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the sentiment of analyzing why the US doesn't have manufacturing jobs & why the periphery manufacturing circumstances tend to be so miserable is great but you shouldn't talk of manufacturing jobs as if they can only be done by Low Paid Miserable Workers in the Pollution Housing Area That Poisons Everyone. that's not a correct view manufacturing and nor helpful if you believe a world outside the current miserable capitalism is possible

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looks like Iran did the old Israeli ceasefire where you keep dropping bombs as hard as you can right up until the last second before the ceasefire starts

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How do they make the food in ghibli movies look so tasty

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I'm beginning to think that making visibly corrupt weapons contractors a load baring pillar of our economy might not have been a great idea.

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it's not the same as iraq. the difference is that they haven't even used a fraction of the effort to manufacture consent: it's been a halfhearted, lazy, last-minute attempt, the decided they don't need to bother selling intervention

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🇮🇷 Tehran, Iran - A man restores a well-known mural depicting the US flag with bombs and skulls, and the phrase “Down with the USA.”

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Q: You knew Stalin very closely. What was he like?

Kaganovich: "Iosif Vissarionovich was a very prudent man. Very. A man who saw very far. Today we should ask ourselves: could we really have fought fascism if we had remained a non-industrialized, non-collectivized country? Could it have, our archaic agricultural village, feed the army and the cities? Who would have the courage to answer yes to this question? We should ask ourselves: why did Tsarism die? Because it had nothing to feed the army with. It had no clothes to dress it. It was a naked, barefoot, and hungry army, that of the Tsar, and it had nothing to shoot. We, on the other hand, in the fight against Nazism, after the retreats we began to increase, increase, increase our military power, and we sent tens of thousands of artillery pieces to the front. When we attacked Berlin, it was an attack never seen before in intensity and power. Where did we get all those tanks and planes? Without Stalin's policy we would never have gotten anywhere, we would all have died. What would have become of the USSR, if we had not made in ten years the progress that normally takes fifty or sixty years? Fascism does not wait, it would not have waited. Our country would have been destroyed. And all these shitty patriots today don't want to understand it, just as many communists don't understand it anymore. We should have taken Bukharin's path, they say, Kondriatev's path... Well, what would have happened if we had followed their path? We would have been crushed, I am deeply convinced of that. We would have been crushed for five hundred years, it would have been much worse than the Tartar yoke. That's what Russia would have ended up like. We gained two years with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, two years, from '39 to '41, crucial for the development of industry, for the strengthening of transport. But now it's easier to blame Stalin and his era for everything."

Q: Have you never had second thoughts about the arrests of that era, about the violence and the victims of the campaign to collectivize the countryside?

Kaganovich: first point to remember is that collectivization was the continuation of a Leninist line. Were there excesses? Yes. But where and when aren't there? There always are. When you fight a war, it is difficult to know in advance how many bullets you will fire. The enemy occupies one of our cities, we must retake it. But inside the city there are our people, innocents who could be killed in the attack. The army will still shout: to the assault, because that is how it must be, in all types of war. Yes, the result is that even the innocent suffer. There were innocent victims in the collectivization of the land. But there were also rich, influential peasants, linked to the church, who disturbed, obstructed. What was to be done? And in industry there was sabotage. Today many historians deny it, but it was true. Sabotage existed, and, I will say more, it still exists today. Perhaps I have the mentality of an old, overly suspicious fighter: but what are the unshipped goods, the extortion,the development of this mafia that is so much talked about, and of the black market, what are they if not a colossal sabotage against socialism? We should intervene harshly, and explain to the people what is happening, why they are made to suffer in this way. We should open a great debate."

Lazar Kaganovich's response to criticism of Stalin's domestic industrial and agricultural policy in preparation for the Nazi invasion of the USSR

From the archives of La epubblica, interview conducted in 1990 via written questions and answers; KAGANOVICH SPEAKS 'WE ARE NOT MONSTERS'

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this australian guy wrote about the columbia protests when he was a student here. he hid his substack and deleted his social media apps before he went on a trip back to the US to visit friends. he was detained, interrogated extensively about palestine by two border patrol agents, then deported back to australia.

^ that's a quick summary he wrote after the experience. the longer new yorker article is really jarring. link without paywall here

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we’ve been on that diorite

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the worlds most principled liberal cant even manage anti-monarchy

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Giant prompt card for the final sequence in The Wicker Man (1973)

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Talk about a ‘US alternative to the Belt and Road’ is, in my opinion, mischaracterised. Near-universally, it rests on the assumption that the US’s depiction of the BRI - as a simple Chinese-imperialist counterpart to its own historical debt-trap neocolonialism - is accurate, and as such cannot actually deal with the reality of the situation.

The BRI, existing as it does in reality, has many concrete impetuses: it provides land routes for Chinese trade, avoiding western sea-power; it weakens western countries geopolitically; and it develops the global south. These last two are important. China’s specific position as a global south nation, as an exporter (rather than an importer, as with the west) means that it stands to gain from any development of the global south - the US, the world’s largest importer, has the ability to sanction or otherwise trade-restrict nations by simply importing from elsewhere. China, the world’s largest exporter, cannot develop too greatly, cannot climb up the value chain and increase its standards of living, its wages, or the US would simply move production to somewhere less developed, somewhere cheaper - which it broadly has done for low-value-added manufacturing, most cheap goods aren’t produced in China any more. However, if the global south as a whole develops, if not just China, but all the myriad exporters increase their standards, their wages, then there is no alternative, and that development continues.

It might be obvious already, but the US and China stand on opposite sides of the question of development. China stands to gain from increased development, and the US stands to lose. In fact, as the US’s extraordinary wealth is drawn from the exploitation of these global south nations, their dependency on the US and its ability to hold their economies hostage, any increase in the strength, development, and autonomy of global south nations is a direct blow to the US geopolitically and economically. Not only that, but increased development and autonomy lead to trading networks and institutions not directly controlled and managed by the US, i.e. of alternatives to the US, and when given the choice, most won’t choose neocolonialism. Any US investment in infrastructure and development would only be investing in an alternative to itself, in giving the nations it enslaves autonomy, something categorically against the material incentives of the continued survival of the US. China and the US are not simply recolours of each other - China takes the stand of the global south because it is in its material interests to do so, because it is a global south nation.

The US can have no Belt and Road of its own - which is why more funding has gone directly to ‘countering the Belt and Road’ and anti-China propaganda than to any proposed ‘alternative to the Belt and Road’. The fundamental difference is that while China can and does work towards solving the problems facing the world and itself, the US does not and cannot - because it is the problem.

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“come, let us march against the powers of heaven, and set black streamers in the firmament to signify the slaughter of the gods” is such a raw line you’d think it’s from Shakespeare, but it’s actually from the slightly earlier Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe

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MTA workers jackets