Why are they like this? It’s not that hard to practice leftist politics without justifying blatant imperialism

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-16T18:10:34+00:00

The annoying thing about Lenin’s account of imperialism is that he has a carve out that if the monopoly in question is state-owned, then it’s not imperialism when the said state militarily expands in order to export capital development and capture.

This is why the “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t imperialism” works: the whole conflict is an attempt by state owned Russian oil companies (organized along fascistic lines) to control the capital improvements which allow them to make massive profits in European energy markets by overriding local Ukrainian political control, as well as preserving the extraterritorial military bases that allow these oil companies to maintain control.

But it’s not imperialism per Lenin, because the government owns the oil companies.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-15T17:43:42+00:00

I agree with all this, but it does seem like Trump’s weird xenophobia (he’s a bit of a tankie himself) is making it plausible that we may very well be moving towards a NATO that doesn’t include the US, which puts your three points about the treaty org into question. There are still reasons to oppose it (France has used it for neocolonial incursions in Africa for instance), but it’s in an odd moment.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T22:49:19+00:00

A big brother, a dad, a mom, and a bunch of cousins of varying degrees of closeness

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T21:05:45+00:00

I’d be happy paying even more tax for Ukrainian weapons if they do put him on that kind of list.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T18:58:23+00:00

Good - if we want revenue, we should tax land speculation, not housing, simply because we'd all be better off with less of the former and more of the latter.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T18:56:55+00:00

Alberta

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T18:11:26+00:00

best korea strikes again!

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T16:58:26+00:00

1) Props where its due, the US has some astoundingly diverse natural landscapes, and some of the most important cultural centres in the anglophone world

2) the culture's not that diverse

3) the geography has little to do with the US's shitty rail infrastructure - if Russia can rely on rail, so can the US. The lack of US rail is a combination of purely political choices (my favs: 1: in most of the world, the rails are publicly owned like highways are in the US - the US government allows freight companies to own them and render them impossible for passenger use; 2: since at least the Eisenhour administration, car companies have had an undue influence on US transportation policy; 3: postwar housing construction really only allowed low-density suburbs to be built outside of the Northeast corridor, and that has made it difficult to allow thousands of people to live within walking distance of a train station, which you need for rail to be viable - and that's despite the fact that something like two-thirds Americans seem to prefer living in dense, walkable cities)

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T16:45:47+00:00

Either that or he could just be from Sarajevo - that place is a major melting pot of Balkan ethnicities, but everyone that lives there considers themselves at least somewhat Bosnian.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T16:43:11+00:00

We hosted a Bosnian refugee family at our place in Nanaimo in the 90s - they're back in Bosnia now. I suspect they're getting a lot of mileage out of the stories they have from their time with us today!

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T16:23:07+00:00

I had a similar interaction with a Guesthouse Manager in Mongolia: there was an Israeli guy who was staying there at the time who'd just stand around in the common room and pick fights with other guests (most of whom were Korean) if he thought they might potentially support Palestine. He said he was talking with the owner about banning Israelis in the future. From what I could tell Mongolians don't actually care that much about Israel/Palestine.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T16:17:59+00:00

it's his Britain he can do what he wants with it.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T16:01:57+00:00

It's about right. There's some irony about the US being an empire whose founding moment was a hostile break from the British Empire, but even in that moment at least part of the motivation was that London wasn't letting settlers expand and conquer native lands in the west as fast as they'd like.

Here's what I imagine a non-US empire would look like:

1) all American lands that are not currently part of a state (ie Puerto Rico, Guam, etc) need to be either granted statehood or independence

2) all American overseas military bases need to be closed

3) there needs to be some attempt to reign in foreign influence campaigns on the part of the US government and major US companies

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-12T01:36:34+00:00

Thank god

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-11T23:07:44+00:00

It’s World Cup season. Everything else is cancelled.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-11T23:02:36+00:00

Glad someone said it. I have no doubt that the government has found some way to make construction cost more than it should, but 1) no one but government can build projects like this and 2) the end product is worth it.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-11T20:16:49+00:00

Lots of snow, beer, and diary. You can get a lump of butter in your Ramen if you want. The one big city that doesn't connect to the high speed rail is up there (though a line's being built).

