came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]

germans are probably still pissed the US took out the nord stream 2. if you want to overcome a 12% spike in energy costs, you gotta spend way more on the propaganda. like yank burgerbrain levels. we’re talking multiple $100 million budget blockbuster summer movies, children’s toy tie-ins, video games. smoke machines, laser lights, 100 meter tall robots breathing fire, all you can eat fried meat, monster trucks crashing into each other, music so loud even the young people think the world is coming to an end.

god that’s heartbreaking. i had never heard of any of this before today. what a massive implosion.

maybe i’m too dumb or old, but i cannot wrap my head around why “fans” are loyal to some sponsored content/native marketing organization like this enough to follow some kid around youtube and crap on their content. or harass someone doing their job. having to do tons of social media content professionally seems soul destroying… especially because “the bosses” only think about The Algorithm and maybe saw some SEO snakeoil pub telling them it’s better to generate 8 weak outputs than 2 strong outputs worth watching, because the “goal” is to harvest all those passive clicks and views of people who are bored out of their skull barely playing on their phone… instead of maybe targeting someone actively engaged and searching for something well made and relevant to their interests.

so you get overpaid bozos who don’t know fuck about shit leaning heavy on underpaid young people to make more internet garbage for the sake of making more internet garbage, and then later complaining that views per output are down or reactions are lukewarm or engagement is off. imagine that job and then a handful of fuckups following you around and shitting on your online presence because you’re doing what you’re told in order to have a roof over your head and food to eat and dreams of a mildly secure future.

as someone who was once idealistic and full of energy and stamina that was taken advantage of by ego-driven and deceptive exploiters: beware assholes, the rest of us can come together and build a world without a place for you in it.

this shit is insidious, widespread, and cleverly deployed.

i work at an R1 and years ago, i remember finding out about an on campus organization that connected young scientists with research institutions in china with incredible offers to study there. free tuition+housing+stipend, all coursework in english with mandarin lessons. and no requirement to stay there when complete. a pure “come learn some shit, you eager dorks” at the time i was finishing my MSci here, but the deal was absolutely incredible and the program selection/participating institution list was enormous. and we’re talking for stuff like ecology, the bastard child of US academy that relies entirely on highly competitive, small bean grants, very few assistantships with research results generally ignored and high burnout among professionals. i totally filed it away for an alternative when i finished my MSci if i was unhappy with my professional options.

smashcut to a few years ago, the US comes down hard and insists any institution with this organization on its campus will have all fed funding clawed back. so naturally, it’s gone with a CYA style email from the uni president saying, “this has been a great opportunity for our students, but our hands are tied. we can’t give back $40 million [or whatever jumbo number].”

the writing has been on the wall for the neoliberal research university: they are starving us out. only research with immediate industry application (i.e. petroleum geology, etc) is getting any love, the rest of us can fuck ourselves. and this move was to staunch the flow of brain drain to the places where people with political power want to support scientific inquiry. 10 years ago i was hearing stories from senior faculty that had visited china and these were all casual libs, but they were blown away by the resources being put into scientific investigation into environmental sciences. when asked, “what research questions do you want answered?” the administrators said, “that is for our scientists to determine.”

i cannot even imagine how far beyond the US they will have leapt in the coming decades.

maybe they meant one of our langley-based fedposters.

lmao, insane assistant-lacross-coach-at-a-private-high-school-in-maryland ass mayo name. looking at his picture, it looks like he changed it from Biff “Whitey” Corngood.

maybe the only pays for the initial derailing post attempt, not the followup quarter-assed defense of “international rules-based order” that exposes the ignorance and unfamiliarity with material reality.

the word you are striving not to say is capitalism. capitalists did this to russians, using the playbook developed and advocated for by western institutions.

imagine ignoring the absolutely ruthless, western led cannibalization of the former soviet union and pretending history’s baseline started AFTER the largest decline of living standards in global history.

human trafficking, prostitution, alcoholism, food/energy insecurity, diseases of despair all exploded when the west forced capitalism and privatization onto the former soviet union in the immediate aftermath. Gorbachev thought he was going to get some easy-going nordic social democracy, but instead the west carved up their public sector like a christmas ham. maybe you were too young, but in the 1980s the propaganda portrait the west had of russian women were all heavy-set, ugly babushkas. suddenly, after 1989, the mail order beautiful russian bride phenomenon exploded. they were fleeing the gutting of the public sector and the shattering of the social safety net, which made it near impossible to raise a family in the eastern bloc without becoming a sex worker.

the west sponsored every retrograde nationalist reactionary psycho to undermine any hint of democratic resistance to economic liberalization schemes and bombed the shit out of infrastructure (Yugoslavia) whenever they could get away with it. the west has the most blood on its hands for the aftermath of the USSR, but people like you want to ignore those early days and then claim credit for the “winners” the west propped up in the aftermath of all that chaos. like a killer who torched a town but kidnapped a few kids and now touts his heroic rescue of them. the most ignorant and disgusting take.

the average manager/boss is so inculcated with “job creator” brain worms in the US, they believe they, as benevolent nobles, are the ones generating value in the organization while their underlings extract value as salary/wages. it leads to shit like this where bosses are baffled they can’t actually get everything they want by snapping their fingers, even though they control the immediate material access to housing, healthcare, etc.

as it turns out, workers are the critical resource because they make it all go. the execs are the ones extracting massive value as salary/benefits or stock manipulation, while realistically only going to meetings to strategize ways to get more value out of workers without sharing any increases. workers are paying managers to boss them around all day and act important.

David Graeber wrote an incredible book called Debt: The First 5000 Years which is sometimes referred to around Hexbear as “the debt book” or “graeber’s debt book”. it’s an incredible read and one of the central themes is the language of debt and its connection to moral religious language (and historical association with religious institutions).

in short, the language we use to talk about debt contributes to our general moral confusion around who are the victims and who are the bad actors.

in secondary school (ages 14-18) it was highly encouraged to take at least 2 years of a foreign language, though american sign language counted. and kids on the “not college” pipeline didn’t have to do that. j’ai trois ans de les cours de francais, but i haven’t had much opportunity to practice or use it conversationally in like the 25 years since.

edit: secondary school offered french, spanish, german or ASL. the private $$$ schools offered mandarin and others.

where i grew up in burger land, back in the 80s, the public schools were teaching us all spanish in from age 5 to 10. not like true bilingual education, but we had a spanish class once a week. it last about 2 years before the white nationalists–who panic at the idea of working class people easily communicating with each other–got it shut down. between that and some years working with seasonal agricultural workers practicing their english, i am at the comprehension level of an inebriated toddler. i wish i had more opportunities to practice. honestly, the US should have all its signs in english and spanish anyway, but you know the reactionaries would go info a full blown pogrom over even a whiff of that being proposed.

i remember some small business tyrant in florida in the 2000s called up my work one time and wanted me to pass along his complaint to my boss that our phone system had an option to “press ocho for espanol”. he said that our company even offering the option to “those people” was wrong… in FLORIDA… the state with the name that means “land of flowers” in spanish.

i joined chacha as a lifeboat years ago when the CTH reddit got banned and stayed as it became Ursus hexagonalis. the lack of ads, the memes, irreverence for institutions combined with respect for humans, and the absolute god-tier emoji selection is what keeps me here.

also, the megathread topics are very interesting/informative as a People’s History, since many of the stories come from the “periphery” for all my world systems nerds out there. living in the imperial core, the constant cacophony of cultural outputs and hegemonic discourses, i appreciate any channel that connects me with post-colonial narratives, critical theory, etc.