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Author Topic: AmeriPol thread  (Read 3532864 times)

martinuzz

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37125 on: May 31, 2020, 04:37:25 am »

thx martinuzz these are definitly murder victims only that nobody had to sully their hands
We all sully our hands on that every day. When we want an affordable cup of coffee, when we want an affordable banana, when we want affordable clothing...
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Friendly and polite reminder for optimists: Hope is a finite resource

We can ­disagree and still love each other, ­unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist - James Baldwin

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

Kagus

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37126 on: May 31, 2020, 04:41:02 am »

Y'all seen this thing yet?

https://twitter.com/tkerssen/status/1266921821653385225

National guard and MPD firing paint canisters at people on their own porch.


So, it'll be fun when this gets some independent verification.

MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37127 on: May 31, 2020, 04:45:08 am »

Affordability is a lie. The world has enough to satisfy everybody, and has for a long time. But you can't satisfy a system of infinite escalation and greed, no matter how benign it might be at any particular time. I liked the way Jim Sterling put it: If a new product doesn't make all the money in the world, it's treated as a failure.

There is no amount of effort that can satiate the insatiable. The desires of workers are not insatiable. We want a certain amount of production, and that's it. But the parasitic desires of capital have no limitation, and will soak up the entire world but be not yet full.
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Quote from: Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
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martinuzz

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37128 on: May 31, 2020, 04:54:11 am »

It's crazy if you think about it. Governments are now spending 100s, even thousands of billions on 'saving the economy' from the corona crisis...  While it is estimated it only takes 650 million per year to set up a food distribution system that will reach every nook and cranny of the world that is not closed off by authoritorian regimes (I am looking at you, Maduro, even Kim Jong-un allows humanitarian aid sometimes) and end hunger.
The amount of money being spent now to compensate for a few months of business closure could end hunger for more than 1000 years
« Last Edit: May 31, 2020, 04:57:05 am by martinuzz »
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Friendly and polite reminder for optimists: Hope is a finite resource

We can ­disagree and still love each other, ­unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist - James Baldwin

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

dragdeler

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37129 on: May 31, 2020, 04:58:33 am »

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« Last Edit: November 24, 2020, 01:21:20 pm by dragdeler »
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martinuzz

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37130 on: May 31, 2020, 05:19:30 am »

Not sure what that has to do with christianity. But then again I now not much about christianity, I was born and raised with no religion.
Wanting everybody to do well should be pure self-interest, because it allows you to live with your guard down.
That's a pretty grim view of life.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2020, 05:23:44 am by martinuzz »
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Friendly and polite reminder for optimists: Hope is a finite resource

We can ­disagree and still love each other, ­unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist - James Baldwin

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

dragdeler

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37131 on: May 31, 2020, 05:23:24 am »

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« Last Edit: November 24, 2020, 01:21:24 pm by dragdeler »
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scriver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37132 on: May 31, 2020, 05:53:39 am »

Good thread that effectively summarizes how capitalism intersects with what's going on right now

I agree and disagree. Most of it is true (except for the standard police-hating nonsense) and the mixing of classism and racism is understandable because, we'll, it's how US culture has mixed it up, of course.

But the idea that racism only can end if you end capitalism is in itself wrongheaded. This is where the intertwingling of class and race takes the American astroll. I mean, yes, class equality would cut racism to the heart, both through increased class travel and because to achieve it the white and black lower classes must united to begin with.

I don't believe this is news, the American clause 22: to end class inequality you must end racism. To end racism you must end class inequality. It's a nice little paradox you've landed in and the people who benefit from it have of course fueled it considerably. Both through curling the racism of the white working class and by fueling the reaction hatred of the black working class (and other minorities too, of course, but you know, historical prominence). When everybody wants somebody lower than them in the ladder to shit on it's easy to point a target on other people.

This is a painful segway because I actually want to take a paragraph and mention something I thought of the other day. It's about the need for the white working class to step on the black lower class so they can say "hey at least I'm above those guys". You know, totempolism, or whatever you call it. Well, I'm not sure how familiar with working class history you are (or how applicable the following description of Swedish working class history is for the rest to the rest of the world) but there used to be a very strict hierarchy to what counted as "working class". And this hierarchy was fiercely gatekept to keep the lower status occupations down. I've forgotten the technical name for them, and I have absolutely no idea what to translate it to, so for the lack of better words I will just refer to them as workers vs labourers for simplicity. Basically the difference was that workers were steadily employed or required skill or good reputation but labourers did menial duties and could be hired and dismissed at will. For example, builders and factory workers were working class but such work as dock workers and herring-wankers, and many female-dominated ways of making pay, were "labour class" (and below them both were the farm labourers of course but that's a whole other story). And the arrogance and disdain concerning the labourers was used fairly frequently to sow distrust and disloyalty in the worker's rights movement both by outsiders who wanted to hurt the movement and by insiders who wanted to keep feeling that they were higher than the next guy on the status totem pole (stotem pole?). Unsurprisingly, rights for labour class workers lagged behind until the working class movement finally said "fuck it, we're going whole hog on this shit and you get to go along" to the labour class (but still left out the farm labourers of course, but that's still another story).

