Im not going to pull punches on this rant. I am so exhausted by this rhetoric and unfortunately it is pervasive in my personal life and online. I spend most of my productive time reviewing literature on various global issues. Namely land grab discourse, genocide studies, conservation efforts, state development policy, IFI reports etc etc.

Let me tell you something about the lives of rural and Indigenous people in the global south. They get their homes burned down and murdered in their sleep. Their lands are stolen from them with techniques perfected by colonial powers, especially from US settler colonialism.

The state will steal their lands and "preserve it" for use of private capital, for white settlers, or to create a national park or preserves that wealthy foriegners can hunt game and so they can parade to the world how "modern" they are becoming.

If they cannot steal land outright they will use other more complicated manners to incentivise rural people to be tied into market relations, such as dependence on ecotourism or even biochar and other technologies presented as liberatory or as needed due to damages colonialism has done. "A bit of colonialism will help your colonialism problem," if you will.

These relations will contradict and then corrode their lifeways and distracted from effective traditional methods because white tourists don't want to see the cattle of pastoralists when on vacation. They are also shamed by the excess wealth of tourists, and the settlers that facilitate tourism, encouraging them to become more enfranchised into modernity so their lands will either become vulnerable to direct theft or the market relations will mold them into what settlers want them to do for the benifit of their estates.

These extreme minority settlers often own like half of an entire county, while the county next door is over half conservation area. This means fewer lands for grazing and fewer water sources available for rural people. It leads to starvation and death, especially during dry periods such as the current drought in east Africa, all while the state concern trolls about food security and executes the development dance to attract aid and FDI. It also means that lands are degraded by over use because these people are being choked out of their ancestral lands. The state and white settlers then blame the pastoralists and forest dwellers and weaponize Human Rights against them, saying the rural peoples are preventing the states quest for water security as they redirect all waters to metro areas and settler estates.

All of this is the genocidal process of primative accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. It is a privilege I am able to research these situations. It is a privilege that I am able to work with organizations that work with local Tribes on the issues they are concerned about. It is a privilege I am a grad student that is paid to do this, although our union has to fight the university for a fraction of a living wage.

I am not privileged to not vote Blue. It is more like a curse of understanding. Who do you think backs these violent efforts of dispossession? USAID is never far away. The EU is never far away. The IFI are always right there. Conservation as we know it was created in North America to conquer the continent and take the land from Indigenous peoples and it has exported these methods abroad. All of this is supported by institutions and policies that democrats and republicans alike believe in and enable globally. It is supported by finance capital which is the foundation of the present democratic party

Let me tell you what people who vote blue do about this. Kenya or some other post colonial state will massacre people and burn down their homes and create a national park. Netflix will then hire Obama to narrate a docuseriese on the glorious national parks of the world. Blue voters will then consume the erasure and genocide of rural people as feel-good, green(TM) content with satisfaction that the world is becoming a better place. That's it. Then they go vote blue.

Anyone who says I am privileged to not vote blue has no clue or no care regarding how the world works and is a combination being hopelessly US centric, too focused on bourgeoisie partisanship and embarrassingly naive about the world. Voting blue is the opposite of solidarity. The people who say they are not privileged enough to not vote Blue fail to see their own privilege of living in the Disney land of the global north. What ever gains they think Democrats will give them will either never happen or will be cut from the flesh of people they are happy to sacrifice.

I will not be extorted by bourgeoisie partisans. My moral worth and political identify is mine to create, not theirs to demand. My concern is with the fundamental machinations of capital and the devestating impact it has on people while it reproduces itself, and it is most destructive in places far from the minds of democrats regardless of issues in the US. I'm not going to be tricked into supporting a party that enables the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that stands on a foundation of genocide. They only have moral arguments but they do not have moral standing.

My relationship with balloon is over. Airship is now my best friend.

That is all.

Furthermore we are seeing major euro chemical corps taking preservation measures that may be a signal for a death spiral for the competitiveness of European capital. We also see leaders like Macron pissed that the US is in such a good spot relatively speaking. All of this is only getting harder to watch. The US truly is cannabalizing the west.

Not sure how long we have until Biden pivots towards the OILagarchs (sorry) but the fact that US troops are apparently being pulled out of the kingdom is like a dream come true. We truly live in a time of qualitative change. The world is shifting polarity faster than the US can keep up. These maneuvers by OPEC+ are such a game changer because it softens the benefits that the US is getting from the situation in Europe. Anything that infuriates the US like this has to be worth paying attention to anyway.

Just got done listening to one of their episodes. I've heard several before and had to quit because its just kind of garbage. More than just bad content that usually fails to engage with whatever it is talking about, but its actually pretty reactionary.

When I look back on how the sub for the podcast was so big and influential I just cringe.

Decided to go to a sporting event. I did my due diligence and arrived on time for the game as to avoid the screeching nightmare of people standing for the Star Spangled Banner.

However, there was no escape from imperial chuavanism because I happened to find myself at a game that celebrated US Millitary personnel the entire time, complete with pre-recorded videos of players droning on about the "sacrifice" the military makes to ensure our freedoms. Someone from each branch threw a ceremonial first pitch and got the ball signed by a player. This event was literally sponsored by Boeing, proudly. I saw from videos played on the jumbo screen that people in Boeing collared shirts were the ones that spread out the massive US flag that was present during the anthem.

Every baseball game sings God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch so i went to the bathroom to avoid that of course. But between every inning there was some gooftroop being honored for their service with the backdrop of Boeing iconography littered around the ballpark. They even had a fucking enlistment ceremony where several people swore allegiance to the US military.

Obviously, this isnt new. There is no discovery here. The Empire is who we thought it was, make no mistake. But it is always chilling to hear the cheers for the American death cult, all brought to you by the military-congressional-industrial-complex.

Wow would it be nice if a few more people would just boo at this shit like they boo 27 year olds that cant throw a strike. Like damn I might cry tears of joy if 25+ thousand people would ruin the national anthem by just booing the shit out of it. Or if these military personnel and their families could be humiliated on their special day. They are part of the problem and they deserve to receive vitriol and malice. Fuck their service and fuck their valor. They dont deserve an autographed ball they deserve one that says "baby killer."

So it seems to me that across many spaces there is a tendency to water down queer and gender issues into the cynical commercialism that finance capitalists have pushed for. Among communists I see this with what people in Donbas have said, what a person from the DPRK has said to a Chinese interviewer, and it is also found in the west. Also in sections of the Indigenous community oftentimes elders will claim that (ironically) white people made up Two-Spirit people, all despite evidence to the contrary.

We also see characters like Putin rallying around this idea that the west is obsessed with "gender freedoms" despite the very obvious coordinated crackdowns against these supposed "freedoms" in the west.

When I hear people make these claims I am baffled because I am certain that colonialism has damaged and (attempted to) erase Indigenous gender expressions around the world. To say that queer issues can be boiled down to liberalism is clearly false and likley has its root in colonialism. Yet communists and other forces that are otherwise opposed to the financial imperialist system are not unified on this issue.

It does seem clear that the west tries to weaponize human rights to justify war and to justify investments. It also demonizes and makes sure to show when its enemies show these sentiments. But this reactionary strain of communism has failed to explain how the bourgeoisie apparently invented trans people without simply criticising their least favorite liberal feminist or gender theorist (perhaps Judith Butler). But gender is dynamic and if it has been molded by capital in this way then it should be demonstrable beyond criticisms of a single theorist or a single field.

I myself am absolutely no expert on gender or queer theory. Im straight and grew up in a reactionary home. Im hoping people here can give insight on how to address these issues that exist among communists. I think we can tallow the west to use human rights to further colonize the world and gender issues accross the world probably manifest differently and that should be understood and respectes. Simultaneously, we cant allow this erroneous view that the western bourgeoisie is not only the protector of gender rights, but its progenitor.

Anyways, I am hoping for some discussion on this.