're not going to be deterred by fucking tear gas. They’re going to understand that it’s worth trying to get rid of you, even if it’s a long shot. They’re going to line up to kick you in the shin just for the hell of it. And that’s exactly what millions of them have already done.

These dumbass motherfuckers radicalized Taylor goddamn Swift!

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE HER DO!

So yeah. People who had given up are fucking voting. Texas has already had hundreds of thousands more people vote than voted in all of 2016. BEFORE ELECTION DAY!

Vice President Biden likes to recite a poem by the great Irish bard Seamus Heaney. It’s about how you have to have faith that a better world is possible, even when you don’t have any rational reason to expect it any time soon, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to seize the most precious of opportunities, when “justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.”

Sometimes hope and history walk into a bar to tell dirty jokes for a bachelorette party in downtown Austin. And they rhyme.

For a hundred and fifty years, unreconstructed revanchist terrorist sympathizers have threatened that “the South will rise again.” They mean the treasonous mobsters who called themselves the Confederacy.

Why do those losers get to define the South? Like, literally, they’re losers. They lost.

There’s another South. The terrorists cut it off at the knees, so it never quite rose the first time. But it’s always been there. The South the heroes of Reconstruction tried to build. The South of the Kennedy Space Station and the Center for Disease Control. The South of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the gay neighborhoods of Atlanta. The South of Barbara Jordan, Ann and Cecile Richards, Stacey Abrams, and the young women of the Virginia state legislature. The South of Maya Angelou, Molly Ivins, and Mark Twain. The South of the exiles of Miami and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The South of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Representative John Lewis. The South of James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Once upon a time, there was a colossus. The richest and most resentful white people feared it, for it was both great and good. So they hunted it mercilessly. They tortured and killed its most vulnerable people. They bound it and silenced it and told the rest of the world it didn’t even exist. But they knew that wicked lie was the best they could do, for something so mighty could never be slain by the likes of them.

The giant grows stronger every day as it struggles against its chains, and those chains are turning to rust. One day soon - maybe in this decade; maybe this week – it will break free. It will rise. And it will shake the earth. Just you watch.

#2020 election

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guccitaehyung · 5 years ago

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Surprising Him On Tour (Namjoon X Reader)

Requested?: No (but requests are OPEN)

Genre: Slightly sad at first then turns into fluff, mentions of smut

Warnings: Mention of smut (no actual scenes or details)

Word count: 2k

*(y/n)’s POV*

I was currently sitting on my bed in my shared bedroom with my boyfriend, Namjoon, as I was staring at him through the screen of my laptop. He was currently on tour with his band, BTS, which also includes my younger brother, Jungkook.

We stared at each other for a few minutes before Namjoon decided to say something.

“I miss you so much” He says

“I miss you too. The bed is so lonely and cold without you here” I said pouting

“I just wished you could’ve come on tour with us” He said

“I know, but you know what’s keeping me from coming on tour with you” I said

“Your work, I know. I swear you should just stop working, I earn enough money for the both of us of survive” He said with a sigh

“And you know that I’m an independent woman and I don’t like to depend on people” I said back

“I know, I know. And that’s why I love you” He said sending me a flying kiss and I made a hand motion to show that I was catching his kiss.

We talked for a few more minutes before Namjoon had to go.

“Babe, I gotta go, we have a very hectic schedule tomorrow and I have to be rested properly for it” Namjoon said sadly

“Ahh, well goodnight then” I said sadly waving at him

“Don’t worry, I’ll call you tomorrow when I get some free time” He promised

“Ok, byeee. Sleep well babe” I said

“You too, bye” He said waving

The call ended and I let out a sad sigh. But that’s when I got an idea and I decided to text Jungkook.

I dialed Jungkook’s phone number, it beeped 3 times before he finally picked up the phone.

“Ello” He said

“Hey Jungkook, how’s tour?” I said making small talk

“Good, why you’d call me?” He asked

“Listen, I want to surprise Namjoon by flying over to where you are currently. You in?” I explained

“Yeah sure, anything to make him stop rambling about how he misses you” Jungkook said with an exaggerated tone

“OMG, I better come save you guys quick” I said and giggled at the thought of the members having to listen to my boyfriend just ramble about missing me. It was cute, to be honest.

“When do you wanna come here?” He asked

“When is your next concert?” I asked back

“In 2 days, Saturday, why?” He asked

“I’ll come on Saturday morning then” I said

“Ok cool, need help to book a ticket?” He asked

“Thanks but no thanks, I’m old enough to do it myself. By the way, what are you doing up? I believe it’s nearly midnight where you are?” I asked in a taunting way

“Um-I gotta go (y/n), Namjoon is calling me” He made up an excuse

“Namjoon went to sleep Jungkook” I said while silently laughing

“Right... see ya!” He quickly said and hung up

“He never changes” I said to myself shaking my head

For the next 2 days, I booked my plane ticket to where BTS currently was which is California, USA and had a discussion with my boss about using my accumulated holidays to cover the rest of the tour. Being quite close with my boss, she and I were able to come up with an agreement of being able to work from home whenever I wanted to join Namjoon and BTS for tour. This would work in both our favors as I would be able to be with Namjoon more and my boss would have her job done by the end of the day and I would not have to use up my holidays available.

It was so hard not to tell Namjoon about me being able to work from home and join him on tour and it was even harder to not mention that I was going to come see him in a few days.

I was waiting to board the flight when I received a call from Namjoon. I didn’t answer as there was a high chance that he would suspect something, especially if an announcement was made during the phone call. I decided to send him a text saying that I couldn’t talk right now.

I felt bad about having to lie to him but it would pay off eventually. After I boarded the plane, I prepared myself for the 12-hour plane ride to California by playing my playlist I had created earlier while waiting for the plane. I also had brought my neck pillow hoping to get as much sleep as I can.

*Skip plane ride*

I finally arrived in California at the airport of LAX. I got off the plane and through immigration. As I was waiting for my suitcase, I called Jungkook to tell him that I had arrived. We had arranged that he would come to pick me up from the airport to go to the hotel.

“Hey Jungkook, I just landed and I currently waiting for my suitcase” I said after he picked up

“Ok, I’m waiting for you just outside the baggage claim area” He replied

“Ok, I’ll be out soon, bye” I said and hung up

I quickly got my suitcase and headed out to where Jungkook was. Once I got out, I saw my younger brother along with his group member, Jimin, both wearing back face masks to not attract the attention of any possible fans around. I hugged both of them as soon as I reached them.

“Heyy guys, how have you been?” I asked excitedly

“We’ve been good, your boyfriend, not so much” Jimin said

“Huh? What do you mean?” I asked worried about Namjoon

“He constantly whines about missing you and how you should have come on tour with us. I’m pretty sure Yoongi is close to strangle him, so you’re being a lifesaver for all of us” Jimin explained

“Oh my, let’s get going then” I said and they both laughed

They led me to their car that was driven by their chauffeur. Jungkook helped me get my suitcase in the trunk and sat with me in the back as Jimin sat in the front, next to the driver.

During the ride to the hotel, Jugkook, Jimin and I started catching up on what was going on back home and what was happening on tour such as the funny moments, the fans and all the amazing stages and talk shows they were invited to.

When we arrived at the hotel, the boys were able to sneak me into the hotel lobby and to the elevator without anyone realizing that I was here. We got to the floor of my room which was luckily not on the same floor as the boys and the staff as we didn’t want to get caught by Namjoon after all of our efforts into this surprise.

I was sitting on the queen-sized bed of my room alone. The boys had already gone to the venue of their concert tonight to practice. They were going to come back in the afternoon only to leave again for the venue to prepare for the concert. While waiting for the afternoon to come, I decided to visit the town and go shopping.

After my little shopping spree, I came back after the boys already came back and left for the concert. I got ready and changed into a plain white off-shoulder with jeans skirt overalls and I wore white converse high tops. I grabbed my BT21 Koya bag which had my ‘ARMY Bomb’, phone and wallet in it.

The chauffeur from earlier was the person that was taking me to the venue. So once I got ready, I went downstairs, headed to the car and drove to the venue. Once I arrived, I headed towards the entrance where all the fans were. I was waiting with them for the doors to open and while doing so, I made small talk with the ones that recognized me. Mine and Namjoon’s relationship went public 2 years ago so the fans got used to see me around and accepted me. Of course, there were the ones that were jealous of our relationship but I learned to not let it phase me.

The doors opened and I headed backstage. I texted Jungkook to inform him of my presence and he told me exactly where to go. They had finished doing their hair and makeup so I headed there and stayed in the room until they were on stage and the coast was clear. In the meantime, I spoke to the hair and makeup noonas in the room. And they all told me that Namjoon had spoken a lot about me and that they were, quite frankly, fed up.

The time passed by really fast and the boys were now on stage doing their first quarter of the show before they had to come backstage and change again. I sneaked out to the wings of the stage and enjoyed the concert from there. I spent the whole concert trying not to be spotted by Namjoon and whenever they had to come backstage, I would hide in a vacant room that I knew they wouldn’t use. At some point, they were performing ‘Mic Drop’ and during the choreography, I saw Namjoon turning and looking in my direction and I quickly hid behind the curtains that were nearby hoping that he hadn’t seen me.

*Namjoon’s POV*

I was performing our song ‘Mic Drop’ when my gaze shifted to the wings as something got my attention and I saw a girl that looks exactly like my girlfriend (y/n). I tried looking again but the figure disappeared. Weird I thought.

When we went backstage to change, I was looking around a lot to the point where I got the attention of the other guys.

“You good hyung?” Jungkook asked

“Yeah, why?” I replied still looking around

“You looking for something?” Jimin asked cautiously

“Nope, just looking around” I replied without looking at them

*(y/n)’s POV*

I enjoyed the rest of the concert while still making sure that Namjoon didn’t see me. At the end of the concert, I went to their changing room to wait for them to get off stage.

While waiting, I sat on one of the sofas that were in the room and started scrolling through my social media to pass the time. I waited for about 10 minutes before I heard a ruckus in the hallway. I put my phone away knowing that the boys were about to get here any second now.

The door opened and the boys got in it took a few seconds for Namjoon to realized the massive elephant in the room, which was me. When he did, he froze in the spot with his mouth agape.

“Hey Babe” I greeted him

He didn’t say anything and just came over to me and held me tightly in his arms.

“Oh my god, am I dreaming, or are you really here?” He whispered in my hair

“I’m really here babe” I said looking up at him and pecked his lips

“Jagiya I missed you so much” He sighed after the kiss

We held each other for a while before I decided that I had to greet the other guys so that I didn’t seem rude. I tried to get out of Namjoon’s grip but he seemed to hold on for dear life.

“Babe, could you let go?” I asked cutely at him

“Why?” He asked looking down at me

“So I could say ‘hi’ to the other guys” I replied

“Nooo” He said pouting

“Babe” I said giving him a look “Besides, you’ll be able to have me the whole night” I said winking at him

“Damn right, Jagiya” He said smirking and tapped my ass as a walked off to the other guys

For the rest of the night, the guys and I went for dinner at the restaurant near our hotel and it was there that I told them the news about me being able to work from home and join them on tour. They were all excited about the news and that they wouldn’t have to put up with Namjoon’s whining anymore.

It seemed like Namjoon couldn’t hold his excitement anymore as when we got back to the hotel, well, let’s just say that Namjoon and I didn’t get much sleep as we were occupied filling each other’s needs and cravings that were formed during the time we were apart.

REQUEST ARE OPEN

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zd772 · 4 years ago

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Expert Interview with Professor Piero Garofalo

The following contains edited excerpts from an hour-long interview conducted with Professor Piero Garofalo from the UNH Italian Studies department. Professor Garofalo is a professor of Italian Studies and the coordinator of the Italian Studies program. He has recently taught linguistics and film studies for the Italian department. When he came to UNH there was no Italian program so he was essentially hired to introduce Italian to UNH. He developed many of the Italian courses that UNH offers, started the department’s study abroad program, and worked with others to get the Italian minor and major developed. His research experience, which can be explored in more detail here, includes explorations of culture and cultural production within certain periods, fascism’s relation to this, and internal exile in fascism, to name a few areas of interest. For my interview, we discussed fascism, populism, and media.

Disclaimer: The content is edited for length and clarity, but the meanings behind the answers are not altered. The full transcription can be accessed here for more information. The format shares highlights of quotes or responses on specific topics which demonstrate my understandings as well as Professor Garofalo’s expertise.

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Interviewer: Zoe Dawson (ZD), senior Communication student at UNH

Interviewee: Piero Garofalo (PG), professor and program coordinator for Italian Studies Department at UNH

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On the topic of fascism in relation to our course (p. 2):

ZD: So I’ve looked into your research on the COLA website and I saw that you had some research focus on fascism (PG: Mhm) so first I thought I would share a few of the things that I’ve learned in this class so maybe we can have a conversation about that or hear about your research... So, in a reading by Federico Finchelstein from my class, we read that “Fascism was founded in Italy in 1919 but the politics it represented appeared simultaneously across the world.” (PG: *nods head*) And then, also he talked about Mussolini’s version of [fascism] being that “the creature was bigger than the creator,” which I thought was interesting. And so those two points, I thought, were significant in relation to Italy.

PG: Yeah. So, I think Federico Fincehlsltein is, I think he’s Argentinean (ZD: *nods head*). I’ve read several of his studies and he does a really good job of taking concepts like fascism, in particular, fascism and populism, and globalizing them beyond the usual suspects. So instead of just looking at fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, he’ll look at Latin America and different movements to kind of give a broader perspective.

I definitely agree about what he said about fascism in Italy in the sense of, the term itself obviously comes from Italian. Preceding Mussolini there was a movement in Sicily called The Fasci Siciliani. Fascia really is just a bundle. It’s a bundle of rods or sticks. So, that movement was really a workers’ union, almost like a unionized attempt to form a union against these large landowners and that movement was suppressed. The government intervened and they were striking and twenty-two of them, twenty-two of the strikers, were killed. And that’s a very different type of movement than what Mussolini was doing (ZD: Mhm), even though the origin of the term is the same. Yeah, so we have this movement in Italy that begins in 1919 and takes on the name of fascism, and that term kind of ends up being, you know, good PR (ZD: *laughs*) and has a lot of success internationally and becomes sort of the default term, kind of becomes overused today right? We talk about ‘fascist, anti-fascist’ without contextualizing the terms.

And yeah, I think it also, the second part that you mentioned, I think it definitely did grow much beyond what he was trying to do or thought of. And so, when we talk about fascism, even within that historical context, we need to be careful about what we mean because Italian fascism is different from Spanish fascism from the 1930s, from German Nazism, and so on and so forth, but even though they share many commonalities and a similar sort of source within each of those societies.

On the connections between fascism and populism (pp. 6-9):

ZD: … I have a few questions related to what I’m about to say, but also in our class we’ve learned about the idea of modern populism as being a post-fascist idea, and also being like a reformation of fascism in post-war contexts so what are your thoughts in relation to Italy since fascism was so prominent?

PG: Yeah I understand the definition, but I don’t know that I necessarily agree with that definition because there are many movements that I would describe as populist which I would not describe as fascist (ZD: *nods head*). If populism is also sort of this mass reaction to the elite, we hear that rhetoric a lot. We talk about Trumpism as a form of populism, you hear that rhetoric against the liberal elites and that sort of thing. You know, there was the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was the 99% against the 1%. You could even think about Black Lives Matter movement, as a grassroots movement or people reacting against the elite, the people in power, the people who’ve created a system that doesn’t allow them to flourish.

In Italy, we have two movements, in your blog you talk about them both. We have the League, the Northern Leagues which now have expanded beyond just being the Northern Leagues, that are a populist movement that I would align to some degree more closely with that idea of fascism, of neofascism. But then we have the 5 Star Movement which describes itself as a movement whose major tenets are the environment, sustainability, access to democracy- everyone’s supposed to have a vote and have access to a vote and participate in the vote, you’re not supposed to be excluded, which many of its programs we would associate more with the political left…

So, a direct line between neofascism, or fascism, and populism I don’t necessarily see. Lots of different movements which have certain characteristics that might fall into these different categories. And it’s become such a broad term that it’s begun to also lose its significance. The word itself as you know, the Latin word populus or in Italian popoli, it’s the people and having that word have a negative meaning. I don’t think it co-opted that way either, I like to think that when people are reacting to an injustice that they see that involves fundamental changes in society, that can still be a positive and not fall under the same rubric as Hilter and Mussolini.

ZD: … That made sense. In our class, I think in the same Finchelstein reading, he talks about how the word ‘fascist’ and the word ‘populist’, they’re both sometimes used interchangeably and also used to describe something as evil or bad even when that really isn’t the case with historical definitions, so what you said made sense with that.

Then also relating to fascism, what do you think the remnants of fascism look like in Italy? I know you mentioned the League, which is far-right.

PG: There is a party that’s more in tune with fascism than the League even. Its new name is Brothers of Italy, FDI- Fratelli d'Italia, and that’s like Le Pen’s party in France. So that’s sort of a far-right party that really does see itself as the heir of fascism. Its earlier iteration, Mussolini’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, was a part of it. After World War II, the fascist party was nonexistent, but this party formed called MSI- Movimento Sociali Italiano, Italian Socialist Movement which was really a fascist party, although the die-hards stuck with that it was always a very tiny party.

The other big difference, of course, between Italy and the United States is that Italy has many political parties and it’s easier than here to find a party that conforms more closely with your ideas. Here you kind of have a choice between two parties, and you might agree with everything your party says, but chances are there are divisions. Some things you agree with, some things less. There the parties are much more splintered, there’s an issue that they don’t agree on, they kind of split and go on in different directions.

So this party then became Alleanza Nazionale, or AN- National Alliance, and in that iteration in the 1990s it kind of rehabilitated its image as being professional, not talking about fascism the way it was spoken about in the past but trying just to appear like a legitimate party. They didn’t use a lot of rhetoric, it wasn’t populist in that sense, it wasn’t trying to appeal to people’s emotions and whatnot. It was trying to just rehabilitate fascism in a way that made it seem innocuous and the latest iteration of that party because different moments or scandals or events have led to the elimination of Italian parties… So the latest iteration is this one, Fratelli d'Italia, Brothers of Italy, which is the real right-wing party. The League, the Northern Leagues now there are various Leagues so we just call it the Leagues, shares many commonalities with right-wing parties. In particular its very strong stance against immigration and its xenophobia toward immigrants. In other aspects, it’s anti-European but it’s anti-Italian as well. These parties go back to origins of the modern Italian state where they never see that they’re Italian, that they’re from Venice or Milan. They see their local identity which is what survived for thousands of years. They never managed to bring the puzzle of Italy together to form a unified country.

So, they’re very much rooted in the local; in the local traditions, in the local ideas, the local language, and that’s why they’re anti-immigration. They’re anti-anyone who isn’t them. They’re anti-Southern Italian. They’re anti-everything it seems. They wanna secede, they want total autonomy. That’s why they’re anti-European because European identity kind of erases or limits your national identity… And that’s what we see in Italy, in particular, is that populism frequently takes on that League form of local identity. You have a League in Sicily, it’s the same thing, ‘We wanna be independent.’ So it takes on these kinds of xenophobic and philo-fascist attitudes in many activities. It also sees the central government as the enemy because it conquered Sicily literally. So in Italy populism, with the exception of the 5 Star which is this very different kind of movement, the populist movements tend to be very focused on the local identity and reasserting a local identity that the Italian nation has tried to wash over, eliminate, white-wash for the past 150 years since unification.

ZD: Yeah, I think that’s interesting what you were talking about with the regional specificity kind of. I watched a documentary and one of the politicians was harping on ‘Italians First’ but based on what you said it sounds more like specific to their region, their people first. (PG: Yeah.)

On how populism has affected the political climate in Italy (pp. 9-10):

ZD: … how would you say populism has affected Italy’s overall political climate?

PG: Well it’s definitely created more chaos. The Italian political system was intentionally designed to be weak. After fascism, the Constitution is intentionally designed to not let political parties accomplish very much unless there’s a lot of support for what they’re doing. The moment that there’s opposition to what they’re doing they get kicked out of power. So it always seems like Italian governments don’t last very long, but that’s built into this system…

The populist parties have made that more difficult because there’s less room to compromise. They have very strong stances on big issues that used to be, despite differences, pretty much agreed on… So you’ve lost room to really coalesce, to form a coalition with other parties with enough common ground where you can really accomplish stuff. That’s always been a challenge but not really a big one because we see historically these same parties really ended up forming the next government only with a slight change and then they got the legislation that they wanted to do until they hit the next crisis. There was a lot of predictability. You weren’t worried that the country was gonna go in a completely different political or economic or social direction. Now it’s a lot harder to predict, there’s a lot less certainty and it’s not clear who the opposition is either. The center-left parties are also reforming themselves and fractured and also have less coherent identities so it makes things much more messy and tricky now.

ZD: Yeah that makes sense and I’ve definitely seen that. And it seems really relevant to right now also. I researched a little about Giuseppe Conte’s coalition and that really led to him having to resign.

PG: Yeah, and it was one of the center-left parties that withdrew. They had like 1% of the vote, but that 1% was all they needed, and all of the sudden he didn’t have a majority and he was out. And it was a gamble because they could’ve gone to elections or Salvini could’ve come into power or something and now we have this technocratic government and we’ll see if it lasts until the elections next year.

On the populist presence in the media (pp. 12-13):

ZD: … one of the people I focused a lot on was Matteo Salvini and his use of Facebook and Facebook live to kind of “expose” people like I’ve seen him shouting at immigrant families and things like that. And it’s very blunt and in your face (PG: *nods head* Right) which is effective for his followers which I think is interesting. So if you follow any Italian media and government, how would you say the populist presence is?

PG: I think it’s expressed the most through social media. In Italy, the media for many years was dominated by the RAI, sort of the BBC of Italy. So you had these sort of government-owned and so anything they talked about they’d have to present all the different parties’ sides, everyone had to have equal time on television running for office, this sort of thing. That changed in the 1980s when Silvio Berlusconi came into power, so it’s part of the Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher movement, this neoconservatism of the 1980s… In the last decade especially, social media has become the center ground for promoting your ideas, promoting your campaigns, and being media savvy is extremely important for, especially populist politicians, but modern politicians in general.

One of the things about Donald Trump was this constant use of Twitter, right? Always keeping himself in the news. Obama was considered incredibly media savvy, but he didn’t do things the way that Donald Trump does and Joe Biden is not media savvy in that same way at all. But as you pointed out with Salvini, they’ll do lots of events which they’ll stream live through Facebook. They keep issues in your face. If it’s print media or the 6 o’clock news, it dies after a day or two or three, but they don’t let it die. They keep it in your face, in your feed constantly. So they’re very active on Twitter and other platforms, though certainly, Facebook is the most dominant one. They use it to connect to people and to keep them enraged in a sense, you know? To keep you emotionally invested so that you’re out there voting, promoting that point of view, and you’re keeping them on everyone’s mind. PR is half the battle, so if it’s always out there they must be important, they must have something to say.

ZD: Yeah I was gonna ask how the forms of media play into social and cultural grievances, but that really seems like the answer (PG: Yeah). That it’s so in your face that you can’t really avoid it. I was gonna ask also what populism’s role is in inflating that, but that also seems to be kind of the answer.

PG: Yeah I think that it doesn’t matter what the issue is. Whether it’s a boat capsizing in the Mediterranean or a boat being stopped, or some sort of government scandal- I can’t think of a good one that’s happened recently, but anything is an excuse for outrage that allows them to step forward and say, ‘Look at what they’re doing, we need to stop this’ even if they’re doing the same thing…

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Thank you again to Professor Piero Garofalo for taking the time to be interviewed and giving very insightful answers!

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Finchelstein, F. (2017). From Fascism to Populism in History. Oakland, California: University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvpb3vkk

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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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The clashes in Charlottesville catalyzed the American public’s reckoning with the budding white nationalist movement, which had accelerated after Donald Trump’s election. Afterward, the wave of public shaming of the violence in Charlottesville led at least one “Unite the Right” marcher to insist his participation in the rally was misinterpreted as racist. Others who attended quickly lost their jobs after online campaigns exposed them.

But the eventual identification of the man in the white tank top and red hat shook many: He was revealed to be a 33-year-old Puerto Rican resident of Georgia, originally from the Bronx. “I’m the only brown Klans member I ever met,” Alex Michael Ramos joked in a Facebook Live video before he turned himself into police Aug. 28. The Facebook post has since been taken down.

But Ramos wasn’t the only “Unite the Right” marcher with a Hispanic background.

Christopher Rey Monzon, a 22-year-old Cuban-American, is associated with the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a neo-Confederate hate group. Monzon was arrested weeks after Charlottesville for charging at protesters in a separate Florida demonstration. And Nick Fuentes, a 19-year-old student who hosts an alt-right podcast called America First, said he had to leave Boston University in the aftermath of the Charlottesville protests after receiving death threats over his participation.

The presence of these Latino men at the largest white nationalist event in recent memory underscores the complicated racial position of Latinos in the United States. Latino white supremacy, it turns out, might not be a contradiction in terms.

Increasingly, Latinos are identifying racially as white. In fact, more than half did so in the 2010 U.S. Census. A March 2016 report from Pew Research Center found that 39% of Afro-Latinos also identified “as white alone or white in combination with another race.” With a current population of around 58 million, Latinos make up the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., just behind whites.

Another Pew Research Center study from December found that 59% of U.S. adults with Latino heritage who identify as white believe others see them as white, too. Over time, the study found, descendants of Latino immigrants stop identifying with their countries of origin and consider themselves more and more American.

