badupdate:

sex positivity could’ve been about promoting healthy and safe communication and behavior inside and outside the bedroom, providing resources for people with STI’s, destigmatizing sex work and sex workers, and decreasing the unfair pressure put on teenagers (primarily teenage girls) to have sex and replacing it with better and more effective access to important information and resources but y'all made it about “normalizing” getting pissed on and choked in bed

tariqah:

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.

The Carbon Majors Report  “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.

Traditionally, large scale greenhouse gas emissions data is collected at a national level but this report focuses on fossil fuel producers. Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change.

The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks.

While companies have a huge role to play in driving climate change, says Faria, the barrier is the “absolute tension” between short-term profitability and the urgent need to reduce emissions.

A Carbon Tracker study in 2015 found that fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than $2tn over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables – in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.

CDP says its aims with the carbon majors project are both to improve transparency among fossil fuel producers and to help investors understand the emissions associated with their fossil fuel holdings.

A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report. “That puts a significant responsibility on those investors to engage with carbon majors and urge them to disclose climate risk,” says Faria.

Investors should move out of fossil fuels, says Michael Brune, executive director of US environmental organisation the Sierra Club. “Not only is it morally risky, it’s economically risky. The world is moving away from fossil fuels towards clean energy and is doing so at an accelerated pace. Those left holding investments in fossil fuel companies will find their investments becoming more and more risky over time.”

softtrade:

One feminist psychological definition of objectification is the combination of 1) extra scrutiny of women, leading to the 2) breaking down of visualizing women into discrete body parts, which 3) leads to mentally processing them more as a collection of organized objects than people.

I think it’s clear that trans women not only receive this sort of treatment from society (being explicitly broken down into body parts [‘sorry abt your dick’]), but also that people who pride themselves on subjecting trans women to extreme scrutiny in order to pick apart their individualized body parts to ascertain their assigned sex are enacting the exact definition of patriarchal and misogynist objectification

thug:

stimcourse:

remember when queer theory was about understanding how sexuality affects socioeconomic standing and how to liberate LGBT people from their oppression and not this neo-liberalist “who can be more inclusive” ego-stroking mess

Queer theory was about making intelligible how LGBT people come to exist in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. That institutional moment in academia (1990’s) was concerned with unraveling revolutions in how we understand the world through the vantage point of people who are ravaged by heterosexual oppression. It looked at contradictions, stigma, and what types of events undermined the tyranny that heterosexuality has on regulating the embodiment of people. It rarely was concerned with how to achieve “liberation,” but that isn’t bad tho lol it’s just a mischaracterization of it.

What makes the “Queer theory” we see today noticeably dissimilar from the 1990’s is the rise of cynicism and nihilism among people pushing queer theory in the academy for the past… 13 or so years. An edgelord phase, so to speak. The greatest work of queer theory to me is “Epistemology of the Closet” by Eve Sedgwick. One the worst is “No Future” by Lee Edelman, which highlights the nihilism streak.

The fixation on “inclusitivity” and queerness sort of being a grab bag of identities that straight people can cloak themselves in to feel oppressed and have moral authority on demand is largely a ~2010’s invention. Straight people were interested in queer theory before of course but this is where we really begin to see “Being weird makes you queer” types of things. Headlines about “if a woman pegs her man that makes you queer” hilarity. Queerness quite explicitly being reduced to “you are oppressed if you don’t identify as straight” and valorizing minoritarian identities.

I rambled but anyway yes contemporary queer theory sucks ass and balls but calling the primarily collection of queer theory works that were concerned with mapping out “liberation” is kind of an oversimplification and a mischaracterization.

quoms:

argumate:

quoms:

the gates foundation’s charity is not ineffective. in fact, it’s very effective, and the capitalist class and its mouthpieces have good reason to celebrate it as widely as they do. it’s just not effective at ‘lifting people out of poverty’ or alleviating food insecurity or whatever it says on the tin. but market expansion, not poverty, is its byword

do you expect it to have any effect on food insecurity, child mortality, treatment of girls, or any of the other causes they like to talk up?

