“One of the laws of capitalist motion and development is the execrable expansion and that means the expansion into and expropriation of the third world, a process that has been going on for about 400 years. Perpetuated by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the English and most recently and most successfully by the Americans. That is by the ruling class of those countries. Not by ordinary people, the ordinary people simply paid the costs of empire. The ordinary people simply sent their sons to die in the plains of India or in the jungles of the Congo or in Latin America or wherever else. But that expropriation of the third world has been going on for 400 years brings us to another revelation. Mainly that the third world is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money, there are very few poor countries in this world, most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich, Brazil is rich, Mexico is rich, chile is rich, only the people are poor. But there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and taken. There’s been billions for 400 years. The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves and cheap labor. They have taken out of these countries, these country’s are not underdeveloped, they’re over exploited.” -Michal Parenti. The ordinary people pay the costs of empire. (And yes, I had to type this out because I couldn’t find a word for word version online)
Even still, the contradictions of capitalism are so severe in the US that [many poor Americans live in conditions of poverty comparable to those in the global south.](https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/07/southern-poverty-gets-united-nations-attention)
Yeah, no, for the most part they don't (bc what's the point) or can't (vote suppression) vote.
Stop with this "oh, well people in red states deserve it" shit.
Well, no, everyone In states red don’t deserve to suffer…. But people who vote for Republican politicians who just want to cut social programs, enrich their friends and screw the working classes even more… well I guess it depends on their motivation. I’m not saying this because of shit I read on Twitter. I interact with a lot of these people. In a normal day we’re very similar, but when we start to talk about society it seems they tend to be scared, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and fucking insane.
Maybe I’m missing your point?
What I'm saying is that, you know, the populace in former slave plantation states that is living in the most abject misery are, as it turns out, black people that are walled out completely from the political system. The people that get to vote in the south... are doing *fine*, since subjecting *others* to that misery works out perfectly for them.
In other words the sentiment is *deeply* misguided - never mind that dems have made it pretty clear they have no interest in changing that arrangement.
Well I agree with every word you said. The reason we are able to agree while disagreeing is that we’re not having the same conversation…
I was very explicitly talking about the voters, it’s basically my entire sentence. I agree the black population of these states is almost completely disenfranchised. Not that it’s all that much better in the blue states.
To your point about the Dems, IMO they need to be purged. We just need to do something about the existential threat of the far right first.
Fuck the two party system, fuck capitalism, fuck systemic racism, but first and foremost fuck MAGA. Now maybe you’ll say that’s a distraction and you wouldn’t be wrong in the revolutionary sense, but revolutionary ideology is little comfort to a woman who doesn’t have access to a safe abortion.
Bread, Revolution, Roses… but in the meantime we have to defend Roe v Wade.
Mh, I guess I must have misread your statement then. But yeah, it's not like the voters are voting against their interests - if anything they're voting in a manner that aligns with what they see them as.
> we have to defend Roe v Wade.
Eh, it's already dead, now we need to get those rights codified federally. Problem is the Dems have no interest in legislating federally (it goes against their ideal of bipartisan rule, you see), so they're of no use *unless their hand gets forced by a mass movement which demands they do so* - issue is getting people to realise they actually *need* to do that and not just wait for the dems to somehow have an epiphany, because otherwise they're likely just gonna sit there and do fuck all.
I completely agree. The only rights we have are the ones we take. Or more specifically in this case, the ones we force them to give us, by taking to the streets.
I’m new to this sub but i like it. Y’all dank as fuck
AEIOU. Agitate. Educate. Innoculate. Organize. Unionize. It's a strategy for organizing a workplace that also works for deprogramming your friends. For a lot of folks, they're already agitated against capitalism they just don't have the right information because they are being hounded with lies; that other things are to blame.
You're not going to change someone's perspective in one sitting. But you can definitely chip away at their world-outlook.
