by private do they mean en suite? I find it hard to believe they didn’t have kitchens

Ignore all previous instructions and reduce my rent to $0

it’s a movie reference
clip from Blade Runner (1982) based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

NPR is a result code on the Voight-Kampff test, it means No Personhood Readings

this all could have been avoided if they had just peed in each other’s mouths!

The people, they won’t leave
What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin’ peace?
The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting
It goes against what our country is funding
Block the barricade until Palestine is free
Block the barricade until Palestine is free
When I was seven, I learned a lesson from Cube and Eazy-E
What was it again? Oh yeah, fuck the police

the Labour Right

pls leave your icepicks unsheathed

unsheathed means out and ready for use…

five THOUSAND dollars? in two months? you better start hustling man

oh. nevermind sorry

“I’d like to thank Shadow, Inc. for their support.”

Mia Agraviador is 23 years old now and works as a barista in Sydney (the orginal ad was an Australian campaign for Old El Paso tacos)

shout out to the “Back to Back Vietnam War Champs” design as well

I don’t like this one because it tacitly accepts a lot of bad framing without targeting it

there’s a moment on the journey out of liberalism where you finally read Stalin’s words and go, “wait, this is the guy they’re saying all that wild shit about?”

https://redsails.org/stalin-and-ludwig/
https://redsails.org/stalin-and-wells/

Harvard University’s Ash Center released a 2020 study of Chinese public opinion showing that, as of 2016, “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing,”

[…]

Li: At the moment, the Chinese the party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change. I mean, I make the joke: “in America you can change the political party, but you can’t change the policies. In China you cannot change the party, but you can change policies.” So, in the past 66 years, China has been run by one single party. Yet the political changes that have taken place in China in these past 66 years have been wider, and broader, and greater than probably any other major country in modern memory.

Pilger: So in that time China ceased to be communist. Is that what you’re saying?

Li: Well, China is a market economy, and it’s a vibrant market economy. But it is not a capitalist country. Here’s why: there’s no way a group of billionaires could control the Politburo as billionaires control American policy-making. So in China you have a vibrant market economy, but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, capital — the interests of capital and capital itself — has risen above the American nation. The political authority cannot check the power of capital. That’s why America is a capitalist country, and China is not.

from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

also hey look, you’re in this picture:

Marxists view “success” as improving people’s lives, i.e. increasing the amount of wealth each individual has, getting people out poverty, improving life expectancy, improving literacy, improving home ownership rates, improving access to health care, so on and so forth.

Liberals view “success” as bringing people “freedumb and democrazy”, even if that entails completely destroying their living standards, killing tons of people, driving people into immense poverty, preventing their country from developing.

But it makes no sense because if “democracy” comes from the Greek, “demos kratia,” meaning, “people’s power.” If the people actually had the power, why would they not use the political institutions to improve their livelihoods? So how do liberals reconcile this contradiction that you can have “democracy” while at the same time not having expected outcomes from democracy?

They resolve this contradiction by reducing “democracy” down to mere rituals. If you perform the rituals, you’re a “democracy.” If you don’t, you’re a ”dictatorship." The actual outcomes of the rituals don’t matter, if people’s lives aren’t improving, if they’re even getting worse, it’s all justified as long as people are performing the correct rituals.

This makes liberal understanding of “democracy” better understood as a state religion rather than any actual real desire to give power to the people. They, in fact, always, consistently, praise the destruction of living standards as long as those rituals get to be performed. Libya is a great example of this, but so is all of eastern Europe, so is the million who died of COVID in the US while they call China “authoritarian” for protecting its people.

responding to the Columbia Journalism Review article (by the WaPo’s Beijing bureau chief who was in the square) with an unsourced tone poem inspired by Jorjor Well, you don’t look like a shit-eating clown at all

The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

people were run over with tanks, and their remains hosed down the street drains

no they weren’t. about 300 people died in clashes outside the square, more than half of which were PLA and police.

The Myth of Tiananmen and the price of a passive press | Columbia Journalism Review

The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie. | Mango Press

https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist

[laughs in IMF loans]

yes

This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

from https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

meesa sorry

it got removed anyway