This is the work we have to do as individuals, to struggle with our understandings against the real world we live in and challenge our own positions and understanding to more thoroughly champion those values we hold dear. Keep going, you’re on the right path. Keep struggling, it only gets harder for a while. If it starts getting easier, you’re going the wrong way.

Keep going! I think you still need more precision. Your racialized students are all victims of racism at nearly all times. What you’re talking about is when racialized students are victims of harm (which comes in many forms) where that harm is the intimate form of structural racism.

So when someone uses a racial slur, racialized people experience harm if they are exposed to it. A) what is that harm if the slur was used at them versus if that slur was used near them but not at them? B) is there harm if no racialized people are exposed to that event?

Being able to articulate these sorts of nuances in a way that is internally consistent will be the result of struggling with these concepts and coming to deeper understandings and the path forward will be clearer.

To put a finer point on it, if a white child, in a room of 5 white children and a white teacher, uses a racial slur, how would you describe that, how would you understand the consequences of that, how would you make the decision on whether and how to intervene, and how would you communicate your decision in context?

I will challenge for the sake of you refining your argument: bigotry is equivalent with rude behavior and aggressive confrontation. Bigotry is not limited to the structures of racism. You can be a bigot against people without hair, bigot against people based on height, a bigot against people based on body fat, a bigot against people based on body shape and proportions, etc.

Racism, on the other hand, is a structure that exists even without bigotry. Bigotry is a symptom or an outgrowth of structural racism. The earliest racists didn’t spend their time being rude and getting into fights with people, they spent their timing writing academic essays, giving lectures, and generally being perfectly calm, reasonable high society people who just believed things like race is inherent in the person and values are inherent in the race.

I challenge you to get more precise about why you think bigotry is different than other forms of conflict, connect it to the structural so that you’re not only dealing with the individual, and proceed from there with a refined analysis and set of proposals.

It’s a social democratic country run by an early stage neofascist party. Social democracy is the form of a state adjacent to fascism - fascism emerges from social democracy and fascism returns to social democracy.

So Italy is in an early stage of fascist potential.

plenty of escaping Nazi officers fled…

This is a misattribution. Nazi officers were protected, transported, and given new lives by the US military and the Vatican working together.

You literally just described a settler state, complete with using reproduction as an occupying tactic.

Israel, the state, is illegitimate and needs to be dissolved. The Israeli people can integrate and co-createba society with the Palestinians or they can GTFO. Any that stay to explicitly disrupt this and form reactionary movements can get rekt.

However, as you say, this reality won’t stop the genocide. So a two-state solution is the most likely interim step.

It’s for engines designed for high pressure, this usually but not always involves a turbo. The higher octane allows greater compression for greater torque at higher RPMs.

This is why hexbear disabled downvotes, because it requires the would-be downvoter to engage

Not really though. The workers don’t control the state, the owners do. The workers can’t actually use the state to advance their interests. Every concession given to them by the owners is a) only given if the alternative is revolution and b) rolled back as soon as possible. Once the workers take over the state, taxes no longer serve that purpose but instead serve the purpose of smoothing out the money supply to avoid hoarding and accumulation.

Yes, in theory it would be great if we could tax the rich, but history shows us that we cannot, and ultimately theory has shown us the same thing.

Taxes are completely fucked. Here’s why.

ALL of the wealth of a society is produced by workers - they do the mining, the harvesting, the planting, the refining, the quality assurance, the distribution, literally ALL value is produced by the workers.

The owners got togther and formed a country. Not the workers, not “the people”, only owners formed and organized the country. They chose a private property regime because they now own all the wealth produced by workers. 100% of what workers produce under an employment regime is owned by the owners.

But the owners can’t sell anything if the workers can’t buy it. And the workers can’t work unless they can support their needs. So the owners take a portion of that value they steal and give it to the workers.

Then, the government that the owners created take money from the workers in the form of income tax, sales tax, and property tax.

Then they create NGOs and spend billions of dollars (that they stole from workers, remember) to convince workers to DONATE their salaries to the NGOs to solve social ills created by the owners.

Then the owners use the government to maintain their own wealth structures and prevent the workers from threatening them. When the owners make mistakes that would cost them fortunes, they take the money from the workers taxes.

Then they realized that even with this scheme workers were able to buy and own things. So they used their government to change the rules again. Fractional reserve banking let’s a bank hold 100 dollars in cash and create 900 in loans. The bank loans this magical money to workers and the workers collateralize it by giving the bank on lien on their house. The bank now has a more collateral that they can use to generate 9x loan values from, and the act of generating that money causes price inflation in housing, which increases the amount of money the banks can loan out. The net result is that workers pay rent to live in their own homes and that rent goes to the owners who control the government. When this scheme runs into issues, the owners use money taken from the workers (a portion of what was given to them after everything was stolen from them) to smooth out any hiccups and keep the scam rolling.

So, no, taxes don’t make things better. Only completely dismantling capitalism and running the government for workers by workers and eliminating private property and profit will ever help the 99%. Everything else is a scam and a distraction.

The West is the most dysfunctional, unequal, and unfree region of the world. You are the one who is delusional. All you need to do is look at the US prison population, the amount of land occupied by Western powers, which country is the only country to drop nukes on civilians, the Atlantic slave trade, the occupation of India, the Berlin Conference, the Opium Wars, the Open Door Policy, the indigenous genocide, etc.

