freagle

Congress people want to know what their actual constituents think

Not according to the evidence.

https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

What!? And let our military shrink to only 600% the size of the next largest military ?

Oh look, a lemmy.world user who’s never wondered why fascism has only ever emerged from liberalism. Shocker.

You’re so funny. You do realize that for 100 - 150 years after every Euro-liberal revolution the masses of people were destitute while the elite became insanely rich? You think the robber barons were an anomaly? Why do you think the labor movement happened? It wasn’t because people were well taken care of.

Meanwhile in every communist revolution mass poverty alleviation was the primary driver of economic organization, ending centuries of famine cycles, lifting 100s of millions out of abject poverty, and it only took them between 10 and 30 years to establish the industrial and economic base to do it. In the USSR rent was less than 10% of person’s income. In China, a child laborerer on a rice farm in 1949 is today sitting in a car that park itself.

Stalin came from poverty and ethnic minority, became the most powerful man in the USSR and died with almost nothing to his name except some clothes and few pieces of furniture.

Would I prefer a system that governs for the benefit of the masses? Absolutely.

What’s funny is that you are so adamant that having a vote in a liberal democracy matters so much that it’s evil to not have exactly the type of voting system from liberal democracy, and yet that self same voting system is exactly what allowed the oligarchs to maintain and grow their power for 250 years without anyone ever being able to stop them.

Yes, I would gladly abandon this farce of a democracy for something that actually helped the masses instead of the system that protects the opulent minority from the will of the majority (to use the words of American founding father and 5th president James Madison).

Wow. You literally just described voting in liberal democracies founded by land-owning white supremacist men who sought to hoard wealth without the masses having any power to stop them

No, the existing security gap between open source software and closed source software will grow, with closed source showing more vulnerabilities at unpredictable intervals as a.i. gets better at decompilation and fuzzing, while OSS will openly provide the source code allowing for faster finding and repairing of vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle

Rhyming days of the week is, uh, wow. Fucking contrived news coverage. It’s as though they know the only people watching them are old white people who think a black person listing days of the week is rapping

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him rapping in public events. Quoting hip-hop lyrics, yes, but not actually trying to rap. If that’s the reference, then yeah, that’s a whoosh on my part. I would love to see a video of Jeffries rapping

only the definition that you prefer is valid. Not the actual meaning of the word

So the meaning of a word is how it’s used. This case with Jefferies, the meaning of the word is “famous black man like Tupac”. That’s the meaning. We know this because the person assigning it to him is not speaking in Arabic, and not applying the same moniker to white people.

So even in that basis alone, the moniker may as well be “AIPAC Blackman”. Because that’s literally the extent of thought being put into it.

The problem is that Tupac’s name is not just some accident of history. It is a deliberate choice. Therefore it comes with meaning.

Meaning is constructed. It’s not something found in a dictionary, it’s a participatory process.

This is true for plenty of other names: Hitler, Trump, Gandhi, etc. Imagine calling JD Vance’s wife “A Hot Ma Gandhi”. Not only is it offensive simply by virtue of the dehumanization that comes from decontextualizing a name based on ethnicity or race and just applying a famous name of one member of that community to another (like calling all Chinese people Lee or Ching), but it’s ALSO applying a name with the baggage if honor to a person who doesn’t deserve that honor.

I wouldn’t be offended on behalf of the Gandhi family. I would just find it offensive and ignorant.

This is like that. I am not upset on behalf of the Shakur’s, I am upset as me, because it’s an ignorant and offensive name for all of these reasons. And you defending it is a lot like the good old boys saying “what are you some kind of Indian lover? If they don’t like it let them come tell me to my face that they don’t like it”. It’s not a good look

So you missed the entire history of the contemporary black American Shakur family, where the name was adopted by Black Panther James Coston as part of his conversion to Islam after Malcolm X’s assassination? Where that others in the Panthers choose to adopt that name for themselves as a sign of solidarity, respect, and commitment to black liberation? Where Tupac’s mother changed her name for this reason, and changed her son’s name as well.

The only thing linking Jeffries’s moniker and the Shakur family name is that AIPAC and Tupac end in the same three letters. It both assigns a very specific radical revolutionary name to an opponent, which in and of itself is disrespectful to the name and the family, but then does so simply because Jeffries is black, because none of the white people in Congress that take money from AIPAC are called “AIPAC Shakur”.

