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#“war machines”??? in this climate???

workersolidarity · 1 year

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Watch "The true cost of the military-industrial complex." on YouTube

youtube

This old video is more relevant than ever.

When it came out 3 years ago, the US Defense Budget was just over $700 Billion a year. A ridiculously bloated number that defies all logic.

Now, just three years later and the Defense Budget is set at a staggering $858 Billion.

And none of this includes the Military slush fund, the black budget, or the CIA black budget. And considering the CIA is now described by MSM as having "its own paramilitary army", one imagines that black budget to be significantly large.

It also doesn't include any of the $110 Billion or so spent so far in Ukraine.

This War Machine MUST DIE

#war machine #us war machine #us imperialism #war and climate change #socialist politics #socialism #communism #marxism leninism #socialist #communist #marxism #marxist leninist #progressive politics #Youtube

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shinobicyrus · 7 months

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We are joined by Antony Loewenstein — author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World — to discuss his extensive reporting on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the policing tactics and surveillance technologies that are tested on Palestinians before sold as part of lucrative global export industry, and how the dynamics of occupation never stay within their cordoned zones but always expand to capture increasingly more people and places.

This came out five months ago, so before the current conflict. It was very enlightening and shattered a lot of the perceptions I had grown up with around Israel. Particularly, Israel's history of coopering with brutal regimes and their selling their skills and technology to the highest bidder. Oftentimes as a middle-man for the United States.

#one thing the October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Palestine has demonstrated #is that despite Gaza being one of the most heavily surveilled places on earth #guarded with all of this advanced technology - drones and next-gen border walls #semi-automated turrets on check points #with all of these tools being sold to advertised to rich countries in preparation for future (probably climate) crises #none of it worked #none of was able to prevent an attack by people with decidedly less advanced technology #but were determined and organized #the Oct 7th Attack was a huge embarrassment not just for Israel's government and military and intelligence agencies #but for the Israeli's leviathan Tech Sector that dominates a huge chunk of their economy #Israeli Military #Big Tech #Military Industrial Complex #This Machine Kills #audio #podcasts #Imperialism #Israeli Occupation #Capitalism #SoundCloud

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mypatchworkreflection · 2 years

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"The military has done next to nothing to reduce their carbon footprint, either ignoring the climate mandate completely or just focusing on creating more advanced weapons systems that can continue to operate under worsening climate conditions," said VFP executive director Garett Reppenhagen, a U.S. Army veteran.

"From the burn pits to nuclear waste to water contamination in Hawai'i, the U.S. military is responsible for an unprecedented amount of climate disasters," Reppenhagen added. "It is past time for Congress and the president to hold the U.S. military accountable for their catastrophic effects on the planet."

"The U.S. spends unprecedented amounts of money on an ever-expanding U.S. military, using veterans like me as pawns in their justifications for more money," Velazquez added. "We need to be reducing U.S. militarism and redirecting that money towards climate solutions like renewable energy and resources that meet human needs."

#us military #us politics #climate change #environment #imperialism #veterans #red hill #us war machine #military industrial complex #the americans are not okay

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reasonsforhope · 4 months

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The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.

That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...

More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.

There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024

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nientedal · 7 months

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What progress at home has biden enacted? What policies of his show that he is making progress that prove he is actually different than trump?

I like to pretend I have faith in humanity, so I'll answer as if you're asking this in good faith.

Biden's DEA has lifted restrictions on telehealth prescriptions to make appointments and assistance more accessible.

He put a funding package into place to help unhoused people get access to mental and physical healthcare, as well as short-term and long-term housing.

He has attempted and is still attempting to get student debt relief through - this was blocked by Republican judges appointed by Trump, but he's still working on it.

Infrastructure repair - his administration has budgeted funds to actually fix some severely-damaged and frequently-traveled bridges.

Trying to expand access to healthcare to include undocumented immigrants who came to the USA as children (Dreamers) under the Affordable Care Act. Support for Navigator programs and outreach has also been increased.

He has vetoed Republican-led bills that were attempting to overturn environmental protections - one that would have forbidden investment fund managers to consider climate change in their portfolios (I have two degrees in accounting and this is actually huge), and another that would have overturned restrictions on agricultural runoff into our waterways.

He and his administration worked for ages to get rail workers paid sick days.

This is just some of what he's been doing. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans want to criminalize the lives of LGBT people like you and me. They want to eliminate no-fault divorce and force births that will kill parents or devastate them financially. They have stated flat out that they want to install a military dictatorship in the USA. They attempted to put that in motion on January 6th, 2021. They failed once. They will do better next time.

One party wants to house the homeless and expand social safety nets, while the other one wants to criminalize homelessness. One of them wants a future in which I might be able to vote to change how much of a war machine my country is, while the other one wants to eliminate my ability to vote entirely. Those are not the same. Those literally are opposites.

At the end of the day, all you and I can do is choose to do the least amount of harm possible. You and I cannot choose to do no harm. This is the USA, we sell war, you and I cannot choose to do no harm. I wish we could, my god do I wish we could, but that is not an option. So we grieve for the harm we couldn't eliminate and work to minimize the harm that is done. Despite all the crap they support, Democrats are the minimum amount of harm right now. Acting like they aren't is exactly what brought us to an election where our options are a future where we are either wading in blood or drowning in it.

Not voting for Biden will not help Palestine. Not voting for Biden will guarantee a Republican president who will make the situation in Palestine WORSE. AND it'll hurt a lot of other places as well, both at home and abroad, because Republicans are about business and the USA is in the business of war! And I would very much like that to change someday! I would very much like to someday be able to choose to do no harm! And I know what I have to do to try for that future, so what are YOU going to do? There is no standing off to the side in this. If you aren't helping pull, you're the dead weight we're pulling. Are you going to dig your feet into the mud and blood and drown us there? Or are you going to get the fuck off your ass, grit your teeth, and help us pull free?

#askbasket #iam-the-wild #us politics #israel #palestine #if you do not vote blue you do not get to call yourself an antifascist #i HATE that that's the case; don't mistake me #but that is the reality we're working with #there isn't any other #do nothing and kill five people or act and kill one.#so what are you gonna do? i can't choose for you. but i know what my choice is.#i'm part of this world. and as much as i hate it...turning away is not one of the options.#we fight on ALL fronts #we protest we donate we write we call #AND WE ALSO FUCKING VOTE FOR THE LEAST OF THE EVILS. BECAUSE NO EVIL IS NOT AN OPTION.

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brunelsblog · 6 months

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On 5th December of 2023, The Atlantic came out with an article titled "War in the Congo Has Kept the Planet Cooler" written by Ross Anderse, the senior editor at the Atlantic, where he oversees the science, technology, and health sections. As you could've guessed, this genocide-friendly title did not fly by the internet and they have since (9th December at the time of writing) changed the title to "The Grim Ironies of Climate Change", a paywalled article.

Let us break this down further to try to understand their thought process-

1) They posted an article with an insanely insensitive and dangerously racist title.

2) They, rightly, faced backlash.

3) With the knowledge that what they had done was wrong at least on some level, they decide not to remove the dangerous article...

4) ... but rename it and continue to unapologetically host it in their site?

There is no way to make sense of it outside of the framework of white supremacy that has dehumanized African bodies to the point where they, to a colonial mind, appear as viable sacrifices to quell the climate disaster that continues to be driven by the same countries whose foreign policy is to keep Congo as unstable as posible. There is no "war" in Congo, there is a genocide for raw minerals that, through multiple levels of slave labor, become the smartphones and other electronic devices you and I own. And the colonizers know this -- that they have implicated billions of people around the world in their inhumane project, and they hope to turn this forced complacency into active genocidal intent, where the plunder of Congo becomes acceptable to you if it buys the west a little extra time to protect what little comforts it has thrown your way. I am not going to tell you how to think. Sit with this information and come to your own conclusions.

They might have changed the title of the article but the internet is forever. Here is the link to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the original title. Ironically, you can access the archived version that implicates them for free, while you would have to pay to read the current version.

