‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

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Joined 5Y ago
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Cake day: Aug 27, 2019

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the history of atrocities around banana plantations.

but have u considered mao stalin che marx


Pity that we don’t have an antisocialist here to say ‘WHATS CAPITALISM GOTTA DO WITH THIS???????’ Because we’ve seen how obvious phenomena like marketability and profitability suddenly become foreign concepts when they’re linked to anything embarrassing.

Alternatively: ‘at least you can still get bananas. under commulism you dont get anything and they genocide your entire neighborhood if your suspect of having a banana’ (a classic evidence‐free accusation, unless you count ‘my grandparents are chinese north korean cubans from venezuela so i should know’ as evidence).


>These new layoffs in the tech industry are a continuation of major cuts over the last year. According to the tech-job tracker layoffs.fyi, there have been more than 200,000 tech jobs eliminated since the start of 2022. They include 18,000 layoffs at Amazon in recent months and 11,000 at Facebook parent company Meta in November. > >To add insult to injury, many of the Google workers only discovered they were terminated when their key fobs didn’t work after they arrived at work. Google notified the workers through an email, rather than through personal contact. Meanwhile, corporate spokespeople and human resources representatives of the tech giants can be heard condescendingly telling laid-off workers to “build their resumes.” With mass layoffs at such a high rate, it is difficult for the displaced workers to be optimistic about future job opportunities.
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>Many prisoners say they enjoy the jobs, if only because it gets them out into the free world and gives them something to do. The biggest problem: They are often paid less than $1 an hour. And despite the misconception that everything in their lives is paid for, prison life is really quite expensive. Prices for goods are about the same as in the outside world. From pens and paper to envelopes and stamps, it could take a full week for some prisoners to buy what they need to send a single letter to a family member by mail.
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([Relevant quote!](https://lemmygrad.ml/post/170762/comment/120368))
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I certainly don’t share the author’s respect for De Gaulle, but it’s good to have documents of anticommunist officials (partially) admitting that Imperial America is bent on world domination — a part of the world, in this case. The effects should already point to that conclusion, but explicit commentaries and discussions like these from élites make it harder to wave it off as some mere conspiracy theory.


According to the Motion Picture Association of America, showing someone gleefully firing a weapon is fine for children, but showing what happens when bullets strike a person is not.
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> The **Young Turks**, hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, is a left-wing news commentary channel. Uh… not really. The rest of the article is fine (if painfully unsurprising), though: > While **YouTube** offers the possibility for independent sites to reach a wider audience, its most-subscribed news channels remain largely reflective of the corporate biases of the global media landscape as a whole.
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Imperial America is also (gently) toning down its sanctions on its enemies, notably the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Republic of Cuba. These are by no means major victories, but they support our prediction that the Empire is slowly dying: it was only a few years ago that it was trying to sanction everybody and their dog in the BRV. Such concessions would have been almost inconceivable then.

Needless to say, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is not going to spend that extra money on civilian infrastructure.


Mozilla CEO increased her salary from $2.5m to over $3m in one year (10+ times more than her peers’) despite poor performance, still wants donations
>**Summary**: While laying off many workers the CEO of Mozilla piled up a lot of tax-exempt cash, and it continued to increase in spite of criticism (the above isn’t even the latest; it may be a lot more by now).
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Upon closer examination, it turns out that the principles described in the declaration are clearly not in great demand among the Western public.

Then why do you people care?

Today’s Russia is an absolutely capitalist state.

Thank you for stating the obvious. While you are at it, maybe you can remind us that Sudetenland was capitalist, too.

This is another very bland article. When it isn’t glossing over communist arguments without comment, it’s filled with the typical oversimplifications and common misunderstandings that communists have already addressed repeatedly. Just because I’m disinterested in going on and on about how much Putin sucks doesn’t mean that my sentiment is ‘Putin good’.

Focussing on the Russian Federation only distracts us from the real causes of this conflict and how Western capitalists set the stage for it. But I’m unsurprised that these dullards care less about that and far more about an unpopular minority.


>All elements of the U.S. imperialist state — military, intelligence and administrative — are lined up to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia and to use the Ukrainians as cannon fodder. And while no NATO or U.S. forces have officially entered the war, the U.S. is sending 8,000 additional U.S. troops to Europe and an unknown number of contractors, that is, mercenaries. Some are in Germany training Ukrainians to use advanced weapons.
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Capitalists are using the war to promote DRM
>It truly bothers us and troubles us to see how the media was spinning DRM in tractors, portraying the whole thing as benign if not *benevolent* just because in one particular case — involving a stock of tractors (not even so many of them!) — it harmed Russia. As if Russia will turn back and end the war (a surrender by Putin is highly improbable […]) — all this because of some bricked tractors… one might argue that bricking them would generally contribute to more hunger if not famine, seeing the already-diminishing supplies of wheat and cooking oils (amongst other basic commodities).
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In fairness, the author of the video could be right‐wing (judging by the other content that he’s published), but if you can look past that then it should still be useful; I’m sure that the information is easy to verify. Broken clocks and whatnot.


Meeting the Real Elon Musk: “Why I Hate Elon Musk”
ETA: I should warn that the author of the video is probably right‐wing, but the information presented should still be verifiable.
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>As part of its “decommunization” campaign, Zelensky personally announced March 20 the suspension of 11 moderate to left-wing political parties in Ukraine. The parties barred are Opposition Party-For Life, Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc. > >The targeting of some of these parties threatens the security of the trade unions affiliated with them, despite Zelensky being portrayed as a “liberal darling” by the West.
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I suspect that the long‐term goal here is to balkanize the Russian Federation, rendering it impotent. Making more money in the arms industry is probably just a bonus.



I know that this image is supposed to be funny, but it’s hard for me to take any amusement out of this subject.


This makes me want to read The Illegal War on Libya so that I can understand the NATO better. Pity that Libgen doesn’t have this book.


>On Feb. 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the stock value of these arms manufacturers soared. Raytheon and Lockheed officials openly told investors the Ukraine conflict was “good for business.” In a company “earnings call,” issued Jan. 25, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes described how they could benefit from the conflict. Similarly, Lockheed CEO James Taiclet told investors the “great power competition [between the U.S. and Russia] over Ukraine bodes more business for the company.” (The Wire (India), Feb. 28)
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This is the end result of class collaborationism: socialists with great potential either die in combat or the bourgeois state disposes of them after they outlive their use, and in both cases the world is no closer to outgrowing capitalism. If this person were still alive, I would have been irritated enough to shake him in frustration.


> You know, when the Biden administration first was talking about doing sanctions on Russia, they simultaneously talked about targeting Putin and a few oligarchs, and they would use phrases like, to use their language, “crippling sanctions.” And, as you said, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that this is targeted and specific, and also talk about attacking the entire Russian economy, which the kind of sanctions that they have pursued intend to take out an economy. When you cut the Russian economy out of the international banking system, for example, that’s not just going to affect the billionaires, that’s going to affect the whole population. And as we’ve seen, the ruble has been crashing. So that does affect the population. So this is the design. It’s how sanctions are intended.
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>China’s foreign ministry has called on the U.S. to disclose information on the Pentagon’s biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine “as soon as possible.” (tinyurl.com/bdvkxwbf) Spokesman Zhao Lijian stated that according to data “released by the United States itself,” the U.S. Department of Defense controls 336 biological laboratories in 30 countries around the world, including 26 in Ukraine alone. (tinyurl.com/3dekk2mx)
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…on a completely unrelated note, who’s the joker who keeps downvoting these threads?


You are missing the point. Do you really think that a Western empire and its (rarely reliable) media would sincerely care about and honestly report other states committing atrocities when there are already cops beating or killing thousands of civilians, thousands of ill prisoners dying from neglect, unconsensual destructions of native lands happening, thousands of nuclear weapons awaiting use, and other ignored problems running rampant, all right here on their own doorstep yearly? Do you think that that’s all just an unfortunate coincidence?

No, it isn’t.



>This massacre has to stop. The only way to achieve a permanent peace between the two neighborly peoples, Ukrainians and Russians, is to stop the U.S. and NATO in their frenzied drive to impose their domination in a unipolar world. The U.S. and NATO could stop the war with a single phone call to the Ukrainian president, with a demand to respect the already signed Minsk agreement of 2015. > >The existence of NATO and its current proxy war against Russia is costing dearly. [It’s the ordinary people around the world, including here in the U.S., who will suffer in the years to come from the cost of the wars and sanctions.](https://lemmygrad.ml/post/122907/comment/109503) People must organize to stop the military spending and demand their tax money goes to improve their own lives.
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>While [Oleksiy] Kuzmenko emphasizes that "there are no indications that the Azov Regiment is disobeying orders," he also noted that the movement's messaging "suggests that — as it has been the case since its inception — the internationally active far-right Azov movement will continue to pursue its own agenda in the time of war even when it's not aligned with the government."
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>Between December 2015 and December 2021, railroads cut up to 35% of workers on Class 1 railroads — carriers with revenues over $900 million. From 2000 to 2020, there was also a 30% increase in the average tonnage carried by individual freight trains. The impact of these cuts leaves little room for error.
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Wowzers, they sure showed them.

It’s not like people can get their fix of awful heterosex through youtube‐dl or other porn sites or anything like that.


Here’s the deal:

There is a finite amount of money in the world, and it all has an owner.

This means that not everybody can become richer simultaneously.

You with me so far, capitalist apologists?

So, how does an individual become richer? By getting money from somebody else.

And what happens when somebody gives money to somebody else? The giver becomes less rich.

Now, since Elon Musk is getting richer overall, and there’s a finite amount of money in the world, where is he getting that money?

Hint:

It isn’t falling out of a worm hole.


Pictures of…what? When did this happen? I’m confused by your comment.


It’s like I argued back in September 2020: ‘richest country’ does not mean ‘ordinary people are living pretty good’. That’s another oversimplification that anticommies push repeatedly because it’s so much easier than coming up with an actually good argument.


A few years ago I was frequenting a Subway restaurant and I slowly became acquainted with the employés there. One of the workers told me that he got a call back when he was working at Taco John’s, learned that his son was either dying or already dead (I can’t remember which), and he was getting ready to leave until his boss threatened to fire him if he walked out the door. He told his boss something like, ‘You can go ahead and fire me because I’m not gonna miss my son for you.’ and never looked back.

I am sure that I got a detail or two wrong in this story, but the crux of the matter—a boss fired somebody for leaving early to attend a family emergency—is something that I definitely remember.


NOT ALL CAPITALISTS ARE BAD
CAPITALISTS ARE A PEACEFUL PEOPLE AND THIS MAN DOES NOT REPRESENT CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY

GRAPH GO UP MEAN WORLD MORE GOODER


Honestly, the choice of photo is what I find most baffling of all. From the looks of things, there’s a lot more than just flatulence in those, and she’s probably been shitting blood too, which would fit with the reports that she needed medical attention. But for some strange reason, the article never mentioned either of those.

Also… can the OP tag this as NSFW or something? Seeing somebody’s bowel products does a number on my appetite. I’ve skipped entire meals before as a consequence.