make you feel like you are loosing your mind

It’s not you, it’s them.

Their ability to feel empathy for non-whites is impaired. And they do that to themselves on purpose to live with less cognitive dissonance when noticing all their privilege. But once it’s done, it’s done. It’s really hard to reverse. They can’t just start to feel normal human feelings again on command.

The genocide is another example. All the suffering just doesn’t feel as real to them, since it’s happening to brown people. They couldn’t help it if they wanted, even if they tried hard. Whatever happens in Ukraine feels real to them cause the people there are white. Gaza feels less so.

The study that coined the term empathy gap had white social workers who’s whole job it was to work to combat racism. They were educated on the topic and had a material interest not to be racist and they certainly wouldn’t have said anything racist. But when asked to rate the pain of people on photos, they still consistently underrated the pain of black people. They just couldn’t feel it as much.

The only thing, that definitely works like a charm to reverse it is genuine, close human connection with affected people. But that’s hard to scale up. But I think, getting a metaphorical (or actual) hit on the nose by resisting people also works to a degree. Makes them notice, that someone has human feelings too and is angry and cares enough to strike back. It’s just less effective in closing the empathy gap and they can always frame it to integrate it into their racism. But of course, it’s not our job to help them get their full humanity back.

Yes, that makes sense to me. Monotheistic theocracies can splinter too over doctrinal issues, but I think the splintering is structural in polytheism. Though only if it’s not just ideological, but also material. For example because different gods have different temples and their cults are mostly centered in different cities. I just quickly researched examples.

Like in Egypt it was material: when the pharaohs were weak and the priests ruled temporarily, Thebes Amun cult dominated, but still constantly competed with Ra. Much later, when the city Thebes became powerful again, they were combined to one god Amun-Ra.

In contrast, the Buddhist theocracy in Tibet recognized many deities on an ideological level, but was materially very centralized and stable for a long time.

I like that bovine Yahwe. I think I even read before the their that Yahwe was a god of semi nomadic cow herders. It would make sense to forbid eating the product of competing, more sedentary pig herders.

If it’s about meme terms, I don’t know either, I don’t get such things very quickly. But for imperialist powers it can’t be too far off, to just assume the US is meant by default, can it?

Not sure, if the following is helpful or obvious, so feel free to ignore. I sometimes use the term “the imperial core” and I mean the US and related countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Western Europe: UK, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands etc. Basically like in those “always the same map” memes. You can get technical about Israel for being a settler colony and South Korea for being subordinated to the US to such a high degree.

More formally, the term means countries that profit from unequal exchange, because their capitalism developed to such a high degree. You’ll recognize them, because they have a high organic composition of capital. Meaning lots of capital tied up as constant capital in machines, less in wages. Though the wages tend to be high, it’s just that the machines are even more expensive. That gives them an edge over other capitalist because of the equalization of profit. They let other countries do labor intensive work for them like in sweatshops. And they seek to push their crisis brought on by their own contradictions on other countries, using military power.

Yes, exactly, you said it better. Of course, I’d still like for fascists to shut up though…

Then it seems like it didn’t really narrow the discourse (fascists certainly didn’t shut up) but actually broaden it. So couldn’t that be used as an argument against the typical “free speech” argument?

In a better world, they’d put all those on trial, that prevented earlier trials.

And it’s not just that they get half of the goods and services, it means we spent half of our work making that stuff, cause it has to come from somewhere. And a big part the rest flows into war or financial speculation. I wonder how much of 90% people’s work time (created value) actually goes towards their own consumption. Has to be less than 50% apparently.

Fucking Amazon? Why? For badly translated product descriptions and fake reviews? Those already were the closest thing to AI texts, before AI even existed.

Walmart? Really? Can it get any worse?

LinkedIn

Noooo!

And the 50.000 were just last week. There are way more people homeless and displaced.

falsekees webcomic

But why has a comic with a terrible boomer joke a JoJo reference?

I don’t know in this case. I’m not from the US. But for example in the case of the health care CEO, it was plain to see, how even libs and conservatives were happy or at least didn’t condem it.

Are there any libs who are on the fence maybe? Giving context about all the harm that person did and about the larger class struggle around it might help some people. Like, how the billionaires stole from us first, in order to pay this fascist to spread their lies.

So, anyway, I think we’re still allowed to celebrate.

It can also undermine class struggle by weakening revolutionaries directly. Not just innocent third parties. Lenin lost his brother to adventurism. He was against it, because it’s not organized. If we started advocating for it, we would lose comrades. You could argue, that one could build orgs and support networks and everything to mitigate risks, and get the masses on our side first, but then it wouldn’t be adventurism anymore, just regular class struggle.

The important thing about moments like this is to capture the revolutionary potential they reveal and funnel it into our orgs.

Sure, I’ll just use my freedom to spend over 80 million dollars a year agitating for my side of the class war. I’ll just do this real quick. Should be easy because of freedom /s

The billionaires who oppress us paid this fascist and his giant org to spread their lies and hate speech with our stolen wages. Profits are theft and speech doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The missing context is class war. The means to reach people are contested and certainly not free.

Maybe by fingerprinting your browser by your settings? Did you use the same Firefox (or chrome) account with the same settings as before? Also if you didn’t move or use a VPN, your IP address might still narrow it down a lot by geolocation.

I had to look up the dead fascist because, being non USian, I didn’t know much about him. For anyone else who’s out of the loop, here is some important context: apparently, today the world lost

• an influential propagandist who pushed all kinds of hate and fascist ideology: incited millions of his followers on many platforms to commit racist, anti-LGBTQI+ and genderbased violence and to support such policy, spread deadly misinformation around vaccinations, covid and climate change
• the leader of a large and multipronged reactionary propaganda organization focusing on students with even an arm in the UK, spreading the same fascist ideology
• a powerful politician and ally to Trump who tried to prepare a coup and might have become a contender in the next elections

Did I miss anything important?

The revolutionary potential in France (despite all the racism) is always good to see. Why can’t Germany at least be like that?

I don’t know how to deal with the immense feeling of disgust I have towards these pro-genocide libs.

The hats are way too small too! Or have weird proportions. The visor doesn’t give any shade to the face. It just rests on top of the head.