well, yes, actually. but the sort of charity the gates foundation engages in is something like this:

there’s a town in a small third-world country full of starving, unemployed people. they’re starving because they’ve been dispossessed of their land, of course - perhaps they were stripped of it as a community by some outside force, or perhaps processes of population growth coincided with an intense internal concentration of wealth, creating a local bourgeoisie; either way we pretend this is irrelevant and don’t talk about it  - and as a result they have no choice but to go to the (globally integrated) market for food. but they have no jobs, so they have no money to pay for food with, so they starve

now, the completion of some public-private ‘philanthropic’ endeavor provides jobs to the people in the town, let’s say at a garment factory. these jobs pay 50 cents a hour. 50 cents is an improvement on 0 cents, so these people’s lives have been improved in a quantitatively measurable way. the charitable foundation involved calls this a ringing success

two things: (1) 50 cents a day still isn’t enough to feed the town. they starve less, but they still can’t live, so already the charity is successful only in the most relative terms. (2) the value of their labor on the global market (where its products will be sold) is immensely higher than 50 cents an hour. whatever corporation owns the factory and sells those garments will rake in enough in profits that feeding a small town would be trivial, and it wouldn’t have those profits if it didn’t have these workers, because nothing would get produced

so because that corporation appropriates the majority of the value of their labor (and the pittance they’re given is sucked right back into the market when they go to buy food), what actually happens is that the wealth gap between rich and poor goes up and up and up, because of charity operating under the logic ‘life would be better for these people if they had jobs’. and the charitable foundation is correct in that logic, and again its success is quantitatively measurable and it will trumpet that success in spreadsheets and on its annual report. but it will never publicly admit that just purely financially, purely numbers-wise, by far the largest beneficiary of its charity is a for-profit corporation that makes garments

but 50 cents is still better than 0 cents; some families able to educate their daughters is better than no families able to educate their daughters. so yeah, there are going to be improvements in an objective sense

altonin:

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

garbageflowers:

entitledrichpeople:

Capitalism produces scarcity artificially where there is none.

There are enough houses.

There is enough food (in fact there’s currently massive amounts of “overproduced” grain being left to rot)

There is enough water.

Even without changing the horribly designed production systems, there is no real shortage.  People don’t starve, have no fresh water, have no houses to live in, etc. because there are not enough of these things.  People don’t have access because capitalism denies them it.

There’s enough to share for everyone.  It’s not a zero sum game for poor and oppressed peoples. 

but the violence that protects it. 

nike cutting up shoes, clothing shredded, dumping tons of food away, expiration dates (that are mostly to have a justification to throw away food -> couldve just been given away instead), etc.

if an employee tries to just take the shoes instead of destroying them for personal enjoyment or donation then they wouldve been fired and arrested for stealing property.

if an employee eats food at the job or takes food that was supposed to be thrown away home or to donate they can be fired and arrested.

if a homeless person sleeps in a vacant house, they can be arrested. hell a homeless person could be out in the fucking cold in winter and capital would rather them die in the street than sleep in their buildings all protected by cops on the behest of property owners.

this is why cops are bastards. they always serve the interests of capital before the people, property is theft, and how capitalism is violence

thetolerantleft:

thetolerantleft:

Science is not even a coherent body of knowledge; in the abstract, it is merely a methodology. As such, to mobilize in defense of science is not even a coherent means of mobilizing around the belief in anthropogenic climate change. The insistence, in fact, that science represents some sort of ahistorical or apolitical truth, fails to understand the methodological nature of scientific inquiry. A method is enacted by actors embedded within historical and political moments, and the raw data provided by this investigation is processed through regimes of power from a given moment.

We can defend the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and more importantly the necessity of addressing it politically, without naive appeals to an absolute scientific truth. 

This really matters too.

On the one hand we would not want to endorse naive anti-scientism which allows the reduction of science to power to lead us to an opposition to scientific inquiry. We can simultaneously hold the scientific method as a human accomplishment which results from certain formulations of power/material economic social structures and recognize that scientific inquiry can give historically contingent insights into our relationship to materiality.

Naive scientism fails just as much as naive postmodernity, and we need to strike a balance between the two.

zamaron:

Trans women who present a certain way do it as a form of protection. Girls who are pre transition and still present as ‘masculine’. If someone like myself goes out and wears feminine clothing and/or makeup there’s a good chance i’m going to get harassed or possibly killed. So me refraining from doing so is not because I want to but because i HAVE to for my own safety. This is not “male privilege”. Saying that a marginalized group has privilege by conforming to an enforced societal norm as protection is idiotic. This would be like saying that a cis woman has “make up privilege” because she wears make up to not be ridiculed, brutalized and ostracized in society. It doesn’t make sense. At all.

