if youre not in NYC or socal it's only $10/month for 1-3 movies per month. im not entirely sure about all the terms but that's an insane deal tbh, i feel like this is the only thing you can buy that's the same price as it was before covid

this post brought to you by MoviePass^TM^

Death to America

i recently learned about the buddhist concent of dependent origination, which states that all phenomena arise in dependence with other phenomena. this was surprisingly similar to my idea of dialectical materialism, and it got me thinking about how buddhism could be reconciled/combined with a marxist world view. has anybody here read books or articles on this topic?

obviously not everything buddhists believe (reincarnation is an obvious example) is going to jive with marxism but that doesn't mean it's worthless to try to analyze one in terms of the other

Death to America

Sometimes I have like manic episodes, for lack of a better term, in which I fixate intensely on a topic and I'm suddenly extremely motivated to learn as much as possible (i don't think they're real manic episodes and I'm mentally fine so dw), but for the first time I want to actually follow up on this momentum and learn about the topic I'm fixating on. Behold my ramblings:

What books should I read to learn about the stuff below? If no such books exist, I'll write one.

Overall question: what are the mechanisms by which capitalists extract surplus value from labor? And how can the working people of the world dismantle these mechanisms?

• I use the phrase “what are the mechanisms by which” and not the word “how” intentionally, because I know that the answer to “how” is “by violence or the threat thereof.”

• The question I want to answer is more in the financial “nitty-gritty” of the process. It is obvious that, for example, a coffee farmer in Ethiopia, stevedores in various ports all over the world, and a barista at the Starbucks in my neighborhood all produce value which is extracted by the Starbucks corporation as well as other companies involved in the production process of a cup of coffee (international shipping companies, the companies that make the plastic cups used at Starbucks, etc.). But how, precisely, does that extracted surplus value turn into wealth (not just money in a bank account but wealth in the broadest sense of the term) for the people who own those corporations?

• The most obvious answer is in the dividends paid to shareholders and the increase in the stock price of the various companies involved. But what else? Surely there is a huge obfuscatory architecture of financial tools that hides the true extent of the wealth of the haute bourgeoisie.

  • Examples that jump to mind include: money laundering via fine art (e.g., Salvator Mundi), off-shore bank accounts, and shell and holding companies

  • What do the “bank countries” (Singapore, the Cayman Islands, the City of London, etc.) have to do with this?

• Of course, the final question to ask is: how can we destroy these mechanisms? What are their greatest vulnerabilities? Taking control over any given state seems like an insufficient response, since international capital has numerous bases from which it can operate to hide the extent to which the haute bourgeoisie are hoarding wealth and there’s no indication they can’t create more if we did manage to destroy one. How can the proletariat take control of international finance?

Background reading

• What do the Panama Papers tell us about this question? What other work has been done so far to unravel the obfuscatory architecture mentioned above?

• To what extent would Marx’ Capital provide a framework in which to answer this question? What about writings by later Marxists?

I apologize if this makes no sense at all

Death to America

linked article is what has convinced me he's got it in the bag. the wapo/nyt libs are exactly as insufferable as they were in 2016 and the results will the identical. he'll win for all the same reasons he did the first time and libs, having learned absolutely nothing, will make all the same complaints and tear their hair out trying to figure out what happened. watching the most performatively irritating people on earth eat crow is going to be absolutely

and i don't even have to feel bad about laughing because kamala's policies are literally identical to trumps, so its not even like theres gonna be additional palestinians/trans people/women who are suffering because of it

Death to America

it's joever for me

Death to America

[posting this here bc the fitness comm is pretty dead]

I'm tryna track my calories more closely and I've got a solution for tracking the calories I eat (shout out to the Nutritionix app) but its functionality for tracking calories spent is very rudimentary and I want to get something more precise than just going to an online calculator like this.

If any of yall have recommendations on cheap wearables that'll keep track of the calories I burn while exercising, I'd hugely appreciate it. I don't need it to do anything else and I don't even need it to connect to my phone, since I'm willing to manually input the number of calories burned every day.

Death to America

Death to America

lmao

Death to America

Death to America

anybody who you're calling deeply unserious, whatever that's supposed to mean specifically, 1) already knows they don't seriously espouse the values they claim to espouse and 2) doesn't care. it's a pointless comment to make

Death to America

they never should have let white people have guitars

Death to America

yes it's nice that it's joever but kamala is fucking evil. she's a cop, she laughed about putting parents in jail for their children's truancy, and she wouldn't let cannabis offenders out of prison after it was legalized because she got paid by private prison lobbies to do so. total scumbag who deserves absolutely 0 support from anybody but the most trump derangement syndrome riddled liberals

Death to America