In case any libs see this
The joke is Guantanamo Bay
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the 196 people would love this while not understanding the actual joke
What’s the beef with 196? Is it reddit’s 196 or did they manage to infect lemmy somehow?
It’s a total mess. I believe the original 196 (i forgot the instance) was a spin-off from reddit. At some point, it ended up on blahaj, where I first encountered it. For the last year or so, it’s basically been a meme channel barely above shitposts but often with a lot of trans memes.
Then recently the mod just unilaterally tried to “move” the community by locking up the blahaj instance and opening a new 196 on .world. The community backlashed, someone started onehundredninetysix and people spammed it heavily for a few days. Then, I believe, the old mod reopened the blahaj one or the admins gave it to someone else or… I dunno, my attention span for lemmy drama runs put around this point.
tl;dr, a bunch of mod drama has resulted in no less than 3 different 196 communities all of which are basically meme communities with low standards.
oh god there’s 3 of them!!! 🤦
Idk but I blocked one on lemmy because it was a bunch of whining about tankies with memes pretty much exactly like the above, in both reasoning and format. I don’t even know what they think a tankie is; I could never figure it out from the context or comments.
Tankie is a straw man intended to deride a people with left leaning political views who don’t accept western neoliberalism; effectively engendering peer pressure against anyone from espousing non neoliberalism.
There’s a 196 on Blahaj (or at least there was, there was a whole thing about moving to .world, but idk)
Libs posting “We now have a concentration camp in America!!1!” as if they haven’t had those on the southern border for 10+ years
Honestly, US prisons in general seem like concentration camps to me. Lots of persecuted minorities, forced labor, cramped spaces and overcrowding, torture, etc. Plenty of laws seem arbitrary or overly punitive: drugs, 3 strikes laws, failure to pay fines, probation violations, shit like loitering and vagrancy.
Fuck I hate this place
Prisons are closer to a hybrid financialized gulag system than concentration camps. The ultimate goal of concentration camps is permanent removal. The ultimate goal of gulags was economic extraction. US Prisons and Jails function in this way in the sense that many governments in the US use prison labor. However this goes further in the sense that the bodies of prisoners are typically commodities in and of themselves when you’re looking at the interplay between private for-profit prisons and the various governments they contract with.
But we’ve had actual concentration camps for immigrants along the Southern border for decades, these camps are also hybrid financialized systems because some of them are also run by for-profit companies.
America is simply the synthesis of the horrors of humanity with a financial twist!
You don’t think permanent removal is at least part of the point of prisons/jails? Seems like there are quite a few people who think of prisons as a way to get rid of “undesirables” and there has been a constant push to speed up death penalty proceedings. The entire probation/parole system seems like a way to keep people coming back.
Like yeah there are economic reasons, but that’s pretty much always true under capitalism. There were also economic reasons for Nazi concentration camps.
Plus the entire system was built around putting black people in prison to continue slavery. How is that not permanent removal? The US has basically just been making baby steps towards prison reform for 100+ years so it isn’t quite as blatant these days, but literally millions of people have been permanently removed by it
You don’t think permanent removal is at least part of the point of prisons/jails? Seems like there are quite a few people who think of prisons as a way to get rid of “undesirables” and there has been a constant push to speed up death penalty proceedings. The entire probation/parole system seems like a way to keep people coming back.
I agree that in a microcosm and at the individual level it’s a removal of undesirables, and it works that way in rich locales, but there are way more poor people than there are rich people, and way more poor prisoners than rich prisoners.
The problem is that prison industrial complex needs bodies. The other extractive bit of this is that the revolving door of US jails justify the thin blue line’s enormous extraction of local resources. The majority of the imprisoned in the US are in jails waiting arraignment. It’s a revolving door. These people end up being locked out of a real life because the system is punitive, and feeds itself. So while it does control where populations of people are, it is not a permanent removal in the same way where you empty San Francisco of all Japanese people and move them all to empty land.
Plus the entire system was built around putting black people in prison to continue slavery. How is that not permanent removal? The US has basically just been making baby steps towards prison reform for 100+ years so it isn’t quite as blatant these days, but literally millions of people have been permanently removed by it
Remember that slavery is not removal. Death is not removal. Slavery is extraction. The US is not removing black people, it is trapping them. That’s the history of slavery and anti-slave patrols that seeps into law enforcement. It’s a strategic difference that implies a difference of intent. We are not removing communities, towns, neighborhoods etc, of the black population to force them into slavery. We are trapping individuals in the legal system which in aggregate affects those communities, towns, and neighborhoods but we are not “emptying the cities”.
Notably the comparison falls apart a little because originally gulag were often seeded with mass population transfers, but towards the middle/end of the soviet union gulags had a stable enough rotating population to simply shard a larger camp into smaller camps at the periphery. By that time people were sentenced to gulags individually rather than transferred en-masse.
It’s a fuzzy distinction for sure, but the main distinction is that we’re moving bodies one by one, not street by street/neighborhood by neighborhood/town by town/etc.
waterboarding in guantanamo bay sounds like a rad ass time if you dont know what either of these things are
Wasn’t Sean Hannity suppose to do that to prove it isn’t torture?
Yes, amongst many others who never ever did. There was one conservative commentator who actually did it and admitted it was really scary and unpleasant and that in the moment he felt sure he was going to drown, but the idea that his version of it (choosing to do it willingly, for not more than a few seconds, in a friendly environment surrounded by people who do not wish you harm, and a full medical and psychological support staff on hand) was even close to the experience of victims is absurd.
Water boarding wasn’t even the most common form of torture at Gitmo. And one of the worst wasn’t the sort of thing that got focused on by the press (like sleep deprivation, pressure holds, mock execution, dogs etc).
Almost 50 prisoners a day were force fed twice a day each, with each session regularly continuing for 2hrs at a time. Yasiin Bey / Mos Def worked with Reprieve and the guy who made Senna to film him undergoing the procedure (again in a closed environment with people who knew and trusted, other doctors on hand etc) and it pretty much completely broke him in minutes.
The footage is really disturbing, so I won’t post it here, but going through 4 hours of that a day at the hands of people who kidnapped you off the street and hate you on principle and even enjoy subjecting you to it is honestly impossible to grasp in it’s horror.
The mos def video is harrowing
Hitchens (rip bozo) did it and changed his mind and said that it’s torture
I get that it was originally a “fuck you” by Castro, but Cuba should start charging the US a ridiculous amount for using Cuban land to do war crimes.
Like figure out what the lost revenue is due to the blockade and double that.
