were-wave:

brendanicus:

brendanicus:

Oh btw did anyone miss out on the MSNBC anchor who went off to fight in Ukraine lol

By the way this is, in any meaningful sense of the word, radicalization

the funniest part is this guy is a 60 something intelligence analyst who hasn’t seen a hot combat zone firsthand since the 90s. He’s not exactly going to be out on the frontlines, both because he is tactically worthless and because if the doughy fucker did get shot or captured by Russians that would be taken as justification for the US to get actively involved. How does the threat of WW3 measure up against one man’s greed and vanity?

He’s kicking back on a supply depot somewhere, waiting for the Atlantic Council to cut his shell company think tank a nice fat check as a reward for all this PR he’s doing. Like pushing for the US to arm Ukraine even more heavily than we already are.

That picture of him all decked out in battle rattle so clean you could eat off of it is no different from the pictures all the fobbits would take while they were downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan in between typing up reports. Just posturing for the rubes back home. It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so dangerous.

peashooter85:

Bronze sword, Elamite, 900-700 BC

from Apollo Galleries

justscreenshots:

Splatter University 1984

probablyasocialecologist:

The foundation of everything happening now is a sort of late capitalist nihilistic politics fueled purely by culture wars — an almost primitive flight from rationality driven by a half century of rising inequality and crumbling faith in ineffective public institutions. The American dream is dead: Children no longer do reliably better than their parents. The dream of a one-income supported household is over. In its place have sprouted the gig economy, crushing student debt, the death of unions and generalized precarity. The rich are unimaginably richer, and everyone else is spinning their wheels. The Republican response has been the culture wars, in lieu of actually redistributing wealth. This has been effective, ironically, because the sort of healthy institutions that would prevent culture war politics from being so powerful are the very institutions that are withering away. Technological changes and the atomization of mainstream media have intensified our division into warring political camps, identity-based tribes that further radicalize electoral politics, and are in turn radicalized by it in a non-virtuous cycle.

That is the soil of America today. And sprouting from that, in the spring of 2020, was the pandemic. The economy briefly shut down, and there was a panic, and then there was a ton of government stimulus money, which has successfully staved off another Great Depression. That is good. An effect of that, however, is that there is simply a lot more money in America than there was before. That money has flowed into every sort of asset — stocks, real estate, you name it. Its enormity is fueling weird bubbles, the kind of bubbles that happen when people are searching desperately for salvation. Booming ​“meme stocks” like GameStop soared then fell, their up-and-down stock charts standing as stark illustrations of the fact that it is impossible for pump-and-dump schemes to replace a functional social safety net. Even more significant is the rise of cryptocurrency (and, to a lesser degree, NFTs, the ephemeral online artworks whose value is now approaching that of the entire traditional U.S. art market). Crypto is now worth trillions of dollars. All of that value is premised not on some fundamental utility, but rather on the idea that there will always be someone else who will come along and pay you more than you spent on your crypto. This is going to end badly.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Stephen Millies

Capitalist media used the slogan “people cause pollution,” as if it didn’t have anything to do with making profits, the profits-before-people system. Today the banks, utilities and other corporations claim to be “green” as the earth continues to heat up.

We need to take Earth Day away from the billionaires. And we need to learn from V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks who first broke the capitalist chains enslaving humankind.

socialistexan:

emdots:

thattallnerdybean:

[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought trans people were trend of today’s youth!

I’d like to add my great great aunt Flora!

Y'all wanna know why we don’t see or hear about trans people from that era?

That’s because that picture was taken at what is known in its native language as Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, it is the place where the first trans healthcare was developed, where the term transsexual was coined.

Do you want to know what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft?

It was the victim of the very first Nazi book burning. Their teachings were outlawed and their books destroyed. Their leaders - such as Magnus Hirschfeld - were criminalized and exiled, if not outright murdered.

The fascists exterminated not just a generation of trans people, but they erased our history from the books almost entirely. It took us almost a century to get back to where we are now.

We’ve always been here, but our future is not guaranteed. We have to fight for our survival, because it’s happening again.

rue-bennett:

jot that down

shadow-banned-the-hedgehog:

marxistprincess:

muffinlevelchicanery: