LibsEatPoop

Fucking scary shit.

The actual article is now only up here. It's even scarier than the fact that it was taken down.

India is what they want us to think China, Russia, and North Korea are.

DDOSecrets that published the article seems pretty cool. Their logo has the trans flag on it, in their donation page they call out "far right extremist groups", and their about section has a majority non-men team, a few of them out and proud anarchists.

I'm scared they'll be taken down or forced the close. They're publishing the article, despite this possibly leading them to legal troubles. And they've only raised $8k so far of their intended $150k to keep the website up and running.

Those people, if they are people and not just bots/multiple people on one account for a brand or spy org, have consistently the WORST fucking takes.

You've been on reddit for a year and have made 10k comments? Banned from reddit and a mandatory psych evaluation.

I encountered this tool recently and he isn't even the worst. If you don't wanna click - he's probably an Ayn Rand fanboy (objectivist in name) + and talks Che being a homophobe and a "killer" for multiple comments on a post about a Linux app distribution platform's recent guideline changes. Another dude, who's made 30k comments in 2 years, compared Marx to Hitler.

What did these people take offence to? The recent guideline change had a couple pics where, in an example of what a Contacts app should look like, they showed a picture of Marx and had others like Che in the contacts.

And these idiots, in addition to being butthurt, cannot understand "how promoting Karl Marx fits in to the overall goals of Flathub as I understand them"

Yeah, why would Linux users/devs, the ones who want Free and Open Source Software, who oppose Apple and Google and Microsoft for their privacy-invasive ways and praise Snowden for his leaks about the NSA want to promote Marx?

The reddit mind just cannot understand such complexity.

There should be an add-on that automatically blocks redditors with multiple thousands of comments and posts within a year. Like, literally, go touch some fucking grass.

Link - https://twitter.com/ClareDalyMEP/status/1747323130060697682

They already Community Noted her - Clare Daly is a highly controversial Irish politician who was accused of nepotism, support for dictators like Putin and Assad, causing divide in European parliamentary left, and arguably doesn't represent not just dead Irish ancestors but also majority of living Irish.

Changes they wanted:

Australia was increasingly isolated in opposition to the Indigenous right of self-determination at the time, fearing it may encompass secession, the records show. It wanted the term deleted and replaced with "self-management."

Canada accepted the term self-determination, conditional on it being expressed through negotiation and "agreement with government."

The governments jointly proposed deleting references to demilitarization, restitution of land, armed conflict and cultural genocide, while adding language affirming the territorial and political integrity of sovereign states, ultimately yielding mixed results.

A line affirming states' political and territorial integrity was eventually added, for instance.

But an article banning the forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands — which the governments wanted changed because, in Australia's view, "there are circumstances where removal is legitimate (eg. for child welfare purposes)" — was left unchanged.

Why?

At the time, the Indigenous caucus had an absolute "no changes" stance, Deer said. Australia hoped the substitute would compel "moderate" factions to break ranks with "hardline" leaders, the records show.

Australia saw promise in a 1999 Canadian proposal to develop "states-only" text on certain "easier" articles.

"Divisions are beginning to appear in the Indigenous caucus between hardline adherents to the original [declaration] and those Indigenous representatives who are prepared to contemplate negotiated compromises," the 2002 memo says.

Amid such pressures, some Indigenous leaders did begin proposing amendments, opening the gates for negotiation, said Deer. Post-2003, the original was overhauled — talks Deer recalled as horrible — though it wasn't totally gutted like Canada and Australia wanted.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. were the only four countries to vote against the declaration in 2007 when it was adopted by the UN.

The lesson?

Never fucking compromise.

After that the matter has to go to the UN SC (where it will be vetoed) but then it could go to the General Assembly. That’s the pathway to getting something done, right?

All assuming the verdict is again Israel, of course.

Completely insane. Declares no state will stop it from permanently defeating the children of darkness, the axis of evil lead by Iran of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis.

They will kill every Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist and return residents to north and south (is this settlements?) and stop Iran from getting nukes.

Some highlights:

We are continuing the war until the end – until total victory, until we achieve all of our goals: Eliminating Hamas, returning all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again constitute a threat to Israel. I believe that after the massacre of Oct. 7, we will not compromise on anything less than total victory. I say this, on your behalf, to every world leader who I speak with – we will not compromise and we will not stop. We are continuing until victory; we have no other choice.

