William Blum: Can anyone name a single daily newspaper in the United States that is unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? Can anyone name a single television network in the United States that is unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? Is there a single daily newspaper or TV network in the entire United States that has earned the label "opposition media"? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People's Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
I'm feeling really grateful today and just wanted to share that feeling.
I'm grateful for... * Living in a time when HRT is available * Having easy access to it even though I live in the state of Texas * Being blessed by the boob fairy (46B after 6-months when most trans-femmes are lucky to hit A-cup after 2 years... insert suspense tone for what that means for later) * HRT absolutely demolishing body/hair growth and making everything very manageable * Liking pickles before HRT so it's not as confusing * HRT feminizing my face enough that I feel comfortable going out without makeup * My hair, which was just a short mess before... now just magically grew into a cute bob with zero effort (and this is it's maximum length... I do lament not having longer hair though) * Having an incredibly supportive adoptive family * Skirts, dear god the skirts I've got now are so damn comfy * Randomly knowing how to adjust my voice properly so I skipped voice training entirely * A work from home job that allowed me to easily transition before ever worrying about work * A Christian boss (also owner of the company) who was baffled at the idea I even had something to worry about with coming out at work... in a traditionally conservative industry * Being born it Illinois which makes it trivially easy to update my birth certificate (just waiting on the legal name change documents first so I can do both at the same time)
* being a grower and so small that I don't need to tuck in 90% of cases and couldn't if I wanted to * being grey-ace and not phased by the shrinkage * not really having bottom dysphoria... that shit's expensive AF
Michel Chossudovsky: The "Anglo-American axis" in defense and foreign policy is the driving force behind the military operations in Central Asia and Middle East. This rapprochement between London and Washington is consistent with the integration of British and American business interests in the areas of banking, oil and the defense industry. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Andre Vltchek: Yes, over 100 people died in Paris (November 2015). While thousands are dying in Yemen, every month... While 17,000 already vanished in Iran - victims of West-sponsored terrorism... While hundreds of thousands have been dying in Libya and Syria... While millions have been dying in Somalia and Iraq... While some 10 millions already died in a looted and raped DRC (the Democratic Republic of Congo) ... All of them victims of Western assaults and banditry or of Western-sponsored terrorism directly. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Madeleine Albright: We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
S. Brian Willson: Being at war against sanctioned enemies forms the core of US American identity, driven by a mythological notion of US American exceptionalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The great part that the public debt, and the fiscal system corresponding with it, has played in the capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation of the masses. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Serj Tankian: We first fought in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
T.J. Petrowski: U.S. and Western imperialism is the root cause of the "refugee crisis". Everyday men, women, and children are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. and Western-backed militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, European and North American mining and oil conglomerates in Central and Western Africa, or are starved to death in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Arab blockade of the country. Until the genocidal aims of U.S. imperialism, with the support of Canada, Australia, the European Union, and regional allies, are defeated, the "war on terror" will continue to make life too unbearable for working people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to remain in their home countries. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Jacques R. Pauwels: The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the "axis of evil" countries: Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century. Welcome to the brave new era of permanent war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Philip Giraldi: By one estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001. There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia. ... Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Ledeen: Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Guy Debord: The US government has not publicly identified - nor even estimated - the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans and Syrians it has killed, or caused to be killed, during its invasions, occupations, and CIA-led insurgencies. Neither is anyone in the media publicly counting the number of Muslims the US has killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, driven into poverty and despair, and/or condemned to disease and insanity. ... US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars - the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives -out of the press and away from the public's consciousness, in order to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American "exceptionalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertolt Brecht: Those who take the meat from the table teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss call ruling too difficult for ordinary men. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Arnold Toynbee: For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's phobia about world communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world's eyes. Today America has become the nightmare. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
S. Brian Willson: Because the self-image of the United States has been built on collective denial of the painful realities of the dispossession of others - Indigenous inhabitants in the Americas, Africans, and Third World peoples - fantasy politics in the US has become a way of life. Our collective fantasy is consistently reinforced by virtually all our education, entertainment, political discourse, religious sermonizing, sports, etc. Most of us have been emotionally and intellectually programmed in the perpetuation of the heroic myths of our origins, and the consequential feelings of righteousness that have led us into war after war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: An extremely important cause of differences among those taking part in the labour movement lies in changes in the tactics of the ruling classes in general and of the bourgeoisie in particular. If the tactics of the bourgeoisie were always uniform, or at least of the same kind, the working class would rapidly learn to reply to them by tactics just as uniform or of the same kind. But, as a matter of fact, in every country the bourgeoisie inevitably devises two systems of rule, two methods of fighting for its interests and of maintaining its domination, and these methods at times succeed each other and at times are interwoven in various combinations. The first of these is the method of force, the method which rejects all concessions to the labour movement, the method of supporting all the old and obsolete institutions, the method of irreconcilably rejecting reforms. Such is the nature of the conservative policy which in Western Europe is becoming less and less a policy of the landowning classes and more and more one of the varieties of bourgeois policy in general. The second is the method of "liberalism", of steps towards the development of political rights, towards reforms, concessions, and so forth. The bourgeoisie passes from one method to the other not because of the malicious intent of individuals, and not accidentally, but owing to the fundamentally contradictory nature of its own position. Normal capitalist society cannot develop successfully without a firmly established representative system and without certain political rights for the population, which is bound to be distinguished by its relatively high "cultural" demands. These demands for a certain minimum of culture are created by the conditions of the capitalist mode of production itself, with its high technique, complexity, flexibility, mobility, rapid development of world competition, and so forth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Douglas Feith: No country in the world upholds the Geneva Conventions on the laws of armed conflict more steadfastly than does the United States. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Shiri Bailem • •* being grey-ace and not phased by the shrinkage
* not really having bottom dysphoria... that shit's expensive AF