Even though we had a little bit of warning about federation, I think we’re off to a rocky start. Maybe we should have compiled a list of things we think that may make other people very upset. That way they can quickly get to know what we’re about and go hide in a social media bubble if it scares them.
I figure I’d start with a good one. America deserved 9/11. I’m burying the lede a bit with that one. I don’t think random acts of violence really accomplish much and I don’t think randos, albeit imperial core randos, should die. But this wasn’t a random act of violence, was it?
There’s a little something called Foucault’s Boomerang. Basically it’s the tools, means, and experiments carried out by imperial countries tend to make their way back home one way or another. Military gear gets tried out on the battlefield then next thing you know cops at home have the same equipment. It also works for cause and effect. America did 9/11 to itself.
After WWII America courted the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, who had some really “interesting” religious ideas at the time, to ensure a source of oil. Oil was very important to American manufacturing and the war effort. Our domestic reserves helped us get through WWII. We needed more. So the US decided to look the other way on Saudi foreign policy while they ensured us first dibs on the oil. The UK also made deals on building their infrastructure and finance needs, to which the US eventually pushed them of the back rooms where such deals were made. But that’s another story.
The US also backed anti-Soviet/anti-Communist groups in the Middle-East as they had in other parts of the world. This meant giving aide and weapons and training to those groups. In exchange they would beat up all the communists and pro-soviet people in their country and keep the borders open for US trade.
Not to “yadda yadda yadda” through a lot of interesting history but the US made a lot of enemies and ruined former alliances in these places because we valued the exploitation of their resources more than the actual relationships formed. Once the Soviets were gone, we could just do what we wanted to them and there was nobody left to oppose us.
So our former (and some current) friends stabbed us in the back. The imperialism boomeranged back home and we got a terrorist attack on US soil.
The people who died didn’t particularly deserve it but people die when an imperial power does imperialism. That’s part of why it’s bad. Imperialism will never benefit the common person, it will only hurt us in the end. You best believe all this funding, weapons, and shit going into Ukraine will come back on us too.
What are some other real-ass takes for our visitors who need disillusioning?
If it weren’t for the Nazis, the British empire would have been the big baddies of history, because they did some real bad shit, just spread out over a much longer time period
I think the Dutch skated on a lot of terrible shit, because they convinced the world they were all about tulips and clogs.
The Belgians too. My God the Belgians.
“But Leopold personally-” shut the fuck up and pay your reparations to the Congo.
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For real. Its like finding out that Germans still make little human skin lamps out of caramel.
Uh wait, what the fuck?
I knew the Dutch still love blackface, but what is this?
Yeah they make candy celebrating how they used to cut Congolese people’s hands off if they didn’t give them the rubber.
Jesus fucking christ
Return that country to the sea
I live there and I have never seen such chocolats. Where have you seen them?
Antwerp
I was torn between calling out the Dutch or Belgians…Thanks for the alley oop!
they both suck
posh british accents are literally shorthand for ‘imperialism’ lol. this is one thing an american lib can sometimes parse but will usually still hand-wring about that being ‘in the past’
yes that’s a real-ass take for sure: imperialism is alive and well, and if you’re complaining on hexbear it’s probably YOUR country doing it
Aristocrat’s have to die*, as they openly call for the murder and worse! of people slightly left of liberals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNGIyUnLX_0&t=192s
*: (or give away their titles/ill gotten wealth/have their power taken away)
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GOOD post. glad you are here
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“Social democracy is objectively the left-wing of fascism.”
I’m not going to elaborate too far into this, but this Stalin quote is timeless and really shows how much more he understood the processes of socio-economics and history than anyone around him. Time and again, Social Democrats prove themselves to be absolutely spineless in the face of capitalist opposition, with their only effective political purpose being punching to the left and preserving core imperialism. They have no internationalism, and they are a political dead-end, simply being the left-wing shepherds of the apocalypse. When Gorbachev wanted to bring Russia into a European social-democratic (euro-communism) model, all he ended up doing was absolutely blasting the Russian economy and setting up the tragedy of Yeltsin and Putin.
I could go in further, really getting into the nitty-gritty of the racism and colonialism that powers the Nordic models, but that is another post for another day. It’s something to remember that Bernie was the compromise for many of us. Not a good compromise, but an acceptable one.
