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Vaush Facts

This page is still a work in progress. This means some information may be incomplete, or some links may be broken.

Fact 1. Vaush claimed Marx and Lenin would have voted for Biden.

Fact 2. Vaush clams that Marxism is an ‘extension of liberalism’.

Fact 3. Vaush refers to himself as a liberal.

Fact 4. Vaush (a cis man) called the non-binary lefty Youtuber ThoughtSlime ‘fragile’ and ‘dumb’ for his opinion on gender abolition.

Fact 5. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush stated “there’s a difference between exploring child sexuality and sexualising children” then went on to ‘joke’ about owning CP. link

Fact 6. Vaush has engaged in forms of Holocaust denial, using common nazi dogwhistles and believes the numbers are inflated as propaganda.

Fact 7. Vaush (a cis man) claims “Trans people do not have a better understanding of trans-ness..."

Fact 8. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush said: “If you are not paying for child pornography there is no argument in favour of morally condeming people who view it.

Fact 9. Vaush said Black people trying to preserve their culture (that was systematically eradicated) is “exactly the same as white nationalism”.

Fact 10. Vaush argued passionately against socialists demanding a $25/hour minimum wage.

Fact 11. Vaush uses the n-bomb unironically for some fucking reason.

Fact 12. [CW: sexual harassment] Vaush is a self-confessed sexual harasser. link Despite this ‘apology’ he went on to ‘joke’ about scaring his victim into shutting up link He said he had ‘done nothing to feel remorseful for’ link and ‘nothing to apologise over’ link. In fact, his own sysadmin suggested he change his handle link to hide from sexual harassment allegations.

Fact 13. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush appears to have a pre-occupation with paedophilia. He:

Asked if anyone had ever fucked a minor as an adult.

Replied with “unironically hot.”

Asked someone “what did pedos ever do to you?

Refered to ‘Salem Pedophile trials..

Joined in this conversation about child-sex bots.

Fact 14. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush has defended the consumption of child pornogrpahy because ‘there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’. link This paints a deeply troubling picture when added to his history of sexually innapropriate behaviour (see Vaush Fact 8), his sharing of drawn CP on Twitter (see Vaush Fact 21) , his claim that under socialism the age of consent "should be lowered" link and this exchange on Discord. link

Fact 15. Vaush admits to being an informant when he lived in Santa Monica, California. He admits to revealing activist identities to the FBI.

Fact 16. Vaush is explicitly anti left-unity: “God, I fucking hate leftists. There is no left unity with me."

Fact 17. Vaush had a meltdown when someone in his chat joked that he couldn’t get laid, and responded with ““Do you have any idea who the fuck you’re talking to? When I got off Tinder because of the fucking quarantine, Tacoma wept. Even ignoring the fact that I have a girlfriend, even if we’re just talking like randos, I’m two hours away right now from being inside someone else. I have two skills -it’s non-monogamy and speaking publicly, okay? Do some fucking research!”.”

Fact 18. [CW: pedophilia] An ‘old close friend’ of Vaush has alleged that Vaush once admitted to viewing images of child pornography. link

Fact 19. Vaush unironically endorsed Keynesian economics, stating “I feel neo-Keynesian economists have the answer.”

Fact 20. Vaush called the LGBT community ‘cancerous as fuck.’ because there’s a “ton of mental illness” and said they should be “excised from the left.” He also called them “less than human” and “fucking disgusting”.

Fact 21. Vaush said that a “large portion of the left is predicated on shared mental illness.” He then doubled down in a future video.

Fact 22. [CW: pedophilia] I’m not going to link to it for obvious reasons, but here’s Vaush admitting to ownership of a Twitter account that shares drawn child pornography. link

Fact 23. Vaush claimed that he was taken out of context when he called trans people 'mentally ill', then doubled down and did it again.

Fact 24. Vaush posted a meme saying that socialism must be ‘balanced with minority rights’, a clear nod to class reductionists.

