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Joined 7 years ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2019

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  • College / university in many countries.

    In the US at least, its become such a parasitic industry, with tuition fees rising exponentially and far exceeding wage rates and job availability, that it accounts for a large portion of most people’s personal debt.

    With so many applicants for so few jobs, a college degree is the new highschool diploma / “minimum requirement” for nearly every job now. 1 / 4 US adults have student loan debt, with an average of 40k in student loans.. Nothing is putting the brakes on degree inflation, tuition, or the student loan industry.

    The US federal government also makes a killing off of student loan interest fees, most of which is going to the MIC and Israel.

    They’ve made the product they’re selling you (a degree), both required, and extremely expensive; the ultimate goal of any parasitic industry. Its a dream for state and private colleges, the US government and its military, and a nightmare for people either without a job, or chained to their desks for fear of losing their job and getting further behind on loan payments.




  • The US has been around just as long as a civilization. If the Chinese get to claim credit for the radically different ancient predecessors to modern China, then the US can claim decent from both the ancient Native American civilizations

    The US is a settler colonial project that carried out an extermination campaign and genocide of hundreds of native tribes, and stole their land. Settlers have no right to claim descent from the people (they’re still) trying to exterminate. Unlike South America, there’s not even a genetic heritage; the US colonialist just killed every indigenous person they found, or put them into reservations.

    Neither the PRC nor most ME countries are settler ones. The number of settler-colonial countries is tiny: the US, Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, are the main ones.




  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlLibs be like
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    2 days ago

    Intelligence services like the CIA produce two types of info: disinformation (for public dissemination and propaganda), and correct information (usually for internal consumption only, but also occasionally for the public).

    This is a declassified internal memo.



  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml"cuz, y'know, China bad."
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    2 days ago

    Finland was one of the front lines of the Russian revolution, and the whites used finland as a base of monarchist assaults and intrigues against the world’s first socialist state.

    The finnish communists then unfortunately lost their civil war, the finns then killed all their communists and made the communist party illegal, and became one of the fascist / reactionary powers in the 30s like nazi germany.

    Territorial disputes between the whites and reds escalated during the 30s leading to the winter wars, which finland lost, then ww2, which finland also lost.

    You are again siding with the reactionary side of history.


  • Finland lost ww2 as a member of the axis. The finnish army aided in the siege and starvation of Leningrad, which was one of the worst atrocities of ww2.

    After they lost the war, they ceded part of their territory to become an SSR, and were never strong enough again to challenge the eastern bloc.



  • The opposite. From here:

    Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens