chat

Makes you wonder how many potential Luigis are stoned out of their mind right now instead of doing the right thing

American's politics chiefly lies in the fact that the inescapable propaganda (it literally starts from before school)

Someone made a mistake turning "paw patrol is copaganda" into a joke. Kids cartoons today can't go five fucking minutes without

• Sudden fucking police car
• Stripe-wearing thieves
• Cops investigating thieves
• Locking thieves in prison as they beg for mercy, followed by laughing and pointing protagonists
• Families comprised of thieves, basically races of inherently thieving people
• Another sudden fucking police car

It is FUCKING INSANE. I used to watch Sesame Street and sure, they'd have some cop trot up to talk to Elmo or whatever, but very occasionally. Now it's literally a given that children's programming is OBSESSED with police arresting and punishing people. People really really believe that cops are a basic element of childhood itself, I mean on the level of eating your vegetables, share, woof woof look at the dog, ooples and banoonoos, ABC 123, shit like that. Cops throwing people in jail is right in there.

we are a deeply sick country

Interesting. I wonder what the best pedagogy is for encouraging this kind of formalized exploration of the experienced incoherence. List flaws in propaganda narratives? Share some background facts about social structures? Point out material contradictions? Assist in analysis of class interests? Explain dialectical thinking? Explore how we got here with historic materialism? Give them space to share limit-situations and encourage limit-acts (like Paolo Freire)?

I didn't try all that, but what kind of worked for me in the context of Palestine is to give very good friends theory home work. But this needs a lot of good will from their side and they have to be leftish leaning all ready.

People here are really libbed up in my experience. Especially in Boulder, where they’ve destroyed the real left wing culture it had decades ago and replaced it with full on ravenous lib culture, celebrating pricing out the workers and hand wringing over meaningless gestures. The nature is beautiful for sure, but the class consciousness is lower than other parts of the country I’ve visited. Still a lot of internalized racism from living in what is basically a segregated state too.

Alexis de toqueville? That'd be the 1800's.

I’d like to add that I do union work as well, and that’s about the biggest source of sustenance in my day to day life. At work I can barely have a conversation more than a few minutes without turning it to wages, our benefits, and general working conditions. A lot of people are pretty receptive, although often hesitant (tying into the comfortability I mentioned above). Homelessness is bad in my city and it’s definitely functioning as a threat to a lot of people (as I think it’s pretty much intended).

Yeah same lol, being in a party formation that's explicitly anti-imperialist in the belly of the beast and who work against the active settler colonialism of the US, it really helps practically and psychologically

But with neoliberalism triumphant pretty much everywhere and reaction in ascendance in much of the world, it's tough out there worldwide.

This so much. Really have no idea where in the world it's supposed to be better (don't say China)

If I weren't so tired, I'd list every specific experience that I thought to jot down in my journal — there were many different things — but really it's those things you mentioned and more. I'll mention a few specific illustrative examples of things I noticed.

First Anecdote—

I was going to get food somewhere, and I saw a sign outside with a stern anti-loitering message. Now most people I'd reckon don't think twice about a sign like that, because these signs are so common that they just fade into the background. But I see that sign and I think about what its implications really are.

Because the unspoken meaning of "no loitering" is basically "fuck homeless people, and also, police can harass anyone who looks 'suspicious' if you catch my drift" — and homelessness is widespread in Seppoland among other reasons to make an example of people, showing everyone what will happen if people fight back, with a cruelty necessary to uphold bourgeois rule in the very heart of empire. Furthermore these types of "broad license to harass" laws have a long history of being used to facilitate the effective enslavement of Black and Indigenous people.

Los Angeles is incidentally a very good example of precisely this: the United States never signed any treaties with the Tongva people, and with the beginning of the Septic occupation of Tovaangar — the Tongva homeland — the native Tongva people were widely made homeless. Many Tongva were then arrested for "loitering", and made to do construction work as penal labor — and these Tongva were paid, of course, in alcohol, with public drinking also being illegal, only exacerbating the situation. So the Tongva were in other words forced out of their homes, and immediately forced to build new homes for their own "replacements".

