[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 week ago

Capitalists will gladly repackage and sell anticapitalist stories if it will make them a profit.

It isn't all doom and gloom, though. These things emerge from the systems from their class interest that is most often expressed through self-intrrest. They will sell you the exact media that can help radicalize you as well as the cooption garbage. So an element of this does have the capacity to work against them.

If you tell someone to root for the uppity underdogs against empire it can at least be a useful for pointing out why they should not support an empire putting down a just resistance.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 73 points 2 weeks ago

You wouldn't commodify an animal to the extent that you clone and breed it exclusively for rich losers to "hunt" them in enclosed outdoor spaces using helicopters and four wheelers.

The summary in the screenshot is wild.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 48 points 2 weeks ago

The recent military attacks on the people of Lebanon have increased Netanyahu's popularity. When people talk about Netanyahu being unpopular, they often forget that this is because his government isn't sufficiently meeting demands for blood and retribution and making the Israeli Ubermenschen feel like they are perfectly safe and dominant at all times. Attacks on Lebanon checks all 3 boxes, at least in their minds.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 84 points 2 weeks ago

These kinda of things are why the US supports Israel. It helps destabilize the neighbors that don't fall in line with US interests. The US fears a sovereign Middle East where they get to choose what to do with their own countries and resources, not just for the usual Imperialist reasons, but because of the importance of the petrodollar system.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 37 points 3 weeks ago

It's a press release from the White House. Why would you need a journalist to stenograph it for it to become news?

And OP's description is good, it helps cut through the typical liberal mealy-mouthed framings that are, otherwise, the only ones you would ever hear.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 55 points 1 month ago

The Biden-Harris administration will say they are troubled and then provide $3 billion more to Israel.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 49 points 2 months ago

Congress is an organ of the ruling class and always has been. When they (rarely) do something seemingly against ruling class interests, it is still a strategem to best keep the capitalism boat afloat (it tries to sink every 5-10 years).

Sure, Congress is corrupt, but it always has been. The system is working more or less as designed. And if you want to oppose this design, the system is also designed to fight you to the death. And funneling all of your capacity into sheepdog voting is how your masters tell you you should oppose them. So if you want to oppose this system, you must become informed as to how it functions and join up with like-minded individuals to develop actually effective means of resistance.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 40 points 3 months ago

You will understand why better when you take a look at who they say this to and who they don't.

This is not something that generally happens to white people speaking some French in the US. It does not raise the ire of this psychology. On the other hand, they love to target brown people speaking Spanish (almost exclusively, in fact). There is, naturally, spillover where white people speaking Spanish or brown people speaking Hindi would get targeted.

As others noted, and as these examples suggest, this is an instance of xenophobia and racism. Language is being used as a proxy, really, and provides a way for these people to unleash the frustrations they have been taught, societally, to have against them. Generally speaking, these are people that will call any brown person that speaks Spanish a "Mexican" regardless of their actual place of birth, where they were raised, or ethnic heritage.

But this is just a surfacr-level analysis. The next question is why they are taught to target people with xenophobia and racism. Why are there institutions of white supremacy? Why are their institutions of anti-immigrant sentiment? How are they materially reinforced? Who gains and who loses?

At a deeper level, these social systems are maintained because they are effective forms of marginalization. In the United States, racial marginalization was honed in the context of the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery, beginning, more or less, as a reaction to the multi-racial Bacon's Rebellion. In response, the ruling class introduced racially discriminatory policies so that the rebelling groups were divided by race, with black people receiving the worst treatment and the white people (the label being invented for the purposes of these kinds of policies) being told they would receive a better deal (though it was only marginally so and they were still massively mistreated). This same basic play had been repeated and built upon for hundreds of years in the United States. It was used to maintain chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and modern anti-blackness. It was used to prevent Chinese immigrant laborers from becoming full citizens and becoming a stronger political influence in Western states.

It was and is used to maintain the labor underclass of the United States, which also brings us to xenophobia more specifically. The United States functions by ensuring there is a large pool of exploitable labor in the form of undocumented immigrants. It does this at the behest of the ruling class - the owners of businesses - who have much more power to dictate wages and working conditions when it comes to this labor underclass. They make more money and have more control, basically. But this pissed off and pisses off the labor over class, as they have lost these jobs (or sometimes are merely told they lost them even if they never worked them). To deflect blame away from the ruling class for imposing these working conditions wages, the ruling class instead drives focus against the labor underclass itself, as if working that job for poor pay and bad conditions their fault. This cudgel should remind you of Bacon's Rebellion again: it divides up workers so that rather than struggle together they fight amongst themselves on the basis of race or national origin. The business owners are pleased, having a docile workforce to exploit.

So while racism and xenophobia are themselves horrific and what is behind the "Speak English!' crowd, it is really just an expression of the society created by this system that, by its very nature , pits workers against business owners while giving business owners outsized power (they are the ruling class, after all).

Another important element to this is imperialism and how imperialist countries carefully control immigration (it used to be basically open borders not that long ago). But I'll leave that for any follow-up questions you might have.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 92 points 4 months ago

The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it's free and they don't have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I've seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.

The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It's just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 49 points 4 months ago

New York governing authorities are attempting to make the subways into a zone full of police and surveillance. There has been no substantial decrease in safety on the subway. The subways themselves are behind on maintenance but money is going to cops instead of the transit authority. In addition, despite the normalization, there is still actually a pandemic going on that masks prevent the spread of.

I am curious to know the real reasons for the push. Possibly to privatize the subway? Just a grift for cops? At some point in the various administrations there are strategists presenting options and executives making decisions.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 43 points 4 months ago

Militarized "aid" port no longer even serves its empty PR purpose

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