And then this whole myth of trans women being socialized as male. The first issue is that the only people saying this are people who are NOT trans women. It’s mainly cis women who have no idea about how life is growing up as trans women that legitimately think that a trans woman and a cis man have the same exact experiences growing up. This is a very blatant form of oppression. A group in power assigning a blanket generalization in order to delegitimize the experience of the marginalized and further the violence against them is oppression. A man saying that women are naturally physically weaker for example is a myth created by men as a tool to further oppression. The myth of male socialization works the exact same way. Trans women are telling you our experiences and you are constantly denying them because they do not fit into your preconceived narrative that allows you to continue to contribute and enable our oppression.

This other idea of trans women not really being women because we do not grow up being mocked for our vaginas is utterly juvenile. Women do not have to check a boxes of instances of oppression to be considered women. Not every woman, cis or trans, interacts with patriarchy exactly the same so even implying that if a woman isn’t oppressed in a certain way then they aren’t a woman doesn’t hold weight. A white woman does not go through the same struggles a black woman but that does not erase either group’s womanhood If a woman is never mocked for her looks then is she not a woman? The same concept applies to trans women.

Trans women are not socialized as male. We are socialized as trans women. There are trans women who start presenting at a very young age. I personally know girls who have been on blockers since before they started puberty and have been out since then as well. The other girls who may not have started hormones till later in life or not at all are still not “socialized as male” just the same as a closeted lesbian woman is not “socialized as straight” and doesn’t have straight privilege because she grew up closeted and presented a certain way. A majority of the time trans women are abused for displaying any sort of feminine behaviour in our child hood. These lessons that our fathers and mothers attempt to teach us about “being a man” don’t absorb the same way they do for cis men because we are not men. These lessons only harm us and reinforce the message that we have to be hyper feminine in order to be accepted. Trans women do not interact with cis women even close to the same as cis men. Whenever a trans woman becomes aggressive, particularly if she’s black, a cis woman will say that this aggressiveness is a result of “male socialization” rather than a natural response to oppression. A trans woman getting angry at being called a man, something that gets us killed and keeps our people homeless and in constant danger, is not a result of being “raised as a male” but a result of constantly being exposed to violence for existing.

At the end of the day trans women are constantly being brutalized, disenfranchised and murdered for simply existing. So for self proclaimed feminists and just women in general to ignore this is oppressive. For these women to see this violence and dismiss it and thus promote it is oppressive. For these women to push the idea that trans women are just men in wigs which gets us murdered is oppressive. For these women to allow this extermination of trans lives to happen and not lift finger when one of us has our lives taken because we at trans is oppressive. Implying that a trans woman is trying “infiltrate womanhood” is oppressive. We just want to be able to exist in safety. That’s literally it.

chicanochamberofcommerce:

gothhabiba:

gothhabiba:

squeezemetillipop:

gothhabiba:

gothhabiba:

there’s a very particular way in which white supremacists n their sympathisers talk about Greek and Roman civilisation and it’s really uncomfortable

like you can just tell when some crusty white person’s paean to Greeks and Romans as The Inventors Of Civilisation And Reason is motivated by the desire to locate the origins of the qualities that they deem to make people worthy of life & humanity in a white source while ignoring all of the arguably more impressive things that were going on elsewhere in the world concurrently or even previously

Greek and Roman civilization was multi-racial by today’s standards. 

Like Ancient Greek people saw people moving from East Africa, Asia Minor, and the Levant. If you spoke Greek, worshiped Greek religion, and practiced Greek laws you were considered Greek. Regardless of how you look.

And Rome was even more Multicultural. The empire stretched from Iberaia and North Africa to the Middle East and saw and exchange of people all over. You got African people living in Britannia writing letters to their family in Africa complaining about how cold and wet it is. 

And the idea of whiteness as we know it today didn’t even come to play until after the Roman Empire fell and Northern Tribes started to take over once Roman lands and Global focus went to the East.

Like this division by race and skin color is new. It was invented to absolve guilt for enslaving other humans. 

