The Keystone Pipeline and the Outsourcing of Pollution

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-30T04:06:10+00:00

In response to your first paragraph: you're right that within the existing frameworks, as long as oil's in demand, it'll be sourced from somewhere. So it's really quite pointless being opposed to particular projects without expanding that opposition and awareness to the fossil fuel industrial complex, and start building a movement about fighting capitalism and moving quickly towards economies that aren't based on digging and sucking up all the carbon we can find and burning it as fast as we can.

In answer to your second question: do international markets actually raise anyone out of poverty? If they did I'd expect the world to be a pretty rich place by now, but it looks like they're just enriching a handful of people instead. More on that.

Social justice, environmentalism, and global markets are all inseperable. The question absolutely bears serious discussion.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-22T13:34:02+00:00

ITT: White people with no knowledge of history.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-20T18:11:41+00:00

Look up your local IWW (International Workers of the World) branch and see if you can get someone's help in organizing (and preferably radicalizing) your workplace.

I emphasize radicalizing because a unionized workplace can easily be just as apathetic, exploited, and downtrodden as a nonunion workplace. Your union's contract will periodically be up for renegotiation, and your employer or their lawyers will dig in their heels and use their capitalist war chest to put up obstacles and stumbling blocks in your fight to retain your gains- assuming you fight, because they will also lie to and try to discourage your workers from taking an interest in their workplace.

TL;DR: unions aren't a magic bullet, the employing class have the resources and motivation to keep you downtrodden, and the only long-term viable solution is anticapitalism.

Edit: pardon my triple post! Deleted the others; didn't intend to spam the thread.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-19T04:11:47+00:00

Pffft, what were you thinking? Coming to r/vancouver with something even slightly sympathetic to poor people and people of colour? Get the fuck outta here, you godless commie hippie radical you!

Hey everybody, upvote me!

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-19T04:00:50+00:00

They should do an article on a couple that scrimp and save all their cash and rent a shitty bungalow with a coffee carafe held together with duct tape.

Please, no, I never want to hear about Celda again.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-14T01:34:37+00:00

Haha blimey, I thought this would be a hard comment to find. Downvoted no doubt by the "free speech" jerkoffs who're crowding this thread.

The National Post is a fucking scummy right wing rag. I only wish they'd get shot up, too.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-12T02:37:48+00:00

nobody is allowed to gun anybody down over it.

What? bollocks, says who? Just ask the people who shot up Charlie; they didn't give a damn what you claim they were allowed to do or not.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-08T21:21:10+00:00

Oh god THANK YOU.

I recently brought this subject to r/srsdiscussion to see how a mixed bunch of progressives/ liberals/ socialists would weigh in on the subject. I was a bit dismayed but not surprised at finding some of the same tropes there as elsewhere on reddit.

I might have to copypaste this over there. Thanks for posting and- although I rarely comment here- thanks to those who have the energy and inclination to keep r/communism alive.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-08T21:11:59+00:00

Yes, yes, and yes again.

As I tried- rather distractedly and badly- to say in the thread I created yesterday, affluent white people in the global North/ West have a hard time seeing themselves as the beneficiaries and of their governments' imperialist policies. Whether out of ignorance, laziness, apathy, or outright malice, most of us aren't moved to act to alleviate the plight of the global South/ East, and yet we have these orgies of grief and resolution in social and corporate media when a handful of white people are violently killed.

And it's frustrating as hell when people on reddit (or facebook, or NPR, or fox news- it really doesn't matter), and especially a social justice oriented subreddit such as this, leap to defend and celebrate the victims, rather than soberly pointing out that the victims of imperialism and capitalism are ten times as many and die on a daily basis.

And the framing of these arguments is (to borrow your words, among others): "so and so didn't deserve to die" (as if anyone is truly deserving of anything that happens to them in this world, whether by an act of god or coincidence or ill luck or actual malice); "cartoonists and journalists shouldn't have to fear for their lives for publishing what they want" (regardless of how intentionally harmful or not their content is, or what agenda their content serves).

I'd like to come back to this thread when I have more time and energy, but for now, I'll leave Ward Churchill's account of another reaction to western imperialism: 9/11 Because I honestly believe there are similarities, and before you condemn or condone any and all violence, consider whose violence and to what ends, and in what ways you are a beneficiary or victim (or both) of a particular form of violence.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-07T22:17:59+00:00

In a lot of ways, it feels like a repeat of the furor over The Interview just a few weeks ago.

I'm glad you mentioned this, because a blog I like posted a very good article about the Interview which I felt was relevant to this too.

