Thank you for the recommendation, I’ll give it a read! I’ve never really studied urban planning, that’s more my wife’s field, but I’m sure they’d love if I read this and we had a good discussion. Appreciate it <3

There are a lot of great criticisms to be made about academics and how they eventually get caught up in little self-contained idea vortices that don’t actually matter to the world at large; they lose sight of how small their field is in the grand scheme of things and start to project its importance in their life to the wider society.

However the thing about using words like this: they are specific. It’s important to learn that just because two words are synonyms does not mean they are interchangeable. Some words are more correct for the specific idea you are trying to communicate.

These complete goobers are probably using it for visual symmetry with swastikas, but the symbol itself is a shield knot, which is like, a super common and basic knot that’s been around for ages. It’s a ward knot, and was often used to decorate, you guessed it, shields.

Unfortunately (and this is true outside of Ireland as well), a lot of fascists love Celtic knotwork (almost as much as they love Norse motifs).

Oh hey, so this isn’t specifically communist (and isn’t on my larger reading list), but if you’re interested in examining how to build better relationships I recommend Dean Spade’s Love in a Fucked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together.

Dean Spade is one of the founders of the Silvia Rivera Law Project, and has some great writing on abolition (Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law is a great/terrible read), and this book just came out. It’s about fostering healthy relationships while acknowledging the impact that politics plays on every aspect of your life. So how to find the balance/bring to the forefront your desire to change the world around you, the pain caused by the systems of oppression we experience, and that desire for community and fostering mutual power in your relationships.

Hello! May I please direct you to this massive reading list I put together the other day: https://hexbear.net/post/4435465

In particular, the introduction to feminism and the Queer Marxism sections will likely have some things that catch your eye.

I can give you some more specific and narrow recommendations if you want, depending on what specifically interests you (eg., historical accounts of communist feminists, feminist philosophy, writings by socialists, etc.)

Ohh this is a great conversation, thank you!

To add onto this: many Christians may be familiar with the term “benediction”, which is literally “good speech.” This is a blessing, where good words are invoked to bless you (usually as the end of a sermon, to bless you as you depart).

Its opposite also exists: malediction. A malediction (literally “evil speech”) is a curse. Curse stems from Gaeilge (Irish). Cúrsachadh means abuse, so to curse someone is to literally wish harm upon them; it is a very real and dangerous threat. Malediction stems from Latin, but there is also an Irish term, mallacht, that has the same root as malediction.

Cursing in Irish was seen as a literal violence: it is a poetic art with the power to disrupt lives. In fact, it was common for a poet to be brought to battles to curse enemies. The satirical verse (glám dícenn) was one such form, and often the point was to render the target unclean (escaine). Essentially, to besmirch them. Another was conntracht (from Latin contradictio), which was literally to speak against someone. With conntracht, someone could even speak against royalty, which was a serious accusation that required legal arbitration. In the County Waterford area, a word for curse–guídóireacht–is also used to mean praying.

All of this to say that cursing was built on the belief that speaking evil against someone was actually harmful–that it would be literally damaging to them, not just through diminishing of reputation. And that this evil was usually connected to making unclean, impure, abusing, or making common–in a Christian society, this then naturally lent to the most powerful curses being ones that targeted someone’s connection to God. To paint someone with sin, or to curse–to pray–to God to bring justice and punishment. (Pre-Christian curses were wild too, I could go on forever about Irish curse-culture, but I just wanted to add a bit on the Christian elements and why praying to God to damn someone was a literal call for someone to be tortured for eternity and seen as one of the highest forms of punishment).

Edit: recommend The Book of Irish Curses by Dr. Patrick C. Power

This isn’t “caving” to America, Canada is built on militarized repression of motility. This is a win for them, because they get to do something they already want (more cops to target migrants and Indigenous people under the guise of “security”) and now they even get to say that this thing they already wanted is absolutely definitely worth the money and really quite a “cheap” tradeoff to stop big bad America’s unreasonable tariffs.

Increased border security and larger military/police budgets is just standard operating procedure.

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Malaysia doesn’t recognize the state of Israel, and acknowledges its existence as occupation as national policy. They have a Palestinian embassy with diplomatic relations with Hamas. There’s a Malaysia Street in Gaza.

Lots of great options here, and may I also recommend one of my favourite comfort foods: colcannon. Irish dish of cabbage in mashed potatoes.

Ryan Tedder also has songwriting/production credits on so many chart toppers through to today, he is prolific as hell in the pop scene.

Highly recommend Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.

The securitization and militarization of borders functions as a valve to control the flow of labour and capital. By destabilizing the economies of the Global South, the North is able to secure capital flow into their countries, while limiting capital flow out. At the same time, the militarization of the border creates a tiered system of labour that fixes labourers into the destablized economies of the South, where they can be hyperexploited, while also ensuring the precarity of migrants in the North to serve as a domestic force of hyperexploitable labour.

Basically, by controlling who is allowed to move where, capital can ensure desperate labourers are available to work for a pittance in special economic zones, while also having a ready supply of domestic labour that is reliant on their visas (or fear of deportation through undocumented status) to suppress wages in the core.

Borders have had other meanings in the past (though still mostly economic), but this is by far the main point of modern nation-state border securitization. An argument can be made about jurisdictional limits being important (and they are, because it allows for differing rules and regulations and creating different tiers of labour based on citizenship), but if that was what mattered most the actual militarization and securitization of the border wouldn’t really help with that.

“you’re talking about probably a million and a half people”

2.2 million in 2023, so you know, getting close to acknowledging how many people Israel has murdered.

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"Earlier this month, The Telegraph revealed ministers were planning billions in cuts to disability benefits in an attempt to calm market nerves over economic plans.

The annual cost of support payments for people with disabilities and health conditions is forecast to soar from £22 billion to £35 billion by 2029 – a 60 per cent increase.

The Chancellor has pledged to stick to Tory plans to cut £3 billion from incapacity benefits by 2028."

It’s literally at the top of the article before the break, and DisabledAceSocialist included a bit of this in the body of their post. I generally recommend reading an article before asking questions about it, in case the question you are asking is answered in the article.

I had never read that website (before today when I was curious why it would need this warning) but “Unfortunately I have yet to find a complete list of those EOs.” Lol, it’s literally on the white house’s website, which he links to in the very next paragraph. Does he read??

Also he’s very glad that a bunch of white supremacist militia guys and their useful idiots got pardoned. What a chud.

Yeah the CBC spends a lot of time talking about illegal border crossings to imply that has something to do with it, but there’s no information about what actually happened. Either way, this coupled with the executive order Trump signed to take “complete operational control” of the borders (this is one of the only bits of his orders that was worded to include the border with Canada, whereas most of the language of his orders yesterday specified the southern border) and all the premiers pushing for tougher borders to appease him and mitigate the tariffs…seems that the northern border is about to get more militarized

“U.S. Border Patrol agent killed in Vermont near Canada-U.S. border, say authorities”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-border-agent-shot-1.7436853