Tomorrow we will submit a budget that will ensure the continuation of the war: More money – a lot more – for security. More compensation and grants for reservists, families, the self-employed and for all who are bearing the burden.

We will restore security to both the south and the north. Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else. In recent weeks, we have proven to Hamas and Hezbollah that every terrorist is a dead man, wherever they are. This is the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness.

The State of Israel, the IDF and our security services are fighting a moral and just war that is without parallel, against the Hamas monsters, the new Nazis. In the murder tunnels of Gaza, our forces have found copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In a home in Gaza, they found a child's tablet with a picture of Hitler as the screensaver.

This is a war against the axis of evil led by Iran and its three proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. I do not forget, not even for a moment, that in addition to the war in Gaza, in addition to the return of our hostages and the return of the residents to their homes in both the north and the south, we have another, constant, existential mission – To prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. This is my mission. This is our mission.

Source.

On Nathan J. Robinson. I learnt yesterday that he didn’t do any union-busting, and the departing writers/editors who stirred up so much drama on left-Twitter were lying all along. This article by Yasmin Nair gives the full breakdown with a lot of receipts.

I was linked this article by @HarryLime@hexbear.net in his post yesterday, where NJR was vindicated on calling out Fetterman being terrible back in 2022. The replies to that tweet are filled with people dunking on Nathan, while the quote tweets, almost all from the past couple days, are filled with everyone apologizing.

It’s pretty interesting to see.

I’m currently going through his other tweets. So far, NJR seems like a pretty decent guy with a lot of good analysis', completely different from the caricature I made up in my mind from memes and tweets.

It’s quite strange. I used to read Current Affairs before the “incident” and even listened to the podcast. I liked everyone there, including Nathan. I guess that’s why when I heard what happened, and saw in real time all the people I liked fighting with each other (well, all the people I recognised from the articles and the podcast dunking Nathan), I felt betrayed in a sense. I remember writing an email or filling out a form or something similar that the writers who’d been “fired” had set up. Maybe I donated money too, but I don’t remember that. If I did, it would be a small amount.

And I stopped my subscription to Current Affairs, changing it to Jacobin instead.

There was a lot of trolling that went on. I don’t think I ever tweeted at him personally, but that doesn’t matter. I know I consumed the tweets and posts (even here and on the subreddit back when it existed!)

Why? For me, I guess, it was a sense of justice mixed with betrayal: here was a man who headed an org I respected who had betrayed these principals we all hold dear, and in doing so hurt these other people who I also like. And the only power I have in enacting “justice” is in ridiculing him a little bit.

But even then, that never achieved anything. I won’t say “dunking” as a whole is useless. It can be useful in bringing people together and giving us a sense of camaraderie, but only when it’s against deserving subjects - billionaires and the like. It’s like part of forming an identity around common things we hate.

But… completely divorced from any other forms of unification, any other ways to group and coalesce, all that left is a weak identity that does nothing but dunk for no other purpose. Thats, I guess, what happened to me.

None of us here became leftists for the purpose of trolling others. Using it to hurt and bully others is what people on the right do, even if they consider themselves apolitical sometimes.

But dunking on Nathan…became that. Didn’t it? In the article, Yasmin Nair points to real world examples of people bullying him. I imagine they did so out of a similar feeling of “betrayal”, and sought “justice” too. But how would that achieve it? It wouldn’t. It can’t.

This happened because we separated our actual politics - leftism - from our online activities. Maybe not all of us, but I’d wage at least quite a few. If Current Affairs had failed in the years between the Incident and the start of Jan, 2024, I would’ve thought “sad this happened, but serves him right” with no thought to the actual damage that would’ve done to the real world impacts of losing a magazine like that to left politics.

That’s a failing on my part. It’s a failing that I let my personal grievances with Nathan (Ill-informed as I now know) shut me off completely from Current Affairs as a whole, with all the great writers who work and publish there, then and now.

I remember there was an effort, early on in this site’s history, of making this place more than just a place to shitpost online - to actually be used to organise. It failed, partly because we were small and partly because we were too resistant. There were also onboarding efforts to allow us to grow to mitigate that first problem, but it ran into the second one, our resistance to change, and, well, here we are today. Is there anyone here who remembers those days? What a mess. Since then, a lot of original people who created and did the heavy lifting of maintaining this site, including creatively, left.

