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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2024

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  • I rarely watch fj, so I’m not who they’re talking about, but Manufacturing Consent is the first political theory book I properly read. It’s certainly worth a read and clearly still relevant today (but if you know you never will read it, at least read the wikipedia summary). The book can be easily downloaded online for free.

    Reminder for the newer crowd: “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”


    There are chapters in this video labelled “corporatism”, and I think this is one of the few times I’ve seen that poor term used correctly.

    The word “corporatism” is so often misunderstood and misused instead of “corporatocracy”, a system where business corporations have strong influence in politics (which is effectively just describing capitalism…).

    But corporatism isn’t even referring to these corporations, it’s derived from the word ‘corpus’; body, to refer to a system where economic interest groups like guilds and labour associations, collectively bargain on the basis of their common interests. Notably, it advocates for class collaboration rather than class struggle, an idea which sounds pretty nice in a speech but has repeatedly resulted in domination of labour by either the owning class or the state, and the suffering of the worker class, who has been disempowered by being forced into collaborating at a rigged table. Obviously, when the ruling class is threatened by the worker class, class collaboration such as corporatism is an appealing compromise (trap) for them to support.

    While corporatism has a long and varied history, and I don’t mean to oversimplify it, corporatism is especially well-known as a core aspect in Fascist ideology [wikipedia]. It’s no coincidence that the video author is drawing comparisons to Mussolini’s face on the Palazzo Braschi. The fascists said a lot of contradictory, arrogant and garbage things in speeches, but one can’t ignore this quote of ᴉuᴉʅossnW in the book The Doctrine of Fascism:

    “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”






  • Sometimes it’s not even about denial of what happened, but rather a mindset that the past doesn’t affect the present anymore.

    I often-enough hear people saying things along the line of, well, past generations took the land but society is better and less racist now, we collectively apologised, and my family weren’t even here at the time, so we have no obligation to do anything now. Almost like if my dad stole your car ten years ago, died after, and I say well I’ve never stolen anything in my life, it was my dad’s car, this car is mine, stop complaining about the past. It doesn’t make sense to start acting like equal treatment is fair after so much is stolen and so little is given back. But I know people who believe morality is that own individual behaviour, whether they are doing hurtful acts, and disregard their own position in society, how they got there and who suffered to allow that to happen.

    Guilt isn’t what people are asking for, guilt actually doesn’t do anything useful, but rather we need people to realise that it doesn’t matter that we personally didn’t commit massacres and seize land, because the consequences of those acts still disadvantage current generations of the victims, and it’s not resolved if we dismiss the consequences as someone else’s sins.








  • The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.

    On one hand, there is absolutely harsh struggle around the world for the vast majority of the world.

    On the other hand, it’s not as if most people are never in a good mood. Australia’s state broadcaster (ABC) had a show where people in small or disadvantaged groups answer anonymous questions, and when it came to Sudanese Australian refugees, a few were saying that life in Sudan was often happier despite their material struggles. IIRC a main part was that they had a collective culture, in some places outside of the cities even a communal village culture, and where good fortune was cause for celebration. Some contrasted that with our largely individualist, money-centric culture here.

    All that to say, money doesn’t buy happiness, poverty doesn’t guarantee sadness. Money and other resources really really help, but it’s far from the whole picture.


  • The media sanewashing/legal sanitizing is actually pretty disgusting.

    It’s laughable that neo-fash and their friends think the ‘Roman salute’ excuse is rational. Nazi culture was heavily inspired by the myth of Rome, from architecture to that salute. People in the US don’t just do that salute. No sane person will say ‘ah clearly Elon felt the need to do an ancient roman gesture’. And in case anyone needs this stated: neo-nazi groups colloquially refer to the salute as a ‘roman’.

    Example of a neo-nazi chatroom referring to the salute as a 'roman' after the nazi group performed a nazi salute in public.

    [image’s source article]





  • I’ve been to protests and thought ‘well obviously most politicians won’t see this and change their mind, we’re dozens of thousands but not millions’, but then that’s not the actual point of most protests. I’d say they’re:

    • to publicly establish that there is an organic movement that you can get involved in
    • to raise public awareness (e.g. there was recently a nearby protest at a facility manufacturing weapons which locals didn’t even know was there and advertising in their schools to groom weaponry engineers, and since most of that community are Middle Eastern war immigrants, it was a big deal to raise awareness)
    • to get interested activists, new and experience, all together in a place to network
    • to build connections and form political organisation, which can accomplish more than a peaceful authorised protest

    If you go there and stand around yelling, you might be wasting time. But if you go there and get involved, that’s how you can begin resisting the regime. The people handing out fliers aren’t just pests. (only half of them are ;)