understated

Top left: “Socialism is when the state takes command over the means of production in the name of the working class. Conflict-ridden conditions means the state must concentrate power and represent the socialist project.”

Top right: “Socialism is when the antifa PC cuck mob runs wild, oppresses the White Male®, and destroys Western Civilization™.”

Middle 1: “Socialism (a society with a state where there’s democratic control of workplaces and communities) is a transition stage on the road to communism (classless free association without a state). The former is largely just the ‘early stage’ of the latter, so ultimately they’re part of the same political project.”

Middle 2: “Socialism is when there’s abundant social services (welfare, education, libraries, etc.) in an otherwise capitalist economy.”

Middle 3: “Socialism is when countries we’ve oppressed in the Global South start nationalizing their resources. Communism is that too. We’re gonna invade to restore F R E E D O M.”

Middle 4: “Socialism is when the government literally holds a gun to your head to extort you to pay for the laziness of the Lobster-Eating Corvette-Driving welfare recipients.”

Bottom left: “Socialism is the horizontal organization of society whereby all classes, states, and hierarchies are dissolved. Society is managed through direct democracy and coordinated through voluntary communes and federations.”

Reclaiming Billionaires’ Wealth (via azspot)

There is also a strong and logical case to be made that the rules of property are out of synch with the needs of society.  That is, no one should have been entitled to accumulate such a large percentage of available resources in the first place.  

(via randomheresy)

The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones (via azspot)

Hot off the, uh, keyboard from me at The Week, on the president’s decision to veto last night a bipartisan bill to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.

There are many questions in American foreign policy where reasonable, ethical, well-intentioned people can disagree. Whether it is right to continue U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition intervention in Yemen’s civil war is not one of them.

Yet that is exactly what President Trump has decided to do, issuing the second veto of his presidency to reject S.J.Res.7, a “resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress.” Trump’s refusal to halt America’s contribution to the world’s most acute humanitarian crisis is utterly indefensible — a wretched recommitment to brutality — and his veto statement is a rat king of falsehoods, militarism, and unfettered executive overreach.

In a lengthy roster of Mideast misadventures of debatable morality, necessity, and execution, the conflict in Yemen stands out for its obscene effects on ordinary people. The United Nations estimates nearly 7,000 civilians had been killed and another 11,000 injured as of this past November. Since then, the pace of these deaths has increased.

Do you remember the school bus bombing? The one that killed 51 people, 40 of them children? That was a tiny fraction of those 7,000-plus deaths. Others were caused by coalition attacks on hospitals, funerals, weddings, schools, markets, refugee camps, and residential neighborhoods. These are strikes conducted with American guidance (“including intelligence sharing, logistics support, and, until recently, in-flight refueling of non-United States aircraft,” to borrow Trump’s veto statement summary), often using American-made bombs whose sale was approved by our State Department. It is not histrionic to call them war crimes.

And those are just — “just”! — the direct casualties of war. But the horror in Yemen is hardly monopolized by bullets and bombs. Conservative estimates say 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of 5 have died of starvation since 2015. More than a million children are suffering from severe malnutrition, and fully half of Yemen’s 28 million people are at risk of “the worst famine in 100 years.”

WikiLeaks’ early mission and their publishing of government documents is praiseworthy and allowed for unprecedented access to the truth about human rights violations, mass surveillance, and the brutality of American foreign policy.

WikiLeaks’ later evolution into an informal intelligence outlet for conspiratist right-wing populism is awful, and they’ve sucked for years.

Julian Assange is an absolute asshole, and deserves to be brought to (fair, apolitical) trial for the rape charges against him