I literally started counting down from the second I made this post like “T minus 15 minutes before someone reblogs this complaining to me because they don’t know what the fuck race is”

I even tagged this post “#no ancient greeks and romans weren’t white but you know what the fuck I mean so don’t start” because I Knew

anyways this is so wild like imagine acknowleding that “this division by race and skin color is new” and yet simultaneously acting like the fact that the Romans conquered parts of North Africa means that some Roman citizens were like somehow ontologically nonwhite

i kinda twitched at “rome was even more multicultural” too. like no it wasn’t lmao at all, it set the standard for brutality of dissidents but also of its supporters.

like when tacitus describes how romans subjugated the britons, he talks about how rome brought baths and theaters and the native elite loved it bc it was new to them and entertaining and it became a standard to differentiate between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ and begin the process that the west inherited and perpetuates, between the center and the periphery, core and other, etc. like if even the aspects that “we” (westerners) today consider “good” about rome, like its architecture and culture, were recognized by contemporary roman elites as being pleasurable but still oppressive to other cultures, you probably weren’t all that multicultural lmao

gendernihilistanarchocommunist:

rebel-without-a-cunt:

rebel-without-a-cunt:

rebel-without-a-cunt:

The idea of post-leftism kind of irks me for many reasons but the biggest one has to be when its explained on the grounds of “well revolutions are just too hard!” Like, there are people who consider themselves radicals but also view a social revolution in the US as practically impossible, largely because they have many false assumptions about what something like that in a major imperialist country might look like. This is why I believe “studying a 100 year old event” can be valuable; the lessons of October teach us that all we really need is radicalized mass action in a few of the largest cities (not Portland and Seattle) to achieve major success. Basically something the size of the Women’s Marches but disruptive and radical rather than polite and liberal, sustained over about a week.

Like, I just remember seeing all these discussions between anarchists and post-leftists on the supposedly immense logistical support and strategic coordination that such a thing would require, and it really felt more like they were rping a Command and Conquer game than thinking about how something like that might function in human terms. Like, vast overestimations of the institutional integrity of businesses and security forces are in the face of true mass action.

It just seems like the underlying reason for that sort of thinking is to stress the importance of service-oriented activism versus the glamorous violence of revolutionary terrorism, because we always have to be roleplaying wargames - everything must have “strategy” or “tactics” behind it. Well, aside from the basic moral good of service, what about 

- it helps keep the most vulnerable alive and healthy, the exact people whose support we will have to count on if we want to wage class struggle

- it makes socialism look like more than some weird fashion statement, and thus draws people to the cause outside of the now stereotypical disaffected youth

- direct interaction with people who are oppressed and suffering is necessary radical education, far more valuable than anything a study group or lecture could provide

not a post-leftist, but one of the things that’s interesting to note about the shift in material conditions is that March 8th, 1917 started off with a women’s march and then spread to the working class within one city, and then out and out and out at a time when a) the working class on a whole had more power to affect the capitalist economy than they do today and b) there was a wildly unpopular World War that Russian soldiers wanted out of that had been dragging on for fucking ever, so they also had a crisis to help spur the attempt to change material conditions

b is easy enough to replicate in the sense that capitalism inevitably generates crisis after crisis, there’ve been plenty of opportunities in that regard in the decades since 1917 (and some have even been advanced upon, all have eventually failed and leave us with important lessons as all failures do, including 1917) but a is a tough one because the material condition of the working class today is so vastly different that the entire working class in every sector except for a few could strike or even take over their workplaces without harming capitalism the same way as you could in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Basically resource extraction workers, factory workers, power and energy workers, waste workers/garbage collectors, distribution and transport workers, airport and seaport workers, etc, basically any work that actually has the power to cause massive disruptions even just by slowing down the rate at which they work (much less ceasing work, much less seizing their workplaces and the means of production from the capitalists that employ them) are the ones that have power to change things and this is by no means the entirety of the working class. Every single sector of the working class except those with the power to bring capitalism to a grinding halt and change the material conditions could go on strike for a month and it wouldn’t do shit if it didn’t catch on in those sectors (which, admittedly, it definitely could if the rest of the working class was leading by example in such a way it sparked that desire in the sectors with actual leverage). We can see this in the pattern of modern French strikes that catch on and become national strikes, the government and business community only begins to quake when it spreads to dockworkers and other essential workers with the power to bring everything to a grinding halt (and even then they drag their heels, knowing not every essential sector will strike 100%, but the minor demands they capitulate to are always after at least one of those sectors goes on strike). 