Jumping in to add, the social democrats helped found the Freikorps, a paramilitary organization that engaged in the mass murder of European communists and later became Hitler’s SA.
Everything bad the USSR was accused of doing, the United States and it’s allies actually did, and usually 1000x worse. And surprise! It wasn’t for the “good of democracy”, it was because some American business tyrant wants to build a mine somewhere.
ACAB is another one libs don’t like but less offensive I think than the above.
You actually need to have some deeply ingrained racism to accept at face value basically everything negative you hear about the DPRK from Western news media. I’ve had people irl relate to me that “you know the people of North Korea believe their leader doesn’t poop”, -buddy, who’s the fool here?
oh yeah, and my god the history of Ukraine did not start with the 2022 invasion by Russia - idk how many times I’ve heard irl and on this federated site “oh no, actually I’ve followed the conflict since 2014, actually! and here’s why we need to kill every ruzzian ork on site”
and when asked about “ok, so what about the objective fact of ousting the elected president for a fair right wing candidate that immediately tries to make the russian language illegal? what about nazi marches in the streets, mysterious snipers that shot both protestors AND police, the RECORDED PHONE CALL OF US OFFICIALS PICKING THE NEW GOV, uh the nazis who boarded up the trade unionists and burned them alive, uh and on and on” and their response is just SILENCE or just picking a different (often single-line) response to comment on instead
ACAB is another one libs don’t like but less offensive I think than the above.
You just have to mix this in a cocktail with police abolition and they spin up to full RPM
I don’t think randos, albeit imperial core randos
I think it’s worth correcting this. The people of the WTC were not just randos. The tenants list of the towers was:
WTC1(North)
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - Randos
Marsh & McLennan Companies - Huge finance capitalist firm
Bank of America
Cantor Fitzgerald - Huge finance capitalist firm
Dai-Ichi Kangyo Group - A japanese Keiretsu (monopoly group) (more bastards)
Sidley Austin Brown & Wood - Law firm, primarily serving finance capitalists
Restaurant “Windows on the World” - Randos
WTC2(South)
Verizon - Randos
New York Stock Exchange - Finance capitalists
Morgan Stanley - Finance capitalists
Xerox Corporation - Randos
Keefe, Bruyette & Woods - Finance capitalists
Aon Corporation - Finance capitalist advisory firm
Fiduciary Trust Company International - Finance capitalists
WTC7
Salomon Smith Barney - Finance capitalists
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission - Finance capitalist regulator
Standard Chartered Bank - Finance capitalists
U.S. Secret Service - Ghouls
My point here is that these were not “randos” that were attacked. This was a direct and targeted attack on the bourgeoisie. This was targeted directly at the ruling class of america and the response that occurred posing it as an “attack on america” was because the bourgeoisie consider themselves to be america and that any attack on them is an attack on the nation. Had this been a bombing against randos it would have been largely ignored, as you see with most bombings of random shopping centres etc. It was because it was an attack on the ruling class that it created such an extensive response from them.
Xerox Corporation
Tech companies, especially tech companies that are as old as Xerox, definitely are at least finance capital adjacent. Old school mainframes were almost exclusively catered towards financial institutions like banks because they’re the only place where you would simultaneously need computers and could afford computers, in this case for number-crunching financial transactions. Mainframes were also used by the military and the feds as a counter-insurgent weapon, in this case as a means of handling massive amounts of data gathered by informants and general surveillance. The origins of tech as an industry that caters to the military and finance explains the general reactionary character of subcultures that have origins in tech like gaming as well as entirely predict how social media companies would be entirely incorporated within the surveillance apparatus.