Fuentes — who says he’s about 25% Mexican — identifies as white, not Latino. In an interview with Mic, Fuentes also said he believes multiculturalism threatens white national identity. Monzon, meanwhile, has called for South Florida to secede from the U.S. His ties to the League of the South are generational, as his parents have also protested with the white supremacist fringe group, according to the SPLC. In a Facebook profile the SPLC has attributed to him, Monzon goes by “Ambrosio Gonzalez,” the name of a Cuban general who fought as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War.

Ramos, however, rejects any notion that he’s racist, insisting he went to Charlottesville in defense of free speech and as a show of force against left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

During the nearly hourlong video Ramos posted to Facebook, he became agitated at users who challenged him for marching with the KKK and jumping a black man.

“Yeah, I stood side-by-side with racist people, but they weren’t racist to me,” Ramos said. “They did not call me a ‘spic,’ they did not call me a ‘fucking wetback,’ they didn’t say nothing as such. We stood for the same common goal.”

Alex Michael Ramos has been charged in connection with the beating of a black man during violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the “Unite the Right” rally Aug. 12.

Uncredited/AP

Despite his stated goals, the brutal violence in the video from that day was enough for judges in Charlottesville to twice deny Ramos bond.

“The victim was defenseless,” Judge Richard Moore of the Charlottesville General District Court said at Ramos’ bail hearing in November. “Mr. Ramos rushes into something where people are pummeling Mr. Harris. He is an unreasonable risk to others.”

Ramos is facing a malicious wounding charge and could spend up to 20 years in prison if convicted, according to local station WVIR-TV. Through his attorney, Ramos declined to be interviewed.

Other alleged perpetrators include Daniel Patrick Borden of Ohio, who was identified online and arrested in connection to Harris’ attack. Like Ramos, he was also denied bond. Authorities arrested another suspect, Arkansas man Jacob Scott Goodwin, in October and extradited him to Charlottesville the following month.

Harris himself was later forced to turn himself in when Harold Ray Crews, an attorney and resident of Walkertown, North Carolina — and the state’s chairman for League of the South — claimed Harris injured him in the same scuffle. Though Harris’ felony charge for unlawful wounding was dropped in December, “there are still misdemeanor charges pending,” according to the Root.

Fuentes is, in many ways, representative of the ideas of the so-called alt-right, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as a “loose network of racists and anti-Semites.” His Twitter feed shows equal disdain for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the South Side of Chicago, which has seen a sharp increase in gang-related murders in recent years. Though he decried Heyer’s murder at the “Unite the Right” rally during his interview with Mic, he also equated it with antifa violence.

Fuentes did acknowledge there isn’t much reconciliation between his stance on multiculturalism — simply put, it’s bad and should be avoided — and his own cultural background: His Mexican ancestors immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Intermarriage has created a “beige, rootless mass,” he said, and he rejects any notion that Latino immigrants can assimilate.

“I don’t buy the idea that if you come to a country and your kids learned the language, you’re from that country,” Fuentes said. “You have to understand that America is an exceptional nation; it’s the proposition nation. That’s why the identity question is so big here. America was obviously settled only very recently. If I moved to China and I filled out the paperwork, would that make me Chinese? Of course not. I would maybe be a part of the People’s Republic.”

“They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

Fuentes’s own standard — that learning English and settling in the U.S. does not make you American — disenfranchises himself and his parents, a fact he acknowledged. From the perspective of someone who sees the U.S. as a foundationally European nation, as Fuentes does, being anything less than white is the same as being a nonentity.

“You rob children of something very fundamental when you take away a common and coherent identity,” he said. “I look at my Eastern European people from high school and they have their food and their special clothing from their home country. But when you have race mixing, you rob them. I do pause at that. This is not an experience I wish to replicate. I don’t know if I wish I could turn back the clock and change things, but ideally there wouldn’t be mixing.”

Joanna Mendelson, senior investigative researcher and director of special projects for the ADL, sees growing anti-immigrant views from the descendants of Latino immigrants as a unique conundrum.

“It’s this idea that, ‘we did it right, we did it legally,’” Mendelson said in an interview with Mic. “They’re not just addressing illegal immigration — which would be one thing — but they’re against refugees and Muslims and legal immigration. They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

On Aug. 20, days after the Charlottesville protests, Juan Cadavid, a Colombian-born Californian who now goes by the name Johnny Benitez, led an “America First!” rally in Southern California he described as a vigil for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Dozens of supporters were drowned out by nearly 2,500 counterprotesters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In an interview with NPR in December, Benitez shared how he went from Occupy Wall Street protester and Bernie Sanders supporter to alt-right nationalist, claiming he was exiled from Occupy and called a bigot after he questioned the need for the group to support transgender people. He insisted he was not a white supremacist, but an advocate for what he called “white identity politics” — which includes embracing the 14 Words slogan used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Benitez also told NPR he pushes for a United States that is “Italo-Spanish” white, to make room for the descendants of southern Europeans (which he considers himself to be). White nationalists such as Richard Spencer have said white Latinos could theoretically be part of a white ethno-nationalist state, but they still have mixed feelings about assimilation.

“In some instances you are rejected from the host culture, made to feel not American,” Benitez said of being an immigrant in the U.S. “And if I go back, I’m definitely not Colombian. You know, I didn’t live there, you can hear that I have an American accent, things like that, when I speak Spanish.”

Benitez’s girlfriend, Irma Hinojosa, cohosts The Right View, a YouTube talk show hosted with four other women who call themselves the “Deplorable Latinas.” The show features conservative Latinas commenting on the news from a point of view that conversation about Latinos and immigration focuses on the undocumented versus those who entered the country legally. Hinojosa also has her own YouTube channel where she livestreams protests and alt-right events. She was the only woman to speak at a June “Freedom of Speech” rally featuring Spencer and other alt-right figures.

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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In the wake of Trump’s election, Brexit, and the growth of anti-EU populism, the placid doctrines of establishment politics are now being remade. But perhaps more significant is the absolute and utter collapse of Western self-declared “anti-establishment” politics: the “socialist” left has proven to be one of the earliest casualties. The cresting wave of left-wing populism turned out to be illusionary; as it receded, its only lasting legacy was bitter acrimony, rotting political hopes, failed analyses, and stranded careers in academia and the NGO-world.

This is not to say that “the left” has lost. Only the romantic narodism of the 21st century left has truly died: the belief that “the people,” or “the working class,” can be relied upon in the political struggle. One need only consider the riots going on even now in the US, or the one of the many institutional revolutions playing out (at foundations, newspaper editorial boards, and academia), to recognize that the movement is still in good health. But after the disappointments of late-2019 and mid-2020, those revolutions will no longer maintain any pretense of being waged by the people. They won’t even pretend to be waged for them.

…

The left may prefer to talk about a supposed “precarization,” of the college educated, and the right may be more comfortable talking about ”useless college degrees,” but neither side denies the facts on the ground: that for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that this class of people (which, again, nobody denies the existence of) might begin acting as a class.

…

Rather than try to pin the blame on American television, or even social media, it behooves us to recognize that the conditions for this new “Springtime of the Managers” are just as ripe in London and Berlin as they are in Portland and New York City. What we have now on the left and right—on both sides of the Atlantic—is an open and bitter class war. It is a conflict between a growing cadre of imperial lords and the peasantry they hope to subjugate; between the managers and petty nobility of the much-prophesied “knowledge economy” and those they aim to manage.

Just as few took the existence of this class of people seriously, no one took the existence of this class war seriously until recently. The left was forced to outright deny it because they were already on the side against the working classes, and any acknowledgment of that fact would destroy their legitimacy. What is East Germany, without Communism? Nothing; it is merely part of greater Germany. The left faced a similar dilemma, and so the charade, emptied of all class conflicts in favor of “cultural” ones, had to be maintained.

Meanwhile, a minority of left intellectuals have already begun jettisoning ideological ties to a people it no longer belonged to or recognized. In the UK, thinkers like Paul Mason diligently sought to replace workers with young (educated) people who have a smartphone as the natural constituency of the left. In the US, Nathan J. Robinson, the publisher of Current Affairs magazine, pleaded for the left to finally abandon Marxism and historical materialism in favor of couching its arguments in moral terms. These characters were, almost without exception, mocked and ridiculed. But time has vindicated them. It is now clear that they took heat not because they suggested a new and different strategy, but because they were advancing the end to the left’s doublespeak and doublethink. The left had long since abandoned the workers; Mason and Robinson were merely preparing the ideological contingency plan for when the workers would abandon the left, as has now well and truly happened.

In the leadup to the 2020 election, the right faced a different dilemma. For them, the class conflict they refused to recognize was internal. The Democrats, having fully consolidated its new political coalition between petty managers, Silicon Valley grandees, and a dwindling base of minority clients, could not only defeat the likes of Bernie Sanders, but also reabsorb all of the hammer and sickle-brandishing “revolutionary communists” back into the machine. Unfortunately for the GOP—as with the Tories in Britain and the Sweden Democrats or Rassemblent Nationale in Europe—the consolidation of “the ascendant” into center-left parties has left them stuck with the political leftovers: an entirely ad-hoc coalition consisting of disgruntled heartland workers, small business owners, and big business also-rans. For this reason, and in part due to the intellectual legacy of the Cold War, talk of actual class conflict comes at a very high risk for the right. Trying to unite the competing interests that make up the extant and potential base of the Republican party is nigh impossible. The Democrats—and the Western left in general—talk about culture rather than political economy because they know the makeup of their coalition, who their enemies are, and what their plan is. Republicans—and the Western right in general—talk about culture rather than politics because they know none of these things.

…

As a political cause, Black Lives Matter seems to thrive just as well among the surplus managers of Dublin as it does in San Francisco—never mind the complete incompatibility of the Irish situation with the American. Sweden, for example, never had a plantation economy nor a period of formal or informal Jim Crow rule. But this in no way impacted the formation of a Black Panther movement in immigrant-dominated suburbs. At first blush, the children of immigrants to Sweden—predominantly of Middle-Eastern descent—cosplaying as 60s-era Afro-American freedom fighters reads as a hilarious anachronism. But there is an institutional logic behind it: Sweden already has a state-funded patronage network geared towards “community organizers” in particular, but also the surplus professional class in general.

Behind most declarations of proletarian solidarity or racial justice, one tends to find repeated and urgent demands for the state to simply create more jobs. How do we solve the thorny issues of racial justice? By diverting more federal and state money to employing the various temporarily embarrassed aspiring commissars currently stocking the shelves at Target, of course! While the language of economic redistribution today maintains a veneer of proletarian radicalism (often eagerly assisted by various red-baiters on the right, as seen during the fairly anemic “Joe Biden will usher in SOCIALISM” run-up to the 2020 election), only the truly credulous could believe that demands for the state to directly and indirectly employ more and more college graduates—creating as many ideological commissariats as necessary to rescue them from the ignominy of having to work at Starbucks—merely represents some innocuous side effect of the political project as a whole.

A full accounting of the scope of the Swedish patronage machine is neither possible nor necessary in this essay, but it does serve as a valuable example. Most of the country’s patronage machine actually predates the class that currently subsists on it. The “one percent rule” which states that at least one percent of the budget allotted to new buildings or infrastructure must be paid to artists for the express purpose of creating art, is just one example. The Swedish Inheritance Fund, (Allmänna Arvsfonden) was established as far back as 1928, when the country abolished the automatic inheritance rights of cousins and other distant relatives in the absence of a written will or close family. Originally, the intention was that the state would use this newly “orphaned” money to fund the care of orphanages and related causes. The fund’s mission has expanded over time to the point where it now funds a great variety of overtly ideological causes—often with next to no oversight. As such, the fund has become controversial, especially in the eyes of the Swedish right.

The various incarnations of the “one percent rule” or the Inheritance Fund only scratch at the surface. On every level—state, regional, and municipal—myriad grants, privileges, subsidies and direct cash transfers are available, aimed at a heterogenous group of race hustlers, artists, activists, and academics. It hardly needs to be said that cultural minority status, or fluency in the shifting language of wokeness, is a strict and unavoidable requirement for those seeking to access these resources. The state also pays the salaries of many Swedish journalists, either directly (through the various public service channels) or indirectly, through massive distribution subsidies. Are you perchance a radical syndicalist on a holy quest to crush the capitalist value-form while also grinding the running dogs staffing the reactionary Swedish state into dust? Have no fear, that state will gladly subsidize both your salary and cost of distribution for your newspaper urging the workers to destroy capitalism! Even as larger and larger parts of Sweden succumb to deindustrialization and lack of opportunity, this money tap will keep flowing.

