shituationist - Tumblr blog

[shituationist]

Socialist groups should have comradely etiquette courses that can teach some of these people that come to these things the social skills they evidently did not learn in the school system

[shituationist]

The Kent State massacre has been in our collective consciousness lately so here's my contribution to that.

[shituationist]

The DNC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect Henry Cuellar from left-wing challengers only for him to eventually lose his seat after bringing ignominy to his party. That's good. The sooner the Democrat party is destroyed and capital finds itself with one party, the GOP, the sooner we can have an electorally viable, dues-funded, socialist party that's not beholden to billionaire donor interests.

[shituationist]

I don't know if anyone has pointed this out to you yet, but if you were a university student, you were not subject to the draft. There were lots of ways to beat the draft, too, from immigrating to Canada to failing a drug test (before the war on drugs was started, it wasn't that big of a deal). Most of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam were enlisted men and not conscripts, if I recall correctly.

I don't know if the students think they're in a safe setting. Certainly the police have made it very unsafe for them, from directly assaulting non-violent protesters to tolerating Kahanists with 2x4s walking into encampments and attacking anyone they see. I think it takes a lot of bravery to show up and protest something when your target is spying on you, building a file, and sending in armed thugs to bust your skulls.

And who's to say it doesn't effect them? Henry David Thoreau was never going to be effected by the Mexican-American war, not directly anyway. There wasn't a draft, and he didn't live near the battlefield. But he still protested by withholding his taxes, an illegal act which he was arrested for. Thoreau knew that he was involved because his earnings were being used to fund the war and the governmental operation of one of the party's in the war. Students today know the same. Our government is financing a genocide, and it could stop doing so.

centrist guy in 1970 seeing university anti-vietnam war protests in the news

[shituationist]

Here's the thing: imagine if we fixed the housing market, so that the price of housing only increased to match inflation. That would be great, right? Except, homeowners typically spend $2000-$10000 per year on maintenance. So homeownership would go from an investment to an endless money pit, just like renting. The idea of a house as an investment, a house as a way to build wealth, requires that housing prices increase faster than inflation forever, which means that the burden of housing costs on working people must keep increasing forever, and the number of homeless people must keep increasing forever.

The housing crisis isn't just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It's an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up.

Conversely, if we want to end homelessness for good, we need to accept that housing is someone we'll all have to continuously pour resources into, because buildings are complex physical objects that break a lot.

[shituationist]

The “hard hats”, as they were called - mostly white union construction workers in New York - rallied in defense of Nixon, the war in Vietnam, and the perpetrators of the Kent State massacre. They carried American flags and chanted the familiar Birchite mantra, “love it or leave it”. The police allowed the hard hats to assault the protesters, effectively dispersing them. The hard hats made their way from there to City Hall, where they would demand that the mayor raise the flag from half staff, where it was in honor of the dead at Kent State, to whole staff. After some back and forth, New York’s deputy mayor Richard Aurelio ordered the flag to be raised. Over 100 were injured in total, mainly student protesters. American unions at the time were broadly in favor of the war in Vietnam. Union workers were alienated from the student- and youth-led New Left, and many union jobs were located at “defense plants” that built weapons for the war effort. High off the hog of the GI bill, which transformed many proletarian ex-soldiers, veterans of the second world war and the war in Korea, into members of the home-owning gentry, these workers experienced the height of the American empire, at least the height for the “middle class”. Having bought in to the petit-bourgeoisie (via state-subsidized mortgages), and being led politically by class collaborationist business unions, they did not expect the capitalist class to turn on them - they were, after all, not just fellow Americans, but white Americans, many the descendants of settlers, and many also descendants of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants who had only relatively recently been brought in to the fold of whiteness. To them, this was their society that the left-wing students wanted to dismantle. But less than two years after the hard hat riot, Nixon made his trip to China, the first step of what would coalesce in the opening up of China’s labor market to American capital. Offshoring began not much longer after that: American capitalists could move their factories from places like Ohio and New York to Shanghai, where workers could be paid a fraction of the wage that was demanded by the American labor aristocrats, and made to work in far less safe - but far cheaper - working conditions. American workers lost their jobs en masse, as well as their bargaining position. Technological changes, especially the advent of the humble shipping container, meant that production could be more easily centralized in Eastern Asia, where labor costs were pennies on the dollar. The opening up of China’s labor force would be followed, in the 1990s, by the resumption of diplomacy and trade with the same government in Vietnam which 60,000+ US soldiers died fighting against. “To die for the reactionaries is lighter than a feather.” American capital would become free to move anywhere across the globe, and it moved in search of the lowest cost of labor.

The Kent State massacre has been in our collective consciousness lately so here's my contribution to that.

[shituationist]

The Kent State massacre has been in our collective consciousness lately so here's my contribution to that.

[shituationist]

tax credits for clawfoot tubs

[shituationist]

The destruction of the Catholic Church from Sebastian Meyer’s Apocalypse commentary, ca. 1536-45

[shituationist]

Crossdressing on my front porch so prospective buyers of my neighbor's house know what they're getting into

[shituationist]

On this day in 1944, Leila Khaled, Palestinian revolutionary, was born in Haifa.

If you have time today, you should read her autobiography from 1973: My People Shall Live. Here’s a free PDF.

Via @ayaghanameh

[shituationist]

just gonna try to forget how i ran out to the garbage men in my night gown to get them to take the trash I forgot to throw to the curb

[shituationist]

Jury duty today how fast will I get voir dire'd

[shituationist]

cock confidence vs cock shame

[shituationist]

*tamp tamp*

ah i see youve noticed me tamping down the soft earth

[shituationist]

to a beautifully thick white woman like you ancient coins must mean very little, or nothing at all

[shituationist]

ethnic prejudice? elitism? wait until you find out what happened in Germany the year after this!

Harry Price waiting to confirm if a goat can turn into a handsome young man, through a maiden pure in heart, during a full moon night, Brocken, Germany, 1932 Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13579 / CC-BY-SA 3.0