@scalematey / scalematey.tumblr.com
I'm Lama from Gaza, I'm 24 years old, and my husband is Mohammad... We got married in 2022 in a house full of love and happiness. Our house was beautiful, we chose everything in it carefully... We were waiting for the end of the day to go there after a tiring day of work, but the occupation did not leave us. 😔😭💔
This house was bombed with all hatred. Here we are after the genocide. We have nothing... We lost our house, our work, and our car.😭😞
We were displaced to Rafah in a tent that could not accommodate 5 people, and after the displacement from Rafah, we were displaced to Mawasi Khan Yunis again. It was a very difficult period... but now we are in Mawasi Khan Yunis in a tent that does not protect us from the cold of winter or the heat of summer.😞😭
This is our tent, its floor is made of cardboard, as you can see, and I suffer from severe eczema due to the pollution of the air and the materials used, and the medicine is very expensive.😭💔
Urgent: My husband needs a very necessary operation and medication. Please help my husband in order for his health to improve. He is in pain.😞😭🫂🙏🙏
I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?
alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.
so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.
there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.
when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.
why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!
this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.
so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:
bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.
so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".
(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)
and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!
tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)
running for president as a member of the American Fujoshi Party with a foolproof plan to address male loneliness
I love my job, but reblogging employment jelly for someone else I love.
people are wrong about chosen family. chosen family can become just as involuntary and inescapable as regular family if you use your fucking imagination
My name is Ayaa, a 24-year-old teacher from Gaza City. I used to live a peaceful life with my family in our home, a 6-story building that we built through years of hard work. Sadly, it was completely destroyed, leaving us homeless.
My brother and I ran a language training center where we taught English to kids, teenagers, and adults. We were passionate about our work and had big dreams, but the war shattered everything. One morning, we woke up to the news that our center had been destroyed, along with our family car, which my mother had bought by selling her jewelry.
We have lost everything, and now we turn to you for help. Your kindness and support would mean the world to us as we try to rebuild our lives.
it is literally wurmple sippy soup wednesday
wurmple sippy soup THE MOTION PICTURE wednesday
tbh i think acting like being a feminist w any spine and not coddling men is somehow transmisogynistic IS transmisogynistic . trans women are my sisters and the patriarchy and male sexual violence and misogyny effect them just as much as they do me if not more so. you are literally just calling trans women men in a roundabout way.
We excitedly return with over 150 new illustrations!
To see the rest of the project FOLLOW THIS LINK
cover by @meowsillycat and previews featuring illustrations by @clambuoyance and @lc710v
my art for this year's panel redraw zine <3
Concept I've been stewing on for a while here. I've got a name for it now and I'm calling it the Shot Dog Factor. It's a numerical value, assignable to any internet post, which represents the average number of engagements it needs to reach before someone comes along acting like this post shot their dog.
And for the sake of High Number = More Danger, which feels like the intuitive and sensible read, let's call it the inverse. As in the chance that any given interaction results in a Shot Dog response.
"Hee hee haa haa" type of silly shitpost? Low Shot Dog Factor. Largely safe. A genuine political opinion? Critically high Shot Dog Factor. Guaranteed to elicit such a response if it breaks containment.
As a result of this phenomenon, you see phrasings and circumventions added specifically to lower the Shot Dog factor. Every "now I know this doesn't apply to EVERYONE'S specific situation, but I just think--" about something where the non-specificity was obvious, but OP needed to add that disclaimer to avoid the Shot Dog from someone who thinks it needs to apply to them.
And another--perhaps the most--critical thing to understand about the Shot Dog factor is that 0 is not a valid value. There's a discontinuation at 0. And as such, the Shot Dog limit, as engagement goes to infinity is, in fact, 100%. Any and every post you have ever made, given enough containment breaching, WILL piss someone off in wild ways. You can lower the Shot Dog factor but it is never 0. Sometimes when a post of yours escapes containment, you must simply sit back and accept this reality.
#op the fact that you called it this. has skyrocketed the shot dog factor for this one astronomically. im so sorry (via @mecharose)
Thank you yeah no that was part of the vision
Palestinians demolishing the Erez Military Checkpoint, part of the network of colonial military outposts and border fortifications that have been used to entrench decades of Palestinian dispossession.
I know all the posts about how to stockpile hrt come from a good place but yall. Stockpiling T on purpose is a felony and its not one i judge you for but...STOP admitting it out loud on your blogs frankly and with none of the "teehee THEORETICALLY" shoplifter blogs used to have. Im seeing people talk abt the stockpiles they already have AND their plans to share it and my guys... this website WILL give your personal info to the government if subpoenad. Idk that its LIKELY but I know itd be embarrassing as hell to go to JAIL for felony possession of controlled substance w intent to distribute bc you couldnt stop yourself from YAPPING on a fucking tumblr post and then mr hammers gave your email and login ip to the cops. I KNOW youre all not using secure enough burners and vpns and shit 4 that Cmon now
Seriously though, shutting up is vital but I'd also highly recommend not fucking around this way. Pharmacies track this. Insurance companies track this. I look at people's prescription info every day I work. It goes back years, and it's very detailed. If I saw something suspicious, no I didn't - but not everyone with this information is trustworthy or on our side.
It's not fair or right that T is controlled and E isn't, but don't risk that heat, not with things as they are currently.
i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping
this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top' is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top' is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back
additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you
useful terminology for different kinds of clothing shapes :)
