Leftism

https://twitter.com/RightWingCope/status/1758494628481737161

Fucking nuts. Every single one of them. Even the two people at the end.

It's still Black History Month, so I wanted to share this older video from SMN. MLK was a black christian socialist, and this video covers how and why Martin Luther King JR has been whitewashed of his radical messaging.

To kick off Black History Month, I wanted to share my favorite interview of Prof. Davis about her activism in the Black Panthers and at college, being a political prisoner, and why she joined CPUSA. My all-time favorite quote from her is in this interview:

It was important at that time that we recognize that we could be victorious. We were not simply targets of repression, but that we were active historical agents that could set an agenda, fight for that agenda, and win.

Q: You detail a long clash in Southeast Asia between the CIA and the DEA. What resulted from this?

A: In the course of writing this book, it became very obvious that this was another example of the CIA utterly failing to comprehend the repercussions of its actions. The CIA used drug traffickers as intelligence-gathering assets during the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and my research indicates it protected them from prosecution from local governments—and when the DEA came into the picture initially, from the DEA as well. The CIA and the DEA just think completely differently on this issue. If the ultimate goal of the CIA is to maintain American supremacy and working with a drug trafficker will weaken your rival or help you get intelligence on your rival, they think it’s worth it.

Q: Whereas the DEA wants to shut it down completely, no matter what.

A: The DEA sees this from a strict law enforcement perspective—our job is to take down drug traffickers, whoever they are. The law is the law. And as a former CIA officer that I interviewed for this book explained to me: We’re allowed to break the law. And then he quickly followed up, Foreign laws, not US laws. But… (laughs). Look, spies deceive. Spies lie.

When there’s a drug-trafficking organization out there that is not serving America’s interests or has no valuable role in intelligence-gathering, the CIA is happy to help bring them down. The CIA has an anti-narcotics division, and I’m sure it’s responsible for bringing hell on all sorts of drug-trafficking syndicates. But not the ones that are valuable to maintaining American dominance.

Q: What’s the relationship between enabling drug trafficking and the heroin that American soldiers discovered during the Vietnam War?

A: The roots of the war on drugs originate in Southeast Asia. The moral panic over narcotics really began with GIs in Vietnam doing heroin and bringing that addiction back home to the United States. The war on drugs was a response to that. The heroin that those GIs were doing originates in the highlands of Southeast Asia, and one of the major producers of the opium that was refined into heroin were the Wa people. That opium was collected by an organization affiliated with the CIA, used by the CIA as intelligence-gathering assets.

Archived at - https://archive.is/jtuj3

Another interview I saw with this author and a bit more info, "How Narcotics have shaped everything for the Wa, an ethnic minority in Myanmar"

The U.S. has had a profound impact on Myanmar's Wa people. NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Patrick Winn about his new book, Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA.

...

INSKEEP: Now, as isolated as they are - I'm just looking at a map and seeing that this corner of Myanmar is next to Thailand, which is a U.S. ally, next to Laos, which was of great interest to the United States during the Vietnam War period, next to China, which is of great interest to the United States now. Is there a history of the United States in this otherwise very isolated region?

WINN: Very much so. And the original U.S. entity that was interested in this place was the CIA. What the CIA did manage to do is to use this area as a launching pad for covert missions into Communist China, to steal documents, to tap phone lines, in one story I uncovered to blow up a bridge, to do anything they could to gather intelligence and pull information out of Communist China, which was very, very difficult to access at that time. Later on, other American agencies, namely the DEA, became interested in the area as well because it was churning out so much narcotics, and so much of it was going to the United States.

INSKEEP: OK, so the DEA is not a fan of the Wa or of that area anyway or of their drug activity, but it sounds like the CIA had quite a relationship going. What was in it for the Wa to work with the United States in these covert operations decades ago?

WINN: Growing opium and selling opium is a capitalist endeavor. At the time, the Communist Party was dead set against opium. So if China were to expand into this area, which was a very genuine threat, it would end the opium business, and that would have affected these Wa warlords.

INSKEEP: How effective is the DEA, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, trying to cut back on the drug traffic from this area?

WINN: The DEA has utterly failed. At one point, the DEA actually wanted to work with the Wa to cut this deal. The U.S. would go in and provide education, schools, hospitals, basically to modernize the Wa people. And in return, the Wa would wind down their drug production. But it didn't work out, in part because the CIA did not want it to work out. These different wings of the U.S. government don't always get along, and at that point in time - this is the mid-1990s - the CIA and the DEA wanted very different things from them.

[Bolding added]

Archived at - https://web.archive.org/web/20240131131425/https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227828571/how-narcotics-have-shaped-everything-for-the-wa-an-ethnic-minority-in-myanmar

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/13355449

Capitalism is a game where only a few people get to win.

We have also seen time and time again that it is a game that is able to manipulate and change whatever ideology or behaviour you have to work towards its own benefit.

So the only way to actually "win" is to not play the game.

Right now that seems impossible because it is a massive collective action problem, however this whole platform is a testament to show that it's possible to overcome that kind of problem.

Reddit is a dominant platform that is starting to destroy itself. People are in turn finding alternatives such as Lemmy to satisfy the need that Reddit once did.

I view capitalism in the same way. It will never truly completely cease to exist (the same way Digg never truly died), but it can become irrelevant over time if we collectively decide to just use another system to satisfy the same needs that capitalism is satisfying today.

The one example that I can think of that tries to tackle this problem is the idea of free stores that are based on a gift economy. If more people decided to use this system instead of capitalism then capitalism will have less sway over people's lives.

And in the end it doesn't have to be specifically a free store that needs to be adopted by wider society but whatever it is does need to satisfy the same basic need that capitalism does in our current society.

Dr. Wolff gives a historical analysis of the different political choices when workers had a lot power due to different crises caused by Capitalism.

Also, The Girl Scouts explicitly rejected a large donation from an anti-trans organization: https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2015/06/donor-says-girl-scouts-can-t-use-100k-gift-for-transgender-girls

Girl Scouting is for all girls. Trans girls are girls, so they belong in Girl Scouts.

Have you been wanting to unionize at work? Are you concerned about union busting disrupting your organizing efforts? Well then this website will be invaluable to you. CWA is a bottom-up, worker led union. Ever since the PATCO strike made unions afraid of striking, CWA alone has basically kept the idea of striking alive in the US. As an effort to modernize their definition of communication, CWA has created this playbook to prepare you and your coworkers against the insidious and misleading language union busters use to destroy your campaign.

It wasn't until 2020 came around and we regained our voice before things changed in favor of organized labor. Even with companies violently affecting workers with layoffs, now's the time to organize. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now. As a tech worker myself, the knowledge that there wasn't a single union member laid off at Activision Blizzard should be sign enough that unions provide job security.

It's really incredible to hear her childhood story from her own mouth so many years later, and her thoughts on racism and civil rights today.

"Racism is a grown-up disease, let's stop using our kids to spread it." -- Ruby Bridges

There weren't any videos today that I found especially interesting, so here's the full text of the public domain book "Anarchy", distributed by the Anarchist Library. It's not especially long, I'd say it's about an hour long read at most. Give it a read and feel free to discuss!

It's ok to laugh at ourselves here and there.

explaining the joke

What an icon ✊

Happened upon this movie last night on tv, definitely going to have to give it another watch when I'm more alert, some fantastic critiques of the advertising industry and capitalism in general. This clip had me cracking up..

If you're in the UK it'll be on all4, otherwise I'm sure it exists to watch elsewhere.

Dr. Wolff gives a masterclass lecture in how exactly corporations serve and maintain capital, especially in favor of capitalists at the expense of workers.