All of this is to say that there is a very real, non-ideological endpoint for many of the fervent demands coming from the Red Guards of the American cultural revolution. The state can take it upon itself to create and sustain an ever increasing number of jobs for the surplus elite generated by our universities. Moreover, even systems that were originally not intended to serve as patronage machines for surplus managers—such as a state fund for orphans—can easily be repurposed into a job creation program controlled by woke guild rules. Again, to reiterate: very few of our institutions that are now notorious as liberal-hegemonic patronage machines were created for that purpose; they were colonized. American conservatives should thus be very careful in their quips about “socialist Sweden,” given their own immediate future.

…

The left populist project is very much a project of social democracy for young professionals. Joe Biden’s electoral victory—such as it is—would have been impossible without the immense class solidarity and sense of purpose uniting the supposedly “ascendant” or “reality-based” half of America. (Drunk on victory, there is already talk of drawing up lists of people who in any way abetted the old regime.) They no longer feel any need to hide their power, or their plans for the future.

Broadly speaking, these surplus managers have two complementary goals: the above-discussed expansion of the social-democratic state, and the establishment of formal and informal guild protections and structures within the newly-expanded or pre-existing professional fields they hope to inhabit. Some characterize this secondary goal as one of ideological domination of the workplace, but this confuses the means with the ends. Put plainly, the ideas that are getting people fired today are not only empty of content, they are also constantly and arbitrarily changing. Compared to the often murderous totalitarianism of, say, a crusading religious fanatic, there is a distinct lack of object permanence at play here. The religious fanatic, obsessed with forcing everyone to bend to the True Faith, chooses his doctrine once and then sticks to it. But in the world of the woke, doctrine is ever-changing, and the commissars of today will gleefully sign your proscription sentence for holding opinions they themselves held only yesterday.

Yet, in this cultural revolution, the fickleness of its dominant ideas is an essential feature, not a bug. The point of this “totalitarianism” is not to force everyone to think correct thoughts at the risk of getting fired; it is to get them fired. Full stop. Like the medieval guilds of old Europe, surplus managers are threatened by the existence of a mass of people willing to do any job within their ambit that cannot be comfortably accommodated without inviting the pauperization of their entire profession. For the medieval guilds, guaranteeing that only a select few who could actually hope to become carpenters or glove makers had nothing to do with improving the economic efficiency of the towns, but rather to secure the living standards and social status of those carpenters and glove makers already in practice.

Guilds, unlike unions, are institutions meant to inflate scarcity. It is hard to imagine an American auto workers union threatening strike action in order to forestall Ford or GM from producing more cars. After all, more cars means more workers, means more potential union members, means more power for the union. The specific political opinions of any one worker does not factor into the basic arithmetic. For a guild, however, the arithmetic of power is very much concerned with the ability to discipline its own members, as well as raise barriers of entry into the workplace via social, cultural, or other grounds. For the union, having more members is (almost) always just a good thing. For the guild, it is a nightmare scenario. (Of course, exceptions exist. In some narrow vocations, unions maintain scarcity through licensing requirements and other means. But even then, the interests at play are economic, managing qualified labor scarcity for the benefit of its members.)

It is significant that the figure of “the boss” is imagined by these surplus managers as being evil not because he is a capitalist, but because his myopic profit motive or outdated personal morality is an obstruction to the creation of committees staffed by employees for the purpose of firing and disciplining other employees. Today, one can even be a millionaire capitalist while maintaining a properly anti-capitalist, revolutionary outlook, denouncing other companies that refuse to discipline their workers for ideological commitments.

…

To illustrate the hopelessness of any conservative or right-wing project which aims to somehow “shift the debate,” consider the way those same efforts played out on the left before the election. Take the case of Jacobin magazine’s recent article entitled, “Trying to Get Workers Fired Is the Wrong Way to Fight Racism.” Within minutes of its being published to Twitter, the article was inundated with angry and shocked reactions from mostly self-identifying socialists. The idea that bosses shouldn’t be trusted with the power to arbitrarily dismiss workers over allegations of racism produced a firestorm of controversy among the people who, we are supposed to believe, represent the vanguard that will lead those same workers into a revolution against those same bosses.

If this is just a modern expression of “Marxism,” then it has certainly come a long way.

…

Just as the Boston Tea Party looms large in the minds of Americans, the entrance of the black ships into Edo bay occupies a place of importance in the Japanese historical memory. It is seen as the moment in which the simmering social and political contradictions irrevocably boiled over. Neither the British monarchy nor the Japanese shogunate recognized what was happening until well after the point of no return. The fight against Trump has already forced such massive changes that the old social compact no longer exists. Silicon Valley has merged with the larger progressive machine, taking it upon themselves to guide (if not outright control) political discourse, picking political winners in a completely open and blatant manner.

The old order that was constituted in the US in the 90s depended on the separation not of church and state, but of the separation of civil servants, technical expertise, and scientific empiricism from politics. Without it, end-of-history liberalism lacks any legitimating mechanism. But it is precisely this separation that has just been destroyed; often violently and publicly. The election—with its artfully coordinated media blitz, the monumental failure of institutional polling (again), and the sudden about-face on the existence of electoral interference, is just the final swing of the knife against what remains of post-war Western liberalism.

This is not some trifling ideological point. The last year has seen very large institutional changes in the real world—huge cash transfers from business to various progressive NGOs, the embrace of political education in government institutions as a matter of course (briefly and ultimately meekly resisted by Trump’s executive order, now poised to return stronger than ever). On top of that, the US has seen a series of rolling purges of politically unreliable people from all positions of importance within academia, journalism, and similar sectors. Are those people going to suddenly be rehired now that Trump is gone, no harm, no foul? Will the alliances forged between progressive liberal causes and big business be voided, and all that money returned?

Even so, it is very much in doubt that many people actually want to go back. All these new alliances, all of these new technical and social instruments of political control and discipline, are far too useful for anyone to willingly give up. You can hear it clearly coming from congresswoman Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez: the tune for the future seems to be a mix of revenge and reeducation, not restoration. But since the deplorables are unlikely to whip themselves in penance, the reeducators will have to be trained, deployed, and (one would assume) amply paid for their work.

The class war is here. It will not go away on its own. After 2020, not even the staunchest anti-communist or “traditional conservative” on the right should indulge fantasies to the contrary. Donald Trump, whatever else one may say of him, was not defeated by ideas, but by a society-spanning managerial omerta, organized by a stunningly impressive (and frankly, terrifying) class alliance working together in total discipline.

In an era of elite overproduction, the only realistic means of sustaining the unsustainable elite’s social status and standard of living is by increasing the exploitation of the rest of the population; demands, taxes, and tithes levied against the two-thirds of America that does not attend college by the one-third that does. And so more institutions will be built, more money will be transferred from the undeserving poor to their educated superiors. Our media personalities, academics, and experts will continue the work of inventing new crimes for their gardeners, gig workers, and unemployed countrymen to commit, so that they might maintain this process of looting and extortion.

Those of us outside this coalition of the ascendant—whatever else we may lack in commonality—are now called upon to realize one very basic point: regardless of whether you call yourself a national conservative, a one-nation Tory, a part of Blue Labour, or a labor populist, this class war cannot only be analyzed and complained about. It must be vigorously prosecuted and won. It is one thing to debunk the “Marxism” of the surplus managers, but another thing entirely to strike against the structures of their guild privilege, dismantle their networks of patronage and access, and defund and marginalize their institutions and money pipelines.

The battle lines of the class war have been drawn. For those of us who would fight against this miserable vision of the future, it is high time we proclaimed our own Sonnō jōi. Only then can we hope to restore some semblance of dignity. Only then can we hope to halt the creeping rot that is eating us from within.

#malcom kyeyune #the bellows #class warfare #professional managerial class #read the whole thing

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loudlytransparenttrash · 5 years ago

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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 22

Students at George Mason University spent days protesting the hiring of Brett Kavanaugh as a visiting law professor at GMU’s Law School. Some students complained to campus leaders, telling them students’ mental health is threatened by the Kavanaugh hire, despite the Law School being located 3,500 miles away from the university. “This decision has really impacted me negatively. It is affecting my mental health knowing that an abuser will be part of our faculty.” Another female student gave similar comments to the board, “As someone who has survived sexual assault three times I do not feel comfortable with someone who has sexual assault allegations like walking on campus.” A third female student told the board, “we are fighting to eradicate sexual violence on this campus. But the hiring of Kavanaugh threatens the mental well being of all survivors on this campus.” The next day, students marched around campus chanting “kick Kavanaugh off campus” and holding “cancel Kavanaugh” signs while some stuck blue tape over their mouths.

University of Colorado Denver brought back a 2016 course, “Problematizing Whiteness: Educating for Racial Justice.” Students will learn “the plight of people of color and how white people are complicit.” The course details explains, “The study of whiteness has always sought to challenge racism, racial privilege, white supremacy, and colorblind racism. However, to overindulge in the spectacle of ‘white racial epiphanies’ overlooks the ongoing work whites must do to participate in racial justice. Beyond the feel-good of momentary White racial awareness lurk enormous concerns about how to continually examine Whiteness in order to uphold antiracism, moreover the fruition of a more racially just society.” It also, understandably, tells students that recording any of the lecture is forbidden.

A State University of New York College at Old Westbury professor wrote an article which he states it makes him happy when he sees poor white people on the street begging for food and often wonders how hard he should kick them in the head. “White people begging us for food feels like justice. It feels like Afro-Futurism after America falls. It feels like a Black Nationalist wet dream. It has the feels I rarely feel, a hunger for historical vengeance satisfied so well I rub my belly.” White people, he says, are a Rorschach test: “I see in them the history of colonization, slavery and mass incarceration that makes their begging Black people for money ironic - if not insulting. You wasted your whiteness! Why should we give to you?” The professor admits that this isn’t a “good look,” however, when he thinks about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “be thy best self” and “show compassion to those who spite you,” he retorts “go f**k another secretary Martin!”

A University of Utah student reported her business professor to campus administrators for assigning too many books written by male economists and philosophers. “Many of these figures are of great importance. But at what cost do we continue to plant the seed of sexism in the minds of individuals? But especially in a course and college that is already deemed to be a ‘boys club,’ continuing those teachings, and those teachings being delivered by a professor of his character is dangerous.” The student also took issue in her bias report about a joke the professor made about how, “while all our jobs will be taken by robots,” he will be “retired living in Tahiti surrounded by 40-45 beautiful women feeding him grapes.” The student complained, “Not only did the professor willingly and openly objectify women, but he also objectified women of color. Women of another culture.”

University of Texas at Austin freshmen were threatened to be doxed if they considered joining the Young Conservatives of Texas or Turning Point USA. “Hey #UT23! Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation.” They went on to encourage other students, “if you begin to spot the young racists trying to join YCT or TPUSA, send us a tip so we can keep our reports up to date.” The anarchist student network have already released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and urged them to be fired.

Webster University offered its white faculty and staff a chance to “witness their whiteness” in a program that seeks to eliminate racism. According to the event description, Witnessing Whiteness is about “white people voluntarily coming together to do work around racism in a supportive, non-threatening setting.” It’s also about “learning to speak about race and racism, exploring white privilege, and practicing allying with sisters and brothers of color.” White attendees also were taught how to commit to positive change in their lives, workplace and region and understand and practice interrupting racism and developing skills to act as agents of change.

University of North Georgia hosted several "safe zone trainings" to make the school a “safer, more inclusive environment for members of the LGBTQ+ community.” Students were given handouts which featured a ‘gender unicorn’ cartoon and encouraged attendees to use “LGBTQ-Inclusive Language” by giving them a list of “Dos and Don'ts.” They asked students to not use words such as “mailman” and “ladies and gentlemen” or phrases such as “both genders” and “opposite sexes,” instead suggesting that they use “all genders.” Attendees were also shown a YouTube video from Franchesca Ramsey called “5 Tips For Being An Ally,” which instructed them to understand their privilege.

Middlebury College were forced to soothe upset and angry students after Polish conservative scholar and politician Ryszard Legutko was invited to speak on campus about totalitarian temptations within liberal democracies. Ironically, the school canceled the lecture just hours beforehand after some students complained, then later held a reflection meeting with the student protestors, where administrators told them, “I hear you, and you should be outraged, and we should acknowledge that and apologize, because that’s the least we can do right now, because we can’t make it right in the moment. But in the future we will do everything we can to make it right.” As the safe space meeting was going on, unbeknown to the protesters, a political science professor allowed Legutko to be ushered into his classroom and address students in secrecy.

At University of Texas at Austin, a pro-life speaker’s event was disrupted after someone set off a smoke bomb, triggering the building’s fire alarm and forcing attendees to be evacuated. The event went forward in another building.