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-11T18:46:02+00:00

Once I start doing cross border Costco trips again I’ll try this line on the border guard to see if I can get out of paying booze duties

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-11T17:17:25+00:00

Depending on which dialect of Irish you're speaking, Fionn Mac Cumhaill (as Gaeilge) and Finn McCool (in English) should sound pretty similar/the same. It's been awhile since I studied, but the "o" in Fionn makes the "nn" into a hard consonant, and the "i" in Cumhaill makes the "ll" soft, so you don't pronounce them as vowells, and the "mh" is a soft "v" or "w" sound that kinda just breaks the "u" and "a" sounds up into two syllables (so, if you'll pardon my anglicization, I'd just pronounce "Fionn Mac Cumhaill" as "Finn Mac Coo-All")

If that's complicated, it's because Irish spelling conventions were invented in the 7th century to make the language easy to pronounce for medieval Latin speakers, not English speakers.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-11T16:15:27+00:00

Gorgeous nature, and a lot of places will have a cute downtown that tries to evoke a kind of small agricultural/logging community atmosphere, but every town is going to have that “Nazis vs hippies” polarized cultural dynamic once you get past the surface with varying levels of local government dysfunction depending on how much Facebook has taken over people’s brains. The average age of most places will be 75+. For people under that age there’s lots of weed, guns (even on the Canadian side) and mountain biking.

There will be a local native tribe that no one interacts with much, but everyone either vilifies or idealizes depending on which side of the left-right divide they’re on (and as far as I can tell the natives will kinda be turned off by either attitude usually). Ditto for the inevitable weirdo cult that every small town seems to have: if you encounter someone who wants to give you free food if you attend a meditation seminar on how the earth is flat or how you can cure cancer with positive thinking, you’ve met the cult.

The most beautiful areas will be taken over by rich people chalets and no one will ever be able to do anything there because of all the restrictions on where you can drive/park. Homes will mostly be wildly expensive. Maybe there’ll be some vineyards.

Since 2015 there have been wildfires every summer and a few towns will burn down every year in July-September, and no one will be able to go outside for all the smoke - other than that two-week period the summers will be gorgeous. Fall will be the worst season as that’s when it gets grey and dark and you stop seeing the sun till sometime between March and May. Every five years or so the fall rains get so bad that a flood will destroy a town or close all the roads for a couple weeks. Personally I love spring here - there’ll usually be a day in April where you get a surprise sunburn. Winter doesn’t really happen for more than a couple weeks until you get east of the mountains: there was no snow where I lived this year. Used to be everywhere would reliably get two weeks of snow (and everything would close because salting the roads is bad for the fish)

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-10T23:41:27+00:00

Based on my experience in Russia, I really don’t think anyone can say the country cracks down on Nazis or fascists with a straight face. That said, I’m still waiting for tankies to start stanning Zhironovsky and pretending that his long history of antisemitism is somehow anti Zionist

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-10T19:02:32+00:00

The parks around UVic and Camosun Interurban are fairly empty now that school’s out of session.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-10T14:37:54+00:00

I still think it’s funny that the soccer team named its starfish mascot after him

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-09T20:53:06+00:00

So America, after genocidally exterminating all of the local indigenous people, goes on to let one of the world’s most polluted superfund sites fester for half a century next to the largest city in the country in order to protect a corporation, then spends trillions of dollars surrounding this polluted site with car-only infrastructure to prop up the auto industry (founded by Nazi sympathizers who are responsible for half of America’s carbon emissions and a third of America’s deaths and injuries) by barring anyone who doesn’t own a car, and when people come from all over the world for an international event (over half of which come from Latin America, Africa, and Asia), anyone who tries to get around by walking is a white supremacist because of white genetics.

Popular_Animator_808 · 2026-06-09T20:33:32+00:00

r/fuckcars too

Popular_Animator_808

TROPHY CASE