Was the WTC where the actual execs and shit were working though? From what I understood I thought it was mostly middle management and lower type employees in those buildings. This makes a lot of sense, though - I never really connected the contents of the WTC building with its selection as a target for the attack. Still, as much as we collectively deserved 9/11, it’s hard for me to lean in and say ‘those guys ESPECIALLY deserved it’ if they were just middle of the rung 9-5ers. If that was the case, they’re like… a degree or two closer to the imperial core, but this country basically forces you to work for those assholes if you want to be even lower-middle class. Unless I’m totally wrong, in which case forget everything I just said. But I prefer to think along the lines of how Chomsky described our collective guilt via our indifference during the Vietnam war era, namely that we were all equally culpable for not doing everything in our power to stop this project. Every American (us included) should be doing more.
dont fall far this shit , this position reqires every american to have an Impact on Policy , You dont . Its a Psy Op by witch the rulingclas spreads its guilt onto you . dont let them ,… same Psy Op currently runns in regards to Climate Change , were it is framed as beeing a issue of “individual Responsibility” , So you are suddenly just as guilty as a factoryowner , even more ! he eats only Organic meat ,and his Servers sort the Waste …
Chomsky Btw is precisly “Allowed” in puplic discorse because he preaches this “Classless Guilt” shit…
its a “Divide et Imperia” thingy …
Chomsky was a bit more culpable than the average for being a “left” opposition to the more serious protestors:
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I think the US embargo on Cuba is a genocide. No really, it fits the UN definition of a genocide
Based take and should be added to the rotating header message list.
I’m pretty sure blockades are also illegal under international law. I think unilateral sanction regimes are, too.
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The sovereign is he who decides the exception- Carl SchmittThe term in the German original is not exception, but Ausnahmezustand, which means “state of emergency” or “martial law”. Schmitt is ultimately going for what you are implying there, but the translation still seems off to me.
Sorry for being the smug asshole doing the “in the original German” bit, just felt it’s kinda worth mentioning.
True. Thanks for the correction comrade, tho in my head I was indeed understanding it as ‘state of exception’ being synonymous with ‘state of emergency’. But yes thanks for noting the better translation.
The difference really isn’t that huge, ultimately declaring martial law is just a codified way of saying “i just altered the deal, pray i do not alter it further.” The sovereign is the one who can force anybody to play by the rules while declaring the very same rules to be void when they see fit.
the German original is not exception, but Ausnahmezustand
Man these Germans really have a word for anything.
In typical German fashion, that word for “martial law” literally translates to “state of exception”
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“Gesundheit.”
Translation notes are really important for understanding nuances that get lost across language. I appreciate your contribution!
There hasn’t been a blockade since the Cuban missile crisis.
I should explain what I mean. I was using the terminology in a way that’s somewhat of a stretch.
There’s an argument to be made that economic embargo serves the same purpose as blockade, and that the only meaningful difference is not having actual warships present. And moreover that it should be treated as similar to blockade because it inflicts many of the same harms.
“It’s not a genocide when WE do it!” Is all the USA has to say about it.
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I had no idea about this. Thank you for enlightening me
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Also, this is something to keep in mind when Americans try to claim that the Soviets started the Korean War.
I’ll add to this that the US helped cement the power and privilege of the chaebol. These conglomerates are owned by families who collaborated with imperial Japan during the occupation.
I just like pointing out how much the National Guard and Army are responsible for fucking over labor rights in the US. It’s not even over, either. Arizona used the troops as scabs when the teachers were largely chased off, or how the troops were used as intimidation when the rail workers were on strike. That they rape and slaughter women and children overseas is hardly a hot take.
Daily reminder that the first bombs on US soil were not dropped in Pearl Harbour, but the US bombing itself to kill communists and labour unionists.
I always heard it was the fire bombing of Black Wall Street in Tulsa. That wasn’t US military though, just racists with an aeroplane.
Yeah, Tulsa happened about 3 months before Blair Mountain.
Also, I always dispute the fact that it was “just racists” in Tulsa, because we know cops and national guard were on some of the “private planes” and where did the bombs come from?
Good point.
probably https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
there were multiple armed insurrections in the eastern mountains organized against capitalism and ultimately put down by the US military because the threat to powerful northeastern capital formations was existential.
it is not a coincidence that this part of the US has experienced extreme poverty and wildly uneven development ever since, while it is repeatedly slandered in popular culture as a place of backwardness and incest.
Nazis and fascism were an extension of the USA, due to it being the fortress of capitalism itself, fascists are the soldiers of capitalism
Recycling this from a recent post of mine but: structural violence is still violence. Colonialism and slavery never ended. Your treats are funded with murder.
There’s no such thing as a good capitalist / landlord / business owner.