I really agree with Monsieur Dupont’s nihilist communism on this, and on issues of “consciousness-raising” or even political organization as essentially useless while capitalism still exists, and I think these bits of Nihilist Communism say what I mean better than I could: 

It is possible that the working class will never escape trade union consciousness (ie being selfish and without transformative vision), that is, they will never stop seeking to defend their interest, never get past wanting more pieces of the pie. This is fine by us because it is possible the working class could drive capitalism into collapse and effect their own erasure and never get beyond a bodily, single-minded pursuit of their own selfish interest. So long as the proletariat’s demands stay within economic terms - that is, so long as they remain impervious to political temptation - then so long do they stay on course for naked conflict with the bourgeoisie in the factories. Political demands obscure the clarity of self-interest, political compromise in times of crisis can easily be reached - it doesn’t cost the owners anything. Which owner lost out when workers got the vote?

and

We would re-emphasise that we do not see the working class take over of the factories as a revolution as such but simply the downfall of capital, we see the revolution (and communist consciousness) arising after this period of crisis when a new material base of reality is coming into existence. We see revolution as being in two stages (as, we believe, did Marx) and it is in the second stage, the becoming human stage, that the vast mass of human beings participate (via consciousness by which we mean organisation/common values, etc, which is determined by the new material conditions). The occupations of the factories are only a means and not an end, therefore we are not ‘ultra-councilist’ as those who would marginalise us would have it; we do not propose workers’ councils at all, we do not presume to call for any specific political institution, we leave that to the participants at the time. We say only that, for capitalist process to be suspended, the ownership of production must directly pass to the workers, without any mediation by political institutions or bodies. 

Incidentally, by factory workers we mean those employed under factory conditions and this includes distribution staff etc, we mean those workers who have the power to stop the economy (this excludes shop-workers, teachers, politicised groups, the unemployed, ethnicities and other marginal categories).

and obviously ethnicities and marginal groups employed as workers at the very levers of regional, national and global capitalist economic functioning are not excluded, but it’s by and through their role as hands paid less than the profit they generate to be on the wheel that sets the use value in motion for others to be exploited rather than through those categories (Monsieur Dupont has more to say on identity politics but it’s less relevant to the point I’m making)

Basically I would say this: we are waiting for a new material base of reality to come into existence for there to be the possibility of political organization that is in any way meaningful. In the meantime, I think it’s perfectly valid for those of us waiting (because we don’t have hands on those wheels) to do whatever we can within capitalism to make lives easier for those within it, but we always have to understand there’s no way we’ll cease capitalism’s functioning with anything we do. If there’s anything I’d say radicals should commit themselves to at this point, it’d be building alternatives to capitalism in food production, mental and physical health care, child care, and other things striking working class people are going to need provided to them when the inevitable conflicts at a time of crisis roll around. 

I think the indigenous anarchist writer Aragorn! says it best (and very presciently given the recent CIA French postmodernist article): 

The point being made here is simply this: abandonment of understanding the mechanisms of control disarms us. In the case of postmodernism, confusing a set of academics with the actual power brokers who enact their ideas is a paralyzing problem.

What’s next then? If there are no castle walls because domination has found a way to succeed without necessarily materializing, then our project no longer looks like a siege. If virtualization has become part and parcel of the dominance matrix then single points of attack are no longer effective. There is no letter bomb large enough.

The simple answer is that we have to be patient. We have to have an engaged patience that is incomprehensible to the lethargy of the revolutionary left. Our role should not be to lay in wait for some mark to come stumbling along because that is never going to happen. Instead we must have total engagement in the social and political processes around us. Nothing should escape our attention. This could look like, and is not limited to, attending church (especially politically active churches), going to shareholder meetings, attending city council, toasters, Elks lodges, civic organizations and even leftist meetings. The idea is not that our efforts should be particularly supportive or even destructive to these groups (although pushing the boundary in both directions should be part of the process) but to understand how it is that modern acculturated civil society works. What does a social group look like and how does it react to the kind of stimulus that can be brought to bear? If you play the game how easy is it to integrate into an organizational form? To what extent do these forms accrue power, negligence and momentum? We need more information.

in other words not just waiting around for rev, but waiting for openings. We need more information. I love that line. 

Get active locally, in your community, find out what the issues are where you are. I would add to the above that if you live on occupied, unceded indigenous territory, connect with the people whose land you’re on (and local indigenous groups, who especially in the U.S. may have been forcibly relocated from their own land several states away to reservations far from home) and find out what issues to help organize around, since I know when people go to do community based work where they live that dimension is often neglected. 

