It is not nearly that simple. Some of the Yanomami are miners themselves but the paternal narative does not mention this just as there is no mention of free prior informed consent. This is how it plays out all over the world. Environmentalism and rights based approaches are used to destroy sovereignty and facilitate land grabs with paternalistic justifications. “Oops we destroyed your family and culture! How terrible! I guess you must submit to capitalist market relations, oh well, now get to mining gold for corporations for subsistence wages and enjoy having zero control over your life and watching the forest die. It’s your right!”

He is a major figure for BRICS and was there at the founding. Not sure if he was entirely his idea or not but he deserves a lot of credit for its creation and resurgence.

I am not Brazilian but I am quite skeptical of Lula myself. He thinks he can rapidly increase agricultural production without any deforestation. He wants his cake and to eat it too if you ask me.

Also he is basically militarizing the forest. Armed federal agents are carrying out operations on Indigenous lands, ostensibly to “help” Tribes against squatter and artison miners, but with no indication of respect for sovereignty. It makes me wildly nervous. They have their justifications and that is all they need. They don’t couch it in genocidal rhetoric but what is the difference at the end at of the day? I’m not sure there is a government on earth I trust to stop the tribe killings.

Especially when everyone either must worship the market or is directly threatened by it.

I tell you what though, I usually keep it to myself because there might be some international benifit to his policy but honestly there is a lot of bleak shit that signals to me it’s all very status quo. I can’t help but ask what kind of word this will build.

Let me get back to you on this because there is a lot to say and I am woefully busy. But this is something I would like to at least attempt to elaborate on with the attention it deserves.

One racist joke.

In short (because the idiosyncrasies of traditional land practices vary among communities and is hardly my expertise), for pastoralists, how cattle are managed effects the health of the land. Pastoralists know how the land reacts to different practices because they have thousands of years of experience with their ancestral lands. An example of this may be that some grasses will die if the grow too tall, some landscapes thrive by being periodically trampled by cattle and wildlife. When problems arise they have ways of determining what to do through informal institutions. Basically, the culture and the land co-evolve together so one will effect the other in a feedback loop.

When outside forces seek to integrate these communities with things like ecotourism it can slowly disrupt those relationships. And it is for little gain as the jobs are poverty jobs. Further, tourists unfortunately routinely feel they have a more authentic experience when they occasionally see poor Indigenous people, or hear about their struggle, but don’t want to see their cattle or lifeways being practiced because it challenges the “pristine” aesthetic they are hoping to consume. Another example is how forest peoples have ways of determining how to do controlled burns and other things that keep the forest healthy. The disruptions of the practices is well documented in North America and is why catestrophic wildfires are common now.

If you want to know more you will need to look at specific communities and possibly learn some new language to understand properly. Not all practices are known to academics. Some are withheld or protected by certain families because of the danger of appropriation, especially information about plants because corps will patent the genetics.

Yeah I was green in 2016 and even tho it’s hardly perfect I don’t regret it at all. Haven’t done it since, I think I voted PSL in 2020. Ive had people tell me the only way to make thrid parties viable is to vote blue. My brain felt like scrambled eggs after that one.

Instead they have spent the last few years sueing to keep the green party off of ballots lol

Oh yeah

I agree that unfortunately fascists will likely take state power (if they havent already)

I like the idea that we could control small territories in some way during the chaos. It could be that coalition between socialists and the Tribes could be dangerous to the state in combination with pressure from an international coalition but the only way the US runs out of oil is if someone is insane enough to set the Permian basin on fire along with all the refineries along the gulf. The US is a petrol superpower that basically competes with OPEC+ by itself. Thanks Obama.

Its just my opinion, but it’s a hard no from me. Even if the US declines nominally on certain fronts, it is not necessarily declining relative to its peers. So it’s it’s influence is not really declining noticeably enough to signal qualitative change.

Yes there are plenty of things to be optimistic about, such as dedollarization and seeming to fail in Ukraine, but this will not be a fast enough process to blindside it. The US has time to adapt and disrupt the coalitions that are necessary to push forward and there is still time for mistakes on the part of coalition builders, or antagonistic contradictions developing among them.

Basically, even as the US becomes more and more vulnerable, everyone else is still vulnerable as well.

Also, the US has other weapons such as it’s propaganda machine and imo it’s never been more dangerous than it is right now. It doesn’t need to be persuasive either, only disruptive.