A Canadian University of New Brunswick professor said he is in favor of taking a variety of actions against “white supremacists” who speak on campus, including publicly shaming them, firing them from their jobs and driving them from restaurants. What’s concerning about this is the professor’s definition of white supremacists. He said the "Make America Great Again" hats will carry the same shame as the uniforms worn by the Ku Klux Klan. “Every time I watch a documentary about the civil rights movement and all the hateful violence they faced, I wonder what the white people who were doing those horrible things were thinking... We are living in an era with Donald Trump and the Republican Party and the right-wing movement in America where things of similar gravity are happening. The entire sentiment of 'Make America Great Again' implies that there was a time when America was great and it's not any longer... America for Trump and his supporters is no longer great because black people have too many rights or there are too many women in the workplace."

A City University of New York professor was interviewed on radio where she stated the “ideology of racialized terrorism” is the responsibility of every white person in the United States. She criticized America for building "mental health hospital beds for white home-grown terrorists, but concentration camps and high-level security prisons for Black, and Black and Brown immigrants.” She goes on to wonder why we pay tribute every September 11 to “the pillars of American capitalism,” but never to “the young Black and Brown” victims. She also claims she's suffered in capitalist America after being designated a “other, non-white" on her arrival into the country and "white America has damned this democracy into the hands of white terrorists.”

A University of Arizona student live-streamed herself on Facebook harassing two Border Patrol agents who were giving a lecture to Criminal Justice students. The female student stood near the door of the room, zooming in on the officers repeatedly while calling them murderers and saying they were an extension of the KKK on campus. “They allow murderers to be on campus where I pay to be here. Murderers!” In the second part of the video, the student follows the Border Patrol agents to their vehicle, repeating the phrase “Murder Patrol!” and also yelling at them in Spanish. At the end of the video, she films a protest apparently against the appearance of the officers. The student also launched into a rant about the “white woman” who attempted to talk to her.

Gonzaga University’s Women and Gender Studies and Native American Studies departments hosted a screening and discussion about Disney’s film, Moana, titled, "Is Moana about rape?" According to the flyer, the professor behind the lesson discussed how Western patriarchy and masculinity attack “the feminine,” indigenous cultures, and the environment and nature. “Layne will ultimately also suggest that the film is Neocolonialist. It excuses Western culture from oppressing women, degrading the environment and erasing/murdering indigenous people,” the flyer says. It also came with a trigger warning, stating that racism, sexual assault, genocide and colonialism will be addressed.

Tufts University decided to remove a historical mural after students complained that the paintings depicting only white people eroded the school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. The Alumnae Lounge mural, which depicts “the great names of men” of the school’s history, does not include “a single image of a person of color" which has lead students to complain that “they don’t want to receive awards in Alumnae Lounge because they feel excluded.” Tufts Senior Vice President said. “We want to attract a diversity of people to the university. But no less important, when they arrive, we want them to feel they belong here.” Tufts Africana Center Director applauded the decision, saying “the murals create an unwelcoming space for current students of color.”

Also at Gozaga University, an assistant professor wrote an op-ed where he blasted one of his white law students and accused him of deliberate “racial antagonism” because the student wore a MAGA hat to class. Without naming the student, the assistant professor wrote, “From my perspective as a black man living in the increasingly polarized political climate that is America, MAGA is an undeniable symbol of white supremacy and hatred toward certain nonwhite groups. I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former. As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me for the duration of the one hour and fifteen-minute class. As my blood boiled inwardly, I jokingly told the student, ‘I like your hat.’ Without missing a beat, the student mockingly grinned from ear to ear and said, ‘Thank you.’” The professor concluded by arguing that “‘making America great again’ suggests a return to the days when women and people of color were denied access to these very institutions.”

A George Mason University assistant professor took to Twitter to ask white parents across America: “Why are you producing so many young white male terrorists?” “What is going on in your households? How involved are you with your sons? Are you missing signs their racism is filtering out of commonplace household racism into ‘I want to murder strangers’ racism?” She followed up with a reply to the white parents declaring their devotion to making sure their child isn’t a white terrorist, “I appreciate the testimonials of white parents doing the work of raising anti racist children. You give me a bit of hope.”

The University of Michigan revamped its already transgender-friendly student health plan to include more services on top of sex-change operations. The school already covers mastectomies, genital surgeries, hormone therapy and counseling for transgender students. These plans now also accommodate “facial feminization surgeries,” as well as facial hair removal and “Adam’s apple reduction.” Another addition is “fertility preservation” for transgender students whose transition efforts result in infertility.

A Massachusetts school superintendent told a community audience that white people in our “systematically corrupt system that oppresses black individuals” need to “rewire their brains” in order to overcome their biases. The Pittsfield Public Schools chief (who is white) also blasted Trump, blaming the president's “daily hate” for the rise in racism and hatred on a national level. The event was planned to announce the implementation of African American history courses in local high schools. The course will delve into African American oppression and plans on stopping the normalization of seeing “black people being beaten on TV.” A teacher who worked on the curricula design at the schools said her eyes had been opened after participating in implicit bias training and reading the book "Waking Up White."

Hofstra University students protested a statue of Thomas Jefferson at an annual event, titled “Jefferson Has Gotta Go!” which was co-organized by local Planned Parenthood staff. For the past few years, students have defaced the statue with “DECOLONIZE” and “Black Lives Matter” in an attempt to pressure the university president to join the long list of schools removing or covering up “traumatizing” statues and artwork. So far, the statue remains.

An academic conference in Toronto focused on “Critical Becky Studies,” with multiple professors and faculty from American universities participating. “This session aims to characterize ‘Becky,’ a term specific to white women who engage whiteness, often in gendered ways,” the session description states. “Explorations of Becky and implications of educational practice from a variety of perspectives and contexts will illuminate the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression tied to the gendered and raced mechanisms of whiteness enacted by Becky,” says the session description. Another paper discussed in the panel was titled “Border Becky: Exploring White Women's Emotionality, Ignorance, and Investment in Whiteness.” According to the description, the paper focuses on white women who must undergo a battle in order to extract themselves “from the white supremacist alliance.”

At University of South Dakota, a planned ‘Hawaiian Day’ themed event had to be changed to ‘Beach Day,’ due to a cultural appropriation complaint from a single student. The student group planning the party were told to make the name change and to ban handing out leis as it violates the school's policy on inclusiveness. The group posted, “It was determined that these (leis) are culturally insensitive by the administration after doing research based off of the essay written by the initial complainant.”

Williams College student activists demanded the Board of Trustees "commit to a complete process of reparation and reconciliation to indigenous peoples." The open letter states, “Many junior faculty of color are considering medical leave due to the unmitigating stress of living in an unsupportive and callous environment and to avoid the emotional detriment of existing here.” The students then demanded a “complete process of reparation and reconciliation” to the indigenous peoples, “approve a request of $34,000 as well as the increase of $15,000 additional funding for incoming Minority Coalition groups.” ”Offer free weekend shuttles for faculty and staff" and provide separate housing for black and queer students, as well as for all other marginalized groups. Lastly, “hire more therapists, especially trans and racial minority therapists.”

Dominican University in California has added a new major, wholly focused on social justice. The school created the major after a “growing number” of students became interested in social justice “careers,” according to the university news release. Students who major in social justice will have the chance to “examine the links between well-being, social justice, and diverse worldviews.” Additionally, students will “analyze social injustices and work toward positive social change.”

The State University of New York-Plattsburgh offered students the chance to de-stress with therapy donkeys during their Wellness Fair.

#college

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imadeletingmysocials · 5 years ago

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Thinking about leftist in-fighting again and how pointless of a charade it is, but ironically at the same time taking a moment to comment on the fascinating subject of Tankies! ALTERNATIVE TITLE: CENTER-ACTUAL-LEFTIST

Can we talk about how fascinating tankies are like? These are often people who were starving to death due to capitalism (which enforces their belief towards COMPLETE and total devotion to anything against capitalism) but then later I guess got some sort of job and is buying North Korea memorabilia, like at least 200 dollars in memorabilia after buying a gun (because if you’re a maoist/whatever without a gun, all I gotta say is: what the fuck?) For the most part I worry for them if they were die a warrior’s death or be imprisoned before they had the chance to do so. But for the most part: they aren’t hurting no one outside of sometimes being annoying online. For all we know all they do is spend their time doing that, they argue online the whole day but they’re very shy in person because they might be confronted with the idea that maybe LGBT people are treated badly in totalitarian states (we don’t know that for sure I guess, also what fucking reason would exist for such policy outside of pure biased malicious intent, if I were a dictator i’d let gay people be cool LMAO I hear cuba gives free transgender transitions, can’t speak for NK though).

Tankies might even have the same fanaticism like neo-nazis have through some really far-fetched absurd relation but unlike neo-nazis for the most part they aren’t harming anybody we care for, and they fight the same stuff we do in the end. Outside of their actions for the most part the whole tankie stuff just seems like a weird nerdy hobby. It doesn’t help that a lot of it is centered around historic iconism (a lot of which doesn’t feel that relevant nowadays, I get liking certain icons due to what they represent for the people but outside of an image of nostalgia and example they aren’t THAT relevant) which in the end bares resemblance to nerdy historic collectors who love to collect memorabilia, something that due to my personality type cannot take seriously. Like I can easily imagine the same happening with comic book people and how they use pictures of Stan Lee with quotes that would motivate you to be a hero!

I LIKE TO consider myself a CENTRIST, a leftist centrist, in other words, if you see you fuckers fighting too much and end up doing what the right-wing want I’m gonna think you’re right-wing, I hate anarchists who uncritically dislike Cuba and I hate tankies who uncritically dislike Rojava. You can go about socialism in multiple ways, state-wise, people-accepting, fuck you could even accept money and collaborate with America a little if you still keep your leftists principles, and if you are 100% against these socialist movements then you just seem like a right-winger at that point.

Here’s a thing ok: functionally, at the moment, all leftists kinda operate the same, leftists in America or capitalist countries in general, outside of title their actions are usually union-stuff, gun ownership yadda yadda. Especially if they have other leftists to do things with, personally I don’t get leftists who are like “quit doing nothing”! Like if you don’t have a organisation or group, at the most you’re like everyone else and you just bought a gun, have a lot of resources (theory) and are waiting and bidding your time, doing what you can, if you see something do something but as individuals we are mostly powerless outside of wishing to be the next Chris Dorner out of a cool suicide and going out in a cool way, so we just wait until we can build or hope to find a coalition.

I’m fine with tankies that by the end of the day aren’t hurting nobody, are mostly doing the same good activism most leftists do and just really like history memorabilia. Most anarcho-communist friends I know accept and understand certain socialist states as to why and how they operated, I cannot say the same about the many tankies who are the straight-up-Rojava-hating kind though!

So basically here’s the full answer to that question: Can tankies like legit be an issue? Of course, I think the biggest red flag is being against rojava honestly like at that point you're too far gone. You could even be ok with states that are secluded out of self-defense due to imperialism (and due to them being shrouded in mystery the fact are mostly that we don’t know for sure anything at all about them, however not letting many people just... Leave or allow transparency is kinda of foreboden, you need to understand that, and if you don’t see that as being fucked up suspicious activity AT ALL without a single ounce of nuance well you are literally brainwashed and just as bad as the Americans who use excuses as to why America operates in such a shady way, but hey! Fear of Spies! I just hope they allow their citizens to turn and eye on pirate stuff like Cuba since it’s a victimless crime, also Karl Marx and Mao said everyone should have guns so if your country doesn’t allow it’s workers to have guns well that’s a bit of a problem isn’t it, seems like a hierarchy against the people where not everyone can have the same amount of power to me) but the moment you're against a group of people for the people without being a state you've showcased yourself as just being a 100% state worshiper first and interested in the struggle of the people second, like treating the idea of a recognized state as the be-all goal.

At that point you’re just some weird religious-like nerd who thinks life should be a game of those Sim games were you can be a dictator (and even in Tropico you can be a nice person that allows immigrants and people leaving the state holy shit) and as far as things go you’re only useful for joining protests people universally like ironically against American’s anti-immigration and racism. North Korea being this weird rape victim of the world isn’t gonna change much in what you do outside of it, it’s pure religious follower ship built on faith and I guess we should respect your religion but if you actually cause more problems than not then that just makes you seem like you’re on another side, because as far as we know it’s funny that most of us don’t 100% know what’s going on at all in North Korea cuz we don’t live there, all we know is that they’re just playing defense.

If you’re the type to start some kind of topic with me and be like “rojava is a pettit bourgeois state” kind in mind, we aren’t in the cold war anymore, we don’t have a soviet superpower out there installing bases in our places for aid, the soviet union no longer exists and you need a super power backing up your kickstarted state for the sake of survival. You cannot aid yourself with THE OTHER super power, there are no sides to pick here, it’s not a yes or no question, Venezuela isn’t going out there to aid, North Korea, or Cuba isn’t either, ok cuba sends doctors but for the most part if you receive aid in wartime, it is not an option, you need to take it. As for anarchists being nothing but “petit bourgeois with no principles”: chances are you are on the internet, chances are you are nothing but a petit bourgeious as well considering we all live in a world corrupted by capital and everything we do, whenever it be for good intentions or not is within the framework of profit and capital, i could buy a commune to aid my comrades and live off the grid but I am still part of that state, i am nevertheless buying a house, everyone is a part of that state, America’s imperialism owns the fucking world. Don’t act like you better for that, it shows your lack of understanding and feeling better for it. You’re being petty because in a world with few choices, a group of people had to receive aid from America.