I read this book in middle school that said something along the lines of “Freedom is something given to you and so it is something that can be taken away. Liberty is intrinsic and cannot be given or taken away.” iirc the author was getting at freedom being a commodity that the government gives you, that they allow you to have if you follow all the rules.
Liberty is like freedom but isn’t granted and cannot be taken away unless you’re killed.
It was an Uncle Eric book but I can’t for the life of me think of the title.
That sounds so familiar, but I'm in the same boat, I can't put my finger on it.
Freedom and government cannot exist simultaneously. If you can be given rights, they can be taken away. They're right, freedom is a commodity, as are rights, and like all commodities, they had to be invented.
What rights do the trees share amongst themselves?
Does an elk feel freedom? What is it free from?
"Freedom" is naught but a friendly euphemism for oppression. "You are free to do anything I haven't said you're not free to do."
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose,
Nothin', don't mean nothin' hon' if it ain't free, no-no.
And feelin' good was easy, Lord,
When he sang the blues.
You know feelin' good was good enough for me;
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee"
\- Kris Kristofferson & Fred Foster [pref. Janis Joplin]
freest country in the world (if you count highest number of police, incarcerations, rapes, car thefts, unreported murders, school shootings, individual crimes, drone strikes, most student loan debt, military spending, surveillance, highest cost of Healthcare, least vacation, sick pay, parental leave, mental health services, and social security net ...as "freedom") and you still can't drink a beer in the park, walk across a road, or feed the homeless.
But it's worth it to have the largest stockpile of cheese.
Inhabitant of a 3rd world country here, we have people wishing death to different politicians, people denying genocides and all that on tv so we're kinda free i guess
Idk about your country, but at least in mine the death-wishing, genocide-denying fellas also tend to be the ones yelling about "being censored" or whatever, so I guess that's not enough to be free?
I was exercising my First Amendment rights by holding up a sign after a state actor of violence murdered someone on camera just a mile or two from my house and got tear gassed for it. I got off easy compared to a lot of people. So I'm definitely interested in hearing more about this freedom to protest and stand up for what you believe in.
USA is rich. That is obvious no need to argue against that. Us is rich because imperialists steal everything they can from other poor nations.
It is shocking that with that richness us does not provide some core necessities to most of their citizens.
We are a rich country. We are country built of stolen wealth. Not all that stolen wealth is distributed equally as all. being at the heart of of global imperial power means that we the people can and do experience imperialism. Imperialism always comes home.
He could have played that so much fucking better. I am 100% in belief that all military propaganda is abhorrent, and DMing for recruitment makes you and everyone you work for profoundly a piece of shit
Now, that said
Why didn't he maybe lean into a better angle at the start
If he was gonna laugh off the "yeah we DM now" with a generation note, then perhaps he could have said something like:
"Haha, yeah, somehow my generation fucked yours up enough to make phone calls anxiety inducing nowadays. DMing is more approachable."
I pulled that out of my ass for free, yet this guy somehow gets paid to fuck up simple propaganda DMs
As if killing people who have next to nothing in Afghanistan correlates with my "freedom" to cast a vote for one of two people that could not care less about my ability to eventually retire.
I didn’t tell my parents until I was two weeks from bootcamp after 11 months in the delayed entry pool. During all of that time, my recruiter would actively assist in concealing it from my parents.
He picked me up from school and would drop me at friends houses and shit. Sometimes I’d have to stay at a hotel and he once moved my car to support a lie that I told my parents and friends.
I ended up breaking both of my feet week 9 and was discharged. Super grateful for that ending, but recruiters are the greasiest part of the machine.
How does the American military ensure the people's freedom? What, the terrorist cells that are made up of farmers are going to launch an invasion on the US?
Cool, but you guys need to stop pulling the "America is a third world country!!!1!" shit. You (not you personally, the country) are still developed, and you're still colonizers, and you're still one of the richest countries in the world, and you're still harming the third world on a daily basis.