Most importantly, very few people in the US seem to actually want it to fall. This important because even if the US seriously stumbles, it is more likley that Americans generally will seek to recover it’s footing instead delivering the killing blow and moving forward in a decolonial and anti-imperialist direction.

At the same time, however, I feel like most of the security the US enjoys is something that could collapes relatively quickly. I just think I would be too optimistic to believe this must happen anytime soon instead of under other circumstances such as a highly developed alternative international coalition and an organized front at home. The BRICS still have work to do imo, but indeed the ball is rolling, just gotta pick up the pace.

People say that when non-democrats don’t vote blue we are enabling republicans. Nothing more.

Then they go and say stuff like this.

Well what is the problem then? Are we wrong for somehow enabling Republicans or are Democrats the ones enabling Republicans through not acting and then justifying not acting to save face?

Your commitment to democrats and to the US electoral game is what legitimizes and enables the political world we live in. But nothing that exists must exist as it is. Things could be different but when someone suggests abandoning democrats to build a new coalition it is shot down as unrealistic and enabling Republicans by splitting the vote or letting Republicans win by not voting. But yet even when Democrats win the Republicans win too because “what were Democrats supposed to do???”

What if bourgeoisie partisanism is just a scam? What if focusing on concrete social or material issues of our communities through organization and solidarity gives us a better shot at a better quality of life and you are wasting the opportunity by defending a party that stands on genocide, and that cannot even achieve a fraction of what people want without taking from someone else.

What if a dialectical understanding of US partisanism reveals that the Republicans and democrats rely on each other for the development American politics and its discourse? One could not stand without the other.

What use is it to even ask what Biden should do? I have no recommendation for Biden, tho it’s true I think he has the ability to take a much harder stance but chose not to.

But I dont want Biden to succeed because it legitimizes a genocidal party that relies on primative accumulation to enrich it’s financiers. It relies on massive exploitation of miners and factory workers. It relies on the erasure of peoples, cultures, languages. It relies on the complacence of the privileged and the oppressed. It relies on planned obsolescence, waste, pollution, the warming of the planet, and the destruction of life. It relies on a narrative of developmentalism that forces the world into a wealth arms race that will kill us all. It relies on the destruction of humanities future.

Why would I support the destruction of all human futures just to defend someone that wont even raise his hand high enough to ruffle some feathers?

What I want is for the people of this land to figure out how to achieve solidarity with people around the world to build their own sovereignty so they can build a future that is fully disconnected from American politics and that directly challenges imperialism, indeed the very imperialism democrats support and require. I want people that can be critical of the status quo and critical of their own interests so that the social virus known as capital can be dethroned and we can begin to heal.

I like a low profile. If it’s useful id like it to be used without attributing it to me directly but I appreciate you asking.

If downvoting didn’t matter, tankies wouldn’t be trying to take it away from you -liberals probably

Harm reduction for the already-privileged, and fuck everybody else. ‘Well, fuck them too’ is what I say.

I couldn’t agree more. These tactics have been used to get people to support political figures that will not advance their goals for far too long. (not to mention how distracting electoralist positions really are from what could be more productive efforts)

Liberals oversimplify politics in a way that erases the dynamic political realities of everyone, especially colonised and working people. They obfuscate the imperialist function of mainstream political discourse. The colloquial left-right political spectrum that is enforced cannot explain the differences between interests of white settler workers, Black workers, or moderate middle income land owners, yet liberals live and die by it and demand coalitions be built with it’s logic.

Ultimately this is why the Democratic Party is a prison house of social movements and marginalized interests, just as the US is a prison house of nations.

Thanks for reading.

Always appreciative of reading recommendations! Especially books. I do not have this one but it looks great.

Not sure how to “just stop oil” even if we had substantial political power. You would need to replace the entire global economy.

Of course that should be done for all the reasons we already know, but saying “just stop oil” makes it sound simple and makes environmentalists sound kinda dumb.

Lemmygrad: 😴

Lemmy: “tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie”

Yeah it also comes up during election cycles in the US. If you say you don’t want to vote Democrat, you might hear someone say that you shouldn’t focus on purity and vote pragmatically™.

Of course they are either unable to understand that there are different politcal aims at play, or they are trying to extort you.

When the “Republican friend” tries to suggest a moderate or alternative dem for “pragmatic purposes” it’s often taken in bad faith. RFK Jr is a decent example of this today, a lot of Dems hate him because he sucks and is an obvious grifter. But if a communist or some other ‘lefty’ doesn’t want to vote for Democrats, they are selling everyone out to Trump because of a dangerous lack of pragmatism.