Fact 25. ContraPoints defended Buck Angel’s transphobia. Vaush called trans people who were critical of this "worthless, mentally ill, basement dweller fucking queer people with absolutely nothing to offer the world" and "degenerates sucking off the back of society like a leech".

Fact 26. Vaush told his followers to vote for Joe Biden while saying of ‘tankies’ (a term used to refer to all Marxist-Leninists by his followers): “Mock them, socially ostracise them, kick them out of your communities. What sort of leftist advocates voting for liberals while ostracising communists?

Fact 27. Vaush freely admits to calling black and trans people ‘subhuman’.

Fact 28. In response to a Tweet saying the left ‘should stand up for the weak and vulnerable’ Vaush replied “Yeah, enjoy your Left, built on weakness and a collective inability to criticise one another. I’ll be over here building my left, which isn’t full of mentally ill crybabies desperately carving out safe spaces and whining about criticism. Debate it if you want, elsewise fuck off”

Fact 29. Vaush called trans people ‘removed’ for taking offence when misgendered“

Fact 30. Vaush Tweeted a literal Nazi meme – glorifying the Nazi-allied Finland for fighting against the USSR in WWII.

Fact 31. Vaush defended saying “fuck trans people” by claiming he has a ‘6-figure’ income for some reason.

Fact 32. Vaush called the Marxist, Iraqi YouTuber Hakim a ‘pseudo-fascist’ and a ‘cancer on online discourse’ because he said Biden will be worse on foreign policy than Trump. Vaush then had a ‘debate’ with Hakim where he politely agreed with everything Hakim said. Following that debate (mere moments after Hakim had left) Vaush said "a lot of tankies are aesthetically and functionally indistinguishable from neo-Nazis".

Fact 33. Responding to Hakim's video on George Orwell, Vaush defends Orwell for being a government informant, calls the USSR fascist, implies Stalinists are worse than Nazis, claims the USSR was allied with the Nazis, says that Hakim (an Iraqi) should have been abducted by the Americans at the start of the Iraq war and forcibly indoctrinated in US propaganda for 20 years, and more. (Full Thread)

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Yeonmi Park, known as a "celebrity defector", is one of the most well-known defectors from the DPRK. By presenting some of the most extreme and absurd testimonies, she has been able to build a cult following and a very lucrative career as the posterchild for anti-Communism.

She is cited more than any other defector because she says exactly what anti-Communists want to hear about a closed-off, Communist country. Today, she is a culture warrior who weaponizes her background for personal gain.

An emblematic example of this in action from The Telegraph, a right-wing British media network:

However, since relocating to America, and earning a degree from Columbia University, she has sounded the alarm over "cancel culture" and political influences on the country's education system...

In an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Park said she was shocked by the political ideology promoted by professors and fellow students at the Ivy League university.

She claimed that while studying for a human rights degree, she was taught that Jane Austen "promoted white supremacy", maths was "racist" and debate over trans issues were silenced...

Ms Park was particularly critical of the way in which discussions around sex and gender were policed on campus, calling it "crazier than North Korea".

— Rozina Sabur. (2023). 'Woke' US schools scarier than North Korea, says defector

Accustomed to privilege

Yeonmi Park has been called the Paris Hilton of North Korea, and lived a life of privilege and luxury among the upper echelon of society in the DPRK before leaving to begin her career as a celebrity defector in the West.

Buried in the shows archives [(“Now On My Way To Meet You”)] are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience.

In one episode in early 2013 she appears with her mother. Family photographs are flashed on the screen and Park jokes, “That’s my Mum there. She’s beautiful right? To be honest, I’m not the Paris Hilton. My mum is the real Paris Hilton.”

Park then goes on to point out the top and chequered pants her mother is wearing “were all imported from Japan” and adds, “My mum even carried around a Chanel bag in North Korea,” to which the host responds incredulously, “There are Chanel bags in North Korea?” Park tells him there are and he then asks another woman if she’d classify Park’s family as “rich.” The woman answers, “Yes, that’s right.”