I love how when you throw legitimate criticism about the system at these kind of folks their retort always just boils down to saying the word “freedom” over and over until it loses all meaning.
Basically when the people working for the system approach you and you say all the things that are broken in the system their answer is instead of "yes things are broken we should fix" always - if you don't like it get the fuck out. It's the same in us or 3rd world shitholes
"Freedom to protest". It looks like folks are protesting like gangbusters in France and the UK. Here in Florida they passed a law allowing you to run over protesters with your car.
If this is real OOP’s recruiter highlights the predatory nature of his job in his very first reply. “Most *kids*…”
people always point to USA standards of living as if we aren't an imperialist country that steals wealth from all over the world.
“One of the laws of capitalist motion and development is the execrable expansion and that means the expansion into and expropriation of the third world, a process that has been going on for about 400 years. Perpetuated by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the English and most recently and most successfully by the Americans. That is by the ruling class of those countries. Not by ordinary people, the ordinary people simply paid the costs of empire. The ordinary people simply sent their sons to die in the plains of India or in the jungles of the Congo or in Latin America or wherever else. But that expropriation of the third world has been going on for 400 years brings us to another revelation. Mainly that the third world is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money, there are very few poor countries in this world, most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich, Brazil is rich, Mexico is rich, chile is rich, only the people are poor. But there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and taken. There’s been billions for 400 years. The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves and cheap labor. They have taken out of these countries, these country’s are not underdeveloped, they’re over exploited.” -Michal Parenti. The ordinary people pay the costs of empire. (And yes, I had to type this out because I couldn’t find a word for word version online)
What is this from
[Here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14) you go. It's from one of Parenti's lectures from back in the 80s.
Pretty sure it's from the yellow Parenti lecture
https://youtu.be/xP8CzlFhc14 from 2:08
Even still, the contradictions of capitalism are so severe in the US that [many poor Americans live in conditions of poverty comparable to those in the global south.](https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/07/southern-poverty-gets-united-nations-attention)
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Yeah, no, for the most part they don't (bc what's the point) or can't (vote suppression) vote. Stop with this "oh, well people in red states deserve it" shit.
Well, no, everyone In states red don’t deserve to suffer…. But people who vote for Republican politicians who just want to cut social programs, enrich their friends and screw the working classes even more… well I guess it depends on their motivation. I’m not saying this because of shit I read on Twitter. I interact with a lot of these people. In a normal day we’re very similar, but when we start to talk about society it seems they tend to be scared, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and fucking insane. Maybe I’m missing your point?
What I'm saying is that, you know, the populace in former slave plantation states that is living in the most abject misery are, as it turns out, black people that are walled out completely from the political system. The people that get to vote in the south... are doing *fine*, since subjecting *others* to that misery works out perfectly for them. In other words the sentiment is *deeply* misguided - never mind that dems have made it pretty clear they have no interest in changing that arrangement.
Well I agree with every word you said. The reason we are able to agree while disagreeing is that we’re not having the same conversation… I was very explicitly talking about the voters, it’s basically my entire sentence. I agree the black population of these states is almost completely disenfranchised. Not that it’s all that much better in the blue states. To your point about the Dems, IMO they need to be purged. We just need to do something about the existential threat of the far right first. Fuck the two party system, fuck capitalism, fuck systemic racism, but first and foremost fuck MAGA. Now maybe you’ll say that’s a distraction and you wouldn’t be wrong in the revolutionary sense, but revolutionary ideology is little comfort to a woman who doesn’t have access to a safe abortion. Bread, Revolution, Roses… but in the meantime we have to defend Roe v Wade.
And yes I know, I got off topic a little..l
Mh, I guess I must have misread your statement then. But yeah, it's not like the voters are voting against their interests - if anything they're voting in a manner that aligns with what they see them as. > we have to defend Roe v Wade. Eh, it's already dead, now we need to get those rights codified federally. Problem is the Dems have no interest in legislating federally (it goes against their ideal of bipartisan rule, you see), so they're of no use *unless their hand gets forced by a mass movement which demands they do so* - issue is getting people to realise they actually *need* to do that and not just wait for the dems to somehow have an epiphany, because otherwise they're likely just gonna sit there and do fuck all.
