I think the most important thing to know about me is that I have never once been funny ever in my entire life
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@aralioideae
I think the most important thing to know about me is that I have never once been funny ever in my entire life

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i dream that one day i will have a blood test that will not come back normal and there will be something wrong with me that can be easily measured and verified, maybe even on a numerical scale and I can point to my test results and go "the thing that is wrong with me is that this number is too [high/low/whatever]" instead of just having to deal with Various Symptoms that have no apparent cause
feeling really weird and out of sorts for the second day in a row what is up with that
shoutout to slow growers, late bloomers, people whose plans got derailed by circumstances beyond their control or their own choices, people who never had a plan to begin with, people who have had to start over when theyre too old to feel like theyre supposed to be where they are, people who cant pretend theyre built for the environment theyre in, and everyone who's not living the life they thought they would. im proud of you for making it this far and i hope you keep going until youre happy β‘
I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?
alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.
so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.
there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.
when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.
why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!
this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.
so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:
the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered
the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate
shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)
bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.
so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".
(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)
and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!
tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

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the owls are really active tonight i think they're arguing π¦
personally I think it would be so cool to have basking sharks feature on a bank note but there's no way that's happening
Bank of England are letting you vote for what animals you want on their new bank notes: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/help-us-design-our-next-series-of-banknotes
Pine martens are an option!
PINE MARTENS??!?
Oh my god, you can choose up to two from each category:
HOW CAN I NARROW THIS DOWN
βhow would other people describe youβ why would i know this
Kris deltarune u r so cool

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adult backpack wearers of the world unite
every time i have to relearn that being disabled means not being able to do all of the stuff other people can i get so pissed. you mean its just like this forever? i want to do stuff...
as much as I dont cope well with heat i could never hate summer this weather is sooooo nice im so glad I've got this week off work
I think it's like, the warm sunny weather positively affects my mood so much that I can cope better with the discomfort of being too hot than I would otherwise?
Idk if I lived somewhere where it was getting closer to 40C maybe i'd feel different but it's hard to overstate just how much sunny weather improves my mood
as much as I dont cope well with heat i could never hate summer this weather is sooooo nice im so glad I've got this week off work
got a sunburnt nose despite wearing suncream today π
im trying out some new face sun-cream options so that is a strike against candidate number one

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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women have no idea how hard it is being a man. for example, [describes an experience that is not at all exclusive to being a man]
and the sequel [describes an experience that is more common or worse for women but isnt taken as seriously]
#threequel [describes something that they could just...Not Do] (via @quasi-normalcy)
I just realized that many many people have jobs
Rb with your job, wtf do you people do while offline???