Master of the sneak attack

(via)

God this is such a mood (I've never been to an Ivy League college like this guy but I've been exposed to the same logic taking econ in community college lol)

transcript:

here's why i left economics. so, when i was a freshman at brown university, i took an econ class called "income, wealth and health inequality in the united states." this class was taught by president of brown university, christina paxson, and we spent the entire semester learning how to study inequality. and then, at the end of the course, paxson invited us all back to her 2 million dollar mansion, pictured here, for a nice catered dinner, with literal servants. and this experience, this irony, taught me that economists fundamentally view inequality the wrong way. they think about is as a natural fixture of our environment, something that we aren't implicated in, something that we can study for a semester and then go back to our mansions and enjoy dinner. something that is just there to study as scientists. and that is not true. inequality is a product of specific actions, behaviours, structures, and systems, just like this house, and the way that econ focuses distracts from the question of what the fuck we're supposed to do.

I hate these fucking cannibals so fucking much

Love that AOC became Nancy-Pelosi-In-Waiting so goddamn fast

–Elsée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal” (1898)

While I don’t disagree with the Elisée (forgot an i here bud) Reclus quote, it has no place in a post that peddles such blatant misinformation.

1) This tweet comes after a thread that starts like this :

2) Goes on to condemn the carceral framework of immigration policy as a whole :

3) And as for the tweet screencapped by op, it’s a response to this :

So here’s what AOC, quote-unquote “cannibal”, is actually saying in that tweet :

- no immigration facility should be carceral

- immigrant children who come in the country alone (which is a situation which has always existed and. will. always. exist.) and/or children who’ve been torn apart from their families should be taken care of in (separate) facilities which need to go through a tougher vetting process

- none of these facilities should be sub-contracted by the gvt

- and some facilities which have had problems in the past should maybe just be closed

- all of these solutions should be short term before a deeper reform can occur.

ALL. OF. THESE. ARE. VALID. AND. PERFECTLY. NORMAL. POINTS. TO. MAKE. NONE OF THEM ARE IN CONTRADICTION WITH AOC’S EARLIER TWEET.

Seriously some people have this idea that advocating for radical reform means you’re exempt from thinking about the meat-and-potatoes day-to-day inner workings of any policy. You’re all for immigration ? Great, me too. How do you plan to house migrants when they arrive ? What kind of facility would you need ? Who would run it ? How do you survey and vet the people running it ? What extra services do you need to provide for immigrant minors who come in unaccompanied and need to be protected in a country they don’t know ? And how do we deal with the damage already caused by the current system ?

AOC is absolutely not saying, as the framing suggests, that “concentration camps” would be fine with a few tweaks. She is saying that such a system is not okay and that deep change is needed, while providing concrete solutions to the most pressing issues with the current way the system works. These two statements are not incompatible.

I understand that we are basically all traumatized with the way we cannot trust any fucking politician, but behind every post calling out AOC as a “corrupted idol” I detect a real anxiety of being “ahead of the curve”, of denouncing progressives for “selling out” before they actually do, so we can’t be disappointed if and when these progressives water down their ideals. AOC is not perfect, nor should she be treated as such. But what’s happening in this post is disinformation, pure and simple. It’s twisting someone’s words for the pervert pleasure of making people feel disappointed and betrayed and dividing us. It pains me to see people fall for it when the tweets in actual context are only a click away. Be better. If we take this shit at face value and discard allies so readily, what chance do we have against people who actually want to cause us harm ?

Context and nuance are important, folks.

Response for when the far-right pick a fight by spewing ignorant divisive bollocks, then claim that they're being 'bullied', or 'cancelled', or 'oppressed' or 'silenced' when other people argue back or criticise them for said bollocks.

This is my theme song

people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.

i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money. 

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”

every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.

This is a really good post

I saw this on my fyp and I am still infatuated with this cinematic masterpiece

I can’t believe a humble security guard saved our planet from the aliens.

this is a fever dream right

He fucking DEATH DROPPED

the SALUTE

The betrayal...

 who did you exploit today?

I don't know that I've ever seen someone make the Aardman Grimace in real life.

Truly a masterclass in harrowingly strained enthusiasm!

This just hit me. I’m so Southern my family has a matriarch and no one in the family knows for sure how old she is. We all also got into a heated debate about the existence of her glass eye (still not confirmed). She’s in her 90s- we think- beat cancer, outlived two husbands, had seven children and has outlived three of them, survived The Great Depression, and either her dad or her grandfather was a full blooded Cherokee Indian… possibly the tribe’s leader but no one really knows for sure.

She also once lit into my dad’s school bus driver, cussing him black and blue about how he treated the kids and didn’t realize she had a butcher’s knife in her hand until he RAN away. She didn’t have any more trouble out of him.

…I wish to know how and why this just occured to you, please

I had an eloquent reason but really what it boils down to is I think Mamaw is a cryptid. The running joke in the family is that Mamaw will be at the end of the world with the twinkies and the cockroaches.

I’m not sure it’s a joke anymore, I think it’s a premonition.

Two years ago one of my cousins wanted to bring her wife to thanksgiving and Joe was all “ew no way” and Mamaw stood her ass up and said “Who the hell do you think you are, saying who is and isn’t welcome in my house? This ain’t your house- you get out! I say who is welcome and YOU is not welcome. Now SCAT!” while slapping at him and then sat back down and asked my cousin if her wife ate catfish. Joe tried to come back in and she popped the tennis balls off her walker and threw them at him until he left

No matter how old Mamaw gets, her hair is still solid black. She still hasn’t gone gray and she’s never once died her hair. Her kids all have heads full of gray hair, and my father- her grandson- is starting to go gray. Mamaw? Nothing. I swear she looks exactly the same as she did when I was a kid.

Mamaw got Covid-19. She presented with symptoms and was rushed to the ER with a dangerously high fever and next to no oxygen. The doctors took note of her age (she’s apparently 93 as best she can guess) and her vitals and, well, Mamaw wasn’t gonna make it past Monday.

By Sunday night the fever was gone and she was complaining that the hospital didn’t get WWE and she was gonna “miss my wrasslin shows!”.

She was home and completely fine by Tuesday. By Wednesday she was calling up the anti-maskers in our family just to call them idiots and hang up.

THIS SPEAKS TO ME ON A MOLECULAR LEVEL RIGHT NOW.

You are witnessing a broken human being

This is actually me like constantly now

The older I get the more I identify with this when I come across it

I just got a new humidifier and I am fuckin’ pumped

When I got a new futon I literally cried

be more mad at your government for not providing adequate covid medical & financial assistance more than you’re mad at individuals for ‘being stupid’. the pandemic is at this level due to governments’ willingness to sacrifice its citizens to keep The Economy running and no amount of personal responsibility was ever going to replace an actual national pandemic response.