#free congo #dr congo #congo #democratic republic of the congo #congo genocide #im gonna tag gaza too because this has Israel all over this #free gaza #free palestine #israel doesn't have a right to exist #fuck israel #fuck united states #fuck britain #fuck europe

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bamsara · 1 year

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OC drawings / painting because I haven't painted in a while. Unnamed OCs for a side project I'm working on. Extra info below the read more

Very quickly scrambled idea summary: The story of an abused girl running away from home set in a dystopia/futuristic setting where automations and humans are commonplace but there’s a societal divide. Humans are constantly at war with each other, using sentient AI as sub-class citizens, and mistreated robots are on the verge of starting a war of their own. While on the run she trips over a corpse in the snow, but it's not really a corpse but rather a combat-machine robot that escaped from the facility it was being created/held in and really has no sympathy or understanding of humanity. They end up traveling together on the run as fugitives because it's easier to run away if you have the guise of a ‘guardian’ figure aka the robot for the child and for the robot everyone thinks he’s a funny-looking nanny bot so they become less suspicious.

AR-50N (The robot, name subject to change): Created as a war machine in an age of sentient AI, it escapes the facility where it was being held with a hatred of humanity and a mission to assassinate key figures in society in order to completely dismantle it. After a kill-switch is activated after it's escape, becomes immobilized in the forest and snowed over to be extracted. However, a young child finds him and removes the chip that tracks and paralyzes him, freeing him, and thus proves herself useful for the first time.

Unnamed Child, (9-11yrs) appearance and name subject to change: The 'trouble' child of a wealthy contractor, this girl decides to run away when the oil-slicken streets and cold forests start to look safer than home. Tripping over what she presumed to be deactivated automation in the snow, she attempts to scavenge it for parts to pawn off for some food money, only to take a chip out which disables said robot, waking it up. It's mean sometimes and scary, but she's faced worse, and since robo-nannies and bodyguards are common, no one would bat an eyelash if they traveled together for convenience.

Unnamed OC (The Hacker Code Named Kudzu, 26-27 yrs old) A brilliant hacker and climate activist, this character is deadset on using and promoting technology to help the planet and each other, even if this means dismantling damaging structures from within, and some other maybe not legal methods. Although she doesn't appear in the story for about a season's worth, she will eventually find a shut-down war bot and an inconsolable, distressed child in her apartment after they broke in for refuge, and decides to help them.

#OC stuff #doodles

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familyabolisher · 1 year

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At the outset of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans' genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other's present is the colonizer's own past. Wells's Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race's own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as "living representatives of the early Stone Age," and thus their "extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged" (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of "our" past, with Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of "primitive" societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on "Scientific Exploration and Empire" in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, "absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel" for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable "fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old" (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

#currently reading

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silliergoober · 6 months

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Ultrakill’s Climate Crises and Symbolism!! Layer 7 Spoilers

Since Limbo with the introduction of Streetcleaners, Ultrakill has had some climate crisis subtext, albeit very subtle. With the introduction of Layer 7, while still subtle, the symbolism has persisted.

For context: the final boss of the layer, the Earthmover, is effectively the epitome of the Arms Race. It’s massive and powerful, utterly dwarfing V1 to such an extent that its body is effectively a level of its own. Its birth marked the final phase of the Final War, cohorts of them levelling cities in minutes. They are the peak of human cruelty; designed from sky-scraping top to bottom to kill billions. The war ended only when the Earthmovers were depraved of their solar fuel via the climate disaster they caused.

Earthmovers are, in essence, man-made machines constructed only to destroy and take for profit, and they catapulted the world into climate destruction.

And of course, they look like oil rigs.

It’s a beautiful piece of visual metaphor and symbolism, and, crucially, it doesn't subtract from the game’s primary narrative themes.