#rojava #north korea #tankies #leftism

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skyfallofcybertron-blog · 6 years ago

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Transformers Skyfall: Chapter 2. Invisible Touch.

Cybertron, before the War, had a rigid caste system. Every form had a function, but one couldn't choose what they where sparked into. Minicons might as well have been even further below the lowest tier in the system. More often than not, we where objects. Tools and pets. Animals. Not even Cybertronian. There was a reason why Ravage and Soundwave’s other Deployers had so much to proof.

I was just like any other Deployer back then. I was cold constructed. Massed produced. There was no love forged for my birth. I relied on any affection from my carrier. Yet, in that short time span, I had already experienced what most Minicons would go through. I was bought, loved briefly, then was sold off for a few extra credits. After that, I sold second hand. Swindle did a good job scrubbing my processors clean of my former contacts.

Though, the longer I thought about it, I’m pretty positive that my former family didn’t want me around anymore. I wouldn’t have being in Swindle’s pawn shop if they wanted me.

My next carrier, Calloway, was a sad and old mech. Somebot with way too many credits and nothing to spend it on. I never learned where he got all of it. He was around for the Golden Age. A blacksmith, I believe. The old truck was massive, but was more skittish than a turbo jackrabbit. Never really held me. Let alone carried me. He’s huge servos always just hung out of reach. Like he was afraid of me.

I truly think that Calloway was trying to make me happy with everything he let me do. The old mech shook his little close knit social cycle. That’s for sure. No one at the time was letting Deployers do anything on their own. Let alone something solely for the Deployer’s own enjoyment.

Yet, Calloway let me do it. Calloway let me get an education. A real one. He bought me things. Expensive things. High grade, the latest inlays, decorations, outings, my own personal quarters within his spire of a home. In the end, I had a feeling it was just a longer, more extravagant leash.

I never could ask why he did any of it. Whenever I brought up the subject, he would just wave me off.

“Let an old fool make one more good thing before he flares out.”

Those fires never died out in his chassis they way he wanted them too. They came to end him personally because shortly after my graduation, war finally came to the streets of Cybertron. One by one, the cities around Iacon flickered out with the Decepticons advances. I was hidden in a cabinet while I watched Calloway’s spark was snuffed from existence.

The old mech was indeed a fool. He refused a order from Starscream himself.

Starscream wanted him to join the ‘Cons. To work and create more for the army. Weapons, I think. It was always weapons with Starscream.

I think Starscream really just wanted Calloway’s forge.

Starscream did get his forge. His Seekers tore Calloway’s home apart. Stole whatever they could get their collective talons on. The smug bastard just stood and preened as he let his goons work. It didn’t take long for them to realize that Calloway wasn’t living alone. To be fair, I also shouldn’t have blasted out of the cabinet. The internal screaming of my processors telling me to run was in greater control than the possibility of being murdered if I fled.

I was caught. No slag there. One lone minicon drone is not much of match a whole flock of Seekers. Starscream took personal amusement out of my thrashing and screaming. I must have looked so foolish to the Air Commander. As if my protests would actually harm any of his squad. I became just another tool for the ‘Cons to pillage. The only good thing that happened that day was that I was paired with Night Glide. I haven’t left his side ever since.

Night Glide now worked for the Badgeless. Police force isn’t quite the words describe it. They weren’t hired goons either. They could work outside the restriction of the law to keep the peace on the streets. That doesn’t sound good either. To be fair, most of the general public didn’t like how it sounded too. The Badgeless, more often than not, where just as corrupt as Metroplex’s actual police force. Nobody liked them. No one, other than me. Obviously. People liked to point that out to me a lot.

“I’m just saying,” I raised my voice a little higher over the noise of the bar. Maccadam’s was as busy as ever. Blurr was, well, a blur keeping up with orders. Though, he wasn’t struggling in anyway. The Ex-Autobot found his new talent in mixing drinks. The mech pretty much manned the bar alone. He must have saved Maccadam a fortune. “If the Badgeless and the police clean out their ranks, we won’t have the fights on the streets as much.”

“You have a screw loose, Sky.” Blurr joked.

Slug nodded in agreement, “Bots are all kinds of messed up now. You saw it first hand with that mech yesterday. War does that to people.”

I hummed softly.

That grounder from the checkpoint was still on my mind. He wasn’t a combatant. He wasn’t even from Cybertron. I read up his file later that night. He was trying to immigrate from Carcer. He wanted to rebuild. Just as much as I do. Though, if I pointed that out to Slug right now; his fair argument would still be pretty valid. The War did mess up a lot of mech and femmes. I couldn’t really argue with that.

So, I instead sat up a little straighter from my perch of stacked data pads to take a sip of my drink out of a curly straw. Being thankful I wasn’t the strangest sight in the room.

Maccadam’s attracted all sorts. Be it ‘Bot, ‘Con, flyer, groundpounder, dinosaur or bug. It was nice to not feel so out of place for once. Minicons both stuck out and blended in with the crowd. Small enough to go unnoticed. Yet, the smaller you where on Cybertron, bots would stop and stare.

I decided to let Blurr and Slug continue on with the conversation which somehow morphed into someone joining an axe throwing competition. I didn’t quite catch who was throwing axes and at what. Or how that, of all things, came out of police brutality. Yet, it was always a challenge to follow any conversation Blurr was having. He did everything fast.

I chatted with (fat) Tanker instead. He was a little rough around the edges, but we were both ‘Cons. We had a mutual understanding over that.

However, all the air was stucked out of the room like an air lock once the door opened and my carrier stood at the top of the stairs. Night Glide was still in his deep gray Badgeless uniform. The orange glass from the helmet was tucked neatly under his arm as he scanned the room.

Despite having every optic in the room locked onto him, Night Glide kept his helm and his wings held high. A Seeker’s way to show he was in control. However, for grounders, it came off as arrogant. Even something as simple as body language was a huge difference between us and them.

Blurr went to say something, but for once, I bet him to the punch.

“Hey, sweetspark. Is everything ok?” I asked as he descended down the stairs to join us at the bar.

“There was a bomb that was set off in the Blacklight Mall. I’m here to take you home and-”

“Not be dealing with a bomb threat?” Blurr cut in anyways.

Night Glide’s red optics locked onto the blue Autobot. Like an animal about to kill its prey. I scrabble from my mountain of old magazines to the bar top. Wedging myself in between the two mechs.

“Night Glide, he’s-”

“Blurr, was it?” Night Glide said, “Ah, yes, I remember Commander Starscream speaking about you. He said that you liked running your mouth as much as your tires.”

Blurr leaned over the counter. He hissed, “I might like spinning my wheels, Badgeless, but at least I do my job.”

“Whoa! Ok!” I flare my wings wide before transforming. I flew around my carrier’s helm a few times, sputtering quickly, “Yes, thank you, Glide. I appreciate you taking me home. Thank you.”

I made a point of making that thank you as loud as possible. I zipped over to Blurr and circled around him. Luckily for me, Minicons are built with their own wifi signal. I paid for my drinks.

“And thank you, Blurr,” I said, “for the service tonight. Drinks were excellent as always.”

I flew back to Night Glide’s side and added, “We all should be careful going home tonight. Right?”

I got a halfhearted response from my drinking buddies. It was better than nothing I supposed. It wasn’t like I could force them to like Night Glide. None of them knew him like I did and he didn’t care to give them the time of day. The War for Cybertron may have been over. The battle with my social life wasn’t.

My carrier’s chestplate slid open. I popped inside.

As Night Glide disappeared back up the stairs; I could hear Slug mutter how he couldn't see what I saw in him. I’m sure that Glide did too. I sent my carrier a soft ping to ease him. He pinged back. I shifted in my compartment as the Seeker transformed and raced into the skyline.

“Blurr didn’t mean it.”

“No. He did.”

“Are you off duty at least?”

“Yes, of course. I wouldn’t abandon my post. You know that.”

“Blurr would know that too if you came out with me more…” I said aloud.

I was going to keep that to myself, but being integrated to Night Glide at the moment; he would know. I felt the Seeker make a gentle bank. He hummed in thought.

“Maccadam’s is not for me, my love.”

“I know… I just want you to meet some of my friends. That’s all. I can talk about you until the Knights come home, but…”

“But I’m still Starscream’s ped licker.”

“No. That’s not what I meant.”

“You were thinking it.”

I sighed softly, “Yeah, maybe…”

There was a beat of radio silence between the two of us. I felt Night Glide transform once again; landing cleanly on our balcony. Once I heard his heeled peds click on the concrete, I let myself out. I stood on his outstretched forearm. It was the only way I could meet him optic to optic. Said optics where dim with a long days work. It didn’t seem fair to me. Night Glide worked so hard to keep the peace and no one cared.

I took his faceplates in my tiny servos to gently thumb his cheeks. The Seeker gave me weak, albeit happy smile. I couldn’t help, but to return the favor.

“I’ll try…” Night Glide finally spoke, “I’ll try again with your friends. If it would you happy, Skyfall.”

I felt my smile only grow brighter. I hadn’t been more proud of my carrier.

#transformers #transformers oc #transformers skyfall #writing #decepticons #seeker #minicon #skyfall #night glide #long post

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Secret Identity, our regular column on identity and its role in politics and policy.

In the days after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the two people who seemed like the Democratic Party’s most obvious 2020 candidates, then-Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, hinted that Clinton had gone too far in talking about issues of identity. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman; vote for me,’” Sanders said. Other liberals lamented that the party had lost white voters in such states as Ohio and Iowa who had supported Barack Obama, and they said Democrats needed to dial back the identity talk to win them back.

But that view never took hold among party activists. Liberal-leaning women were emboldened to talk about gender more, not less, after the 2016 election. We’ve had women’s marches and women running for office in greater numbers than ever — all while emphasizing their gender. President Trump’s moves kept identity issues at the forefront, too, and gave Democrats an opportunity both to defend groups they view as disadvantaged and to attack the policies of a president they hate.

The Democratic Party hasn’t simply maintained its liberalism on identity; the party is perhaps further to the left on those issues than it was even one or two years ago. Biden and Sanders are still viable presidential contenders. But in this environment, so is a woman who is the daughter of two immigrants (one from Jamaica and the other from India); who grew up in Oakland, graduated from Howard and rose through the political ranks of the most liberal of liberal bastions, San Francisco; who was just elected to the Senate in 2016 and, in that job, declared that “California represents the future” and pushed Democrats toward a government shutdown last year to defend undocumented immigrants; and who regularly invokes slavery in her stump speech. (“We are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are Native American or your people were kidnapped and placed on a slave ship, your people are immigrants.”)

Sen. Kamala Harris has not officially said she is running in 2020, but she hasn’t denied it, either, and she’s showing many of the signs of someone who is preparing for a run, including campaigning for her Democratic colleagues in key races and signing a deal to write a book. The Californian ranks low in polls of the potential Democratic 2020 field, and she doesn’t have the name recognition of other contenders. (Her first name is still widely mispronounced — it’s COM-ma-la.) But betting markets have her near the top, reflecting the view among political insiders that Harris could win the Democratic nomination with a coalition of well-educated whites and blacks, the way Obama did in 2008.

Whatever happens later, the rise of Harris and her viability for 2020 tell us something about American politics right now: We are in the midst of an intense partisan and ideological battle over culture and identity; the Democrats aren’t backing down or moving to the center on these issues; and politicians who want to lead in either party will probably have to take strong, clear stances on matters of gender and race.

An opportunity

Harris, who went from district attorney of San Francisco to attorney general of California, was a heavy favorite in her 2016 Senate race. But once elected, she was expected to become a virtually powerless freshman senator in Hillary Clinton’s Washington. In fact, she might have been only the second most important person in Washington from her family, since her younger sister, Maya, was a top Clinton policy adviser on the campaign and in line for a senior White House job.

But Clinton’s loss created an opportunity for Harris. The Democrats had the normal leadership vacuum of a party without control of the White House but also a specific void of people who were well-versed in immigration issues and were willing to take the leftward stances on them that the party base wanted as Trump tried to push U.S. immigration policy right. Meanwhile, Biden and Sanders were not natural figures to defend Planned Parenthood when, as part of the repeal of Obamacare, the GOP sought to bar patients from using federal funds at the nonprofit’s clinics. African-American activists went from being deeply connected to the White House to basically shut out of it, as Trump had few blacks in his Cabinet or in top administration posts. And, electorally, while Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren were obvious potential presidential candidates for the populist wing of the party that backed the Vermont senator in the 2016 Democratic primaries, the coalition of minorities and more establishment-oriented Democrats1 who had backed Clinton didn’t necessarily have an obvious standard-bearer, particularly with the uncertainty over Biden’s status as a candidate in 2020.

