FunkyStuff [he/him]

Kamala Harris refused to denounce a policy that resulted in immigrant students being deported in sanctuary cities before her 2020 presidential run and the Biden-Harris administration carried out more deportations per unit of time than even Trump in 2025.

So why should anyone have voted for Harris to protect immigrants? And you can’t say “because Trump is worse” because by that logic you could argue in favor of voting for Trump 2016 since Trump 2024 is worse.

Shoutout to my boy Camilo Torres who famously said, “If Jesus was alive today he’d be a guerrillero.”

I really hope Khamenei overrules that fatwa, their situation is pretty dire especially with Syria becoming an Israel proxy.

imagine saying this about 9/11 hijackers – they’re just fighting for their country, don’t blame them, blame Bin Laden!

If I’m trying to make a point, I try to substantiate it with evidence, not just generalizing about how I imagine the conversation is going to go. I’ve never talked with anyone from the USSR, but have known some from Cuba (as well as researchers who’ve worked there for an interval). There’s some variety in the perspectives, some are more negative, but there’s a clear throughline: even where the state takes a repressive position, these socialist countries are miles ahead of their comparable Western counterparts in all areas of social development. There’s a reason that after the fall of the USSR, there was a marked decrease in women’s rights, acceptance of queer people, and the safety of ethnic or racial minorities in the region. We can talk about the USSR’s shortcomings at serving these groups’ needs, but the myth of the USSR as a monolithic, socially conservative “redfash” state is laughable. It is simply untrue and any conversation with people who resided in the USSR or any socialist state, or just picking up a book by someone who isn’t sponsored by the Victims of Communism organization, should show that these minorities have benefitted from the proactive socialist state’s initiatives for their benefit much more than they’ve been held back by certain missteps (to be clear, there have been missteps).

I wanna add that the way I formulated it is incomplete, or at least too partial to the functional perspective that someone who wishes to preserve the status quo would have. Obviously trans people don’t just “choose” their gender, it’s much more complicated than that. But I think it’s worth looking at things from this lens to understand why the billionaires in particular are recalcitrant about gender.

Gender is a load bearing brainworm for capitalist society. Capitalists need stratification, having a gradient of various degrees of precariousness for workers to experience that would push them into accepting a worse deal for selling their labor. Gender is clearly one of the primary ways to achieve this: an absolutely incredible amount of domestic labor is performed without compensation by women every day, and society would fall apart if it wasn’t. The rigid structure of the patriarchy is a key feature of this system, which means that trans people represent a clear break in that logic; if AFAB individuals can just choose not to be subjected to gender-based exploitation, it starts to rip the whole thing apart. Equally, transfeminine people represent another break in the opposite direction. The patriarchy is more or less incompatible with the existence of trans people, at least without significantly transforming itself.