The message I'm trying to get across here is just the parallell of the two Swedish lower classes and the American racially separated lower classes. We didn't have a racial component to those two, of course (though if you could go back and look I'd bet a high deal of money that the labourers class was where you'd find the most non-Swedes and Swedes from outside the local region/culture), and I'm not trying to make the story a lesson, a "just do what we did lol it's so easy" moral. I just wanted to make the parallell of how these two classes was used against each other and how I realised the other day how similar it is.

So, any way. That ended up being a bit longer a roundturn than I had anticipated. So to bring this back on topic I thought I'd get back to the whole "end racism to end classism, end classism to end racism" catch and why despite writing several paragraphs about how it's that way I still began the post by saying it's not necessary to kill capitalism to end racism. This is also, by the way, why I don't think ending class inequality will necessarily end racism. And it's do to with nationalism. I've mentioned before on these forums how I feel that the intermarrying of the socialist spirit and the national spirit into a greater spirit of duty to and sacrifice for the good of your fellow men is what was the key behind the success stories of 20th century Scandinavia and how I see the aspect of greater fraternity to an entire populace as the mortar that will hold a socialist system together. Well, there's a problem for America here in that American culture don't do the fancy was style of European nation-nationalism. America does race-nationalism, and it does race-nationalism to the core of it's culture. I'm not just talking the racial supremacists here either, I'm talking the average culture of the average American. You arrive in America and you get sorted by the Great Sorting Hat into your racial house and it's assumed that your whole identity, history, culture and heritage is just erased, just like that. You're just "white" now. You're just "black" now. You're just "Asian" now. I mean, sure, the ever shrinking basis for what goes as "white" means that some new subcategories have sprung up, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the large groupings of the American cultural subconciousness relate directly to the groupings of Ye Olde Tri-race system (though negroid and mongoloid has fallen out of usage through the years the term of caucasoid is still in use through Caucasian, a term that is nonsensical for its usage unless you look at it through it's racist history). And I think this race nationalism is something that will perpetuate racism by itself regardless of capitalism. See, equality doesn't kill nationalism. Equality just makes shitting on people for being different less close at hand. But the American race nations was not forged by the same standards as national nations. They were not forged through a natural bond between people who have identity and culture in common. They were forged to make sure that you have another group on the totem pole to shit on. They are not defined by anything else than status safekeeping. Hell, if you look at the evolution of parts American culture throughout the 19th and 20th century, such as the history of country and southern music, you can actually see American race nationalism tearing apart what was once culture of both black and white people in the south and filing the remainders into neat, racially segregated little folders of "white people music" and "black people music" just so the white race nation could shit on the black race nation an declare their "white people music" folder better.

So to regain some clarity in my ramblings. The big main hindrance to leaving racism behind in the USA is not the economic inequality, in my eyes, but the cultural geist of race-nationalism that pervades how Americans feel, think, and act, and most importantly, how Americans create their identities and identify each other. And I don't see any way that these highly-based-on-old-literally-racist-philosophy identities can survive if you want to change that. There can be no white culture and there can be no black culture. They both spawn the other from itself. You essentially need to commit geno-suicide and reshape your whole cultural identities or something else unattainably u-/dys-topic like that. Then you could start talking about beating capitalism defeating racist class inequality. Because I don't think it is possible before then.


Some intangible guilt as a controlling mechanism is a kind of inheritence from our intellectual past in the west, one might say.

Sounds to me like you're just trying to deny the part you play in the system.
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dragdeler

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37133 on: May 31, 2020, 06:07:11 am »

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« Last Edit: November 24, 2020, 01:21:28 pm by dragdeler »
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Frumple

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37134 on: May 31, 2020, 07:15:40 am »

Nah, it's not particularly hard to not be crippled by it, you just have to accept or learn to ignore that you're kind of a piece of shit in some ways that prefers you and your family/immediate community's comfort over the lives or happiness of others and then just... go about your day to day.

Shit's remarkably easy when you're sufficiently insulated from the effects of doing so, really, and avoiding participation or whatever immiserates you. Maybe you spend a few days or weeks really caring about it or having a breakdown or something, but then you get distracted by things like needing to eat, yourself, or your family needing medical care, or whatever, and most of the issue cheerfully regulates itself to the back of your mind. Maybe you'll try to mitigate the harm you do after you notice how fucked up things are, but the degree you'll do that will probably be pretty limited. Part because it's hard to indefinitely care about indefinite suffering, part because this system will fuck you if you try to disengage or push for significant reform. So on and so forth.

Speaking from experience :-\
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LordBaal

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37135 on: May 31, 2020, 09:15:07 am »

Comunism has directly killed far more people. People dying of hungry today is not capitalism fault, its shitty governent and poor distribution fault. Had the mayority of goverments be communist today both of those would be far far worst.