I remember enquiring sometime ago, maybe 2022, maybe 2023, about what happened to the writers who left Current Affairs. Have they found other jobs? Where are they working, publishing, podcasting? I wanted to support them. I didn’t figure it out. Some have now deleted their Twitter, others have privated their accounts. Maybe it’s for the best.

Maybe things could’ve been different if we could’ve grown and changed and been the place for atleast left-adjacent people to come by the time Reddit exploded and people started to migrate to Lemmy. Who knows? That’s a different world, and probably also a different post. But at least we could learn something from our mistakes. I am trying to from mine. —

This went in directions I wasn’t expecting. I just typed out my thoughts as they came to me. You don’t really have to read it.

TLDR: “I’m sorry, Nathan” and maybe dunking, without any thing else, is not good.

Note - I couldn’t find anything on the “United Federation of Workers of Venezuela” (maybe because it’s a wrong translation?) but here’s some background I’ve managed on find on the author. Pedro Eusse, per this article is a member of the PCV (Communist Part of Venezuela). At the bottom of the OG article, it says the original (untranslated) was in Tribuna Popular, which is the press of the PCV. So that’s additional proof. The PCV supported Chavez throughout and Maduro originally, but stopped in 2020 because of difference in economic policies. Since then it seems the rift has widened.

Per the article (no idea what’s true and what’s not, I’ve edited it to make the points more organized for me and remove the more charged/emotional language) -

In 2023, the government consolidated the policy of labour deregulation initiated in 2018.

It has “destroyed” the minimum wage. November 2023’s annualized inflation was 359%, double that of November 2022. But the national minimum wage has been frozen for 18 months at 130 Bs, less than $4/month, making “the Venezuelan labour force the most devalued in the world.”

93% of the minimum income is based on bonuses rather than actual wages. The majority of workers and families have to survive on these bonuses and food bags. The majority are forced to perform numerous formal and informal jobs to subsist. The result is deteriorating health, and more time away from family care and the fulfillment of social, cultural and organizational activities.

The government has worked to prevent the eventual workers’ and popular protests in the face of the social catastrophe due to its neoliberal policies, by violating - freedom of association, the right to strike, workplace health and safety regulations which cause fatal work accidents.

The National Budget Law of 2024 prioritises capital and the current government with an unequal distribution of national income. There are no budgetary provisions to establish decent salaries and pensions, but only to continue granting bonuses – obviously with no impact on social benefits, vacations, profits, Christmas bonuses and other legal and contractual indemnities.

The government has dismantled of collective bargaining agreements, via the criminalization of workers’ struggles, open layoffs and sham dismissals. All of it occurs with official acceptance (especially against militant union leaders and safety representatives), employer and government coercion to subdue the individual and collective will of the workers, and the use of judicial power to legitimize abusive and anti-democratic political decisions.

2023 began with months of massive protests by teachers and other primary and basic education workers – demanding, unsuccessfully, the signing of the teachers’ collective bargaining agreement – and is concluding with some scattered labour protests demanding the full payment of year-end bonuses from public employers.

2024 will also see labour protests, considering the serious deterioration of the subsistence-level material conditions of those who depend on a salary or a pension.

We have to broaden struggle of the working class and put aside everything that dismantles unions, the retirees and pensioners associations. In 2024, the efforts of the government and the right-wing opposition to manipulate working people and their organizations will be intensified. Thus we must strengthen the independence and autonomy of the labour forces that fight to recover our human, social and labour rights and to defeat policies that only serve capital and that debase the working class.

:)

Airbus all the way for me from now on.

Good at least as far as Palestine is concerned. And he’s still a lib. Toed the line as much as he could. Still got fired. Goes to shows liberalism is literally a dead end.

Link to the post.

Russel Peters, for those who don’t know, is an older comedian who got famous by making fun of his Indian heritage. His comedy, as far as I remember, made fun of Indian accents etc. I was never interested in it, so I never checked it out, and eventually he disappeared.

To my surprise, he appeared today on my tiktok fyp with this short clip. I honestly didn’t expect this take from him. I went and found the original video, and I’ve linked the part where the clip is from.

It just proves that literally anyone who’s not a psychopath can see what’s going on here.