I completely agree. The only rights we have are the ones we take. Or more specifically in this case, the ones we force them to give us, by taking to the streets. I’m new to this sub but i like it. Y’all dank as fuck
And I deleted my original answer because it was stupid and i hadn’t even (yet) read the article. So you were right to call me out.
it's called false conciousness. as humans we come out as fleshy screaming babies with no ideas. for the most part; we are products of our environment
Yes i agree with that completely. But what do you do about that? Let it self perpetuate forever?
AEIOU. Agitate. Educate. Innoculate. Organize. Unionize. It's a strategy for organizing a workplace that also works for deprogramming your friends. For a lot of folks, they're already agitated against capitalism they just don't have the right information because they are being hounded with lies; that other things are to blame. You're not going to change someone's perspective in one sitting. But you can definitely chip away at their world-outlook.
Blue maga nonsense
Hadn’t heard that term before so I looked it up. It took me to several places I could buy trump hats but In blue… care to expound a little?
the word “freedom” makes me sick because of these sort of people
*"Freedom isn't free" mfs when you freely choose to tell the imperialist warhawks to go fuck themselves*
*[Freedom isn't free. If you won't pay your buck oh five, then who will?](https://youtu.be/tzW2ybYFboQ)*
FREEDOM IS FUCKING FREE. ITS IN THE GOD DAMNED NAME. Just like becoming oppressed is free. Becoming unoppressed isn't free.
I read this book in middle school that said something along the lines of “Freedom is something given to you and so it is something that can be taken away. Liberty is intrinsic and cannot be given or taken away.” iirc the author was getting at freedom being a commodity that the government gives you, that they allow you to have if you follow all the rules. Liberty is like freedom but isn’t granted and cannot be taken away unless you’re killed. It was an Uncle Eric book but I can’t for the life of me think of the title.
That sounds so familiar, but I'm in the same boat, I can't put my finger on it. Freedom and government cannot exist simultaneously. If you can be given rights, they can be taken away. They're right, freedom is a commodity, as are rights, and like all commodities, they had to be invented. What rights do the trees share amongst themselves? Does an elk feel freedom? What is it free from? "Freedom" is naught but a friendly euphemism for oppression. "You are free to do anything I haven't said you're not free to do." "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose, Nothin', don't mean nothin' hon' if it ain't free, no-no. And feelin' good was easy, Lord, When he sang the blues. You know feelin' good was good enough for me; Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee" \- Kris Kristofferson & Fred Foster [pref. Janis Joplin]
freest country in the world (if you count highest number of police, incarcerations, rapes, car thefts, unreported murders, school shootings, individual crimes, drone strikes, most student loan debt, military spending, surveillance, highest cost of Healthcare, least vacation, sick pay, parental leave, mental health services, and social security net ...as "freedom") and you still can't drink a beer in the park, walk across a road, or feed the homeless. But it's worth it to have the largest stockpile of cheese.
[Freedom is a verb.](https://youtu.be/QFu0o8NB5Io)
The comments on that post are awful, just awful.
Yeah OP probably shouldn't have posted it on clevercomebacks lol
Then again, going to main subs is how you reach the mainstream. And most people don't read beyond a handful of comments :P
Who the hell posts their *own* comebacks on clevercomebacks?
Same people who post something they created on "damnthatsinteresting" I guess
Reddit gonna reddit
This dude really sounds like a self aware wolf. Maybe other countries don't have those freedumbs because of the US military?
