Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism. Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Everyone deserves Human Rights

  • 299 Posts
  • 2.13K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 18th, 2023
  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Elon Musk is responsible for “killing the world’s poorest children,” says Bill Gates
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid and genocide is well documented, exposing its strong ties to the Israeli military, its collaboration with Israeli government ministries, and its involvement in the Israeli prison system, which is notorious for systematic torture and abuse of Palestinians. Microsoft knowingly provides Israel with technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), that is deployed to facilitate grave human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity (including apartheid), as well as genocide. In light of the International Court of Justice’s legally-binding rulings to prevent Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza, as well as its July 19 Advisory Opinion affirming Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid system, Microsoft has failed its corporate obligation to prevent genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Microsoft, as well as its boards of directors and executives, may face criminal liability for this complicity.

    Microsoft provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services that are crucial in empowering and accelerating Israel’s genocidal war on 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip. Microsoft’s extensive ties with Israel’s military are revealed in investigations by The Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, demonstrating how the Israeli military turned to Microsoft to meet the technological demands of genocide.

    The 7 billion to Africa isn’t as nice as it first seems either; it’s investments into venture capitalist solutions, much more restrictive that aid and the profits are not realized by the locals

    https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/02/perhaps-bill-gates-not-best-expert-hunger-africa

    https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/10/open-letter-bill-gates-food-farming-and-africa

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•History Channel
    6·
    15 hours ago

    ScienceDirect is ‘an independent socialist magazine’? Lmao, that’s hilarious. That’s where those latest quotes were from. Monthly Review publishes articles from many credited economists, sociologists, and historians. You’re reactionary (lack of) understanding of what socialism is doesn’t change that reality. You’re responses make you seem incapable of reading more than a single sentence, missing the rest of the entire paragraph, let alone paper.

    Dylan Sullivan is an Adjunct Fellow and PhD candidate in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, where he teaches politics, sociology, and anthropology.

    Jason Hickel is an author and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.

    Richard Wolff, another economist, explains socialism in a very clear and comprehensive way. If you’re not intellectually curious enough to entertain Richard Wolff, I’m done responding. On the other hand, I’m happy to engage with someone interested in learning and discussion.

    Economic Update: 3 Basic Kinds of Socialism

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•History Channel
    5·
    16 hours ago

    Given these issues, it is clear that the standard public narrative about the history of extreme poverty needs reassessment. In this paper we assess this narrative against three indicators of welfare (real wages, human height, and mortality) for five world regions (Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and China) from roughly the 16th century onward. These datasets point to three conclusions:

    First, it is unlikely that 90% of the global population lived in extreme poverty prior to the rise of capitalism. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year. Extreme poverty seems to arise predominantly in periods of severe social and economic distress, like famines, wars and institutionalized dispossession, particularly under colonialism. Rather than being the natural condition of humanity, extreme poverty is a symptom of social dislocation and displacement. It is important to emphasize that the data here focuses on extreme poverty, as it is defined in the relevant literature, not the higher consumption thresholds that are required to achieve “decent living” today (e.g., Edward, 2006, Kikstra et al., 2021).

    The second conclusion is that the rise of capitalism coincided with a deterioration in human welfare. In every region studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and a marked upturn in premature mortality. In parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, key welfare metrics have still not recovered.

    Our third conclusion is that in those regions where progress has occurred (as opposed to recovery from an earlier period of immiseration), it began much later than the Ravallion/Pinker graph suggests. In the core regions of Northwest Europe, welfare standards began to improve in the 1880s, four centuries after the emergence of capitalism. In the periphery and semi-periphery, progress began in the mid-20th century. Further research is needed to establish the causal drivers of these improvements, but existing data indicates that progress was achieved with the rise of organized labour, the anti-colonial movement, and other progressive social movements, which organized production around meeting human needs, redistributed wealth, and invested in public provisioning systems

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•History Channel
    10·
    22 hours ago

    If one starts from the assumption that extreme poverty is the natural state of humanity, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in extreme poverty today. However, if extreme poverty is a sign of severe social dislocation, relatively rare under normal conditions, then it should concern us that - despite many instances of progress since the middle of the 20th century - such dislocation remains so prevalent under contemporary capitalism. Depending on the subsistence basket one uses to measure poverty, as of 2008, between 200 million and 1.21 billion people live in extreme poverty (Moatsos, 2017, Moatsos, 2021; see also our discussion in Appendix VI).18 While direct comparisons with the wage data are difficult because of the variety of baskets used, this suggests that under contemporary capitalism hundreds of millions of people currently live in conditions comparable to Europe during the Black Death (Figure 4, Figure 5), the catastrophes induced by the American genocides (Figure 7) and the slave trade (Figure 9), or famine-ravaged British India (Figure 11). To the extent there has been progress against extreme poverty in recent decades, it has generally been slow and shallow.

    Conclusions

    In sum, the narrative that the rise of capitalism drove progress against extreme poverty is not supported by empirical evidence. On the contrary, the rise of capitalism was associated with a notable decline in human welfare, a trend that was only reversed around the twentieth century, when radical and progressive social movements sought to gain some control over production and organize it more around meeting human needs.

    As for the condition of extreme poverty, it cannot legitimately be used as a benchmark for measuring progress. Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but an effect of dispossession, enclosure, and exploitation. It need not exist anywhere, and certainly should not exist in any just and humane society. It can and must be abolished immediately.

    If our goal is to achieve substantive improvements in human welfare, progress should be measured against decent living standards and access to modern amenities. Capitalism currently shows no signs of ever meeting this objective, and imperialist dynamics in the world economy seem actively to prevent it.

    As we have seen, the historical record is clear that public planning and socialist policy can be effective at delivering rapid economic, technological, and social development. Rediscovering the power of this approach will be essential if Global South governments are to increase their economic sovereignty and mobilize production to ensure decent lives for all.48 Achieving this objective requires building political movements of the Southern working classes and peasantries powerful enough to replace governments that currently are captured by political factions aligned with national or international capital; reducing reliance on core creditors, currencies, and imports; and establishing South-South alliances capable of withstanding any retaliation. Progressive formations in the core should be prepared to support and defend these movements.

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Israeli bulldozers demolish most of a West Bank hamlet, dislocating dozens of PalestiniansEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Thanks, it’s very irritating when people falsely assume my positions, even if I’ve repeatedly done the opposite of what they claim.

    Pivoting on Israel would have been a significant gain during the election, as dozens of poll on policy show. But that’s yesterday’s news. Palestine is still a critical component of the current resistance against fascism in America. Progressives gaining control of the Democratic Party are our best shot to a genuine opposition to fascism going forward. I do hope elections can be a meaningful path for this opposition, but from what I’ve learned about fascism/imperialism/colonialism and resistance movements that have successfully overthrown them; armed struggle, while a last resort, can never be ruled out

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Released captive: I felt safer in Hamas captivity than in IsraelEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I definitely agree that people / ideologies co-opt religion to justify their own ends. But I also know many people do not practice religion this way, and that there are religious groups that practice religion in a progressive way. Just wanted to decouple that co-opt / corruption of religion from religion itself being evil. I’ve seen people use the latter to justify hatred against entire peoples practicing a religion; it’s clear that you’re not doing anything like that. Thanks for the reply