I don’t think those even qualify as memes, and if I give you the benefit of the doubt that you understand what memes are, that would lead me to believe that you were—and are—in fact are trolling.
Image macros are not merely image + text: the two have to synergistically relate. And since you’re pretending not to know that, what else could you be doing but trolling?
The Cold War had only a brief pause before the pivot to Asia. The US tried to foment unrest in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and when those efforts failed it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just last week.
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
For Universal Basic Income (UBI) to work, the state would have to control the prices of universal basic needs, otherwise the capitalist class would raise prices to absorb it. But state-provided goods & services and state-imposed prices are antithetical to our current hyper-privatized, hyper-financialized neoliberal capitalism.
Adam Simpson: […] You write about rent as it relates to land. […] I’ve seen, for instance, Thomas Paine associated with ground rent and its obvious inequality, the notion that someone has a right to a piece of land that obviously no one can really “own.” He argues for distributing that to everyone in the form of a universal basic income. That seems to be a popular idea now, particularly in Silicon Valley as well as other places. I wanted to know your perspective on universal basic income.
Michael Hudson: I think it’s a misnomer. There’s no problem with giving more people enough income to live. Even archaic societies operated on the mutual-aid principle. There’s a lot of pressure for the Federal Reserve to create a trillion dollars by giving everybody an extra $500. Why are they willing to do that? Because most people would use the $500 to pay the banks – so the banks wouldn’t have to lose money and default as a result of their reckless and unproductive lending. The problem’s not only income, but what people have to spend it on. Paine didn’t talk about universal income, he talked about everybody should have the right to a place to live, a means of their own self-support. That’s independent from income. Once you economize and financialize it, you put in a distortion.
You don’t want to give people income to buy what really should be public goods and services outside of the market. You don’t want to give people more income simply to pay monopolistic public utilities for extortionate charges for water, sewer, electricity, cable TV and education. These are things that should be removed from the marketplace, not giving people the income to buy overpriced and monopolized real estate and infrastructure services that should be public in the first place.
Adam Simpson: I completely agree. That’s my criticism of this ongoing universal basic income debate. It might be a good idea if we solve a lot of other things first. One of them being financial parasites, because in my mind people talk about a trickle-down economy. I get a sense right now that we have what more or less amounts to a trickle-up economy. At the end of the day the rich are going to get theirs. The idea of providing universal basic income or a stimulus, eventually it’s going to work their way up to the top of the system.
Michael Hudson: The key to any such analysis is circular flow. If you give people income, what do they spend it on? As I said, people have to spend 75% of their income on things other than the goods and services they produce. You don’t want to give them services to bloat this [Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE)] sector that is sucking income upward to the 5%. You don’t want to give more people income just to pay higher rents and bank loans to the 5% at the top. You want to do the opposite.
Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, accused US President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict....
It’s not worth my time & effort to look into these particular investors’ true motivations, but as a rule they’re no more or less to be trusted than the C-suite itself. In almost all cases this is just a game to these people for topping off their Scrooge McDuck swimming pools.
The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes and parallel ongoing investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FBI.
Red tape and racism. I suspect that if they were say Dutch, accommodations would be made somehow.
Some people don’t know how to click downvote and move on with their day,
or make a comment,
or unsubscribe,
or make their own c/ComicsExceptPizzaCake community.
Some people have to talk to the manager and waste my time.
I was under the impression that you were going to stay out of gender discussions altogether. Am I mistaken? Normally people with modlog rap sheets this long have gotten site bans. We’ve really gone out of our way, and I’m starting to feel we’re being taken advantage of. You already got your ’grad account banned and you got this one banned from hexbear. If you can’t stop it I will.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."
And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.
I think you’re pissed off at bourgeois feminist theory and bourgeois race theory, which are deserving of criticism, especially since they’re used as class weapons against non-whites both within the imperial core and the periphery. But you don’t get to use these bourgeois theories as an excuse to dismiss the proletarian ones, or as an excuse for bigotry. For example, just because a liberal Critical Race Theory was created and promoted to subsume/recuperate the original socialist theory doesn’t mean we can ignore the original.
Unfortunately ProleWiki doesn’t have much in this area as yet.
Much more often than not, “not all men” is used as a cudgel, similarly to how “not all whites” is, and the same goes for “men are oppressed” / “whites are oppressed.” How bad they are in comparison I don’t care to argue; it’s enough to say that they’re also bad. They are not false statements in themselves (as proletarian theories show), but they’re usually either misapplied or applied in bad faith.
