Skip to main content



Lenin: In contrast to the petty-bourgeois democrats, Marx regarded all democratic demands without exception not as an absolute, but as a historical expression of the struggle of the masses of the people, led by the bourgeoisie, against feudalism. There is not a single democratic demand which could not serve, and has not served, under certain conditions, as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for deceiving the workers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Lenin: The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly "unpleasant" for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that "its own" nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible; the hypocrisy of the reformist and Kautskyan advocates of self-determination who maintain silence about the nations which are oppressed by "their" nation and forcibly retained within "their" state will remain unexposed. The Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must particularly fight for and maintain complete, absolute unity (also organizational) between the workers of the oppressed nation and the workers of the oppressing nation. Without such unity it will be impossible to maintain an independent proletarian policy and class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all the subterfuge, treachery and trickery of the bourgeoisie; for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations always converts the slogan of national liberation into a means for deceiving the workers; in internal politics it utilizes these slogans as a means for conduding reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the ruling nation (for instance, the Poles in Austria and Russia, who entered into pacts with reaction in order to oppress the Jews and the Ukrainians); in the realm of foreign politics it strives to enter into pacts with one of the rival imperialist powers for the purpose of achieving its own predatory aims (the policies of the small states in the Balkans, etc.). wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Robert Parry: As neocon propagandists pursue their goal of riling up the American public against some new foreign threat, that effort requires highlighting certain facts (and even fictions). But the propagandists equally must make sure that many inconvenient truths are conveniently forgotten. Otherwise the alleged threat might not seem all that unusual or threatening. wordsmith.social/protestation/…




John V. Walsh: Russia and China, recently have been driven into one another's arms by the endless crusades of the West to undermine them. Together they constitute a great power center outside the control of the U.S. Empire. Bent on global domination, the U.S. cannot tolerate such a defiant and alternative center of power. The reason is that such a center provides an alternative for others who would gain their independence from the West. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Lenin: Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



George Kennan: Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


David Rovics: In the years following the election of Hugo Chavez, millions of people were brought out of poverty, millions of people got medical care who hadn't had it before, schools and hospitals and farmer collectives opened up all over the country, and Venezuela became a beacon for socialism and democracy for many people around the world, including within the United States. Venezuela's Bank of the South liberated many countries from the intentionally destructive strings attached to IMF loans. Millions of people in many other countries benefited from the generosity of the Bolivarian Revolution's internationalist programs, including people struggling to pay their heating bills in cities like Boston and Chicago. ... Chile when a popular socialist (Salvador Allende) was elected in a landslide and started lifting millions of his country's people out of poverty through his extremely popular socialist policies, here's what happened: the US government, through the CIA and other agencies, organized a massive campaign to destabilize Chilean society and destroy the Chilean economy, while cultivating a CIA-trained general within the Chilean military to seize power in a violent coup, which resulted in a military dictatorship that lasted decades and led to untold thousands being tortured and killed by sadistic, US-trained Chilean soldiers and government agents. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



Lenin: The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


might annoy some (polish) entities, song lyr
tylko jedno w głowie mam


Peter Phillips: Pentagon propaganda penetration has occured on mainstream corporate news in the guise of retired Generals as "experts" or pundits who turned out to be nothing more than paid shills for government war policy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


John Pilger: The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times. The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


David Swanson: If the war lies were not all over the media, people would not learn them in the first place. If the corrections were heard over and over again, they would get through. If our communications system allowed the presentation of a variety of voices and viewpoints and feared promoting falsehoods more than it feared being insufficiently militaristic, we wouldn't need to investigate the widespread phenomenon of engaged citizens certain of their beliefs but completely deluded. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



John V. Walsh: Where once the U.S. fought battles against insurgent liberation movements, now it fights to bring down defiant governments or leaders. That is a feature of neo-imperialism. Defiance of the West has been the common denominator for those whom the West seeks to destroy. As the world knows by now, "democracy" and "human rights" have nothing to do with U.S. neo-imperial strategy. The two cross paths only by accident. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


I shared this 3 years ago today before my egg even cracked...

And honestly, rereading it is chilling a true. I never experienced dysphoria before transitioning, but I definitely felt that those were not my spaces or my people.

On top of that, when around other women I was incredibly self conscious... in the spaces that felt the most natural, the relationships that felt the most natural, I felt like I was intruding.

I was so intimately aware of the threat of men and because I thought I was one I was so terrified of being threatening and making the women around me feel unsafe... because doing so would mean being feared and ostracized by the people I felt most natural with.