As i said, it’s subtle, it’s not in your face or preachy, but it’s potent once you notice. This game has some crazy theming, y’all need to talk about it more

#ultrakill #ultrakill layer 7 #ultrakill violence #ultrakill spoilers #analysis #ultrakill earthmovers

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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Stellantis wants to make scabbing woke

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

I know, I know, it's weird when the worst people you know are right, even when they're right for the wrong reasons: like, the "Intelligence Community" is genuinely terrible, pharma companies are murderous crooks, and Big Tech really does have a dangerous grip on public debate. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, is what I'm saying:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

When conspiratorialists and reactionaries holler about how the FBI are dirty-tricking creeps who are framing Trump, it's tempting to say, "well, if Trumpists hate the FBI, then I will love the FBI. Who cares about COINTELPRO and what they did to Martin Luther King?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

It's a process called "schizmogenesis": forming new group identity beliefs based on saying the opposite of what your enemies say, and as tempting as that is, it's extraordinarily foolish and dangerous:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

It means that canny reactionaries like Steve Bannon can trick you into taking any position merely by taking the opposite one. Bannon's followers are even more easily led, so it's easy for him to convince them that we have always been at war with Oceania. The right has created an entire mirror world of "I know you are but what am I?" politics.

Anti-vax co-opts "bodily autonomy." Climate denial becomes environmentalism ("wind turbines kill birds"). Transphobia becomes feminism ("keep women-only spaces for real women"). Support for strongmen becomes anti-imperialism ("don't feed the war machine in Ukraine"). These are the doppelgangers Naomi Klein warns us against:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The far right has even managed to co-opt anti-corporate rhetoric. Culture warriors rail against "woke capitalism," insisting that when big businesses take socially progressive positions, it's just empty "virtue signalling." And you know what? They've got a point. Partially.

As with all mirror-world politics, the anti-woke-capitalism shuck is designed to convince low-information right-wing pismires into buying "anti-woke pillows" and demanding the right to pay junk fees to "own the libs":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

But woke capitalism is bullshit. Corporations – profit-maximizing immortal transhuman colony organisms that view workers and customers as inconvenient gut-flora – do not care about social justice. They don't care about anything, except for minimizing compensation for workers while maximizing the risk those workers bear; and locking in and gouging customers for products that are as low-quality as can be profitably sold.

Take DEI, a favored target of the right. It's undoubtably true that diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives have made some inroads on correcting bias in hiring decisions, with the result that companies get better employees who would have been excluded without this explicit corrective.

However, corporations don't value DEI because they abhor their history of hiring bias. Instead, DEI is how corporate management demonstrates to workers that their grievances are best addressed by trusting corporate leadership to correct their error of their ways – and not by forming a union.

Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, corporations would create fake "Company Unions" whose leadership were beholden to the company executives. These were decoy unions: they looked and sounded like unions, but when they negotiated with management, they were actually working for the bosses, not the workers.

This is more mirror-world tactics. They're the labor equivalent of the "crisis pregnancy centers" that masquerade as abortion clinics in order to fool pregnant people and trap them with endless delays until it's too late to terminate their pregnancies. Company unions get workers to trust in negotiators who are secretly working for the bosses, who emerge from the bargaining table with one-sided, abusive contracts and insist that this is the best deal workers can hope for.

Company unions were outlawed 90 years ago, and for decades, labor had a seat at the table, with wages tracking productivity gains and workers getting protection for discrimination, unsafe labor conditions, and wage-theft. Then came the neoliberal turn, and 40 years of wage stagnation, increased inequality, and corporate rule.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Finally, finally, we have reached a turning point in labor, with public approval for unions at levels not seen since the Carter administration and thousands of strikes and protests breaking out across the country:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

It's not just the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, either. For the first time in history, the UAW is striking against all the major automakers, and they are winning:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/striking-uaw-workers-win-key-battery-plant-concession-from-general-motors/

The automakers are getting desperate. Stellantis – Chrysler's latest alias, reflecting the company's absorbtion into corporate-human-centipede of global carmakers – has mobilized its DEI programs, trying to get marginalized people to believe that scabbing is a liberatory activity:

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/10/uaw-auto-strike-stellantis/

Stellantis calls each of its DEI silos a "Business Resource Group" (BRG): there's a "Working Parents Network," an "African Ancestry Network," "Asians Connected Together," a "DiverseAbilities Network," a "Gay & Lesbian Alliance" and more:

https://blog.stellantisnorthamerica.com/2021/07/20/business-resource-groups-drive-inclusion-and-diversity/

The corporate managers who lead these BRGs have established a scab rotation for each subgroup, calling on members to cross a UAW picket-line at a Michigan Parts Distribution Center run by Stellantis subsidiary Mopar:

Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team. Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on! Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!"