Democracy has never existed in the USA, at least where euros were in control.
Because the Democrats embrace imperialism and privatization, they would be considered a far-right party in any other country. This includes progressive Democrats and local Democrats (who almost universally pretend to care about LGBTQ+ issues while dumping endless piles of money onto the police).
All the land in the USA should be returned to indigenous sovereignty. Workers who are onboard with this should work with indigenous people and descendants of slaves to make it happen. This might be a hot take for some of my fellow hexbears but colonialism is the primary contradiction, capitalism cannot exist without colonialism, it never would have gotten off the ground in England without Columbus’s “discovery” of “America” and the subsequent runaway inflation that occurred with regard to the 16th century’s religious wars. Higher prices = it’s more profitable to raise sheep = capitalism takes over the planet.
China should find a way to disable amerikkka’s entire nuclear arsenal ASAP.
One day the concept of private property will look as absurd and barbaric as the concept of chattel slavery.
2/3 of covid deaths in the USA took place under Biden. Biden has signed more drilling permits than Trump, and continues to cage children. He is also attempting to start a nuclear war with Russia, and is 100% responsible for recent tensions regarding Taiwan. He is not just Blue Trump; Biden is the more competent fascist that many people were warning us about.
Recycling this from a recent post of mine but: structural violence is still violence.
For others, the main term for this in classical Marxism is “Social Murder,” coined by Engels to describe the creation of conditions (mainly working conditions) in which some number of deaths was statistically inevitable even if the individual deaths were “accidents”.
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
US covid policy is the perfect example of social murder.
Biden ignited a land war in Europe.
That alone is worthy of trial and execution. The man has reverted us back to the era of World Wars and fed hundreds of thousands into a meat grinder for the sake of lines on a map.
The planet is being deliberately destroyed for the benefit of a small number of people. They know they are doing it, and they don’t care. It is not an accidental consequence of a system that is slightly broken: it is the deliberate consequence of a system working as designed.
I can’t stand it when people (mostly liberals) talk about how climate change is self-destructive, they constantly talk about how it’s humanity just irrationally destroying itself
It’s a genocide! We aren’t fucking up the whole earth, we’re fucking up 95% of it! And they can buy the good parts.
Haiti is shit upon by the world because the slaves didn’t follow the rules for order and await white emancipation… making the French look like goons
Cats belong indoors, they live longer and are generally more healthy. They murder less birds that way.
Also, leave river rocks alone
Also, leave river rocks alone
That was one of the most insane threads I’ve read on here
Seemed like most of the arguing was because that seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon. Anyone outside 'merica has never seen or heard of such a thing happening.
what thread?
awhile before federation, hexbear got into an internal argument over whether tourists stacking river rocks in the US southwest was okay or not, precipitated over criticism for Native American groups decrying the behavior as damaging. outdoor cats was another of these.
over whether tourists stacking river rocks in the US southwest was okay or not
Oooh see I forgot it was localized, I remembered the thread how once you even turn one stone in any river, you basically destroy a beautiful ecosystem.
Let’s just say I’ve turned a few river rocks since then. I also thought about the damn thread a lot. But now i’m relieved that central european river rock ecosystems should be fairly save to disturb. Phew!
Indeed, “Leave only footprints” isn’t just a cute catchphrase to put on a sign.
Oof, imagine not simply levitating.
when are we having the “stewardship of the environment requires us to not leave footprints” struggle session?
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but what about the murder treats
eat your beans
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I’m not American but I lived in Manhattan in 2001 about three blocks away from the World Trade Center I got to experience it in real time and I still think the US deserved it.
running angrily at the burning towers screaming “WHY DIDN’T YOU GUYS INVITE ME!”
The United States is the single greatest threat to LGBT+ people in the world. Not only are many parts of the country actively trying to deny trans people life saving medicine, they are helping to fund draconian anti-LGBT+ laws in various African and South American countries. They also helped and are probably still helping Saudi Arabia displace the indigenous Islamic traditions in favor of their more inhumane version, leading to queer people in Islamic countries to be even more at risk.
On top of that, because the US kills so many people, both directly through military action, and through sanctions, that statistically more LGBT+ people are killed yearly by America than all of the countries with the death penalty for homosexuality combined.
