The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

How do you know it hasn’t?

How do I know what hasn’t?

but that doesn’t mean that such unions should be recognised as sacramentally the same by Christian Churches.

Personally, that’s fine my me - provided that sacremental unions have absolutely zero relevance to the law. If marriage did not affect things like taxes, or being with one’s significant other in the hospital, or anything like that, then I don’t care if you want to have some special exclusive ritual. There’s not really anything stopping you from doing that, as far as I’m aware, like, don’t even tell the state about it, you’ll be fine.

The problem is that Christians simultaneously want to have these sorts of rituals be formalized, legal institutions that everyone is bound by, and they want them to be exclusionary. That’s where we run into problems because it violated the legal principle of equal protection under the law. It’s not really about any of this theological stuff about whether “God just wants you to be happy.” It’s that the law is supposed to treat everyone equally and your side insists that your religious traditions must have a legal basis.

Since there was no longer scripture and people felt it hampered their ability to engage in sexual immorality, society changed it’s view. A foetus was no longer seen as human and instead as a “clump of cells” so society permitted the killing of these children

In reality, the opposite has happened. Society used to view a foetus more as a clump of cells, and abortion in no way equivalent to murder. It was pretty much exclusively a Catholic issue. This only changed when forces on the right recognized how it could be used as a wedge issue to take away women’s rights and to keep people divided.

This whole nonsense goes back to Augustine trying desperately to paper over the inherent contradictions in Christian theology. The question being whether exposure to the teachings of Jesus was necessary to avoid eternal damnation and get into heaven. If the answer is yes, then it leads to the absurd conclusion that God is maliciously torturing countless souls without ever giving them a chance to avoid it, including both fetuses that were aborted or miscarried, as well as “virtuous pagans.” On the other hand, if the answer is no, then it would undermine the Church’s authority by suggesting that there are alternate paths to salvation, as well as calling into question why Jesus’ sacrifice was even necessary, if people don’t even need to hear about it to get into heaven. The Catholic Church itself has moved away from the Augustinian position in favor of the idea that it is possible for fetuses to get into heaven and that there may be other paths to salvation.

Obviously, this is another case where if you don’t subscribe to a specifically Christian perspective, then the whole argument falls apart. I don’t believe in souls at all, and am utterly unconcerned with resolving the theological problems that once led to Christians telling women who suffered miscarriages that their baby was burning in hell. Again, we arrive at the legal question of what vested interest the people or the state have in the matter. Unless banning abortion is defensible from a secular perspective, then this is once again just you insisting that your religious views be legally formalized and imposed on others.

That doesn’t matter. The effects of colonialism lingered as we moved to neocolonialism. Many of the resources that had been seized by force remained in the hands of foreign companies, and countries that stepped out of line or attempted to reassert control of their resources, such as Iran or Guatemala, found their governments overthrown by the CIA in favor of far-right western puppets.

The fear of foreign subversion and the memory of colonial rule has meant that many organic social movements are perceived as foreign backed attempts to compromise sovereignty, or as distractions from national liberation.

How about I put it another way? Why do you think that social progress regarding LGBT rights has happened more in “white cultures?” If not because of colonialism, then what is your explanation? I’m guessing your actual perspective is that it’s just some flight of fancy, that it isn’t actually social progress at all, in any objective sense, and that LGBT rights are not actually inherent things. But I figure I might as well press you on the point to see how you weasel around admitting that.

why is it that it’s the “enlightened” west which did the colonialism is suddenly changing it’s mind on sexuality?

At the same time, suffering under the yoke of colonialism stifled social progress and the potential for the sort of organic social movements that happened in the West.

This is simply material reality. I hate the US government but part of why I hate it is because it has its fucking tendrils all over the globe, because it throws its weight around and doesn’t hesitate to use force against anyone who stands in its way. We spend more on the military than the next 9 countries combined. Countless free and democratic governments have made the mistake of underestimating the ruthlessness, militarism, and subversive capabilities of the empire. You can throw a dart at a map and chances are the US has engaged in fuckery there.

For example, in 1975, Australian PM Gough Whitlam uncovered secret CIA plots being carried out in Australia, and threatened to close the installation at Pine Gap. This led to a constitutional crisis as, wouldn’t you know it, an old, outdated law happened to give an unlected official the power to dismiss the PM. An unelected official who happened to have ties to the CIA.

Does the Australian government even have the capacity to close Pine Gap? It’s kind of an open question. There’s no telling what kinds of tricks and contingencies American spies might have in place, should Australia step out of line. Youtube channel Boy Boy has a video about it.

Frankly, I see any country with a US military base as a de facto vassal state until proven otherwise. By all means, prove otherwise.

That’s exactly how I felt about the US after 2001.

This is the most hopeful and positive perspective I’ve read in a while.

Imagine a world where the US tries to invade somewhere like Afghanistan, to loot and plunder while murdering countless civilians, and Europe, instead of supporting it and providing diplomatic cover, tells us to go fuck ourselves. Countless lives would be saved, American, European, and especially the people of whichever poor country is being targeted this week.

If Europeans are serious about this, there’s some great opportunities to prove it with Venezuela and Palestine. By all means, knock yourselves out.

for whatever reason always affirms what the white cultures believe is right.

I assume that by this you’re trying to paint homosexuality and the acceptance of it as exclusive to white cultures. This is complete and total bullshit.

There’s plenty of history of non-white cultures that were fully accepting of homosexuality. Japan is a clear example. Samurai wrote so many gay love poems to each other that they had established literary conventions about it.

What happened, around the world, is that colonizers and missionaries went around the world destroying indigenous traditions and customs and instilling bigotry regarding homosexuality. At the same time, suffering under the yoke of colonialism stifled social progress and the potential for the sort of organic social movements that happened in the West.

Even then, we are seeing in the US a rollback of LGBT rights that we only recently managed to achieve. I don’t think it’s fair to generalize “white cultures” as believing LGBT people have rights, just as it’s not fair to generalize non-white cultures as not believing that.

If WWIII breaks out we’re all gonna fucking die. Will there be any countries left after 24 hours?

Related, in Star Wars lore, Tarkin got promoted (in the late Republic) after landing a ship on top of a crowd of protesters where were blocking the spaceport on Ghorman.

The thing is that the rebels were (mostly) white, and removing the racial lens allowed Americans to see that a struggle like that of colonized people against their oppressors was obviously correct. But it also means they can’t connect the rebels to real world conflicts, because the oppressed people are generally not white, and so it’s understood through a racial lens.

Libs think Trump vs. Harris was like Leia vs Darth Vader when in reality it was more like Darth Vader vs Palpatine.

By that logic, you don’t even need to know my stance on Russia, because the fact that I opposed the war in Afghanistan “proves I’m not anti-imperialist.” The Taliban definitely isn’t socialist either, after all.

I’m saying it’s wild you promote it as AES when it fucking isn’t.

And I’m saying no one considers Russia to be AES, it’s a strawman that libs tell each other about us until they forget they made it up.

If someone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

It’s only baffling if you don’t listen to the actual reasons people believe things and just assume it’s because Russia used to be socialist, regardless of how many people say otherwise.

Liberals will refuse to listen to our explanations of our positions and then call our positions bizarre and indecipherable. Because you get your understanding of our positions from stories you make up and pass around about us that have no basis in reality.

“This is just natural free market competition. The real problem is big government trying to impose restrictions on Hawk Inc.”

I have already defined what crybullying is and explained how your behavior meets it and mine doesn’t. You only think it’s a double standard because you don’t understand what the word means.

Any philosophical theory that has anything to do with the observable universe is inherently self-centered.

Which is not to invalidate it, but it’s not objective, and it has nothing to do with science.

The way I see it, this places quite a lot of physics into the category of “nothing to do with science.” The Copenhagen interpretation of QM, for example, is based on what we can observe and detect, and asserts that particles do not have an exact position because there are limits on how closely it is possible to measure it. To me, it’s the same principle.

There is a subtle distinction in my position. I’m defining existence as a relational property, meaning that what I am claiming is that things outside the observable universe do not exist relative to me. They may exist relative to someone else, although I have no way of knowing if they do. Therefore, I don’t consider it self-centered.

In opinion, the thing that has nothing to do with science is making claims about things that we can’t observe, because they are outside of the observable universe. How can we say, from a scientific perspective, that the universe continues beyond that if we can’t test that theory? By definition, such claims cannot be considered empirical or testable.