important life update for me and my partners
Harold Perrineau as Mercutio in Romeo + Juliet (1996) dir. Baz Luhrmann
a great part of speedrunning documentaries/docuseries on youtube on super niche/old games is the fact that, in most cases, the only people with enough in-depth knowledge to make the video in the first place are the top runners themselves. which results in really funny moments where the narrator is like "but in 2016, a new runner would blow the category wide open with a 3-minute time save... meeee :3 teehee"
i really love when a character, calmly and completely earnestly, is like i’m not important, i’m no one really, just a blade that people use and throw away. no one remembers me for long after i leave their life. and then you look at the evidence and it turns out that every person who meets them becomes permanently obsessed with them, for better and for worse, and the character has somehow completely missed this fact
juri/shiori voted best depiction of high school dyke drama for the 26th year in a row
i hate u female rage i hate u divine feminine i hate u female gaze i hate u feminine energy i hate u gender essentialism poorly repackaged as progressive or revolutionary or in any way subversive....
@everyone defending female rage in the tags. u can stop now
The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.
The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.
Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.
On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.
Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.
So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.
Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintaining planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
Advertising is an incredibly wasteful, ecologically destructive industry that intrudes on our everyday lives pretty much constantly. We’re absolutely fucked if we can’t even question one of the most distinctly obnoxious and useless facets of the ecocidal economic system we live in. Like this isn’t even something that powers our day-to-day existence like the energy sector (literally killing us but also keeping our AC/heat, transportation, etc running)—advertising just pollutes, wastes, and annoys, yet it’s been assimilated into many peoples’ sense of self and their ability to “enjoy things”
“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is these that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that in a society freed from capitalism “being” will be valued over “having.” Personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and products—the sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”
As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve the fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
Advertising pollutes the mental landscape, just like it does the urban and rural landscapes; it stuffs the skull like it stuffs the mailbox. It holds sway over press, cinema, television, radio. Nothing escapes its decomposing influence: in our time we see that sports, religion, culture, journalism, literature, and politics are ruled by advertising. All are pervaded by advertising’s attitude, its style, its methods, its mode of argument. Meanwhile, we are always and uninterruptedly harassed by advertising: without stop, without truce, unrelentingly and never taking a vacation, advertising persecutes us, pursues us, attacks us in city and countryside, in the street and at home, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December, from the cradle to the grave.
Ecosocialism, Michael Löwy
Revolutionary Girl Utena
“For Friendship, Perhaps”
Do you know? Do you know? Have you heard the news? Study normal subjects, find a normal job. Fall in love normally, get married normally. Have a normal family, and have a normal life. But being normal has nothing to do with us! We're tired of doing all the things we've done till now. Time for us to go back to being what's normal for us. Do you know? Do you know? Do you know what that is?
YOU CANNOT FIND LIBERATION IN THE HANDS OF A CORPORATION!! YOU JUST CAN’T!!!!!
most jointly eerie and funny thing how you get the sense there was some mass memory wipe at the end of rgu's black rose arc such that even the arcs recap episode....does not actually feature the black rose stuff. all that stuff you just saw - it is just gone. the stuff it showcases instead is a nanami fail compilation
I hate when you love a character who’s like a kid or a teenager and they so perfectly capture the flaws and struggles of being that age and not understanding everything fully yet or necessarily making the best choices especially when they’re in a very painful or complex situation and they feel so real and human because of it and then you go online and there’s someone who’s like “they’re DUMB and EVIL and SELFISH because of [important moment in their character arc when they messed up and learned from it or broke under pressure or didn’t have the courage to do an incredibly difficult thing or responded realistically to their truly horrifying circumstances]”