Love cormorants I find them so goofy

Orioles because orange and black looks cool

Dang I really need to read their book, they just distilled a lot of thoughts I have had floating around in my head since the pandemic in a clear and concise way and added some crucial evidence to back it up. You could tell people lost their minds behind the wheel early on in the pandemic and it just continues to get worse. I am sure I myself have become a more inattentive or less capable driver just from the growing psychological burden that is placed on us that continues to swell as contradictions magnify and the capital’s profit shrinks.

I am curious if any comrades here from the global south can give insight into how Hollywood and US media in general has affected their countries

I think they mean in terms of ideological threats to capitalism in the imperial core

Already seeing libs call this a false flag attack. So that stage has been set already if proof comes out that Ukraine was responsible

While he simultaneously tells the press that he doesn’t believe in bodily autonomy

I always think about stuff like this. Westerners love to talk about how much they hate other people and how miserable everything is but will still turn around and preach to marginalized and oppressed people domestically and abroad that this is the best system and we are justified using war to “spread” it across the globe

Okay I don’t feel bad anymore

Eventually Christopher Nolan will be correctly and ignominiously remembered as a great propagandist instead of an artist

I don’t mean to come off like I’m attacking you, I’m just pointing out red flags that make me very skeptical of a source or an author, sorry if it reads as aggressive. I am also learning from everyone’s input on this thread and I’m glad you brought this up for discussion.

I can’t take someone seriously who advises presidents who have genocided Muslim peoples and talks about “Islamic Extremism” while ignoring the role of western countries and states like Saudi Arabia for creating groups like the Taliban and fostering their power in the region.

Religion has always justified itself as a “civilizing project”; that doesn’t mean this is correct. I can’t take that argument seriously.

You seem here in good faith so I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but that book sounds incredibly racist and light read of her wiki page says she has advised Bush and Obama during their presidencies, which I think says it all really. She is a white woman from Canada who converted to Islam and apparently just scolds Muslims about “extremism.” I can’t even respond to the claims the book makes because it just reads as Westerner imposing racist tropes on peoples they don’t understand, to say nothing of the fact that it is completely devoid of class analysis and seems entirely ideological.

Ugh we still have so far to go with ableism :(

Haha there is a lot of time spent staring blankly and resisting the urge to explode on some of these hopelessly dense fuckers

For the most part, academia exposes a lot of the bullshit going on. However, liberal ideology prevents researchers from seeing “the elephant” i.e. the horrors of capitalism, so they go searching for answers down blind alleys. For example, in my field, research has established the brutality of our healthcare system; but, research will always seek to answer this by recommending and then further exploring “novel healthcare solutions” instead of, ya know, the solution that’s right in our face (FUCKING DESTROY OUR HEALTHCARE SYSTEM)

I just feel like America’s history as a settler nation made it much more ripe for this kind of insane neoliberal society to be tenable than even modern Europe. Not that I don’t think they will be mostly successful doing this to Europe, but I feel like it is such a big contradiction for peoples that still have a much stronger connection to their history and cultural identities, as bastardized as they’ve become in recent times; add on to the fact that much of Europe is build on a pride that they are at least not as terrible as America. Making sure the growing rage can successfully form a revolutionary movement is one thing, but for the most part Americans don’t even have rage at all towards the absolute shitshow that is their daily life. I’m not saying Europe will suddenly be where it was at pre-World War but it can still create massive problems for the US empire. I mean look at the relative resistance to NATO that we see in Hungary and Austria, two of the most fascistic European countries. Can the US really keep ~800 million people pacified across the ocean the same way they do at home? I just think that it could pose a massive problem.

The US can’t address its issues without creating further contradictions. I think the biggest success they’ve had is definitely sucking Europe dry, but that’s just kicking the can down the road really. Domestically, conditions continue to decline at an accelerating rate. There is no plan to address this. That’s a major contradiction right there. When the next major crisis happens, who are they gonna steal from? I feel like if they had to turn to other countries in the imperial core for wealth extraction, doesn’t that say a lot about the long-term viability of their economy? How will Europe function as they decline from relative prosperity into a hellhole similar to modern America? Will people take it lying down? People in the global south have also definitely taken notice of the Ukraine war and how weak America actually is at defending its interests militarily. Can the US prevent the decolonization of West Africa and the Middle East forever? Will bigger holes start to form in South America or other parts of the world?

The US has definitely taken notice of the seeds of its destruction i.e. de-dollarization and growing Chinese and Eurasian hegemony and taken some measures to address this. However, the contradictions of neoliberalism and financialization have not changed. There is nothing they can do to change them. The death of the U.S. is a process that will take some time and there will be ebbs and flows. Unfortunately, even 100 years is a relatively short period of time in terms of human development, so we could go our whole lifetime without seeing America destroyed even if we can see its inevitability. Also, economic indicators are essentially religious divinations designed to prop up the system, so unless it’s coming from a Marxist or at least some non-mainstream source they really can’t be taken at face value.

It’s not just the ruling class, unfortunately.

Are you telling me double-counting mortgage payments as imputed rent isn’t real production?