For the longest time I thought this was maybe just because I was autistic, and even then I still couldn't understand why I felt natural around women and those socialized as women... It was a sticking point in my mind constantly because I know I wasn't socialized female and I have a bio-brother who lived through similar circumstances and didn't remotely turn out the same way.

And honestly as I finally found true family... I was low key terrified for the longest time because the people I adopted were almost all women (at least, we thought so at the time... funnily enough most turned out to be trans-masc sometime after adopting them, but that didn't change the terror...)

All this is to say we're not men who decide to become women... we're women who decide to stop pretending to be men. Who grew up being forced to pretend to be someone other than who we are, and being told that the idea of being who we are is impossible, gross, and wrong. And even after we have to live in terror of people accusing us of pretending to somehow abuse other women.

Original Tumblr Post via Archive.org

Tumblr by Opiumbug

it’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman

Reply by valkyriethunderbitch

This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.

When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.

Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.

Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.

Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?

If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.

Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.

Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.

A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.

Reply by thecuckoohaslanded

“exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around”

So many people have no idea how true this is. Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.

One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.” This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).

There can be benefits, here and there. But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.

Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces. That does not mean we belong in them. Or feel comfortable anywhere near them. Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying. Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying. You are in a constant state of panic around men. And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family. We NEVER feel safe. And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men. They’re horrifying. What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk. Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this. I have never been an athlete. My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable. I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports. The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING. Men don’t see women as less than human. They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.

Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them. Your LIFE depends on whether they notice. That’s not safety. That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place. Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.

We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people. Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe. Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity. We have to lie to get them. We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are. We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.

Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make. If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:

Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.

Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.

For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces. But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women. Everything else is social. Everything else is acting. Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die. We can never really be anything other than female.

Womanhood is not the thing trans women have to fake.

#LGBT #LGBTQIA #Trans #TransFemme



Stalin: This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. wordsmith.social/protestation/…




S. Brian Willson: US Special Forces operatives, comprised of 70,000 soldiers, have set foot in 150 countries from 2011-2014 (three fourths of the planet's 196 nations), tracking and killing suspected "terrorists." In the process, they torture, destroy homes and families, and kill and wound many innocent. The Special Forces also provide names and cell phone numbers of those they have supposedly identified as targets for guiding drone strikes. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



Lenin: The domination of finance capital, as of capital in general, cannot be abolished by any kind of reforms in the realm of political democracy, and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this realm. The domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least destroy the significance of political democracy as the freer, wider and more distinct form of class oppression and class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


John Stockwell: The basic theme was to make it look like enemy aggression in Angola. So any kind of story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and find ways of getting them into the press. The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. So we came up with another story, and it was kept going for weeks. But it was all fiction. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



Daniel Estulin: Prior to media's "humanitarian" propaganda campaigns, neither Somalia nor Kosovo and certainly not Sudan figured prominently among the typical American's concerns. In fact, over 85% of American public could not find Sudan on the world map. The same could be said for Somalia and certainly Kosovo, not to mention Iraq prior to the Desert Storm invasion in 1991. 87% of Americans didn't know where Iraq was on the map and had no idea who Saddam Hussein was until CNN's diligent, relentless efforts to indoctrinate the American public made those military campaigns possible. Nevertheless, what's absolutely mind-boggling is that the public never questioned any of it (U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003). By the end of 2010, more than one and a half million innocent Iraqis are dead, along with Saddam Hussein, 5,000+ American troops and unknown tens of thousands maimed for life who are "liberating" the country on behalf of British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Halliburton, Blackwater, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of America, CitiGroup and an unending plethora of multinational corporations, all vying for a piece of an Iraqi sweepstakes and wealth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Carroll Quigley: The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching (plan), nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



Lenin: The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Paul Craig Roberts: Mainstream reporters are always pro-war, acting as cheerleaders for the military-industrial complex and propagandists for the government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Zbigniew Brzezinski: Two basic steps are thus required: first to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them; (...) second to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above. wordsmith.social/protestation/…




John Pilger: The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out. And, New York Times and Washington Post are the censors. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Zbigniew Brzezinski: Tu put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependance among the vassels, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: In 2011, NATO launched an illegal, savage attack against Libya, the country with the Highest Human Development Index in Africa. ... At the time, Libyans were fed, they had homes (free), education (free), healthcare (free), a good water supply and Libya was a filter and staging post for migrants moving towards Europe. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Au(dhd?) whinge


Why does my dumb ass keep bouncing around these platforms instead of just using them consistently? new posts should be novelty enough to let the dopamine flow why