Park told us in her interview her father was a member of the Workers’ party, as were all the men in her family, and that she expected to study medicine at university and marry a man of the same ilk or higher.

— Mary Ann Jolley. (2014). The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park

Inconsistencies

Citing her experiences as a student at Columbia University, Park styles herself as “the enemy of the woke,” warning that America is on the verge of liberal dictatorship and that “cancel culture” at U.S. colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads. It’s the theme of her new book, “While Time Remains,” published in February by a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. As of early July, the book, which features a foreword from Canadian professor and conservative lifestyle guru Jordan Peterson, had sold at least 35,000 copies, according to sales-tracking service NPD BookScan.

...But while Park’s moral authority as political pundit rests on her experience as a refugee from an authoritarian pariah state, she has been dogged for years by accusations that some of her more lurid tales of state vengeance and extreme societal decay don’t add up.

Scholars on North Korea who are skeptical of Park say she’s symptomatic of a booming market for horror stories from the cloistered nation that they believe encourages some “celebrity” defectors to spin increasingly outlandish claims.

...Experts on North Korea took note of the strikingly different bio that emerged when Park moved from reality TV to the international human rights conference circuit. Her “Paris Hilton” character was nowhere in this story. Park claimed that she never encountered eggs or indoor toilets until she left North Korea, that she resorted to eating grass and dragonflies to survive.

“She once presented herself as a top 1 percent North Korea elite, so she didn’t see any hunger or malnutrition when she was living there,” Song said. “She totally flipped the narrative when she was on to these conferences.”

Christine Hong, a literature professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a board member at the Korea Policy Institute who has studied defector narratives, noted that Park’s new account didn’t even jibe with her mother’s stories of ready access to food and luxuries. (In one “Now On My Way to Meet You” appearance, the mother explained that Park couldn’t comprehend that her less privileged co-stars came from the same country that she did.)

“But no one seems to care,” Hong told The Post. “And the reason that no one seems to care is that, when it comes to North Korea, it’s basically an informational free-for-all.”

...Cracks in Park’s story had already emerged even before her publishing debut. Mary Ann Jolley, a journalist who interviewed Park for an Australian documentary in 2014, pointed out multiple other inconsistencies in a story for the Diplomat, a news site focused on East Asia.

For example, Park claimed to have seen a friend’s mother executed in a stadium for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie. (In other accounts, it was a South Korean DVD.) But other defectors from Hyesan told Jolley that executions were never carried out in the stadium, and that no executions happened in the city during the time period she described.

The largest discrepancy highlighted by Jolley concerned the family’s departure from North Korea. In her initial accounts, Park claimed that she left the country with both of her parents, helped by Chinese contacts her father met while smuggling.

“There were cars to get us because of the connections with Chinese people, and then we went to China directly,” Park said in a 2014 appearance two months before her viral speech.

Park presented a different story in her Ireland speech, saying that only she and her mother fled the country, and that they did so on foot, joined later by her father, who eventually died in China. In this version of the story, repeated in her memoir and in many subsequent interviews, Park’s mother was raped by a human trafficker, sacrificing herself to save Park from the man, and both women were sexually abused and trafficked in China for years before ultimately escaping.

...She told the New York Times that she makes $6,600 a month working for the young-conservatives group Turning Point USA.

— Will Sommer. (2023). A North Korean defector captivated U.S. media. Some question her story.

Park has also received support from the Atlas Network, a conservative organisation which has received funding from the US State Department and the United States Congress.

An even harsher critic of Park’s has been Michael Bassett, a North Korea analyst who spent several years stationed at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas for the U.S. military.

...he has called Park a liar and a “spinstress,” taking issue with her river anecdote and use of the word “holocaust” to describe the situation in the country. ...

He has also claimed that Park is being used to promote an agenda of sanctions against the country and economic liberalization by organizations such as Freedom Factory, a Seoul-based free market think tank where she is a media fellow.

“It sounds like she is being fed a narrative, it sounds like she is being told to perform,” Bassett said.

— John Power. (2014). North Korea: Defectors and Their Skeptics

Additional Resources

Video Essays:

• What's the deal with defectors? | Hakim (reuploaded, 2023)
• Yeonmi Park Spreads SHOCKING Lies About North Korea on Behalf of U.S. | Danny Haiphong (2022)
• INSANE NORTH KOREAN DEFECTOR EXPOSED?! | HasanAbi (2023)

Books, Articles, or Essays:

• Why Do North Korean Defector Testimonies So Often Fall Apart? | Jiyoung Song (2015)
• Yeonmi Park: is the DPRK defector and ‘enemy of the woke’ a western psy-op? | Thom Waite (2023)

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DPRK

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is grossly misrepresented in Western media. To understand anything about the DPRK today, you have to first understand its history.

Japanese Occupation

Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, and the Korean people experienced harsh colonial rule. During World War II, many Koreans were conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army and forced to work in labour camps. The peninsula was under Japanese control until the end of World War II in 1945.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided by Western powers along the 38th parallel. With the support of the USSR, the North formed the Provisional People's Committee for North Korea, which was headed by Kim Il-sung, a popular, Communist, guerrilla leader who had fought against the Japanese in occupied China during the war. This committee acted as an interim government and a few years later was proclaimed as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

In the South, it was a different story: Seeing the popularity of Communism, the U.S. formed the U.S. Military Occupation and Establishment of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). They installed Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese as officials and advisors. Syngman Rhee was later installed as a fascist dictator to lend the state an air of legitimacy as a sovereign state.

As attempts to reunify the country failed, largely due to U.S. refusal to risk the whole peninsula becoming Communist, the DPRK invaded the South to liberate their fellow countrymen from the US occupation and reunify their nation.

The Legacy of the Korean War

It's hard to overstate the sheer destruction wrought upon the Korean peninsula by the U.S. Air Force (USAF). During the war, the US dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had dropped in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. This carpet bombing, which included 32,000 tons of napalm, often deliberately targeted civilian as well as military targets, devastating the country far beyond what was necessary to fight the war. Whole cities were destroyed, with many thousands of innocent civilians killed and many more left homeless and hungry.

USAF General Curtis LeMay in an 1988 interview with USAF Historians:

We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too...Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away [with nukes], no, we can't seem to stomach that.”

The USAF targeted dams and agricultural infrastructure. The destruction and ensuing floods threatened several million North Koreans with starvation; according to Historian Charles K. Armstrong, "only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine."

The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war's end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II...

Russian accusations of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets did not register with the Americans at all. But for the North Koreans, living in fear of B-29 attacks for nearly three years, including the possibility of atomic bombs, the American air war left a deep and lasting impression. The DPRK government never forgot the lesson of North Korea's vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again... The war against the United States, more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the war's end.

— Charles Armstrong. (2010). The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950-1960

In the eyes of North Koreans as well as some observers, the U.S.' deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure which resulted in the destruction of cities and high civilian death count, was a war crime and historian Bruce Cumings has likened the American bombing to genocide.

Out of the competing barrages of propaganda that have shrouded the 1950-53 Korean War, we are finally getting conclusive admissions that some of the worst atrocities, blamed at the time on the enemy, were in fact committed by our side - and we knew it...

The massacres of civilians during the Korean War are the most shocking to read about. The commission is working through no less than 1200 cases, including about 215 incidents in which US and allied air forces strafed groups of refugees and other civilians. The victims total 100,000, which the commission says is a conservative estimate.

One of the worst incidents preceded the Korean War, in 1948, when the new Syngman Rhee government installed in Seoul by the United States ordered its army to suppress a leftist revolt on Cheju Island. About 30,000 local people were gunned down.

By early 1950 Rhee had about 30,000 alleged communists in his jails, and had about 300,000 suspected sympathisers enrolled in an official "re-education" movement known as the Bodo League. When Kim Il-sung's communist army attacked from the North in June that year, retreating South Korean forces executed the prisoners, along with many Bodo League members...

The American commander-in-chief, Douglas MacArthur, got a report about the killings, but there is no evidence that he tried to halt them, or investigate, according to a search of US archives by an Associated Press team under the veteran correspondent Charles Hanley. The massacre was blamed on the communists.

— Hamish McDonald. (2008). South Korea owns up to brutal past

Defector Testimony

Defectors present biased or exaggerated testimonies to gain sympathy or support from foreign governments or organizations. The prospect of fame and fortune encourages some defectors to exaggerate their experiences or provide sensationalized accounts.

One of the most well-known defectors, [[r.TheDeprogram Yeonmi Park|Yeonmi Park]] regularly presents some of the most extreme and absurd testimonies; she has been able to build a cult following and a very lucrative career as the posterchild for anti-Communism.

The more bombastic the claims are, the better ammunition they are for Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) (e.g., Radio Free Asia) to use in their propaganda campaigns against Communism.

Of course, there are also defectors with less exciting claims, as well as those who even come to regret their decision to leave the DPRK, but Western media never amplifies their message to nearly the same degree.

• Why Do North Korean Defector Testimonies So Often Fall Apart? | Jiyoung Song (2015)

Additional Resources

Video Essays:

• Dispelling Myths about North Korea | Colorado NCTA (2016)
• We Went To North Korea To Get A Haircut | Boy Boy (2017)
• Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul | Liberation News (2018)
• Daily life in North Korea - “My Brothers and Sisters in the North” (Full awarded documentary) | wocomoHUMANITY (2020)
• KJ Noh debunks myths about north and south Korea | International Manifesto Group (2021)
• North Koreans: Are They Brainwashed - Or Are We? Featuring Prof. Felix Kim (DPRK Series Ep.1) | TheRevolutionReport (2021)
• North Korea: Why Is It A Nuclear Armed Fortress State? (DPRK Series Ep.2) | TheRevolutionReport (2021)
• The Truth About North Korea - A Peoples History of the DPRK | Fellow Traveler (2023)
• What's the deal with defectors? | Hakim (reuploaded, 2023)
• Why is North Korea so "weird"? | Hakim (reuploaded, 2023)

Books, Articles, or Essays:

• Korea stands strong: Kim Jong-Il in context | FightBack! News (2011)
• Korea Resilient! Socialism in Democratic Korea | Return to the Source (2012)
• The Democratic Structure of the DPRK | Lalkar (2017)
• Socialism and Democracy in the DPRK | Write To Rebel (2017)
• Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom | Stephen Gowans (2018)
• Juche Idea Study Guide | Korean Friendship Association

Podcasts:

• Episode 40 - Oppa War Crimes Style - The Korean War (Ft. Blowback) | The Deprogram (2022)
• Season 3 - The Story of the Korean War | Blowback (2022)

Senator Josh Hawley has launched a probe to ostensibly investigate the PSL, CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights), and Union del Barrio for "facilitating protestors in Los Angeles".

Of the 3 groups, the PSL is the only political party being targeted.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-immigrant-advocates-asked-whether-they-funded-recent-anti-ice-protests/3721949/

TLDR: Liberal and right-wing students at elite universities like Stanford are now flocking to defense jobs.

The only thing more impressive than the evaporation of morals from liberal students going into defense tech to "defend Ukraine" are the ethnicities of some of the students written about in this article. They have the exact same skin colors as the people the US military wants to bomb or does bomb every single day.

Claudia de la Cruz, the 2024 presidential candidate from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, just became director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO).

IFCO is the only org bringing US medical students to study at Cuba's ELAM (Latin American School of Medicine), the largest medical school in the world. ELAM provides full scholarships for students. IFCO has worked to support Cuban solidarity since 1967, sending aid and acting as liaison between Cuba and the Congressional Black Caucus.

A principled socialist now runs the main connection between the US and Cuba's medical system. This also deeply embeds PSL in older US orgs for leftist internationalism, and continues PSL's work as a vanguard party leading the struggle.

