FunkyStuff [he/him]

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Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2021


  • https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/821d2a6b-85a2-4b82-9582-73551ad53e8d.png
    show me a state in the entire world that doesn’t exist because it has captured a monopoly over legitimate violence. The best the subjects of a state can hope for is that state violence is only ever implicit, but if there was no threat of being put to death or seriously harmed for individuals that threaten the continued existence of a state, that state would cease to be.

    However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there’s a pretty obvious skew in terms of who’s getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn’t executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I’m not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim folks awfully often. Really makes you think, right?


  • I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don’t, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don’t trust what the courts say) and the isn’t really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we’re just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren’t ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. “Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.









  • Do you think the exodus has happened as a result of Maduro’s policies, or the American imposed sanctions? On what basis do you believe that Maduro is not favored by the public, yet the far right opposition is, the polls with very small sample sizes that showed results similar to what Gonzalez is claiming?

    The truth is that Maduro has popular support from every part of Venezuelan society save for the reactionaries who wish for private oil companies to run the country again. I don’t know if you speak Spanish or are from LatAm, but the difference in ideology between wealthier, English speaking Venezuelans and the less fortunate who only speak Spanish is enormous. The numbers that the right is claiming are only feasible if you’ve only ever talked with the upper crust of Venezuela, who see Maduro and Chavez as cruel despots who took away their rightful position in a stratified society. Same as the latifundio owners in Cuba, or the mob, the casino owners, etc. If that is the class of people you interact with, you might come away thinking all Venezuelans hate Socialism. If you talk with the workers you’ll get the opposite impression, and one group obviously outnumbers the other and is being suppressed by this attempted coup.


  • No one is telling you you need to do violence, though. No one in Lemmygrad or Hexbear believes that the time to take to the street and start shooting is right now, obviously it wouldn’t achieve anything and would just be a waste of life, that’s why fascists are the ones committing mass shootings. What we believe is that when the contradictions mount to the point that the ruling class clashes down on its opposition with violent force, we need to be organized and ready to carry out the revolution come hell or high water, like every single socialist revolution in the past. Whether or not you personally want to participate is irrelevant because the historical process in which capital undermines its own existence is inevitable, some amount of time from now the crisis of capitalism necessarily must reach a point where its contradictions can’t be reconciled anymore and either the ruling classes succeed at preserving the system, or the workers succeed in transforming it into something new. Furthermore, regardless of your own participation in the violence necessary to maintain capitalism right now, that violence is happening anyway, and it’s orders of magnitude larger than the violence that the left is capable of, even if we were the bloodthirsty maniacs some liberals claim us to be. The black book of communism claims that communism’s death toll nears 100 million, but every 10 years far more than 100 million people die because of preventable illnesses, hunger, and conflict, which are all direct effects of the decaying economic system. If you reject to resist that system, then you’re complicit too, even when so little is asked of you.








  • FunkyStuff [he/him]toWorld News@lemmy.mlBiden Administration Opposes Surgery for Transgender MinorsEnglish
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    4 months ago
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    They have a journalistic responsibility to include relevant information and seek comment from relevant groups. The article doesn’t include any comment from healthcare professionals or advocacy groups, nor does it contain any information about potential consequences of the surgeries being banned. It fails to actually inform the public on the issue at hand, and the auxiliary information that is brought up just puts the medical procedure into question by positing it as controversial (yeah, controversial because of transphobes) and questionable. Presenting only a limited section of the issue, but making it seem like it encompasses its entirety, makes this article functionally the same as transphobic propaganda.