The American grown & tax subsidized rice that's flooded Haiti since the 80's has contained high levels of arsenic & cadmium. Haiti is one of the largest importers of American rice, as neoliberal programs including tariff cuts & programs run by USAID to structure Haitian agriculture around food exports (to Americans, primarily) dismantled Haitian food production, especially rice & pork. Local farmers can't compete with cheap American rice, which is mostly agricultural surplus due to the heavy subsidies paid to American rice farmers. In spite of all the food aid, including this toxic rice, sent to Haiti, it's one of the hungriest countries in the world. American farmers are rich off of the starvation and poisoning of Haitians.

if you want a good place to start on this here's a good guardian overview on how American aid has ruined the Haitian economy

i think this is a good point. especially when it comes to like “gender-critical” men, who are frequently ardently anti-feminist but will get lumped in as TERFs; it both dulls the critique of absolutely pervasive societal transphobia by associating transphobia solely with one (relatively small) part of the transphobic “movement”, and smears inclusive radical feminists because of the implication that to be transphobic one must be a radical feminist, which then functions backward as “if one is a radical feminist one must be transphobic”

I'm not surprised but this is so :') like. They worship the line above the impending climate collapse! What is going on

choice excerpt, emphasis mine:

When Cavanaugh wasn’t killing time on the floor, she and many of her colleagues spent the days rehashing their arguments over the bill and fighting about matters of procedure. They only needed one Republican to vote against the bill for it to fail. All of the Republicans hated the filibuster, but several of them disliked the bill that had prompted it, too. They struggled to understand its relevance. They had campaigned on expanding broadband access, reducing property taxes, making the government more efficient — things they felt actually mattered in the daily lives of their constituents. They hadn’t run for local office because they wanted to take up arms in the culture war, especially not for a cause many of them had never thought about before and didn’t have much interest in thinking about now. “I’ve spent way more brainpower on this than I ever wanted to,” Senator Jana Hughes told me. One day, a freshman senator named Christy Armendariz led me to a bench in an empty hallway. She found it puzzling that a reporter from New York would come all the way to Nebraska to cover this affair. “I don’t watch the news or get the newspaper,” she said. “Is there anything going on I should be aware of?” I mentioned that other states had passed similar bills and that a federal appeals court in the same circuit as Nebraska had ruled one of them unconstitutional. “So is it a big widespread thing?” she asked. As far as she could tell, ordinary Nebraskans did not know about the issue. “I knocked doors for a year, and nobody brought this up.” She said she wished the bill had never been introduced.

state-level politicians are often, lbr, kinda dipshitty, but the wounded-deer-routine of oh-deary-me-i-can’t-possibly-know-anything-about-the-news is the exact type of dipshittery that particularly makes me go “aaaargh” and tear out my damn hair

and i find it extra annoying since i honestly believe you don’t have to be some hyper-lefty bleeding-heart to oppose this (vile) bill.  there’s a very solid, boring, small-c conservative case to be made against it, on the basis of, “why the fuck is the state senate passing laws prohibiting stuff that should really be left to the judgment of a doctor and their patients, the AMA and board certification and malpractice suits already exist to cover Actual Medical Abuses and this is not that, nuke the damn bill”

(and i don’t think that reasoning would even be particularly out of step with their base!  people like their local representatives, and “keep Big Government TM out of your child’s health decisions” is the kind of thing that markets well in that area, etc)

anyway, if anyone could make that case & weather whatever blowback came of it, it’d be a self-avowedly "not even into the bill in the first place” state senator who’s coming up against their own term limit anyway, who need not be especially accountable to the national party, and who works in a state where senators are very explicitly a part-time not-well-renumerated thing (so, like, worst-case scenario, you get primaried out of office—boo hoo, oh no your measly 12k a year is gone, seriously just get another part-time gig it’ll be fine)...

