This video by Adam Ragusea (a pretty mainstream food channel) looks at how U.S. hereditary farms often preserve quasi-feudal relationships where large farm landowners exert control over migrant and trafficked laborers, recreating power imbalances similar to feudal lord-serf dynamics.

Along the way, he makes a nice overview focusing on the advent of capitalism as a progressive force against feudalism, and how US farmers, whose practices are descended from southern feudal slave plantation owners, still preserve some unproductive, harmful aspects of feudalism.

I have not seen a good explanation on this from Americans, who usually peddle the brainless "they hate our freedom" line. Lemmygrad is also sorely lacking any good discussions on this topic.

The U.S. funded the mujahideen to drain Soviet resources in Afghanistan. This makes it rather strange that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Al-Qaeda (one of the factions in the mujahideen) would turn around and bite the hand that fed them.

Was Al-Qaeda dissatisfied with some aspect of U.S. treatment toward them and expected the 9/11 attacks to change that? Or did the U.S. and Israel tacitly allow or even encourage the attacks to provide an excuse to dominate the Middle East?

I would love more sources and reading on this that aren't just pro-US-empire propaganda!

Chinese automotive glass company Fuyao builds a brand-new factory in Ohio employing 3000 Americans.

WSJ then writes a smear piece crying about the new factory outcompeting an 80-year-old nearby plant employing 250 workers (which is actually owned by a Mexican company, but they only say that at the end of the article to made their smear seem stronger). WSJ complains that China is somehow "hollowing out American manufacturing" by BUILDING FACTORIES IN AMERICA, EMPLOYING AMERICANS, and COMPETING IN AMERICA.

Ohio senator Bernie Moreno now want the US government to force Fuyao to sell its factory and lose out on its investment.

The USA previously stole a solar panel factory built in the US by Chinese solar giant Trina Solar by threatening to pass the bill "American Tax Dollars for American Solar Manufacturing Act", which would deny any solar tax credits to Chinese-run solar plants in the USA. As a result, Trina was forced to sell to American company Freyr (now rebranded T1 Energy). ^[https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1985870993118937221] T1 Energy now has the gall to brag about how advanced "their" new plant is. ^[https://x.com/T1_Energy/status/1985420138058023011]

Even if China builds factories in the USA, they're somehow not doing it the right way. Apparently China is just supposed to build factories in the USA and give them away for free or something. This is some damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't type-shit.

Obligatory Parenti quote:

“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

“If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disenfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

— Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds; Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, pp. 41-42

Good tips on tech for decentralized communication and stopping surveillance. The Youtuber is kinda a nebulous hate-all-states anarchist though.

TLDR: The USA is controlling Cambodia (through Hun Manet) to attack Thailand, a close Chinese partner, as part of their broader strategy to destabilize Asia and extend China in the same way they extended Russia.

How do y'all balance your desire to do more with the understanding that this societal drive for more productivity is partly an unhealthy mindset forced by capitalism?

The term 'productivity' originated to describe the output of workers in a capitalist enterprise per unit time, money, energy, etc. to maximize efficiency. Over time, the term has shifted to 'personal productivity', and the definition has broadened to simply 'using your time intentionally in ways aligned with your broader goals'. To a certain extent this gives us more control, although it also means that productivity is now all-encompassing in our lives as a general pressure, internal and external, to get more stuff done.

Obviously, these origins mean that productivity was originally created by and for capitalism. But it is also necessary to maximize productivity irregardless of capitalism sometimes, such as increasing the time per week you spend organizing, learning socialist theory, and working on personal growth.

If everyone slows down on their productivity (termed lying flat in China and quiet quitting in the USA), then societal progress will slow. In the worst case, we may fall behind the capitalists and enter USSR-style malaise.

So how do y'all reconcile this? It's been bothering me for a while. I feel like a hypocrite telling others it's OK to reject the rat race while I'm frantically consuming productivity books and learning as much as I can.

This seems like a pretty textbook case of capitalist alienation. As jobs and wages get worse, American men can't rely on them to back their sense of self and purpose like they used to.

How would we fix this under socialism?

TLDR: U.S. AI growth is hitting a wall because the power grid is weak and slow to expand. China has huge surplus power and uses data centers to soak it up. State-led, long-term planning gives China an edge, and the U.S. will fall behind unless it changes.

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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)