The city built by these Tongva slaves would eventually become the world-famous seat of the Septic film industry, with its "thirty-mile zone" profiting from the ideal natural scenery and climate of Tovaangar and surrounding Native homelands, which I cannot emphasize enough were never legally ceded to Seppoland, because even the treaties that Seppoland did sign with native Californians were never ratified.

This Septic film industry, in turn, is a cornerstone of Seppoland's soft power worldwide, used to push the lines of the country's ruling class all over the world, sanitizing and glorifying the Septic military, encouraging immigration to the "land of opportunity", making "American" synonymous with "cool", and peddling all sorts of bourgeois ideology.

So in other words, I saw that anti-loitering sign in the Twin Cities, and I remembered all this history, and I thought about how this history is not only comparatively recent, but that its impact is ongoing. Then after I got back to where I was staying, and ate, I watched a movie with my relatives.

Guess where that movie was filmed!

Second Anecdote—

I was staying with an older relative, who is politically conservative, and so she would sometimes leave her TV on, playing Fox News. One day I overheard Fox News covering Edison in Lenapehoking banning the Septic flag from town meetings due to the flag's use as a "prop". And Fox News' infamous talking heads were all blab-blab-blabbing about how outraged they were that the national flag would be given a designation as pedestrian as "prop" — why, the flag is practically a holy relic, isn't it!

One of the talking heads said something to the effect of, "I'm sure the soldiers who risk their lives to protect this country's freedom, to protect that flag, would not approve of it being called a prop." — another talking head said something like, "I think any government official who would call the flag a prop should be removed from office, in fact anyone who calls the flag a prop should frankly be deported from this country."

Calling a military whose sole purpose is to terrorize the imperial periphery, "protecting the USA's freedom", is certainly bold to say, unless the real meaning of "the USA's freedom" is "the US bourgeoisie's freedom" — and the platitude about "freedom" being immediately followed by an open call to deport anyone who isn't deferential enough to a piece of cloth, is certainly ironic, that Seppoland's freedom includes the right to hoist the flag but not the right to call the flag whatever you want.

That the talking head's rhetoric is seen as acceptable enough to air on national TV in the middle of the day, and is nodded to by a wide section of Seppoland's public, indicates to me that Seppoland is a society constantly paranoid about its own collapse. "National defense" means keeping other countries down to Seppoland, and anything questioning the common wisdom is a dangerous foreign element that must be removed.

Threats of deportation are yet another cruel act used to uphold bourgeois rule, in a lot of countries including Seppoland. I have myself experienced someone saying I should be thrown out of Norway for not being anti-Putin enough, so I don't want to act like this is a phenomenon entirely unique to Seppoland. The talking head's call for deportation, though, is rooted in a deep xenophobia running through all of Septic society, and this xenophobia is again rooted in the settler-colonial nature of Seppoland: xenophobia is all a part of making sure that immigrants are aiming to move "up the ladder" towards the platonic ideal of whiteness, towards the maintenance of the settler-colony rather than opposition to it. A colony is at its core always unstable, after all. All that paranoia in Seppoland about threats both internal and external is a survival mechanism of a system with numbered days.

And flag worship would of course be a part of the aforementioned "platonic whiteness", it's practically a litmus test for settlerism: planting a flag in the ground is a common way to assert a territorial claim, so it's no wonder that a society built entirely on stolen land would see a need to fly its flag outside every home, hoist giant flags outside malls, pledge allegiance to flags in schools, symbolically claiming and reclaiming day in and day out all year round the land the country stole. You need to constantly be reminded that the United States of America is a real country with a legitimate claim to its land, that should continue to exist, that the "American experiment" ultimately amounts to something that makes all the cruelty worthwhile.

That's very cool of you!