...buuut they’ve apparently all got jell-o spines and/or blackened coals for hearts, so,,,

I think it should be a pre-requisite to posting about politics online to, like, actually read the theory you're talking about. Even in basic terms! Sparknotes political theory is better than no political theory. & one thing you'll find is that the people genuinely passionate about it will be really willing to either explain it to you *or* give you useful reading lists.

in the last 24 hours the california state legislature has killed a social housing bill and multiple bills limiting highway expansion. lmao. with democrats like these who needs republicans (not that we have a lot of those anyway…which drives home the point further! this is a BLUE state and a lot of these extremely shitty moderates are in perfectly safe districts and yet year after year they kill progressive legislation).

cannot emphasize enough how little “we will be a sanctuary for people fleeing authoritarian right wing states” matters if this state remains fundamentally unaffordable to poor and middle class people. the “rich people are leaving california cause they hate taxes” narrative isn’t really true but what is true is that poor and middle class people are leaving because they cannot afford to live here. and instead of passing legislation that would create social housing, or passing legislation to upzone areas near transit to help alleviate our 3.5m unit housing shortage, shitty moderates (a lot of whom pretend to be progressives) tweet out platitudes about how this state is a beacon of liberal values. it is absolutely not.

tldr bully your state legislators into being actual progressives, and support their primary challengers if they don’t (or challenge them yourselves! the architect of this social housing bill is 25 years old and he’s one of the best people in the legislature!)

one of my favorite things in canadian politics is how we had a c*vid relief program for a brief time and it seems it veered just a liiitle bit too close to the concept of universal basic income - just enough that c*nservatives are still incensed about it a year and a half after it’s ended, and repeatedly bring it up as some sort of evidence that the sitting government is terrible

back to normalposting bc ive removed myself from politics posting on this account at least

"America could (and should) fight a war with China" is an absolutely insane belief to hold. Even if you're a china hawk conservative its incredibly stupid to seriously consider war with China. Like the US Navy can barely send ships across the Pacific in peacetime, you think they could do that under fire?

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, handcuffed and bound for separate prisons awaiting their trial, share a kiss in the police van outside the federal court

Big if true

i want to do less politicsposting in 2024 so here's a last one for you

the left in imperial core countries has completely and totally abandoned its defense of the working and middle classes. it has the 'left' view on other subjects but being unable or possibly, deliberately unwilling to work in the interest of the working classes of your own country should, in my opinion, result in you losing your 'leftist' political alignment. these guys are just bored idiots who countersignal for social prestige, but actually serve the interests of rich neoliberal upper classes.

i can’t sleep because i’m thinking too much about politics. i need to go on a long fucking rant about politics. people need to be SCARED about this upcoming US presidential election and by people i mean everyone in the US as well as people in every country that’s involved in NATO.

i don’t want to politicspost on here but oh my fucking god. i really REALLY REALLY hope people are aware of how dangerous politics are right now. keep your eyes WIDE open. everyone is being fed propaganda and it’s so so so so important that you stay aware.

be politically literate. if you have a phone/computer/library accessible to you, YOU CAN WATCH THE NEWS. you can read the news. you can listen to the news. please please please.

and vote. if you can, vote. tell people to vote. i can’t stress enough how important this is. we cannot let this happen again because this keeps getting more dangerous and i don’t think people are even aware of how dangerous it is. i’m not going to get into specifics right now because it’s late and i’m tired and i’m gonna start crying if i start thinking about it too hard, but this is so so important.

please stay informed.

xx

when are we going to admit that reagan has become a boogeyman for american politicsposters on here

Sorry for the politicsposting everyone. I don’t like these bills and want to do my part to kill them dead- aka calling my senators and spreading the word. Having done that I think it’s important to remember that the world is a big place with a lot of beauty in it, and no matter how much certain people want to control us they can never succeed, because we’re like a weed that keeps coming back, no matter how many times they try to cut us down. Stay safe, take a deep breath, and take a cat pic for the road: