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absurdist tboys injecting preposterone

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I know that a lot of you are banking on having little to do with your nephews/neices as children and then becoming their "cool aunt" once they become teenagers, but I think that you will find, upon analysis, that a random middle-aged woman stepping into a whole-ass teenager's life and arbitrarily declaring herself to be a "cool aunt" is, in fact, the least cool thing it's possible to do.

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I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

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really though theres nothing quite like watching "I saw the tv glow" and thinking "this couldnt possibly be what this movie is about" for the entire first half-hour

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The people's joker and I saw the TV glow are being credited with making me realize why I fucking hate mainstream trans representation

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whoever came up with "lollipop hulkbuster armor" deserves more money than gates, bezos, and musk combined

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how is trump alive?? like hes rlly gone thru his whole life like That …. and no one has ever just fuckin decked him?? gave him the ole one two? knocked his lights out??? incredible

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“We won’t be able to organize/ protest under Trump”.

People in the Global South have been organizing and protesting under dictatorships that America has installed as puppets for decades. You will be fine.

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Like, you could be attached to and want to date only like three other people in the world and you'd still be a "real"* lesbian. Like, I can't imagine any lesbian (or anyone of any sexuality for that matter) is actually attracted to every single potential person that every other person that uses the label is attracted to, you're certainly no different. Like, if you start being a dink to other lesbians because /they/ are attached to the subset of folk they are, that'd be a dick move, but like you just being you? That's as real as anyone.

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*inasmuch as the word real even makes coherent sense in the context of loose, fuzzy, constructed categories that mean different things to different groups of people using the same word to self-describe or identify

I feel like im not a real lesbian because i only want to date other trans women and the pressure to make my body avalible to transmascs is unbearable. Idk wierd

i feel you anon, a lot of transfeminists recently have been talking about the tendency for transmascs to feel entitled to trans women (esp trans lesbians)

you are, without a doubt, a lesbian. fuck those creepy transmascs making you feel that way. you can only date tgirls and be a lesbian. in fact i’d say most of the people who dare only tgirls are lesbians lmfao

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They're dating. Well, to noncommittally fucking anyway, but sometimes that's the same thing

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and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

no tumblr this doesnt need tags im releasing it into the wild as god intended

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queer people on this site really make me feel like a confused straight guy at pride. the discourse here could kill a man

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Anytime I’m told by someone how Star Trek is the tamest science fiction I just-

The thing that started the fuck or die trope that led to the A/B/O universe???? The thing that established that the android CAN fuck within the first three episodes??? The thing where it’s canon that a species has two dicks, another species ears are sexual, and another has to fuck every seven years or else they die??? The thing that has to have a fuckboy for every crew??? The thing that had two people turn into lizards and have children??? The thing that canonically has a species that has four in a typical marriage???? The thing that started fanfiction and fandom????

Nah, bruv, you don’t know anything, that ain’t even the worst of it.

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Your gender is now the first randomized wikipedia article you get. No rerolls.

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Like I certainly don't want to say I disagree, because like piloting a ton of so of material safely is very important and our laws do largely align with that, but like. Traffic laws are some of the most continually and flagrantly broken laws. Like, rolling stops and speeding while passing are like two handy examples of generalized illegalism that are enforced at best infrequently (and when they are enforced at all it's either for egregious examples, or to make an example of some strategically and dehumanized population). Like, in a lot of juridictions you can both get fined and dinged on your licence for speeding and also get the same for going no faster than the speed limit if the flow of traffic around you is consistently faster. The baseline illegality of typical road practice, and the way that illegality is encouraged by contradictory enforcement, is like a whole ass indictment of legalism.

I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.

Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.

People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.

Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.

People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.