Now, these BRGs weren't invented by marginalized workers facing discrimination in the workplace. They come from literal union-busting playbooks produced by giant "union avoidance" firms that charge bosses millions for advice on skirting – or breaking – the law to keep workplace democracy at bay. All the biggest anti-union consultancies love BRGs, from Littler Mendelson to Jackson Lewis. IRI Strategies touts BRGs as a way to "union-proof" a business by absorbing workers' grievances in a decoy committee that will let them feel listened to.

BRGs, in other words, are the Crisis Pregnancy Centers of workplace discrimination. They're a Big Store Con, a company union dressed up as corporate social responsibility.

Now, let's not pretend that unions have a sterling record on race and gender issues. Giant labor organizations like the AFL had to be dragged into racial integration, and trade unions have sometimes been on the wrong side of anti-immigration panics:

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html

But unions have also been the most reliable way for people of color and women to win better workplace treatment. The struggle for racial and gender justice was fought through labor organizing. Remember that MLK's "I've Been To the Mountaintop" speech was given in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis:

https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/mountaintop

Black organizers have always been militant labor organizers. Labor Day commemorates the victory of the long, hard-fought Pullman strike, where Black workers brought one of the most powerful companies in America to its knees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

And women have always fought for gender justice through the labor movement: the New York shirtwaist strike is the Ur-example, when women-led unions fought thugs and scabs on icy New York streets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_shirtwaist_strike_of_1909

It's no surprise that labor activism, anti-racism and feminism go together. Since the earliest days, the labor justice struggle was also a social justice struggle. To learn more check out Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

The most exploited, underpaid, and abused workers in America are also the most marginalized (duh).

From nurses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/kaiser-healthcare-union-says-week-long-strike-possible-early-next-month-2023-10-09/

To teachers:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-18/l-a-teachers-win-21-wage-increase-in-new-lausd-contract

To Amazon warehouse workers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Labor_Union

To publishing assistants:

https://apnews.com/article/harpercollins-union-strike-ends-0a94238718879066d9b21af6266be526

To baristas:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/29/business/starbucks-union-wages/index.html

To fast-food workers:

https://www.ufcw.org/about/

The vanguard of today's labor surge is Black, brown, female and queer. Without a union, workers who face discrimination are on their own, hoping that their bosses will voluntarily do something about it. Black workers in Tesla's rabidly anti-union shops face vicious racism, from slurs to threats to violence. Without a union, they have to rely on the shifting whims of an Apartheid emerald mine space-Karen for relief, or hope for help from the NLRB or a class-action lawyer:

https://apnews.com/article/tesla-racism-black-lawsuit-class-action-21c88bddf60eca702560be58429495de

The far right isn't wrong when they holler that woke capitalism is bullshit. As with so many of their mirror-world causes, they've got a point, but only a limited one. The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union. The problem with relying on Business Resource Groups to fight racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia is that these struggles are all class struggles, and a BRG is never going to fight against the company that created it.

To understand how bankrupt woke capitalism is, conside this: Stellantis is calling on its "Working Parents Network" to scab this Friday. Stellantis is also being sanctioned by the Department Of Labor for discriminating against nursing mothers – the same "working parents" that the BRG is meant to protect:

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2023/02/08/investigation-finds-stellantis-violated-rights-of-nursing-mothers-at-sterling-heights-plant/

Woke capitalism is just another kind of "predatory inclusion," like Intuit's campaign defending its "Free File" tax-prep scam, where they're claiming that ending this ripoff is racist because it denies Black families the right to be tricked into paying for something they are entitled to get for free:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

When I learned about Intuit's wokewashing, I thought I'd found woke capitalism's rock bottom, but I was wrong. Stellantis's call for woke scabbing is a new low.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#inclusive-scabbing

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #race #gender #uaw #stellantis #gm #general motors #woke capitalism #wokewashing #strikes #labor #liberalism #company unions

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starseedpatriot · 5 months

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It is the 4th day of 2024

- Epstein’s associate list is catching the world on fire for the elitists and the media is in a tailspin.