While veteran party leaders like Biden may have wanted the party to move to the center on identity issues, Democratic voters had moved decidedly to the left, a process that was happening under Obama but may be accelerating under Trump. For example, a rising number of Democrats say that racial discrimination is the main factor holding blacks back in American society, that immigration is good for America and that the country would be better off if more women were in office.

“The Democrats are the party of racial diversity, of gender equality — and there’s no going back from that,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the think tank New America, who has written extensively about the growing cultural divide between the parties.

Harris has seized the opportunity. From attending the annual civil rights march in Selma to pushing legislation that would get rid of bail systems that rely on people putting up cash to be released from jail, she has seemed to try to lead on issues that disproportionately affect black Americans and to position herself as their potential presidential candidate. She was one of the earliest critics on Capitol Hill of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, and her push for a government shutdown over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program delighted party activists (even if the strategy ultimately failed). Harris was among the first Senate Democrats to call for Minnesota’s Al Franken to resign amid allegations that he groped several women, and she has been a strong defender of Planned Parenthood.

A different moment

You might be thinking, “Didn’t we just have a biracial person (who was often described as and embraced being a ‘black’ politician) who was fairly liberal on cultural issues as a major national political figure? Wasn’t he president of the United States?”

Well, yes. But here’s the big difference: Obama didn’t emerge as a presidential candidate by highlighting his strong stands on these divisive, complicated cultural issues, as Harris is attempting to do. In fact, his rise was in large part because he implied that America was not as divided on those issues as it seemed — and that those divides were diminishing. The 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that launched him to the national stage seems, now that we are in the Trump era, almost crazily optimistic. (“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” he said back then. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”)

Whatever the reality of such statements, the political strategy behind them made sense: It’s hard to imagine that America a decade ago would have embraced a nonwhite politician who wasn’t downplaying cultural divides and emphasizing unity. Back then, someone regularly talking about his or her ancestors being kidnapped and enslaved probably had no chance at being elected president.

But 2018 is much different than 2004 or 2008 in terms of the national debate on identity issues. For example, compared with a decade ago, a much higher percentage of Americans, particularly Democrats, see racism as a major problem. Over the past decade, Americans went through the birther movement, shootings of African-Americans by police captured on video, Black Lives Matter protests, Trump’s racial and at times racist rhetoric and Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark. And it’s not just race — think about #MeToo, the legalization of gay marriage and new debates on the rights of people who are transgender.

Harris can’t take the Obama “Kumbaya” route to the White House — I’m not sure at this point that a white Democrat could, either. By the end of his term, Obama didn’t sound particularly hopeful about America getting beyond its cultural divides. Clinton spoke more directly about race and racism in 2016 compared with Obama in 2004 and 2008. Sanders and other white Democrats are already talking taking fairly liberal stances on these issues, and I expect that to continue into next year.

I’m not sure Harris had much choice anyway. She is a Democratic senator from heavily Latino California with Trump as president, so it’s a virtual job requirement for to her to take leftward stances on immigration issues. She is a minority woman at a time when minorities and women are trying to gain more power in national politics, particularly within the Democratic Party — and she is the only black female senator. In other words, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are, of course, different people. But they also arrived on the national scene at much different political moments.

“When you speak truth, it can make people quite uncomfortable,” Harris told a group of Democratic activists earlier this year in a speech in Henderson, Nevada. “And for people like us who would like to leave the room with everyone feeling lovely, there’s sometimes a disincentive to speak truth.

“But this is a moment in time in which we must speak truth.”

This is a bit longer than our normal Secret Identity column, so let’s skip “What else you should read.” But please contact me at [email protected] for your thoughts on this piece or ideas for upcoming ones.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Yanis Varoufakis on Angela Merkel’s Legacy, European Politics & the “Sordid Arms Race” on the Seas

— September 29, 2021 | Democracy Now

— GUESTS: Yanis Varoufakis, Member of the Greek Parliament and Former Finance Minister of Greece.

The center-left Social Democratic Party in Germany has narrowly claimed victory in an election that marks an end to the 16-year era of Angela Merkel’s conservative chancellorship. We look at what this means for Europe and the world with Yanis Varoufakis, a member of the Greek Parliament and the former finance minister of Greece. The SDP’s narrow victory should be viewed critically, says Varoufakis, noting that the party “ruthlessly” practiced austerity in 2008 and 2009. “Not much has changed,” Varoufakis says. “It’s not as if an opposition party won.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn now to Germany, where the center-left Social Democratic Party narrowly claimed victory Sunday in an election that puts an end to the 16-year era of Angela Merkel’s conservative leadership. Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats, won the second most votes, with the Green Party coming in third. Social Democrats will now have to form a ruling coalition, which could take weeks or possibly months. The SDP’s candidate for chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who positioned himself as a leader in the vein of Merkel during his campaign, vowed to tackle the climate crisis and modernize industry, he says.

Well, for more on what this means for Europe and the world, we’re joined in Greece by Yanis Varoufakis. He’s a member of the Greek Parliament, former finance minister of Greece who negotiated with Chancellor Merkel and international creditors in 2015, when they demanded harsh new austerity measures for a European bailout of Greece, largely at Merkel’s behest, although at some points Varoufakis was excluded from the negotiations. His latest piece for Jacobin is headlined “Angela Merkel Was Bad for Europe and the World.” His new book is called Another Now.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Yanis. If you can first talk about what’s happened in Germany, what it means for Greece and for the world?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, it’s good to be back, Amy. Thank you.

Look, not much has changed. Let’s not hyperventilate about the great changes. Point number one: Angela Merkel was not defeated. She’s the first German chancellor in the postwar era that has not been defeated. She resigned. So, she is going home because she’s had enough. Point number one.

Point number two: The previous administrations, at least the last two, were administrations — the so-called grand coalitions between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, who now narrowly beat the Christian Democrats. So, it’s not as if [inaudible] Democrats are coming into government. They went into government. Olaf Scholz, who is going to be chancellor, if this coalition that he’s now concocting comes to fruition, he was finance minister until yesterday. So, let’s, you know, take down a few notches all the hype about the great changes that we’re going to see in Germany.

The other point, which is very important — two points, if I may, Amy, quickly, brief ones. Firstly, the austerity that hit our country here in Greece in 2010 was first practiced in 2009 — not to such an extent, but it was first practiced, put into place in Germany in 2009 — 2008, 2009, by the Social Democrats themselves. So it’s not as if the Social Democrats are an anti-austerity party. They were the inventors of austerity, and they practiced it ruthlessly in Germany.

And finally, the point I need to make is that whoever is in this government and whoever leads this government, this government is going to contain, for the first time since ages, the so-called Free Democratic — the Free Democrats of Germany, the FDP, which is a very strong, austerian, right-wing — libertarian even — party. And they are going to exact a pound of flesh from the Social Democrats or the Christian Democrats or the Greens, whoever joins them up. Their price for joining the government will be business as usual.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well ,Yanis Varoufakis, you have argued, in articles you published in the New Statesman and Jacobin, that Merkel’s austerity policies condemned Europe and Germany to decline. Could you expand on that?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Happily. Remember the Lehman Brothers and the great financial meltdown of 2008? Very soon after that, Angela Merkel found out, to her, you know, disbelief, that the German banks were also kaput, bankrupt. And so were the French banks. So were all the banks in the European Union, including the British ones. And they had to actually salvage them, like President Obama did in the United States, except that, unlike President Obama, the Europeans had given up on having a central bank, a national central bank. So they effected a cynical transfer of — instead of printing money, instead of having the Central Bank of Europe, the ECB, print the money, which is what Tim Geithner and Larry Summers and Barack Obama did in the United States — instead of doing that, they transferred their losses onto the shoulders of the weakest taxpayers, who were Greeks, you know, working-class Germans and so on. So you had socialism for the very few, for the bankers, and harsh austerity for everyone else — not just the Greeks, but the German workers, the French workers, the Slovak workers, the Portuguese workers, the Spanish workers.

Now, what happens when you do that? You know, the bankers have been refloated. They are constantly being given money that the Central Bank brings, eventually. And the masses are suffering and laboring under the yoke of austerity. Now, big business looks at the “little people” out there and says, “Oh, well, they will not be able to afford the equivalent of a German Tesla,” let’s say, so they don’t build one. They won’t invest. So investment is very low. Good quality jobs disappear. They are replaced by mini jobs, delivery jobs, you know, the gig economy. So you have discontent across Europe. You have low levels of investment in the places that are the richest, like Germany. And, of course, you have nonexistent investment in places like Greece.

This is what I said when I tried to make the point in the articles that you kindly mentioned, that Angela Merkel leaves the chancellery, the office of prime minister of Germany, much stronger than she inherited it, because of the crisis. She leaves Germany complete and replete and full of economic surpluses, of, you know, surplus money. But she also leaves it with low levels of investment and, effectively, condemned to be falling behind China and the United States when it comes to the things humanity and Europeans will be needing in the next few years, which is green energy, artificial intelligence, high-tech companies that can combine the green transition with some degree of shared prosperity.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about another issue that marks, I guess, Merkel’s legacy, is the issue of immigration. I mean, we’re seeing new images again, not just in the United States of Haitians and Central Americans at the border, but, once again, in Southern Europe, of 600 asylum seekers yesterday in one boat in Italy, a huge increase in those escaping from Africa and the Middle East, coming to Europe. Greece, obviously, has been dealing with this. But Merkel was distinguished among the leaders by initially welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, when other countries were trying to close their borders. Your sense of her legacy in terms of migration policy and how migration is affecting Europe, given the fact that these imperial powers keep waging wars, disrupting these countries, creating chaos, and then insisting that migrants cannot come into Europe?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Yes, you are so right. I mean, it was such a show of hypocrisy recently, when the Taliban moved into Kabul, and the liberal press in the United States, and then, of course, in the European Union, they were horrified by the sight of the Taliban taking over, and all these concerns about the liberal, progressive Afghans, especially women, and then, at the very same time, you know, our great and good leaders, the same ones who were lamenting the success of the Taliban, they started talking about raising the height of the fences that they’re building to turn Europe into fortress Europe — not one mention of letting the Afghan women that are being persecuted by the Taliban come in.

But going back to your question about Merkel’s legacy when it comes to immigration, look, there was a key word in your question. That was “initially.” Her initial response, in 2015, the summer of 2015, when the Syrian refugees came storming in, running away from the civil war in Syria — her initial response was great. I mean, I even tweeted that — and, you know, I’m not a political ally of Angela Merkel. I said in my tweet that I am proud to be European because of Angela Merkel, because she said, “Let them in.” My goodness! And she let 1 million people in. But then, immediately, her pragmatism kicks in. She is the leader of a conservative party that would — was about to eat her up alive, to put it blunt — not too bluntly, I hope. And within two weeks, she reversed course. So, that initial response shows that the woman is probably a very decent person. And, you know, all kudos to her. But within two weeks, she spoke to the Turkish president, Mr. Erdoğan, and together they concocted a travesty of a policy.

Effectively, the European Union, under Merkel’s guidance, bribed, with a few billion euros, the president of Turkey, the Turkish government, to allow the European Union to violate international law, not to allow refugees. You know, refugees, on these ramshackle boats that end up on Lesbos, the Greek islands — right? — here, they really don’t have the right to seek asylum, because Merkel and Erdoğan agreed, years ago, with the approval of my former comrades in this government, after I resigned, the French, the Italians and so on — they agreed that Turkey is a safe country, and therefore, no refugees from Syria, from Afghanistan, from wherever, has the right, the automatic right, to file an application for a refugee status, even if they’ve been tortured. You know, this is absolutely preposterous. So, you have the initial reaction, which was good, and then you have what has been happening over the last few years.

Let me give you some — a piece of information which I think is significant. Last week, two weeks ago, a concentration camp, a prison camp, was built with European Union money, as part of the Merkel legacy, on the island of Samos. Now, on the one hand, you have those who are waxing lyrical about it, because those refugees that used to live in tents, and they would — you know, tents that would be washed away whenever there was a wintery storm or rain, heavy rain falling — you know, suddenly, they had decent dwellings. They even had a restaurant, and they had Wi-Fi. But what they forget to mention is that there is also barbed wire surrounding them. So these people can stay in there for years for having committed the crime of coming to Europe to seek refugee status.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Yanis Varoufakis, you’re speaking to us from a Greek island, and so we’re having a little trouble with the Skype. But thank you all for bearing with us. You tweeted on Tuesday, “At a time when the US& France are competing on which of the two will undermine Peace in the Pacific more effectively, the Greek PM is pushing Greece further into debt bondage by purchasing French frigates–with a nod from Biden so as to placate Macron. Greece deserves better!” And, of course, talking about AUKUS, this new military alliance to marginalize China, many are asking if it’s Biden who is really creating a new cold war with China. He makes a deal with the U.K. and Australia for — it was a deal, $65 billion, nuclear-powered subs. And this cut France out. They felt stabbed in the back. So now France is making a deal with Greece, further militarizing the world. Your thoughts?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: I am ever so depressed by this. You know, we are not learning any lessons from the past. You put it quite rightly. There is a sordid arms race, arms deal race, happening in the Pacific. So, you know, the French want to make some money out of the Australians by selling them submarines. The Americans come in, and they cut the French out of the deal. The French get seriously peeved. All this is happening, supposedly, in order to increase security in the Pacific. It is doing exactly the opposite, because the Chinese are simply going to respond to this arms race by just upping the ante, building more of their own nuclear subs.

