border patrol surveillance blimp floating around in the sky ~200 miles away from the border. very normal. very cool
border patrol WANTS to kill people btw. they WANT people to die.
I know someone who does ecological research near the border, so he camps out for weeks at a time - and more than once, border patrol has waited until he’s left camp and slashed/emptied his water jugs and tent and destroyed his food. he has tried to escalate/complain and nothing happens. you can literally get arrested and convicted for giving someone food or water out in the desert, in case the person you’re helping might be this scary evil “alien” boogeyman.
and it’s happening more often.
and it’s going to get even worse now that DeSantis has sent an untrained armed militia to t/x to “support” border patrol.
this is an actual crisis. these racist fucks are using deadly force to kill migrant people from so many angles. they force people who need to migrate to do so through the desert, where they’re shot or starved or dehydrated or heatstroked to death. and anyone who doesn’t want to risk the desert is having to enter through unsafe trucks. san antonio had a case where dozens of dead migrants, including kids, were found locked in the back of an abandoned truck last summer. over 125° in the truck - they were cooked to death. they had no other options. it’s a fucking genocide in the making
i saw the trailer for the new feel-good “anti-racist” US war movie about the carpet bombing of North Korea and started writing up something for this blog, partially inspired by the absolute shit storm i got for sharing that post i made with pictures of everyday life outside pyongyang
and then i gave up, because what’s the point? westerners can’t even handle a single picture of a north korean not looking miserable without screaming propaganda
meanwhile, there are no stories about the horrors of life in the ‘hermit kingdom’ that are deemed too outlandish to be believable. i can’t remember who said it, but it’s like the entire country has taken up permanent residence in the western imaginary as some silly little cartoon villain, where the leaders of the country does evil things for no discernible reason. they’re just silly and evil like that, and the citizens, of course, are silly, too. silly and brainwashed.
i watched a video recently of a tourists visiting an auto dealership in pyongyang, and the entire time he was just gawking at the employees and costumers, shoving his phone in their face, and confidently explaining to his youtube audience that everyone he’s interacting with are actually actors.
what level of dehumanization do you have to reach for that thought to even cross your mind? to think that the people you see before you are actors? that entire cities and shops are erected with to sole purpose that you, a western, will see them and be impressed?
what frustrates me the most is the casual cruelty that seeps into any mention of north korea, no matter how small. if north koreans are not being evil, they’re being silly.
a north korean newspaper reports that a group of archeologists in pyongyang have discovered an old rock carving with the words ‘unicorn lair’ (mistranslated), and the western press reports that north koreans now believe in unicorns.
a tourist at a hotel in hamhung is told by the receptionist to be careful at the beach: the waves can get high. that day the tourists goes to the beach, and there are no waves. she retells the story to her instagram followers, explaining that the poor woman at the hotel could never have seen real waves before because north koreans are probably never allowed to travel.
she adds a little teary-eyed emoji.
one of the cities i included in the post was sariwon, a densely populated city to the south of pyongyang. below are some pictures from its “folk customs street”, which was built to showcase old korean traditions and customs
here’s all wikipedia has to say about it
Built to display an ideal picture of ancient Korea, it includes
buildings in the “historical style” and a collection of ancient Korean
cannons.
Although it is considered an inaccurate romanticized recreation of an
ancient Korean street, it is frequently used as a destination for
foreigners on official government tours. Many older style Korean
buildings exist in the city.
it’s just north koreans being silly again. there’s no mention of what might motivate them to build a street like that
— why the preservation of old customs, culture and architecture might somehow be important for the city
could it perhaps have something to do with how the U.S. air force dropped
635,000 tons
of bombs, including
32,557 tons of napalm, over the korean peninsula during the war? the carpet bombings, which are now the topic of an upcoming hollywood movie about overcoming racism through warcrimes, destroyed an estimate of 85% of all buildings in north korea. some cities were entirely wiped off the map.
in sariwon they missed a few buildings, but not many
—
after an intense firebombing campaign the U.S. military estimated the destruction of sariwon to be at 95%.