There’s really not a single legitimate reason to use the moniker, and there are at least 2 reasons not to.

To be clear, Jeffries deserve an insult. Using Shakur as part of the insult is insulting to the Shakurs. Jeffries has not earned that name.

Yes, and people calling him AIPAC Shakur are displaying their ignorance of the black power movement and honestly it’s just gross

Giving Jeffries the surname “Shakur” is an insult to the Shakur family. Look them up. The name is a political statement.

If only there was a Democrat president who had access to the full unredacted Epstein evidence and could have directed his DOJ to go after the criminals with the evidence therein!

It’s the economy, stupid

They literally are the only successful slave rebellion in the history of European empire. They are some the most self determined people in the history of humanity not in absolute terms but relative to asserting themselves against the greatest force of domination on history

Again, with all due respect, Haiti doesn’t even exist without Europe forcing it to exist in the first place. It was cleansed of the original peoples, and of the names of the places and the governance and the ecology to the best of their ability and then populated, by Europeans, with trafficked humans who were beaten, murdered, and taught a European language. Literally everything about the situation is foundationally a European construct and the Haitian people are working within that context to liberate themselves despite all of the best efforts of the West to stop them and to limit them.

Do you understand the critique? The Haitian people are self determining, yes, but they are self determining inside of a historical context created by the West over centuries. Yes, it is true that every runner finishes the race on their own, but when the runner is trafficked into the race, beaten within an inch of their life, maimed, and then given salt water by the organizers along the route, it’s not exactly the conscientious thing to say “look, we have to treat them and all of their stumbles and scrapes and lost time as something they cocreated in order to respect their agency”.

It is appropriate to acknowledge, thoroughly, just how devastating the West has been to the world’s people.

So you come in to a conversation specifically about immigration laws and law and order politics wherein my counter to the person I am arguing with was that the West is a massive contributor and maintainer of the causes of and driving conditions behind mass migration of poor and traumatized people into the West and you thought: “you know. I don’t want to get involved at all in the topic of law and order or immigration law, but I just think that if you’re going to talk about what the West did Haiti, it’s really racist of you not to also blame the Haitians for some of their own problems”

Do I have that about right?

My take is centering the European impact because we are discussing European policies. If we strip away your concern trolling, what you’re saying is that EuroCentric nations need to have a rule of law and strong immigration controls to deal with the influx of, in this case, Haitians because natural disasters there cause an influx of immigrants from there.

First of all, the idea that figures like Moïse and their impact is purely Haitian agency and has absolutely nothing to do with the long history of European oppression is totally ahistorical and attempts to paint a “both sides” sort of apologia for empire.

But second of all, bad leaders and natural disasters do not cause mass international migration in the imperial core countries, so why does it cause it in places like Haiti? It is because Haiti has been over exploited and had its ability to develop effective self governance undermined constantly by European intervention.

And finally, even in those situations where a self-governing, non-over-exploited Haiti experienced a natural disaster that caused significant displacement, is that really the reason the US needs strong immigration policies? And to be clear, strong immigration policies under Biden literally meant Haitians being whipped by white cops on horseback.

You can keep acting like what I’m saying is that Haitians are not self-determining, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. I am saying that the self-determination of Haitians is happening within a context of abject white supremacist violent domination and oppression by Europeans which has occurred over several centuries in a coordinated effort to subjugate the people of Haiti and their neighbors and friends and simultaneously insult the people of the imperial core from the backlash created by this domination and subjugation both physically and narratively.

Way to prove the point

Isn’t it funny that I am the one taking an international and historical perspective, developing my understanding of political terms from the actual historical and contemporary movements from all parts of the political spectrum and how their own histories are present in their current formations but you are the one saying “don’t do any of that just sit in this room with these specific people at this time and define everything in terms of what we say about ourselves without any interaction with anything else” and you think I am the one with my head up my own ass. You are literally smelling your own farts in a locked room and telling me that I don’t actually understand your fart smell because I won’t lock myself in the room with you.

Liberals love to accuse “the right” of being anti-intellectual but the minute anyone actually studies politics internationally and across time and domains liberals become the anti-intellectuals.