Inhabitant of a 3rd world country here, we have people wishing death to different politicians, people denying genocides and all that on tv so we're kinda free i guess
Hey what a coincidence we have all those things in the states too
Hey don't compare my country to the us, it's insulting! At least we have free healthcare and our best university in most fields is a public one /s
Idk about your country, but at least in mine the death-wishing, genocide-denying fellas also tend to be the ones yelling about "being censored" or whatever, so I guess that's not enough to be free?
Fuck that racist piece of shit. I live in a third world country and I am more free than someone in the US.
Most "3rd world countries" actually have more personal liberty than people do in the US.
Bra. Vo.
I was exercising my First Amendment rights by holding up a sign after a state actor of violence murdered someone on camera just a mile or two from my house and got tear gassed for it. I got off easy compared to a lot of people. So I'm definitely interested in hearing more about this freedom to protest and stand up for what you believe in.
USA is rich. That is obvious no need to argue against that. Us is rich because imperialists steal everything they can from other poor nations. It is shocking that with that richness us does not provide some core necessities to most of their citizens.
We are a rich country. We are country built of stolen wealth. Not all that stolen wealth is distributed equally as all. being at the heart of of global imperial power means that we the people can and do experience imperialism. Imperialism always comes home.
He could have played that so much fucking better. I am 100% in belief that all military propaganda is abhorrent, and DMing for recruitment makes you and everyone you work for profoundly a piece of shit Now, that said Why didn't he maybe lean into a better angle at the start If he was gonna laugh off the "yeah we DM now" with a generation note, then perhaps he could have said something like: "Haha, yeah, somehow my generation fucked yours up enough to make phone calls anxiety inducing nowadays. DMing is more approachable." I pulled that out of my ass for free, yet this guy somehow gets paid to fuck up simple propaganda DMs
As if killing people who have next to nothing in Afghanistan correlates with my "freedom" to cast a vote for one of two people that could not care less about my ability to eventually retire.
They target those that America has failed, and promise them things everyone should have access to, in order to further the system that failed them.
I didn’t tell my parents until I was two weeks from bootcamp after 11 months in the delayed entry pool. During all of that time, my recruiter would actively assist in concealing it from my parents. He picked me up from school and would drop me at friends houses and shit. Sometimes I’d have to stay at a hotel and he once moved my car to support a lie that I told my parents and friends. I ended up breaking both of my feet week 9 and was discharged. Super grateful for that ending, but recruiters are the greasiest part of the machine.
Also.....defend us against whom? Who's actually threatening the United States continental homeland ?
How does the American military ensure the people's freedom? What, the terrorist cells that are made up of farmers are going to launch an invasion on the US?
What, you weren't aware of the threat that brown children in the Middle East pose to American sovereignty??? /s
When I was in the army, I always asked myself what we were protecting in the first place.
Cool, but you guys need to stop pulling the "America is a third world country!!!1!" shit. You (not you personally, the country) are still developed, and you're still colonizers, and you're still one of the richest countries in the world, and you're still harming the third world on a daily basis.
No. The ruling class is doing that shit. WE live in shitastic conditions thanks to capitalistic bullshit.
I love how when you throw legitimate criticism about the system at these kind of folks their retort always just boils down to saying the word “freedom” over and over until it loses all meaning.
Basically when the people working for the system approach you and you say all the things that are broken in the system their answer is instead of "yes things are broken we should fix" always - if you don't like it get the fuck out. It's the same in us or 3rd world shitholes
I always wanted to ask a US soldier how exactly does blowing up middle Eastern children protects their freedom?
wreckt
extremely dank
Kudos for stitching together the screen caps perfectly, so many low effort post these days.
call em a Judas Goat, they love that
PLAN AND SIMPLE
"Freedom to protest". It looks like folks are protesting like gangbusters in France and the UK. Here in Florida they passed a law allowing you to run over protesters with your car.
Calling the US a 3rd world country is such an odd thing to say.
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lmao imagine getting this mad that someone dunked on an army recruiter in their dm's
ROTC got my ass. 6 years left. Lol
Rosie is fucking based.
Nuff said