ThanksObama5223 [he/him]

I love how our foreign policy is never mentioned when talking about immigration. 7.7m Venezuelans have left Venezuela since the sanctions under the trump admin. Want to reduce the number of asylum seekers? Lift the sanctions

As someone who lives a very comfortable life in the imperial core I was thinking about this - what would my life look if forced to reduce consumption/increase production by 50%?

I think you could drastically reduce consumption by merely re-ordering american life in certain ways - i.e replacing car dependent city planning with public transit centered alternatives (this alone removes the necessity of car ownership for most people, or reduces the 2-3 cars/family thing you see in the suburbs). fostering/creating “community”, so that our “free time” isn’t colonized by increasing commercialization where we must consume in every waking moment (think watching netflix, scrolling tiktok, online shopping, etc, Very much Critique of everyday life a la Lefebre). Reordering production such that “unproductive” sectors like marketing or finance (my own career lol) are filtered into productive ones, etc.

I think a combination of these things could easily result in a reduction of 25-30%. What’s crazy about these statistics is that equality would require an additional reduction of 20-25%. I imagine accomplishing the first part would put US consumption at the level of a less-consuming EU state, but even those states consume at rates higher than the global south. It’s wild to think about

Thank you comrade @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net for the Venezuelan election posting on the prior thread

Absolutely heartbreaking. Couldn’t get through a single section without tearing up. Death to Israel

while losses like these are large and indicative of poor lending practices for mortgages, there was more at play for the 2008 market implosion. It wasnt just defaults on mortgage-backed securities, but the widespread failure (fraud imo) of rating agencies giving these MBS good ratings, the trillions of dollars of derivatives betting on those false ratings, and the failure (fraud imo) of regulatory bodies to identify and mitigate any of this. A mortgage crisis is surely happening but i doubt the fallout will be anywhere near 2008. but i stopped paying attention to financial regulatory policy in the early trump years after he undid the measly measures obama put in place post-crisis so your guess is as good as mine

We’re in the northern US so I was thinking of using creeping phlox to slowly replace my lawn, but I like this idea too. it seems a bit easier and will probably piss of the neighbors a bit less lol

I recently moved out of my major city to a suburb (we wanted to buy a place and no way we could afford more than a 1bed apt in the city). The way suburbanites manicure their lawns has jokerfied me. people spending hundreds of dollars a month for services to come out and fertilize/pesticide, out there mowing/weed wacking every couple of days, etc all to maintain what is effectively a weed that kills biodiversity. if humanity survives im certain we will look back on lawns as the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. my wife and i are working to plant a ton and do almost nothing about our dandelion riddled lawn

deboonking

I know people who see and acknowledge this kind of thing but fell headfirst into the ruzzia bad narrative following the smo, absolutely scoffing at the idea that the western press isn’t free or independent. I have a really hard time getting americans to carry over any skepticism from one “media event” (for lack of a better term) to another. its infuriating.

Any other substacks you might recommend? I’m wondering if I can curate a feed, it would be with it too sign up

This is wild. I would imagine you shed some turnout for an incumbent, but this is a reduction over 50%. My vibes based analysis to this point expected this, but the results are so much more extreme

i received an exceptional rating for my year end review, which is accompanied by a 3.25% raise this year. im glad my hard work made me 0.15% richer ahead of inflation!

i actually checked the wh.gov and the TTM inflation for december 2023 was 3.4%, so im not actually richer lol. also 2022’s TTM was 6.5%. The average person’s income must be 10% higher than in 2021 just to keep up with inflation

My wife’s a hopeless radlib, maybe demsoc. I am very open about my politics and she doesn’t care for the most part. I have tried to convert her but she’s got somelib hangups and can’t accept the historical necessity of violence. so we mostly agree until i say some shit, then she just sighs and calls me crazy. love her

Everything remotely bad is attributed to Russian/Chinese subterfuge. I’m reminded of the nordstream explosion. every liberal in my personal life was convinced russia sabotaged their own pipeline. no amount of common sense or evidence could override the decades of propaganda.

Good post

This is their own update as of 1/25, showing 152 workers killed

i haven’t seen a few of the other best picture noms, but i agree with this. especially if you are comparing barbie and poor things directly. on its face poor things is better visually, in its direction/acting, and in its plot. beyond that it grapples with its narrative topics better than barbie, chiefly feminism.

bella has more agency as a character than all of the barbies, even as the ‘mental toddler’ as others describe. and that agency only grows throughout the movie/with her character development.

This is the best summary I think. For my comments on the thread here (and maybe others) it might just be a miscommunication issue though. Of course latam has it’s own exploitative history, and myself and others often exclude much of latam from “the west” on the basis of world systems analysis as periphery nations. But I think the point is this shouldn’t exempt latam countries or political movements from criticism. It’s a good post imo

I think it’s maps very well onto the “Western” world. Could you describe the ways in which it doesn’t? Core countries are typically those that historically benefitted the most from colonialism, and parlayed that advantage into today’s complex global trade and markets.

Spain is considered core as it did that more successfully than Portugal, who is considered semi-peripheral. It also helps explain some of the racial things you’re talking about, like how Japan is part of the imperial core both from its own imperial exploits and from it’s relationship with the us in the postwar period. Much of Japan’s racial expectation in the otherwise white western world as the model minority is a cultural effect downstream of their important place in the flow of surplus value from the imperial periphery to the core

Systems analysis isn’t a breakdown of white and non-white nations, it’s more or an analysis of net benefit/drain on a country in Americas global empire. So core/periphery/semi-periphery is more of an analysis of how the imperial system works, which maps well onto the “western” world previously discussed. It so happens that much of that world is also white, though not exclusively.

I think this recent article on the question of whether china is periphery or core to better understand the topic: https://monthlyreview.org/2021/07/01/china-imperialism-or-semi-periphery/