Ace Of Words

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

what I mean by that is colonizers viewed the nudity of black and indigenous people as "obscene" and inherently sexual because of the avid dehumanization of them. it's literally just fascist bullshit spread in people's brains SPECIFICALLY AMERICANS. (my European gf has told me many times that America's weirdness about nudity was strange and I agree)

We're not gonna let "protect the trans" be the new "protect the kids", in which neither party is protected and actually all parties are harmed.

Bodily autonomy means I get to do what I want with my meat vessel (and you with yours), and it remains the most fundamental right. Lose that, you risk everything.

Frankly, if a body makes you uncomfortable: good. Sit with that feeling. Assess your discomfort (do you dislike nudity, or are you being fatphobic? Do you dislike nudity, or are you being racist? Do you dislike nudity, or are you being transphobic? Do you dislike nudity, or do you need to silence your inner fascist?). Then realize you aren't being harmed. And move on.

Someone being naked near you, in your line of sight, does not harm you. There is no argument that holds water against this. Discomfort is not harm. Do not moralize your disgust.

well - tens of thousands of tons of silver from latin america make their way to china during the more nakedly extractive portions of the colonial age from 1600 - 1800. the colonial engine flung indigenous people from first latin america and then africa into the burner in order to draw out massive amounts of silver from south america--which was then funneled to china in such massive quantities that the US, UK, Spain, and china all built their economies around the trade for generations.

All that chinese tea, jade, and silk in the old world? bought and paid for with silver coins that started their life as mineral deposits in Peru. So much silver was sent to china that they became known as silversmiths and were able to begin exporting at a high level--sending their reserves American-mined silver back out again to Europe as ornaments, tea sets, and tableware. When we say "have it served on a silver platter"--where do you think that silver comes from?

Silver's valuable. That metal hasn't disappeared. It hasn't been destroyed. How much of that silver was melted down again and reused, and melted down again and reused--how much of that silver is in the wiring, circuit boards, and components of the infrastructure of the North? It used to be some rocks in a mountain in Peru. It's somewhere else now, and even though we still consider silver to be valuable--Peru now has massive national reserves of the stuff--they still don't get any benefit from the silver that's already gone.