none of this is mentioned on the wikipedia page for sariwon.
we destroyed entire cities. memory-holed the entire thing,
called it the forgotten war. and now, 70 years later, we’re convincing ourselves that the people living in the ruins are actors.
and somehow the north koreans are the brainwashed ones
that’s just the infrastructure… 20% of the POPULATION in the dprk was wiped out by the usa. 1 in 5 people. and who knows how many more died from starvation and diseases and injuries from the destruction of their land and the stacks upon stacks of sanctions the west has thrown at them since
you said that religion is actions and relations, not beliefs- would you be willing to elaborate and/or point to some reading? or like at least defining what "beliefs" means here?
sure. now i’m sure there’s some much more recent scholarship on this but everything i think of this is fundamentally drawing on/extrapolating on the german ideology and gramsci’s work–but the gist of it is that there is no (let us take an example) ‘islam’ that exists independent of its practicioners. this is a materialist (as opposed to idealist) stance on religion (& ideology more generally).
so what this means is that–sure, everything that comes under the umbrella of 'islam’ does in fact share a few core concepts (the quran, the indivisbility of god, mohammad as a prophet)–but that attempts to make any sweeping generalized statement about the ideological content of islam are bound to fail because ultimately the islam of the iranian state apparatus & the islam of the taliban & the islam of muslim feminists in indonesia & the islam of the PLO & the islam of liberal arab-americans are all fundamentally different ideologically because they are shaped not by some eternal essence of islam but by the social circumstances and communities within which each of these groups is practing.
(want to be super clear that i am just using islam as an example here, the same can be applied to any religion in any place–christianity, for example, is not uniquely genocidal & colonial due to some inherent ideological content, which is why going through the bible to point out violence & slavery and being like 'see, this is what’s wrong with christianity’ is a futile exercise–christianity has been the religion of a genocidal & colonial ruling class across much of the globe, and so that practice of it of course takes on that character)
hence, for example, there’s absolutely no contradiction between, say, the judaism of diaspora reform jews & that of the israeli state–the stark difference makes sense when you realize that they are not both informed ideologically by some inherent essence of judaism but by the historical context of centuries of persecution vs. decades of genocidal state building. no religion has an innate inextricable character–all character that a religion has is given to it when it becomes a social fact, and comes from the people who practice it and their material and power relations.
the idealist view of religion is v. v. popular and leads to a lot of putting the cart before the horse and other nonsensical positions and interpretations of history, even from people who are otherwise ‘leftists’. a major one is the idea that the 'protestant work ethic’ is somehow responsible for capitalism, as if it did not develop concurrently with the epoch of primitive accumulation, as if it was not informed and conditioned by the development of capitalism itself! or similarly, the idea that christianity is somehow responsible for colonialism rather than an instrument of it–that the kingdoms of europe said 'well, god has willed us to go and do some colonizing’ and sent off the conquistadors rather than being in a material position to economically exploit other peoples & developing a rationalization within the frameworks available to them for why doing so was morally permissible
Today marks the 75th anniversary of Nakba, the Israeli genocide and displacement of indigenous Palestinians on their land furthering their colonial project. And it is continuing till today. It will end the day when Israel ends.
From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.
if you search “porn” right now, you will go to porn hub, and you will see, on that very first page, videos that are sexist, racist, incestuous, fetishising lesbians, paedophilic, etc. this is the mainstream porn. this is the surface. that is what most of 96% of men saw and decided to keep looking. I don’t say things I haven’t checked and so I looked and literally the first video on pornhub offered to me was a role play of a guy fucking his stepdaughter. In my country 99% of men have watched porn. just near every man you ever meet will have watched women degraded and humiliated and fetishised. and they enjoyed it.
