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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Of course they’re crimes against humanity, I’m not trying to undermine anything, I just don’t understand where people think any prosecution like this would meaningfully come from. Like there needs to be a realistic understanding of what can happen, and this is power politics.

    The US is a permanent member of the UN security council, they can veto anything the UN wants to do, and it’s set up that way to ensure it can’t go against any of the big 5’s interests. That alone should destroy the UN’s legitimacy, but corporate media and the political class prop it up and make people think that it’s this place where the big issues are discussed reasonably and rationally. It isn’t.

    No court can prosecute anyone unless it has the power to enforce its rulings, and the UN just doesn’t have that.

    Look up the Hague Invasion Act. The US has stated, as a matter of law, that it will invade the Hague if they ever try to prosecute any US service member. Do you really need me to break down what that means for the concept of international law? If you’re going to call anything cynical, that is cynical. If the UN is the best that exists, then that just means that our current system has no justice.

    The ability to solve this problem will come from people organising resistance, not from states, not from courts of law, not from some big in-control powerful body stepping in to help us. We help us.




  • Yeah, I don’t think that person realises that regardless of how cold and impersonal the resources are, you still need people to get the resources, and those people need to live, and that requires infrastructure, and that requires an occupation, that requires a functioning society.

    If they go scorched earth, they get exactly that - scorched earth.

    Honestly though I think the goal is not really resources but, as all fascists require, to have a perpetual enemy and a war to fight. Without that the fascists’ obsession with a plot turns inwards and they eat themselves.


  • Nobody said imperial powers were immune to poverty. They thrive off of it, that’s where they get their soldiers. Like what, I’m supposed to ignore US imperialism because of the vast poverty that exists in that country?

    Either way that doesn’t mean you get to turn away the people who were made poor by imperialism and tell them to fix their own country, regardless of how much you personally benefited.

    It isn’t fucking relevant that you’re not in a wealthy country. In fact it makes it harder to understand why you’ve got no compassion for anyone else. Immigration doesn’t hurt you personally.

    Someone has taken you in with faux-leftist reactionary rhetoric, but it’s clear you don’t care to learn the reality, so I don’t see much point in carrying on talking to you.




  • The weapons you would support being sent to free them in some hypothetical better world, in this world are used to oppress them. These places aren’t poor because the people just did a bad job at managing them, they are poor because they were bombed and looted.

    You can go to the US’s policies in South America, their policy of keeping it under control as their own “backyard”, how the School of the Americas cranked out death squads, how neoliberalism was born with the sponsorship of a fascist coup in Chile, and how the Chicago School taught countries to privatise and disinvest from public infrastructure.

    You can look at the IMF and the World Bank putting out predatory loans where the rulers of countries are bribed to sell out their own people, leaving them impoverished and in debt.

    Or how the United Fruit Company kept several countries under its thumb, coining the term “banana republic”, so you could buy cheaper bananas.

    Further back you can look at the rape of Africa, where European colonial powers did a campaign of unmitigated atrocities for decades, setting up imperialist structures that keep many of those nations subjugated to this day.

    Or you can look at the modern example of Israel, which is sponsored by the US specifically to project power in the region. The extended wars fought by the US in that region are purely to maintain control over their oil.

    I’m just pulling these off the top of my head. This is a tiny fraction of all crimes done to keep poor countries poor.

    Neoliberalism works to ensure free flow of capital but restrict the movement of people, so that when their infrastructure is destroyed and they have nowhere else to go, they will be desperate enough to accept extremely low wages.

    If you’re going to claim to be class conscious, you need to educate yourself on these issues and learn to have solidarity with workers everywhere. Talking about how you don’t want to sacrifice anything to make others’ lives better is the opposite of what we need to win the class war, especially when your better quality of life was bought with their blood.





  • This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine - it’s designed purely for automation. That’s why it’s tapered, to allow power tools to slip out before they break. That’s good for automation in the *1930s (EDIT: I’ve realised that in a few years it will be the 30s again and maybe I shouldn’t leave this so ambiguous in light of that), not so good for hand tools or any modern tool with a torque limiter.

    You’re much better off with hex or torx, or even the square driver, which is much more tolerant of imperfect handheld tool usage.

    The only reason phillips is still used is because it’s ubiquitous, it’s very much a historical oddity. It’s okay for many tasks but unfortunately the slipping out behaviour can destroy the screws very quickly.

    https://www.ifixit.com/News/9903/bit-history-the-phillips

    I mean it’s conceivable they’d come up with something similar, and it would be weird to expect a props department to find different screw heads just to be lore accurate.

    Edit: Plus it’s common today, which means from a prop design standpoint it communicates the idea that it’s hand-built, because just about everyone has a phillips head screwdriver, so seeing it tells you it’s something you can work on. I think that’s the main reason it would be there. Jedi are supposed to make their own lightsabers.