The conception of “white” as a race literally would not exist without the institutional power that made it so. It has everything to do with power.

White as a concept of race derives from the institution of white supremacy. An institution of power which designates certain people as “white” and others as “non-white”, and then it designates white as superior and everyone else as inferior. This is why you can’t be racist against “white” people. Because there is no institution of power based on designating people as white and then treating them as inferior; it’s just the opposite.

You can be rude to a person who is considered white. You can exclude them from things. You can even carry prejudices around about them (and if you do, it’s probably because you are dealing with them being the oppressor on a regular basis). None of those are the same thing as the oppressive experience of systemically enforced, institutional racism that “non-white” people experience on a daily basis.

Do you see the difference? One is having a bad day. The other is being gunned down by a cop because your skin was the wrong color and you get no justice for it. One is some people may not like you because of what they’ve learned to expect from dealing with you. The other is being enslaved by you and treated as subhuman. One is occasionally you may not get special treatment because of reform attempts to even the playing field for people who are treated as subhuman. The other is having to work extra hard in everything just to get seen, much less seen as anything resembling an equal.

There is no comparison. Some people who are considered white get confused somewhere in this and go “well my life was hard too!” Which is beside the point. The institution of white supremacy does not ensure that every “white” person has an ideal life. But it does ensure that a lot of non-white people live very short and traumatized lives as an exploited group of people, treated as subhuman. You can be white and still have a shit life. You can be non-white and somehow, despite everything, manage to have a relatively good life. But if you’re non-white, you are a special target for exploitation, specifically, if not a target of being murdered just for having the wrong skin color.

I could go on. It’s night and day difference.

He’s got a point there. I’m going to try looking at media that way too. Let’s see, the story of Adam and Eve is a metaphor for me taking a shit. I start out with the temptation to take a shit. When I actually take one, I am cast out of the land of needing to take a shit for taking one and left to walk the Earth, having taken one. Snakes squeeze things, so the snake represents the squeezing of muscles to evacuate my bowels of fecal matter.

It’s also a narrative that was lied about and warped heavily by israel since day one. Pretty sure it’s been confirmed that they fired on their own people Hannibal Doctrine style, but it’s made out as if all of the damage was caused by Palestinian resistance fighters.

Is he trying to play both sides?

“Yes, Cuba and Venezuela are run by evil commie dictators that need to be taken down but our embargo on Cuba is bad.”

I think it’s the old “liberal pacifism” shtick. “The oppressor is bad, but the resistance forces using violence to resist the oppressor are also somehow bad because they use violence.”

No amount of softly condemning the USA’s deplorable actions right after tearing into AES countries is going to change people’s minds.

Exactly. It confuses the issue and puts the oppressed in a position where they are only ever allowed to be a victim, never a self-determining group who is capable of defending themselves.

I think it’s more a thing of the limelight. If he doesn’t lick the boot, he gets shut out of the capitalist media sphere, which makes it hard to get any electoral traction. And people like him are willing to sacrifice principles (if they ever had them) in order to get elected. They just either don’t take into account, or don’t care, that by doing this, they neutralize the effectiveness of their own political platform.

Bernie Sanders wasn’t even radical and he got shut out and misrepresented to a huge degree.

The full quote from the article is even worse:

" I want to be clear on where I stand. I believe both Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Canel are dictators. Their administrations have stifled free and fair elections, jailed political opponents, and suppressed the free and fair press. And yet, our federal government’s long history of punitive policies toward both countries, including extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans and the continuation of a decades long blockade of Cuba, have only worsened these conditions. Democratic socialism is about dignity, justice and accountability. And above all, it’s about building a democracy that works for working people, not one that preys on them."

“Democratic socialists” are some of the most annoying people in western politics because not only are they not socialists in actual practice, they by definition of the moniker make it sound like there’s a version of socialism that is not democratic. They throw under the bus international socialists specifically, and more broadly, countries that are self-determining in the face of imperialism, in order to win some points with a largely already-ignorant population to get minor capitalism reform electoral victories. When they do succeed at all, they only further entrench the miasma of pain that is mass political illiteracy.

Hey, I just thought of a more accurate meaning for the CIA acronym. Colonial Invasion Agency.

UNC administration placed Dwayne Dixon, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, on administrative leave on Monday, effective immediately. The decision follows reports of Dixon’s alleged affiliation with “Redneck Revolt,” an organization that describes itself as an “anti-racist, anti-fascist, community defense formation.”

“The University continues to reaffirm its commitment to rigorous debate, respectful engagement and open dialogue in support of free speech,” the statement reads. "There is no place for or tolerance of inciting or extending sympathy toward violence of any kind within the UNC community.

I know the US is bad, but it still surprises me sometimes the extent of how pathetic its institutions are. They are taking the centrist thing (https://thenib.com/centrist-history/) a step further and pretending to be the centrist, while actively siding with the fascist. It’s basically gaslighting at this point.