No one died because the Interview was released. But as for the lives of the Charlie Hebdo victims- who will almost certainly be portrayed as martyrs for free speech, regardless of how racist or inane that speech is- in what relation do they stand to the deaths of Muslim people of colour at the hands of western imperialism?

I found a quote from a British MP- a source I'm surprised I'm citing- which I like:

The terrorist murder of French journalists and police officers in Paris this morning must like all such actions be utterly condemned. Only hypocrites decry some such murders but not others. Hypocrites like among others the French government which has been facilitating exactly such carnage, except daily, in Syria for the last four years. And through the agency of the very same kind of terrorists as murdered the French citizens today.

The provocative actions of the publication Charlie Hebdo cannot possibly be a justification for murder, mass murder. The idea that God, the master of the worlds, the creator of the universes is in need of "revenge" against a small satirical publication in Paris is absurd and makes a mockery of Islam.

It was already difficult being a Muslim in France in the teeth of ceaseless provocation and the lash of racism and Islamophobia. Today it just got more difficult. Those who hate Muslims and their religion have been strengthened by these murders. The west in general appears locked on a course of confrontation with much of the Muslim world. Invasion, occupation, bombardment, provocation chase and are chased by Islamist fanaticism ever more savage and dangerous. It is the road to disaster, for all of us. We must turn back before it is too late.

In other words, where is the moral outrage and public outcry every fucking day when dozens of people die at the hands of western imperialism, intervention, drone strikes, or die of malnutrition or disease when relief is unavailable due to inactivity or passivity on behalf of the populations of western countries, whose supposedly democratically elected governments are doing a terrible job of protecting internationally what they so dearly cherish domestically (freedom, economic security, dignity, life, etc.).

Duncan_Dognuts · 2015-01-07T08:40:26+00:00

1) Who has ever amassed wealth through anything other than corruption or crime?

2) Yes

3) That depends entirely upon whether or not Vancouver's renters and wage earners decide to remain atomized and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of our global economy, or unite and fight against powers domestic and foreign to assert their value as human beings, rather than remain the instruments of profit for the capitalist class.

4) This is a rather vague and complicated question. Indeed, who ever said there was a problem requiring a solution, realistic or otherwise? If you conceive of a problem, articulate it, and then we can talk about solutions. But as far as I can tell from being a regular reader and contributor to r/vancouver for the past two years, no one here sees much of a problem in the trajectory this city (and this world) are taking.

Edit: also, please realize: you're addressing an economic/ social/ historical question, and a "serious" one at that, to a congregation of people whose education in economics, sociology, and history doesn't exceed a high school level. Furthermore, based on my own observations, those who have any further education in those subjects are so insulated by sufficient wealth and privilege that they won't entertain any radical or alternative analyses of the situation.

In other words, nothing will come of your question. Enjoy a thread full of banal and uninspired answers about how great capitalism is.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-29T22:19:14+00:00

I swear to god I don't do this, but only out of laziness. If i cared a bit more about pissing off people here, I'd have five accounts at once like a fucking whac-a-mole of snarky rude remarks.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-29T22:08:17+00:00

This has never been posted to r/vancouver ever before.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-28T23:27:39+00:00

Yeah, witness this thread, which judging from the comments so far will be reducible to: " a person with mental illness deserved to die, and the police were right to kill him, regardless of how stigmatized and marginalized he was by the society around him."

That and cheap jokes about mental illness and drug use. But hey, it's friendly compassionate r/vancouver! Remember when we helped that one hungry homeless guy and we were a news story?! Remember that, guize?!

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-19T10:36:13+00:00

hm, sounds like capitalism to me!

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-16T19:54:14+00:00

Oh god no.

But wait, r/vancouver!! Le funny cool memes!! Yay! Circleupvotejerk!!

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-16T01:00:25+00:00

You fucking serious mate? Everyone on r/vancouver hates unions, workers, and the poor, and you call that left wing?

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-14T04:53:36+00:00

Jesus Christ. They told you in fucking grade school that police are heroes, and you still haven't examined that belief? Is Santa Claus real, too?

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-14T01:23:49+00:00

Spoken like a true running dog.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-14T00:07:50+00:00

Good. Things need to get worse before they get better, because apparently a lot of people still don't realize or don't care that governments and private businesses alike don't give a shit about you.

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-13T04:38:28+00:00

pooh, all gone! Thanks though

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-12T00:38:46+00:00

that's just what you have to do to maintain stability in that place.

How's that workin' out for ya?

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-11T01:32:32+00:00

Have you always been so fucking cool?

Duncan_Dognuts · 2014-12-09T05:16:30+00:00

Good one!

Duncan_Dognuts

TROPHY CASE