This is how the system of white supremacy operates. The media is used 2 create stereotypes like blk on blk crime.They need black men to fill jail cells for the Prison Indstrial complex
You know what? I’m tired of this. I do not know what exactly they are waiting for. I mean our government comes up with “reasons” to invade other countries, such as Syria, like their government is allegedly violating human rights or something like that. but… I mean for other countries, they do not even have to go deep to bomb the fuck out of this place, they can just look at our media. And this has been happening to people of color since the media has existed.
I’ll never forget this
👇🏾
Did a research project on this in undergrad and the results are extremely alarming because it’s not just in imagery, it’s in language used even in the law making process and within our own communities in a completely different way than expected.
Yuuuup talk about this in our media culture and society class where the exact same Katrina sample was used. White supremacy runs far too wide and too deep to be denied that it exists
OP was deleted for being “a Russian plant” for posting stuff like this. Know your history.
I will also leave a warning(.or.kr) with you all. South Korea has had an internet censorship regime for almost 2 decades now. Any website that a capricious organization with no oversight or real civilian petitionship to appeal decisions (though the website says you can, I’ve never seen an appeal pass) has deemed a threat to national security redirects to http://warning.or.kr, and this very quickly expanded to “threat to public order,” including stuff deemed “too dangerous for children.” This, of course, includes LGBT+ resources. This is coming to your country, too, and unlike in South Korea, if you use a VPN to get around it, it’s 20 years jail time. This is what years of repeating xenophobic language of suspicion against a country across the ocean got you. You reaped and now many of us are sowing. Enjoy your lumps.
I have said over and over again that South Korea and the internet is a vision of the USA, ~10 - 20 years in the future. I was right about image boards radicalizing specifically disaffected teen - 30-years-old young men (In Korea, DCInside/Ilbe aka Daily Best in the early 2000s going into the 2010s -> in the USA, /pol/ hypercharging same demographic’s radicalization), and I’m going to be a Cassandra about this, too. http://warning.gov is coming, and it’ll be thanks to all the political will gathered in treating People’s Republic of China as de facto suspicious, much like how warning.or.kr played into the THINK OF THE CHILDREN rhetoric and treatment of the DPRK as the de facto suspicious.
“Men’s indifference to learning about contraception and to taking any responsibility for it is a theme that emerges from many reports of projects that have attempted, and failed, to reach and educate men. One of the most successful programs of contraception education for men, a Planned Parenthood project in Chicago, abandoned its attempts to reach men over the age of twenty-five when it was found that these men simply would not participate… Instead, the project targeted a younger group, and as part of its research the project conducted a survey of over a thousand men aged fifteen to nineteen:These young men were asked whether they agreed with the statement “It’s okay to tell a girl you love her so that you can have sex with her.” Seven out of ten agreed that it’s okay.They were asked whether they agreed with the statement “A guy should use birth control whenever possible.” Eight out of ten disagreed and said a guy should not.And when asked, “If I got a girl pregnant, I would want her to have an abortion,” nearly nine out of ten said no, they would not want her to have an abortion.These teenage men agreed: Deception to obtain coital access is okay; male irresponsibility in contraception is okay; but abortion is not okay—“because it’s wrong.””
— John Stoltenberg, “The Fetus as Penis: Men’s Self-Interest and Abortion Rights” from Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice
are there any marxists women that are writing on current topics. I believe that there is a rise in marxists men aligning with fully conservative patriarhical positions in a response to the extreme liberalism of the New Left. And I don’t mean conservative in the way that is often unjustifiably levied against proper criticisms of leftist positions such as when you are against prositution, porn, the atomization of gender etc. I mean really proper return to naturalization of women’s role.
And I feel that this needs to be written about in a brand new context. Because it’s different than what you would have seen in the 70s and before. This time it’s actually coming from the left in a new form with analysis of the ruling class ideology some of which is actually true. Things such as capitalism and ruling class destroyed the patriarhical family unit (true), and that women should go back into serving the household or men instead of being a slave to their employer (obviously false). But also re: abortion. That the ruling class wants to reduce population and eugenics (true) and so abortion laws should be curtailed??
So this needs to be written about in news ways. I only know of On The Woman Question.