- The US is having to literally bomb Iran to try to create a distraction. They apparently have nothing else to offer as a ready made false flag.

- The US Federal debt surpassed $34 trillion and we have a negative GPD. The world outside of the snow globe is avoiding global war and watching the machine lose its economic power.

- Deep blue sanctuary cities are having to lash out at their own party’s Badministration over illegal immigration.

- The black and Latino communities are taking a hard right. Young voters are moving right. Labor unions are moving right. The pendulum is swinging.

- The truth of the 2020 election steal is seeing more light with the release of a 32-page play-by-play on swing state shenanigans.

- The J6 narrative is falling apart and is being shown as a federally organized and perpetrated false flag.

- Jack Smith is failing to, “get Trump,” and may be disqualified as a special prosecutor while the baseless Trump indictments fall apart.

- The machine is so stuck with Dopey Joe as a de facto candidate that it is being forced to prop up deep state marionette Niki Haley, who is currently behind Trump by 55 points in the polls.

- Ukraine is falling apart and Israel is losing its mystique as God’s chosen nation as their ruthless technocracy is exposed.

- The globalist warming climate change narrative is disintegrating as the creeps are forced to hyperbole that is easily seen as ridiculous overstatement.

2024 is four days old. We told you it was going to be a year to remember. So far, so good.

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whereserpentswalk · 7 months

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Imagine being a oracle in the ancient world, given visions of a future you cannot know. Everyone comes to you asking about things that matter to them, wars that will be won or lost, children that will be born. But you're cursed to see further then that. You see things you can't comprehend, a billion possible futures branching out from every momment. You can see the temples of the gods laying empty and barbarians ravaging the known world. You can see man made horrors beyond your comprehension, empires larger then anyone could imagine. You know of artifical intelligence, or nuclear war, of climate change. And you can't even describe any of it to most people. Starships fighting over black skies, humans twisted apart and put back together by machines, and nobody around you can even try to know.

Most people prefer false oracles, that tell them only of things they understand. While you only discuss what you know with a few scholars and philosophers who are terrified to understand the futures you can see.

#196 #my thougts #fantasy #history #oracle #my writing #ancient athens #ancient greek #ancient rome #ancient greece #magical realism #magic #short fiction #flash fiction #horror #psychological horror #science fiction

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rivetgoth · 2 years

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It’s like insane how industrial music can be so erotic and sensual and scary and transcendent and sad and angry and everything all at once. The cold pounding of machinery, the artificial and the automatic and the hydraulic, the red bricks and fires of Chicago, smoke rising over factories, the up and down head bobbing of oil derricks on the highway, storms and climate crises and machine guns and bombs in wars and the clattering of animals in metal cages and the beeping of computers and horror movies with this heavy ceaseless throbbing beat that’s meant to be fucked to and this omnipresent sense of magic and wonder. So good.

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cherry-bomb1985 · 3 months

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I keep thinking about Hell's words: "This is the only way it should have ended."

Should. Not could. *Should*.

Like V1 should have been mass produced, obliterated all the Earth Movers, and then the next machine should have come along to counter it in turn and continue the war. Like all that fighting and the cycle of violence should have been perpetuated.

Like Mankind should never have finally gotten their act together, and tried to continue on even in the absence of divinity and in the face of total climate collapse.

There's a notable difference between 'could' and 'should', and the fact that those words are spoken by the only one who would've been *extremely disappointed* by this outcome has me raising eyebrows.

#ULTRAKILL #fuck it I'm putting this in the main tag #something else I don't really see talked about much (or at all really) is all the shit that happened leading up to The Great War #Yeah some guy getting shot in the head was the spark that lit the powder keg #but nobody ever mentions the fact that all that tension coming close to boiling over had been primarily because of /imperialism/#which as we all know--and are seeing LITERALLY IN REAL TIME--profoundly benefits from war and violence #Just like there were “suits” with something to gain from digging into Hell and sending people there #oh I bet it was /delighted/ when that happened #Anyways I refuse to take the words of a superorganism who gets its jollies from the spectacle of cruelty and violence as**#**the end all be all meaning of the game #The themes here might be nihilistic but they're sure as fuck not doomerist

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