I’m glad for you sharing so much of it on the grad, it really is a light in the gloom sometimes.

The individualist fascist cowering alone vs. the collectivist communist hanging out and having a good time.

More like: “Priced out of real housing, more USians are using a big car for shelter.”

The limited-scope decision came down in an unsigned, emergency action that did not disclose which justices voted to side with President Donald Trump’s administration and offered no reasoning. But it nonetheless temporarily overturned decisions from the lower courts that blocked ICE from making stops based only on race, language, location and occupation.

So at this point, the supreme court is just a formality to approve whatever his agenda is? Not that it was some bastion of principle before, but it seemed to at least put on a pretense of process in the past. I guess it’s another one of those mask off things. The US is gradually dropping all pretense of “democracy”.

• So far the evidence points to it not even being a leftist who shot Kirk

• Antifa isn’t an organization

“We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organised campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks,” he said.

What organized campaign? Run by who? No words about the school shootings that terrorize children, but apparently white dudes who spew hate are in big danger from checks notes other random white dudes who can pretty easily get a gun and don’t even need to be organized or do much planning. While they pretend this is a threat from the “left” and use it as a pretense to crack down, they are still under threat from people on the right who don’t like them. But they can’t crack down on that cause they’d have to admit there’s something wrong with themselves. Fascism loves to eat itself for lack of outside victims to claim.

Seems like a broken clock moment, tbh.

He added: “Did you ever hear the statement that, “China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis??? Not good!!!”

Though it’s funny that his thing is “do 6 months instead of 3” like that’s some huge difference.

I’m also not sure how changing the reporting would fix anything without other reforms. Looks like the right-wing populist shtick of “look like we’re doing something about economy in order to secure votes/popularity, but we’re not really doing anything meaningful.”

Since others already addressed the specific, I’ll focus on it as more of a general principle thing:

Essentially, westerners need to come down to earth. They are raised in a culture of superiority that acts like the west is the center of the universe. In post WWII US hegemony, this may have been the case in terms of global power, but it still didn’t mean westerners were superior, it just meant they had more guns. Even that part is changing. China is advancing in technology and productive capacity at a rate that only a socialist project can do, with a significant focus on addressing people’s needs rather than pure profit. While the US continues to work on color revolutions, sanctions, and generally warring and bombing other countries, either directly or through proxies (ex: israel), China is staunch on not being a militarily or economically interventionist power, who throws its weight around in order to coerce the world into doing what it wants. While the US uses its broad reach on virtual platforms in other communities in order to aid in controlling them, there is yet to be any evidence of China doing similar.

China is leading the way in an alternative world power dynamic, one aimed at mutual benefit. They are living in the future technologically. They are overall looking after their people. And with all of this in mind, we are supposed to believe that China wants to gather data on us, so that they can checks notes convince us to vote for John Racist 2 instead of John Racist 1? It’s a real “I don’t even know who you are” moment, you know. If it wasn’t for the western empire trying to undermine, encircle, and destroy China and any other liberation effort that threatens imperial hegemony, China would not even need to care that it exists. Even still, China does not need to care offensively, in the sense of trying to undermine and they have shown over and over that their “offense” is more of a thing of strengthening themselves and others who would ally with them, rather than try to destroy others. So what is there to fear?

Nothing significant. The real thing to fear, which westerners are chronically in denial about, is their own governments. Their governments which do gather data on them and use it for control, which don’t want them getting ideas about real freedoms in life through actually getting their needs met, which would always rather their fear be pointed outward than hit too close to home and come to terms with how shitty their country is.

That’s a fascinating breakdown and it makes a lot of sense to me now, knowing how psychology has been used, or tried to be used, in the past to justify the status quo. Like one of those things where the answer is right there, but the real answer is incompatible with the status quo, so they look past it and try to rationalize a different one.

I don’t subscribe to the “you voted for this” notion, because I don’t believe that all people understand what they’re even voting for.

I think it’s both the ignorance and that it’s not an actually democratic system to begin with. The “you [the voters] brought this on” rhetoric assumes, implicitly, that the system is somehow accurately representing the will of the people. But it’s not. I remember someone even did a study on it, indicating there was very little correlation between what the public wants and what policy gets implemented in the US.

In reading through that, I’m like… so the cops were so shitty at their job, that caused the captor and hostages to work together? And the captor may have actually more so bonded toward the hostages than the other way around? That’s kinda what it reads like to me, that snippet, but I’ve never read up on the accounts of it in great detail.

“Fighting antisemitism”, by uh… checks notes supporting a genocidal colonial project and associating the support of that genocide with support of Jewish people.

In other news, today is surely opposite day.

Capitalists love to be like: “We support your right to go in a corner and yell at a wall, but if you try to change anything, we’re telling on you.”