Chinese perspective: https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3299918/us-port-fee-proposals-targeting-china-make-waves-shipping-sector

USTR has proposed punitive port entry fees on Chinese shipping vessels, Chinese shipping companies, and non-Chinese shipping companies who use Chinese ships.

Of course, these fees may be reduced for companies which use US-built shipping vessels. Unfortunately, the US builds <5 large ocean-going ships annually, while China builds more than 1,000 such vessels each year, comprising 55.7% of world shipbuilding, so switching over in time to avoid these costs is practically impossible.

Shipping companies are already saying that they will pass these fees as surcharges to US importers and exporters.

If these policies go through, they will dramatically increase costs for US imports and exports (because ships that come into port with imports leave with US exports). This will appear as inflation for US consumers.

TLDR: if the rich succeed in building AI systems that cater fully to their needs through the whole supply chain (i.e. AI can mine and process resources into what they want with no humans needed), then the rich will have no reason to keep anyone else around and can just massacre all the poors.

Recently, the r/singularity subreddit has had several posts which show some class-consciousness, despite they mostly-techbro atmosphere.

The post I've linked and reproduced below states a concern I also have with AI:

If we assume that we reach AGI, maybe even super intelligence, then we can expect a lot of human jobs will suddenly become obsolete.

First it could be white collar and tech jobs. Then when robotics catches up, manual labor will soon follow. Pretty soon every conceivable position a human once had can now be taken over by a machine.

Humans are officially obsolete.

What's really chilling is that, while humans in general will no longer be a necessity to run a government or society, the very few billionaires at the top that helped bring this AI to existence will be the ones who control it - and no longer need anyone else. No military personnel, teachers, doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, engineers, no one.

Why should countries exist filled with people when people are no longer needed to farm crops, serve in the military, build infrastructure, or anything else?

I would like to believe that if all of humanities needs can now always be fulfilled (but controlled by a very, very few), those few would see the benefit in making sure everyone lives a happy and fulfilling life.

The truth is though, the few at the top will likely leave everyone else to fend for themselves the second their walled garden is in place.

As the years pass, eventually AI becomes fully self-sustaining - from sourcing its own raw materials, to maintaining and improving its own systems - even the AI does not need a single human anymore (not that many are left at that point).

Granted, it could take a long while for this scenario to occur (if ever), but the way things are shaking out, it's looking more and more unlikely that we'll never get to a utopia where no one works unless they want to and everyone's needs are met. It's just not possible if the people in charge are greedy, backstabbing, corporate sociopaths that only play nice because they have to at the moment.

I find their argument quite valid, only lacking in the explicit mention of 'capitalism'.

Once the rich have full-supply-chain-AI, we wouldn't be able to revolt even if we wanted to. The robotic police force controlled by the rich can just massacre all the poors.

This puts a hard time limit on when revolution needs to occur. After that I guess we need China's J-36s to save the American proletariat.

Russia has fined Google 2 undecillion (20 decillion) USD for banning Russian TV channels from YouTube. Russia fined Google starting at 100,000 every day since the ban in 2020, with the fine doubling for every week of noncompliance.

Good to see a government sticking to their exponential fines against corporations in at least this instance. Russia has no need for Google anyway, since Yandex and co can fill the gap. This should also ensure Russia's national sovereignty.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/1gfplpe/couldnt_pass_on_the_opportunity_to_make_this/

TLDR: China is the only significant force in renewables adoption in the world, because the country uses central planning to advance its environmental objectives. The West's reliance on the profit motive to drive green energy is not working and will not work because renewables are not profitable enough.

This article is the most positive I have ever seen any mainstream news be towards China and central planning. I don't think there is a single "but at what cost" statement in the entire article. Frankly, I'm impressed this managed to get past the TIME editors.

The author, Brett Christophers, wrote The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet and Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, and Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?, among others, published via Verso Books.

TLDR:

The sale has already happened. Norfolk Southern bribed Cincinnati politicians and funded shittons of ads to trick Cincinnati citizens to sell their government-owned railroad to them for cheap.

