Taken from this massive article from the tricontinental: https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/
How long until liberals start saying that the ICJ is controlled by Putin's ally, South Africa?
As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
I'm starting to think Marx wasn't just using an allegory there.
Depending on how receptive he is (and I'm assuming he's a Yankee), send him some Parenti material. You can either start coy with something like his talk about the "Assassination of Julius Caesar" book that's pretty tame, or just go straight for the Yellow one or Blackshirts and the Reds if you're feeling bold. Parenti has a way with words and is more relatable with his New York accent than translated books from distant or long-dead communists.
And always make sure to ask what he thinks, make it a conversation not a one-sided lecture. Eventually he'll say something you don't know about yet, so don't dismiss it out of hand, but try to investigate his claims with him. If all goes well you'll both come out of it wiser.
So long as you are not confrontational and keep it respectful and educational, and most importantly acknowledge when you don't know something you shouldn't fear making him mad. Because if you do it with kindness and he still gets mad, that's all on him for not being respectful back. That's a bad sign for the friendship, not just the political divergences.
And if Russia takes Ukraine then the rest of the EU is next.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
There are usually half a million homeless people in the USA. That means that they could've bought each and every one of those a 200k dollar home with that money. They could also have paid a total of 50 million months of rent at the 2000$ median price. And this is even taking as a premise that housing should be sellable or rentable in the first place. And yet they preferred this instead.
Any Yankee around still not convinced that the USA government needs to end, this is your moment to reconsider.
Having gone through some of that myself, it always annoys me to no end how liberal outlets hyperfocus so hard on the methods (and banning of those) or vague "reducing stigma" rather than actually addressing literally any of the reasons people consider dying. I understand that there's no "one-size fits all" solution, but really basic stuff like having access to mental healthcare, or, in the case of their listed example, dignified drug rehab, being relegated to half a paragraph while they spend most of it talking about guns.
How about public funding for free mental healthcare in order to combat a mental health crisis? No? Or how to build local communities for support and mutual aid? Not that either? Or literally just listing reasons people did it so we can think of solutions? Nah, let's talk about the absolute only thing that Democrats and Republicans actually sorta disagree on, that is tangentially related to this, but will never actually change due to how entrenched gun culture already is in the USA.
CW: Suicide Methods
Research indicates that firearms aren't even that much more effective than some other suicide methods, though they obviously require some more preparation. I doubt banning guns is going to do much, and just actually reading the low rates of mortality and all the cases of people who survived it to a long lifetime of suffering and severe disability was enough to convince me that it is just a horrible risk to take, even if you actually believe that it is worth it.
If there is a nation that actually needs actual humanitarian aid from the USA, it is the USA.
At least I'm getting some gimp experience.
This quote is particularly telling.
Those concerns picked up steam in the past week after Ukraine launched a second push in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and has still come up mostly empty in the eyes of Western allies.
You know, like when you are doing a group project and all your "partners" just watch you do all of it, but in this case the project is made with other people's blood, and you already knew the whole class was gonna fail anyway.
It would be funny seeing the blame game getting heated between (what remains of) Ukraine and NATO, if not for all the senseless and pointless spilling of blood they could've avoided from the start. I bet eventually they'll agree on some third-party scapegoat a la WW1 Germany.
The article doesn't go into detail on that, so I just kinda guessed. I doubt that those "bribes" are only from bourgies since the demand to getting the fuck out is usually pretty high during war, and even some labour aristocracy folks (engineers, programmers, medics) could afford to go out. It's not some fantastic victory of socialism, but I prefer that over those same people getting conscripted to die in the front for nothing.
Though I could be wrong, are there ~~less trash~~ better sources than the Beeb on this that go deeper?
Officials taking cash and cryptocurrency bribes or helping people eligible to be called up to fight to leave Ukraine are among the charges, said Mr Zelensky, in a video posted on social media.
wtf I support military corruption now. These are probably the Ukrainian officials who have saved the most Ukrainian lives, and they're getting the treatment of Germans who helped Nazi targets flee from Germany. What an odd coincidence.
What a spez move. Pre-emptively de-federating is just a bad move, no other way to look at it. They're a very diverse group and generally much kinder than most lemmy users. At the very least you should've tested federation for a day or two to see how the interactions play out. But anybody here can go over there and see for themself how nice they can be even when disagreeing, which they do a lot among themselves.
Also where in the Code of Conduct does it say the only ideology allowed is liberalism? Going the way of Reddit with vague justifications and arbitrary decisions will make the administration a lot of profit some day, but there's a reason people left that one.
They never change.