Dont know what is wrong with some people now that socialism/communism is their fucking wet dream, most if not all long about it of course from the comfort of a capitalist economy under fair or at least democratic goverments with separation of powers. Let me spare you all from that fantasy, because I'm living the dream and guess what? Its a nigthmare. Anyone is free to visit this place if thats what it takes to wake you up.

You can keep your fantasy but really hope it nevers come knocking at your door.
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Il Palazzo

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37136 on: May 31, 2020, 10:00:31 am »

Whether one is talking about communism or capitalism, or any other system whatsoever, be it economic or political, one has to unambiguously show that the flaws highlighted by experience are inherent to the system and not just a free variable (e.g. corruption, nationalism, racism). Pointing at a capitalist or communist system that has historically or currently killed people and declaring ex cathedra that the deaths are the system's fault is like blaming the holocaust on vegetarians and painters.
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LordBaal

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37137 on: May 31, 2020, 10:01:43 am »

But I'm sure vegetarians are part of the fault :P
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I'm curious as to how a tank would evolve. Would it climb out of the primordial ooze wiggling it's track-nubs, feeding on smaller jeeps before crawling onto the shore having evolved proper treds?
My ship exploded midflight, but all the shrapnel totally landed on Alpha Centauri before anyone else did.  Bow before me world leaders!

SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37138 on: May 31, 2020, 10:01:44 am »

Comunism has directly killed far more people. People dying of hungry today is not capitalism fault, its shitty governent and poor distribution fault. Had the mayority of goverments be communist today both of those would be far far worst.

Dont know what is wrong with some people now that socialism/communism is their fucking wet dream, most if not all long about it of course from the comfort of a capitalist economy under fair or at least democratic goverments with separation of powers. Let me spare you all from that fantasy, because I'm living the dream and guess what? Its a nigthmare. Anyone is free to visit this place if thats what it takes to wake you up.

You can keep your fantasy but really hope it nevers come knocking at your door.

I know that you're just going to stick to what you believe because it's based on resentment towards what has directly harmed you, so I don't know why I try.  Nevermind that your country isn't even communist.  Technically, a communist country has never existed.

Quote from: Wikipedia
a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.

But starvation is just the tip of the iceberg (which you can't blame on shitty government and poor distribution without recognizing that it's capitalism which begets those problems).  The leading cause of death in the USA is heart disease, claiming almost 650,000 people a year.  The largest contributors to heart disease?  Processed foods, sugar, lack of exercise, and stress.  Which are all products of corrupt food lobbies (sugar is in EVERYTHING here - it's near impossible to avoid it and the science about how harmful sugar is was suppressed due to capitalist incentives for decades), and working 60 hour weeks in soul-crushing environments. 

Maybe the crux of your argument is that you're only concerned with *direct* killing.  But sorry - I'm not.

And we have all the same problems you do on top of it - just more targeted based on race/class/politics at people that everyone is encouraged not to pay attention to or care about, and better hidden from the world by media complicity, linguistic obfuscation (propaganda), and "tough on crime" culture.  Just had this twitter thread shared with me this morning that's a good list of how fucked up our law enforcement can be.

Systemic targeting based on political beliefs?  Check.
Destruction of property and livelihood?  Check.
Extra-legal kidnapping?  Check.
Torture?  Check.
Rape?  Check.
Murder?  Check.
Secret black sites?  Check.
Flagrant public slander and humiliation based on intentional falsehoods?  Check.

Death squads roaming the streets?....... I wouldn't be surprised if we're getting close.  If tensions keep rising and the alliance between law enforcement and fascist militias is maintained.  Right-wing terrorism already kills a lot of people and law enforcement does their best to cover for them as much as they can get away with.

-snip-

I don't think you're necessarily wrong with your description of race-nationalism.  Culture and political/economic structure are a two-way street of influence.  What you describe is how culture had to evolve to reconcile with making use of slavery the way the USA did/does.  And both things have to make progress together.  What we're seeing right now is the progresses we've made culturally coming into conflict with a political/economic system that hasn't kept pace, and wants to drag that culture back down.  So that's where focus on improvement needs to be right now, which includes addressing capitalism.
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In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

LordBaal

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #37139 on: May 31, 2020, 10:07:57 am »

I wont try anymore either, just really hard hope that the things in your country gets better and that fucking cop and all of those that are so fucking retarded to judge people on their skin color, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin instead of their actions manage to learn better. And that your fantasies don't come true.

I'll stick to other threads for my sanity sake. I apologize if being rude to you guys in someway.
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I'm curious as to how a tank would evolve. Would it climb out of the primordial ooze wiggling it's track-nubs, feeding on smaller jeeps before crawling onto the shore having evolved proper treds?
My ship exploded midflight, but all the shrapnel totally landed on Alpha Centauri before anyone else did.  Bow before me world leaders!
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