More info:

• https://jacobin.com/2023/10/cincinnati-public-railroad-norfolk-southern-east-palestine-disaster
• https://jacobin.com/2023/10/cincinnati-ohio-rail-worker-publicly-owned-privatization-norfolk-southern
• https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/say-goodbye-to-the-last-city-owned-interstate-railroad
• https://www.derailthesale.org/economics.html
• http://archive.today/2023.12.16-020729/https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2023/12/15/norfolk-southern-paid-6m-convincing-cincinnati-voters-to-sell/71745654007/

The Cincinatti government possessed the last municipally owned interstate railroad in the USA, running from Cincinnati, Ohio to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It leased the railroad to Norfolk Southern (of East Palestine disaster fame) for $25 million per year, and it was indispensable for Norfolk Southern's operations.

Norfolk Southern (NS) funded a PAC, Building Cincinnati’s Future, and donated tons to the Cincinnati mayor's election campaign. Together, they made tons of ads to convince Cincinnati citizens to sell the railroad for $1.6 billion to NS, to be put in an investment trust fund.

If you calculate from the previous per-year lease, Cincinnati would have made that $1.6 billion off of the lease anyways after 64 years. A report commissioned by Cincinnati even showed that due to the railroad's importance to NS's operations and NS's impressive financial profits, the city could actually get away with raising the lease to ~$70 million per year. At that rate, the city would have made $1.6 billion back in less than 23 years. Even better, the city would have been able to continue making money on the railroad forever, and be able to raise the lease to match inflation, thus making even more money.

Now that the city has sold the railroad, it has lost that guaranteed income stream forever. That $1.6 billion now sits in "The Building Our Future Trust Fund", and the city will try to make money from it by paying professional money managers to invest in the unstable market. Data shows that more than 90 percent of professional money managers underperform the market in the long term. Not only that, these Wall Street bankers will take a cut of the money that belongs to the people of Cincinnati for the privilege of doing so. If the fund does end up losing value, the city receives nothing.

Any person with basic money sense knows that a stable asset that makes guaranteed money over time is better than a random lump sum which may or may not perform well when invested into stocks and bonds. After all, its why landlords buy and rent houses instead of just flipping them.

Along with the loss in money, Cincinnati has also lost the ability to use access to the railroad as leverage to force NS to do good stuff. For instance, they could have forced NS to add safety features, modernize the track, and let Amtrack run on the line. Now, NS is free to pour toxic waste all along the right-of-way, and the city can't do anything about it.

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Ernesto "Che" Guevara

If you are capable of trembling with indignation each time that an injustice is committed anywhere in the world, we are comrades.

— Che Guevara. (1964). Quoted in Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution (1971) by K. S. Karol

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the Capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later in Mexico City, Guevara met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to [[r.TheDeprogram Cuba|Cuba]] aboard the yacht Granma with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

After the Cuban Revolution, Guevara played key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as Minister of Industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both President of the National Bank and instructional director for Cuba's armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban Socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Additionally, Guevara was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal guerrilla warfare manual, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism, and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedies being proletarian internationalism and world revolution.

Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment continental revolutions across both Africa and South America, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed.

Additional Resources

You can find his writings in the Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/index.htm

Video Essays:

• Who Did Che Guevara Murder? | BadEmpanada (2019)
• Che Guevara: Homophobic Racist? Response to Steven Crowder & PragerU | BadEmpanada (2019)
• Che Guevara's True Legacy | BadEmpanada (2020)
• Conservatives Love Lying About Che Guevara, Inventing Fake Quotes | BadEmpanada (2020)
• Cuba and Che Guevara TALKING POINTS by Sky News - How Do They Hold Up? | BadEmpanada (2021)
• Che Guevara: Revolutionary Hero | Che's Life, Legacy, and Theory | Marxism Today (2022)

Books, Articles, or Essays:

• Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life | Jon Lee Anderson (1997)

Podcasts:

• In Defense of Che Guevara: Analyzing his Life and Answering his Critics | Revolutionary Left Radio (2017)