Outside of gender topics, I personally have very much appreciated your contributions to the site in my comparatively short time here so far. Thank you. We have desperately few Global South voices here, never mind leftist ones, so that is a treasure, and I want this to be a welcoming space for such voices, so we can be exposed to more & more of them.
But this must also be a welcoming space for women. Because we’re intentionally not belligerent toward intellectually honest, good-faith liberals, creeping bourgeoisified feminism & CRT will sometimes surface contradictions between these two goals, which in my mind shouldn’t otherwise contradict. I don’t mean to imply that I’m an expert in this area, but I don’t think you’re equipped to resolve those contradictions, and I’m not sure you’re trying to. Whether or not they come from manosphere/MGTOW brainworms, your takes sound like they are, and we can’t have that.
there are laws, but all of them favour women over men.
Wildly false on its face, and you know it. You’re universalizing something that you know damn well has historically not been so and currently is not so. Where can this come from but unexamined misogyny?
Both the Democrats and the Republicans are right wing, therefore “centrism” and “compromise” are necessarily also right wing. Bernie Sanders, in calling for welfare capitalism, is objectively a centrist, so centrism is as “extreme” as is allowed in the leftward direction.
both political extremes go down the authoritarian route
Firstly for all practical purposes there is no left in the US, “extreme” or otherwise, and secondly horseshoe theory is bullshit.
Then there’s Julian Assange, who the US has been persecuting from afar for the last 13 years despite 1) breaking no US laws, 2) not being a US resident or citizen and 3) not having been on US soil. It does this to threaten journalists not just at home but everywhere.
How is that relevant? Political dissidents like Omali Yeshitela and journalists like Assange have also been persecuted before, but why point it out?
Honestly it sounds like you may be trying to make excuses for these attacks on student protestors by claiming that they’re an inevitable force of nature. That it’s always been this way and always will be. Nothing to see here, move along. Hopefully that’s not what you’re trying to do.
And no, the state is not persecuting students for thinking, it’s persecuting them for the same reason it’s persecuting Yeshitela and Assange: for expressing things it would rather not have expressed.
Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates they've given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says ( fortune.com )
The memes leftists don't want you to see ( lemmy.world )
Untitled...
Facebook algorithm wont show you anything related to the ongoing Israeli genocide on Palestine, unless you directly follow creators that speak out on the issue ( lemmy.ml )
Source
Very nuanced issue ( lemmy.eco.br )
AI 'godfather' says universal basic income will be needed ( www.bbc.com )
How the US privatized WAR ( www.youtube.com )
Second Russian invasion of Kharkiv caught Ukraine unprepared ( www.washingtonpost.com )
https://archive.ph/aqPx3
The evolution of a Scheme programmer ( erkin.party )
What's the most embarrassing thing about you?
University of California workers vote to authorize strike following repression of pro-Palestine students ( peoplesdispatch.org )
Google Search adds a “web” filter, because it is no longer focused on web results ( arstechnica.com )
China is burning all its bridges with Israel ( asia.nikkei.com )
Jewish Biden appointee publicly resigns over president’s handling of Israel-Hamas war ( www.timesofisrael.com )
Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, accused US President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict....
Don't ( lemmy.zip )
Exxon Mobil is suing its shareholders to silence them about global warming ( www.latimes.com )
In case of paywall: http://archive.today/M5OFY
Is it ever okay to generalize about people? why or why not?
Achievements of liberalism ( lemmy.ml )
Hey girl ( lemmy.zip )
Protestation ( discuss.tchncs.de )
Crew stuck on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse ( www.bbc.com )
BBC: Biden plans to send $1bn arms shipment to Israel ( www.bbc.com )
Intel's new Thunderbolt Share provides file and screen sharing without hurting network performance ( www.tomshardware.com )
The USA House of Representatives has 2 fasces. You cannot get more obvious than that ( lemmy.ml )
I have to teach my daughter different things than my son ( lemmy.world )
Major USA political affiliations explained ( lemmy.ml )
Why China’s Economy isn’t Actually Collapsing? ( www.youtube.com )
Zionism is a terrorist ideology ( lemmy.ml )
See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy ( blog.mozilla.org )
To disable it in about:config...
Firefox to collect your (anonymized) search data ( blog.mozilla.org )