A note on that if you’re new to it though: don’t intrude and take over, just listen and support. People will tell you what needs to be done within the confines of capitalism to alleviate the suffering meted out to them by capitalism, whether they’re unemployed and homeless people in an urban environment who need more anti-poverty advocates who see them as people (like, hopefully, you do if you’re actually a radical anti-capitalist, regardless of tendency) or whether they’re sex workers being fucked over by both “official” authority and discipline and the “unofficial” authority of customers and traffickers that are often dismissed when they try to rectify these problems or put a spotlight on them, or people with disabilities or elderly people in your community that capitalism’s use-value definition marks as less than human, or the people who lived where you live first and for hundreds of thousands of years who sometimes are seen as extinct by ignorant-ass settlers, on top of not human enough to worry about the concerns of, past or present, and on and on and on. 

There’s always more work to do than there are people to do it. If we’re waiting, there is work to be done while we wait that lets us gather information and actually help marginalized people at the same time, and if we can do it right we can start building alternatives within capitalism to help the most vulnerable and marginalized that will be able to soak up some of the burden of supporting the people who could actually reshape material conditions when they finally get to that crisis point in conflict with the capitalist class. 

We’ll have our own March 8th, but I don’t think “revolution making is too hard” is valid. It’s easy, it’s just not in the purview of anyone who is pontificating about it to other radical anti-capitalists to be able to have even a minimal effect on it until it’s literally happening. We can still try and build, but I think we’re fooling ourselves if we think it’ll happen any other way than self-interest of a few sectors of the working class clashing with the self-interest of the capitalist class, so what we should probably be building while we wait is stuff a) to help those suffering under capitalism, b) to gather more information in anticipation of an opening we have no control over at an intersection of crisis and self-interest that isn’t ours and c) with that future intersection in mind and what is going to be needed to support them in their self-interest so we can actually get on to a phase where revolutionary political organization of the bulk of humanity might make any kind of sense because of completely transformed material conditions. 

softtrade:

I think a piece of talking abt reproductive issues w trans people (and particularly trans women) that people don’t understand is that if we are talking abt a situation where someone needs to functionally be sterile in order to lower the likelihood of state and or physical violence (ie legal docs), that isn’t simply because they are upset that they don’t have access to their own ability to have children. Although! I think that in and of itself would be sufficient.

But like, given the nature of adoption in our current society, it functionally precludes most trans people (here again, esp trans women) from any method of parenting, barring they had children before. The economics of non adoptive services are excessive, and the social stigma around adoption are likewise major hurdles.

So it’s not even a question of “wanting to impregnate” which honestly is a concerningly antifeminist characterization of parenting I’ve seen written by cis people who claim some sort of feminism, but of like actual access to parenting as a life practice. Of course most people who deny that the former sterilization is an issue don’t want trans women mothering in the first place, but I think it illuminates why it’s an important conversation for many of us who weren’t planning on having our own children pre transition

mostmodernist:

Just a reminder that in 1986 the International Court of Justice found the United States guilty of committing various war crimes through their support of the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The World Court ordered the Reagan administration to pay reparations that amounted to $370 million in damages. The only “No” votes were the U.S., Israel, and the U.S.-supported military junta in El Salvador. Representatives of the U.S. walked out of the proceedings after the vote tallied 94-3. They later blocked the resolution’s enforcement by the United Nations Security Council. Instead of paying reparations, they continued to clandestinely (and against the will of Congress) funnel millions of dollars into arming and training anticommunist death squads to destabilize the socialist government.

By 1991, when the war-weary Sandinista government was electorally defeated by a $22 million U.S.-funded opposition campaign, the United States decided to finally put the international court ruling to rest.

At that time, the damages caused by violating Nicaraguan sovereignty had ballooned to $1.7 billion in accrued interest and associated damages. They settled this out of court with the new U.S.-friendly Nicaraguan president by forgiving $260 million in loans.

Instead of paying almost $2 billion in reparations for war crimes, the United States militarily and economically destabilized a socialist government, forced a regime change, and repaid the new government by writing off a small amount of debt that was only incurred through the economic imperialism and military occupation visited upon Nicaragua by the United States dating back to 1909.

The price of being colonized is forced labor, debt, state and paramilitary terror, war crimes, more debt, violation of democratic processes, ducking responsibility, economic dependence, political instability, more debt, and the forgiveness of some of that debt to better accrue more debt.

IMMEDIATE DEBT ABOLITION AND PAYMENT OF REPARATIONS FOR ALL FORMER AND CURRENT COLONIES AND NEO-COLONIES