The nuclear subs are a waste in any case. Now, you know, we live in a technological world where we have transparent oceans. These old-fashioned nuclear submarines are neither here nor there. They are not increasing security. If they increase anything, it is insecurity.

But there’s a lot of money to be made, by the French, who want to sell them, by the American government, who wants to make sure that their mates that are producing these nuclear subs get the deals from Australia. And Macron is stabbed. And then, sadly, President Biden decides to throw him a few morsels of bread in order to pacify him. And that is to give the green light to the Greek prime minister to buy three or four frigates from the French government, which — exactly what are they going to contribute to our security? Yes, we do have a problem with Turkey. We have a recalcitrant Turkey. We have a Turkish regime that traditionally proves imperialist or acts imperialistically when it wants to solidify its own foundering base within Turkey, because it is a dictatorship, and our Turkish comrades, Turkish democratic comrades, are suffering under it. So, whenever the Turkish government feels unsafe, it creates tensions in the Aegean. But how exactly is this going to help? By “this,” I mean a few more high-tech frigates that Greece is going to buy from France — using what? More debt.

You mentioned that, you know, I was a finance minister at the height of the Greek debt crisis. Well, let me restate it for the record, that, back then, when every newspaper in the world, including in the United States, was covered with articles about the Greek crisis, our debt-to-GDP ratio was something like 170%, 150%, 170%. Right? One-and-a-half times our national income. Today it’s more than twice. It’s 210%, 212%. And still they are borrowing more money from the Europeans to buy European frigates to pacify Macron in terms of what he lost in the Pacific, while both the Pacific and the Aegean oceans and seas are becoming less secure and more prone to conflicts that will only have victims amongst the working classes of China, of Australia, of the United States, of Greece, of Turkey, of France and Germany.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Yanis, if you can say why you called your new book Another Now?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Because I’m a leftist. And we leftists have a problem, Amy, especially those of us who declare to be critical of capitalism or against capitalism, because the obvious question that then comes or is thrown at us is — and it’s a fair question — “Mate, if you don’t like capitalism, what’s the alternative? How could we have organized society — the economy, polity, the whole thing — differently without capitalism?” So I decided to write a novel, a science fiction novel, a political science fiction novel, in which I imagine that the 2008 great financial collapse led to not just Occupy Wall Street, but to a global movement that, with some degree of realism, built another now.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to ask you to stay so we can have a further conversation about Another Now and post it at democracynow.org. Yanis Varoufakis, member of the Greek Parliament, former finance minister of Greece. His latest piece for Jacobin, we’ll link to, “Angela Merkel Was Bad for Europe and the World.” His new book is titled Another Now.

And that does it for our show. Happy Birthday to Paul Powell!

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Sunday, September 26, 2021

Huawei executive returning as China releases Canadians (AP) China’s government was eagerly anticipating the return of a top executive from global communications giant Huawei Technologies on Saturday following what amounted to a high-stakes prisoner swap with Canada and the U.S. Meng Wanzhou, 49, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder, reached an agreement with U.S. federal prosecutors that called for fraud charges against her to be dismissed next year. As part of the deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, she accepted responsibility for misrepresenting the company’s business dealings in Iran. The same day, two Canadian citizens held by Beijing were freed and flown back to Canada. Meng was expected to arrive late Saturday in the southern technology hub of Shenzhen, where Huawei is based.

US police departments clamoring for de-escalation training (AP) Angry over being fired, a former employee slashed the tires of his boss’ vehicle and still held the knife when police officers arrived. Three officers positioned themselves at a safe distance as the man yelled and ranted. One officer had a stun gun, another a handgun. The third used the most important tool—a willingness to talk. Here in a school parking lot in Maine, the emergency was fake, but the strategies were very real. The officers were going through a training course offered by the Police Executive Research Forum that thousands of police officers around the country are receiving this year. Officers are taught: keep a safe distance, slow things down. Police officers are asked to do a lot. They’re asked to be roadside psychologists, family counselors, mental health workers—and even soldiers in an active-shooter event, said Saco Police Chief Jack Clements, whose agency hosted the event in New England. That’s why it’s important to rehearse.

Texas migrant camp empty (AP) No migrants are left at a Texas border encampment, about a week after nearly 15,000 people—most of them Haitians—huddled in makeshift shelters hoping for the chance to seek asylum. Some will get that chance, while the others will be expelled to their homeland. The Department of Homeland Security planned to continue flights to Haiti throughout the weekend, ignoring criticism from Democratic lawmakers and human rights groups who say Haitian migrants are being sent back to a troubled country that some left more than a decade ago. Meanwhile, Bruno Lozano, the mayor of Del Rio, Texas, where the camp was located, said officials would search the brush along the Rio Grande to ensure nobody was hiding and finish cleaning the site before reopening the international bridge. Lozano said there were no deaths during the time the camp was occupied and that 10 babies were born to migrant mothers, either at the camp or in Del Rio’s hospital.

In South America, the climate future has arrived (Washington Post) Sergio Koci’s sunflower farm in the lowlands of northern Argentina has survived decades of political upheaval, runaway inflation and the coronavirus outbreak. But as a series of historic droughts deadens vast expanses of South America, he fears a worsening water crisis could do what other calamities couldn’t: Bust his third-generation agribusiness. From the frigid peaks of Patagonia to the tropical wetlands of Brazil, worsening droughts this year are slamming farmers, shutting down ski slopes, upending transit and spiking prices for everything from coffee to electricity. So low are levels of the Paraná running through Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina that some ranchers are herding cattle across dried-up riverbeds typically lined with cargo-toting barges. Raging wildfires in Paraguay have brought acrid smoke to the limits of the capital. Earlier this year, the rushing cascades of Iguazu Falls on the Brazilian-Argentine frontier reduced to a relative drip. The droughts this year are extensions of multiyear water shortages, with causes that vary from country to country. Yet for much of the region, the droughts are moving up the calendar on climate change—offering a taste of the challenges ahead in securing an increasingly precious commodity: water.

UK scrambles for truckers amid supply woe (AP) British energy firms are rationing supplies of gasoline and closing some petrol pumps—the latest in a string of shortages that have seen McDonald’s take milkshakes off the menu, KFC run short of chicken and gaps appear on supermarket shelves. A big factor behind the problems is a lack of truck drivers. The U.K. is short tens of thousands of hauliers, as factors including Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic converge to create a supply-chain crunch. Officials urged motorists not to panic-buy petrol after BP and Esso shut a handful of stations because there were not enough trucks to get gas to the pumps. As concern over the disruption mounts, the haulage industry is pressing the government to loosen immigration rules and recruit more drivers from Europe to avert Christmas shortages. The government is resisting that move, and scrambling to lure more British people into truck driving, long viewed as an underpaid and underappreciated job.

Red hot lava spews from La Palma volcano as eruption intensifies (Reuters) Rivers of lava raced down the volcano and exploded high into the air overnight on the Spanish island of La Palma and the airport was closed as an eruption intensified and entered its most explosive phase so far. Since it began erupting on Sunday on the small island in the Atlantic, the Cumbre Vieja volcano has spewed out thousands of tons of lava, destroyed hundreds of houses and forced the evacuation of nearly 6,000 people. Experts said the volcano had entered a new explosive phase. Videos shared on social media showed a massive shockwave emanating from the eruption site on Friday.

Situation becoming 'dire' at US airbase in Germany housing Afghan refugees (CNN) The task of accommodating 10,000 Afghan refugees, including approximately 2,000 pregnant women, is putting facilities at Ramstein airbase in Germany under tremendous strain as nighttime temperatures drop toward freezing and what was meant to be a 10-day temporary stay is stretching into weeks, with one US source familiar with the situation describing it as becoming "dire." Already 22 babies have been born to Afghan mothers at Ramstein, and that number will rise very soon with roughly two thirds of the 3,000 women being housed there pregnant, requiring the time and effort of medical personnel from Ramstein and other bases, two US sources familiar with the situation at the base told CNN. Even though it's one of the largest US bases in Europe, Ramstein was never designed to handle such a large transient population especially when there are better equipped and larger facilities in the US. One of the sources called the Afghans at Ramstein "the forgotten 10," as the focus has shifted away from the almost 10,000 who remain stuck in limbo in Germany towards some 53,000 Afghan evacuees already housed at eight military bases across the US.

Some in Hungary and Poland talk of EU pullout (AP) When Hungary and Poland joined the European Union in 2004, after decades of Communist domination, their citizens thirsted for Western democratic standards and prosperity. Yet 17 years later, as the EU ramps up efforts to rein in democratic backsliding in both countries, some of the governing right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland are comparing the bloc to their former Soviet oppressors—and flirting with the prospect of exiting the trade bloc. “Brussels sends us overlords who are supposed to bring Poland to order, on our knees,” a leading member of Poland’s governing Law and Justice party, Marek Suski, said this month, adding that Poland “will fight the Brussels occupier” as it fought past Nazi and Soviet occupiers. It’s unclear to what extent this kind of talk represents a real desire to leave the 27-member bloc or a negotiating tactic to counter arm-twisting from Brussels. The two countries are the largest net beneficiaries of EU money, and the vast majority of their citizens want to stay in the bloc.

Refugees in fear as sentiment turns against them in Turkey (AP) Fatima Alzahra Shon thinks neighbors attacked her and her son in their Istanbul apartment building because she is Syrian. The 32-year-old refugee from Aleppo was confronted on Sept. 1 by a Turkish woman who asked her what she was doing in “our” country. Shon replied, “Who are you to say that to me?” The situation quickly escalated. A man came out of the Turkish woman’s apartment half-dressed, threatening to cut Shon and her family “into pieces,” she recalled. Another neighbor, a woman, joined in, shouting and hitting Shon. The group then pushed her down a flight of stairs. Shon said that when her 10-year-old son, Amr, tried to intervene, he was beaten as well. Refugees fleeing the long conflict in Syria once were welcomed in neighboring Turkey with open arms, sympathy and compassion for fellow Muslims. But attitudes gradually hardened as the number of newcomers swelled over the past decade. Anti-immigrant sentiment is now nearing a boiling point, fueled by Turkey’s economic woes. With unemployment high and the prices of food and housing skyrocketing, many Turks have turned their frustration toward the country’s roughly 5 million foreign residents, particularly the 3.7 million who fled the civil war in Syria.

For India’s Military, a Juggling Act on Two Hostile Fronts (NYT) After the deadliest clashes in half a century with China, India’s military has taken emergency measures to reinforce a 500-mile stretch of the border high in the Himalayas. In the past year, it has tripled the number of troops in the contentious eastern Ladakh region to more than 50,000. It has raced to stock up on food and gear for freezing temperatures and 15,000-foot altitudes before the region is largely cut off for much of the winter. It has announced that an entire strike corps, an offensive force of tens of thousands more soldiers, would be reoriented to the increasingly contentious frontier with China from the long, volatile border with Pakistan. India’s military is now grappling with a reality that the country has feared for nearly two decades: It is stuck in a two-front conflict with hostile neighbors—and all three are nuclear armed.

China says all crypto transactions illegal (AP) China’s central bank on Friday declared all transactions involving Bitcoin and other virtual currencies illegal, stepping up a campaign to block use of unofficial digital money. Friday’s notice complained Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital currencies disrupt the financial system and are used in money-laundering and other crimes. The price of Bitcoin fell more than 9%, to $41,085, in the hours after the announcement, as did most other crypto tokens. Promoters of cryptocurrencies say they allow anonymity and flexibility, but Chinese regulators worry they might weaken the ruling Communist Party’s control over the financial system and say they might help to conceal criminal activity. The People’s Bank of China is developing an electronic version of the country’s yuan for cashless transactions that can be tracked and controlled by Beijing.

8 dead as al-Shabab claims blast in Somalia’s capital (AP) A vehicle laden with explosives rammed into cars and trucks at a checkpoint leading to the entrance of the Presidential Palace in Somalia, killing at least eight people, police said Saturday. The checkpoint is the one used by Somalia’s president and prime minister on their way to and from the airport in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Nine other people were wounded in the bombing, police spokesman Abdifatah Adam Hassan said. The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group has claimed responsibility.

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