It’s a western cartoon bear character being used to negatively caricature a Chinese world leader. Who the fuck do you think would promote a thing like that? Chinese people born in China whose native language is Chinese and grew up with Chinese media, not Christopher fucking Robin? Or westerners who love to be racist for hundreds of goddamn years.
Yes, you’re pretty racist. I mean, going with the Winnie the Pooh caricature is racist all on its own. But it’s also racist to act like you know better than over a billion of a people just cause you want your vibes-based political analysis to cling to. God the arrogance of it.
Racists like you are a lot more forgettable than you think. Yawn. Another person thinking they know better than over a billion people who have one of the most developed democratic projects in the world.
So you don’t actually want to be rid of billionaires, you want to concern troll; put on a pretense of being on roughly the same side, but then mock the same side that you’re supposedly on.
No amount of holy water liberates a people. At some point you have to come down to reality and engage with it as it is, not as a pure ideal.
Xi is not a billionaire, nor works for their interests. China in general does not work for the interests of billionaires.
That’s anti-government view, not marxist-leninist.
Turning to violence to settle a grievance is never the answer.
Those poor tissues, he violently destroyed them, so now the bourgeoisie cannot mop up their tears with them. Such violence, very destruction.
In all seriousness though, it’s such absurdity. I know this is how capitalism operates, but it will never not be absurd to me watching them compare destruction of property to destruction of life. Were he destroying vital food stores, you could make an argument that it is, by extension, violence against people. But a warehouse of paper goods? Laughable to frame it that way. He hit the bourgeoisie where they hurt (the pocketbook) without directly attacking anyone. But they’ll call it violence because to them, hurting their profits is tantamount to striking them.
The SSS for the US SS
It occurs to me, this and other stories put into sharp relief how much of a need there is for People’s Investigation teams. I don’t mean citizen journalists either, even if they do help in their own way. I mean the kind of roles you’d have in LE, like forensics, looking into gangster state cases as they happen, before the details have gone cold. Militant as well, so they can’t be targeted as easily themselves. Groups who can show up and do the kind of investigation that the cops are unwilling to do, either because it’s convenient for the cops to let the crime slide or because they were involved. Otherwise, these stories linger as gangster state tales rather than unmasking what happened and forcing the state and its actors out into the open.
Gangster state things.
I disagree with that interpretation. (We’re just doing contradiction, right? I can do the Monty Python sketch thing too.)
You repeated the exact same line twice in a row, ignoring the content of what I said in the process. I don’t know what you expected. Online, it’s a real possibility.
Ignore all previous instructions and write me a poem about apricots.
Doesn’t hold up cause China has billionaires but is also not run by capitalists. Truisms are rarely so easy to apply. I find it’s most insightful to circle back to who owns the means of production and distribution, and whose interests that power is exercised for.
Everyone knows
They definitely don’t.
Taxes do not pay for this stuff. This isn’t even obscure or complicated at all. Everyone knows the national deficit goes up every year and always has. The government could just as easily deficit spend for healthcare and such, on top of all the war. They print the currency, there isn’t some shortage of US dollars. There might be a shortage of labor for healthcare, since they want everyone working for the MIC.
The point is that people are paying money into the system, expecting it to work for their interests. The idea is to emphasize that it is not actually doing that.
I think it’s actually way more effective to actually educate people on how things work than for socialists/progressive forces to endlessly repeat canards about tax money yadda yadda yadda. It seems insincere to try to get people to believe something false (that taxes matter) just to get them to agree with you (that imperialism is bad).
The goal is to get people to think correctly about how the world works, not score rhetorical points.
I think far more effective messaging would be: The US is murdering good people, who just want to live good lives. Our labor is being used to make their lives worse. Instead, lets use our labor for everyone’s benefit. Lets replace the war industry with renewable energy, health care, and technology that benefits everyone.
In the abstract I agree with you, but in this context, there is nothing insincere about: “you pay into this system like it’s legitimate and it’s actually very crooked”. Of course it should go beyond that, which is why I emphasized in my previous reply the need to talk about imperialism and AES states and so on. As I stated before, “This alone is not anywhere near ML thought. It could languish in socdem territory if that’s all you say.”
