Washburn [she/her]

lol

If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Decolonization is a bloody and violent process. Once you colonize a place and the people that live there, the only ways that it will end is the near-complete extermination of the colonized peoples by the colonizers, or decolonization. There can never be a lasting, peaceful status quo, as the interests of the colonized and the colonizers are inexorably opposed. The colonizer wants more of what is and was the colonized’s. The colonized want to keep their homes, and to not be subject to the colonizers. Both will use violence to achieve their ends.

The question of “how can peace be achieved in Palestine” is not “how can the current conflict be resolved,” but instead “should Palestinians be subject to ethnic cleansing, including violently and directly as occurred during the Nakba, or should Palestinians govern Palestine?”

The last sub I used a bunch was r/traa. I really had no reason to go back to Reddit once it shut down.

Now we have c/traa on Hexbear

She sounds pretty based ngl

A little over 3 years

Putting American boots on the ground is not the only way that the United States brings death and destruction to a region to further (or protect, as some Amercan politicians call it) American, and more broadly western, hegemony (or American interests, as craven ghouls call it). The use of proxy forces like in Afghanistan during the 80s, coups like those carried out in Chile in 73 and, well really most of South America in the latter 20th century, sanctions against countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and the DPRK (which are explicitly put in place to make life worse for the people living there and produce people who would be willing to commit violent acts to overthrow the local government not adequately subordinate to the United States), facilitating the mass murder of people opposed to the pro-america regime or too supportive of communism like in Indonesia and South Korea several times, all bring massive loss of life and terrible suffering. The crimes against humanity carried out by the United States and on their behalf are so terrible and widespread that it is difficult to name a country that has not had blood spilled to advance American hegemony in it. Like Cuba.

At that though, the United States is no stranger to directly deploying troops to crush opposition to American hegemony. Like in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan again, and the RSFSR immediately after the revolution. War is terrible, but it is not out of the question to enforce American hegemony.

In Ukraine, the United States is not interested in preserving democracy or the self determination of the Ukranian people. It never has been in any of the countries or among any of the organizations that receive its support. The United States ultimately wants to have control over the Russian economy to use as a source of cheap labor and resources. That was the USSR and later Russia were denied, several times, entry into NATO, an ostensibly defensive alliance for the region that Russia is in, and the purpose of the rapid privatization of post-soviet economies after ‘91. Ukraine is caught in the terrible position of being used to advance the United States’ goal in the region. Support for Ukraine will be dropped when the United States government believes that it is no longer useful or viable to support them against Russia, after who knows how many people are dead and permanently injured, and how many more whose entire lives have been destroyed.

They tried, using a proxy force of Cuban exiles.

Oh fuck these are the best emojis yet lmao

Materially improving people’s lives is authoritarianism sweaty it needs to be balanced against legalizing violence against marginalized people

But also the marketization and commodification of everything.

Basic necessities like housing and food that there’s more than enough for everyone made or being made, being denied to people to keep the price of those commodities artificially high, is not normal. Food being destroyed with bleach and housing being kept empty while people go hungry and sleep under interstate overpasses is not normal.

we do a little trolling

Wow. I Didn’t Know That. You’re Telling Me Now for the First Time

I got out of construction this year. I was on jobsites for basically the entire shutdown for Covid.

Outside of disease, there are a lot of physical health hazards in construction that you’re just expected to work through. Working at all on a coal-fired power plant, you’re going to breathe in coal dust all day long for your shift, which for me was up to 16 hours a day not including travel time.

Edit: I originally wrote this when I first woke up, and was more combative than I should have been.

When I worked in construction they didn’t give a fuck lmao.

I do physical and digital notes both, just so that information is available in as many places as possible. I need a number to refer to a thing in an email? It’s in a word doc, on a post-it note on my monitor, on my physical and digital calendar probably, and in a spreadsheet. No matter what, I can find the info I need.

And I feel like the actual act of handwriting helps me remember what I’m writing. I’ll take notes during a meeting or a class, never look at them again, and remember the important info. If I don’t take notes, I might as well have not been there lol.

Hulu. I agreed to Netflix for the convenience for the price. Hulu started to get big, stuff started getting taken off Netflix, and I just went back to doing what I did before Netflix.

Pop OS has native drivers for nVidia GPUs even 😎🐧

In an ideal world where there was a good-faith international actor or organization who could take the role of moderating a referendum, and the outcome be respected by all parties, that would be ideal. However, no such organization exists. The institutions of the so-called “rules based international order” serve the interests of western hegemony. That is why, for example, Catalonia is not able to have an effective referendum for independence from Spain, and that is a perfectly fine state of affairs; just the way things are. Maybe a diplomatic complaint gets filed somewhere, maybe someone calls out how awful it is that police were interfering with the referendum in 2017, and they’re not wrong. But ultimately, nothing fundamentally changes, and that is the point.

Should people just accept the way things are until an ideal situation allows them to improve their lives in a way everyone finds acceptable? What should people do if things are only getting worse, and there are no effective, good-faith actors to mediate the best possible solution?

“That was a temporary solution we implemented around 15”

“What, like 15 minutes ago?”

“2015”