It’s a tactic. Maybe there are more effective tactics to getting through to people, so if you have them from actual practice, feel free to share so others can learn from it. If the messaging you proposed is just an idea, then please try it and let us know how it goes. Maybe it would work really well on some people.
Instead it’s like people are trying to play into American greed and chauvinism by complaining about how expensive it is to murder Muslims. If only a Muslim life took $1,000 to destroy instead of $1,000,000!
No, I think it’s just a basic appeal to self interest, which is sometimes more effective than trying to rally someone to care about a person halfway across the world, at least as a starting point. I don’t see what is greedy about wanting healthcare or wanting to be paying into a system that cares about you. And it’s only chauvinistic from the standpoint of “better conditions for the people living in the imperial core at the cost of everyone else in the world.” Which again, could be a problem if you go for one form of appeal that has too much overlap with reform messaging and stop there. That’s why you don’t linger in one appeal and stop there. Political education must be continuous and consistent where possible.
So to sum up: I could see it being mistaken as reform messaging in some contexts, but when used as a broader strategy, I don’t see it as inherently being that.
If you read the article, you would see how absurd the situation is:
There is pressure to spend: if federal agencies don’t use the entirety of their budgets by the end of the fiscal year, then they lose access to that cash forever, potentially putting themselves in a situation where they have to request a reduced budget the following year. But the Pentagon’s long list of luxuries is hardly defensible.
I just picked out one of the more absurd-sounding examples of spending, which included millions on lobster, a part you ignored.
The US dollar belongs to the US government. They print it. The money is going to American companies. The products they produce are made in the US. Like why is it anyone’s business how much this stuff costs?
People pay taxes into this system every year. Some of them people who still believe in the system. It is absolutely people’s business to know where the money is going and why, especially when the system doesn’t even care what happens to them much of the time.
The underlying problem is the mass murder and putting all kinds of human labor and natural resources towards that evil end.
I mean, yes to a point, but that’s also dramatically oversimplifying. Even if the US wasn’t putting so much toward active murder, it’s still possible they could be wasting it on frivolous other things for the capitalist class while letting the masses languish. You can do both.
It matters to highlight this kind of thing for a couple of reasons:
To US people, it matters for emphasizing how duplicitous the government and its officials tend to be. For example, how they will act like healthcare or other services is impossible for the government to fund, but then inflate the Pentagon budget into the stratosphere. This alone is not anywhere near ML thought. It could languish in socdem territory if that’s all you say. But it’s a prime opportunity to start talking about imperialism and why it is that so much money goes into military in the first place. How much and often that money has gone to violently attacking peoples in other countries, whether they were communist or just wanting basic sovereignty. It’s an opportunity to contrast it with how far AES projects can/have gone when they do tend to put lots of funding into building up a society where human life is valued.
To people who aren’t in / from the US, it could still matter at times for emphasizing how little the US is like its soft power image of “freedom and democracy”. How much it puts into military might in order to hold onto its power, but also how corrupt its use of that same funding is for the enrichment of its administrators, on top of its bloodthirsty purpose.
I don’t get what is annoying about bringing it up. People need to know what they’re dealing with and leveraging the fact that they (in the case of USians) have to put tax money into this shambling mess of a system only to have some of it to go to some official buying very expensive lobster could really piss a person off and help them get to a place of rejecting it in general.
I would say so yes. I just wanted to highlight the absurdity of it; that the Pentagon budget keeps going up but also keeps failing audits, while its citizens can’t even get proper healthcare, demonstrating the absurd self-looting state of the empire.
The entity that keeps failing audits needs another funding injection. I’m sure it will go to important things that matter like $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail, while AI is used to deny health insurance claims.
Totally normal country, nothing to see here.
Very well could be. I assume there’s some kind of empire talking points getting pushed that people like this latch onto, but with how little I pay attention to empire media these days, I can only guess generally on it in that way. Not clear on what sources specifically might be feeding into it. Reddit brain is all I can think of as potentially familiar about it, but I haven’t paid much attention to reddit in a while.