Why are there white people in the Western hemisphere? Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression. Why are there white people on Australia and New Zealand. Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression. Why are Hong Kong and Taiwan going through so much turmoil? Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression.

Where did fascism emerge? Western Europe. Under what conditions? Western liberal democracy. Who is voting against the condemnation of Nazis? The US.

What is the 5 Eyes alliance?

The Victims of Communism propaganda project struggles to reach 100M killed by Communism. It includes Nazis killed by the Soviets during WW2 and it includes births that the researchers claim should have happened but didn’t. The authors of the Black Book have denounced their own research. Meanwhile, the Western imperialist order has killed hundreds of millions. 70 - 80 million people indigenous to “the Americas” alone. Millions died in a famine in India deliberately and knowingly created by the British occupiers.

The US has dropped so many bombs that the most bombed countries in the world are all bombed by the US. The US engineered multi-generational genocides through the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, mostly in the Pacific where it has no business being. The US illegally occupies Hawaii by it’s own laws! It sterilized 1/3 of Puerto Rico as part of its eugenics project that didn’t stop until the 1970s. It has never stopped forcibly kidnapping children and separating them from their families. They have been doing it since they landed on Plymouth Rock and they keep doing it to this day.

And then we have the sanctions regimes that have killed millions through collective punishment, starvation, denial of access to life saving medicines. For those it didn’t kill it stunted their growth, made them incredibly ill, traumatized entire nations of people. And these sanctions are not small. They have hit hundreds of millions of people and they last decades.

The West is sociopathic. It is “free, equal, and functional” for barely 30% of its white cis het male population. And unlike other countries, its sociopathy extends far beyond its own borders. Sure, the West oppresses non-white, non-cis, queer, non-men within its own borders to the tune of millions including vigilantism, rape, torture, mass murder, genocide, lynchings, police brutality, domestic spying, theft of property, displacement, deaths of poverty and neglect, active state oppression, etc. But the West has been exporting that shit for 600 years to literally 80% of the world’s population.

The West is the greatest scourge to humanity that has ever existed. It is the source of the supermajority of oppression that humanity has experienced. No one has done more harm to humanity and to the planet than the West.

And the fact that you think it’s the most functional, equal, and free region of the world speaks to your privilege, not mine. The wealth of the West was stolen from the rest of the world. Trillions of dollars extracted from Africa alone. When the Haitian slave revolt won independence from France, what did the West do? They levied a multi-billion dollar debt on them, and they made the calculation based on the market value of each black body on the island. France literally said “you owe us the money we bought you with” and the Western banking system agreed. To this day that debt still stands, it is in the hands of Citi, and they continue to make profit from the interest on it.

Nothing will help humanity more than the dismantling of the Western imperialist world order.

That’s literally not how whataboutism works. Whataboutism is when you deflect by pointing to a DIFFERENT thing that someone else is doing. When it’s the same thing, we just call it “naming hypocrisy”. The article is hypocritical, because The Guardian literally spreads Western propaganda including lies ALL THE TIME. So when the lying liars who lie tell you that there are other lying liars who lie, then the we can say “you’re a hypocrite.”

But that’s not even the important part. The important part is that the lying liars who lie in the West are lying are part of a very large and very long process of war mongering that has causes hundreds of millions to die for Western imperialism. So when the Western lying liars who lie tell you about other lying liars who lie, what they are doing is building a case for killing the lying liars who lie that are $OTHER, but they never agree that the same consequences should be applied to the lying liars who lie that are $WESTERN_COUNTRY_LIST[rand()]. So it’s worse than merely hypocrisy, it’s violent war mongering that kills innocent people.

Even better is when we compare the scope. The lying done by Russia is so small compared to the lying done by the West and has killed far fewer people than the lying done by the West. For example, the lying liars who lie from BRITAIN got 40% of China addicted to opium. When China decided to ban opium, the lying liars who lie from BRITAIN went back to BRITAIN where not only they run a drug dealership but they also own newspapers. They wrote lies about China and convinced the British Navy to attack China. The Opium Wars were literally launched by British drug dealers who owned newspapers and published lies. And who were these drug dealers? Ever heard of Forbes? Yes, Forbes magazine is part of the Forbes business empire that was built from fortunes made on building US railroads funded by the money accumulated by selling opium to China…

So fuck The Guardian and the lying liars they are. No one gives a shit about the lies of the Russians because the British and the rest of the West have been lying for 600 unbroken years and used those lies to kill 100s of millions of people around the globe and dominate 80% of the world’s population for a long time. Yes, the Russians lie, because that’s the fucking game that the West has put everyone in. It’s the only way to beat the West and no one seriously thinks Russia’s lies are worth getting upset about except the fucking war hawks. So when you repeat the propaganda, you’re participating in the war machine.

It’s not whataboutism.

No argument was actually made. I was the one making the argument, which was that Russia’s meddling is smaller and less damaging than Western meddling.

You have no fucking idea what that terms means. Whataboutism is when you say “Johnny stole a cookie” and I use whataboutism to say “But you killed the dog 3 years ago.” Whataboutism is not when you say “Johnny stole a cookie” and I say “But you invaded and occupied the bakery, killed the original owners, steal the ingredients to make your cookies, and issue predatory loans to hungry people so they can buy your cookies at price gouging prices.”

It is not whataboutism to call out hypocrisy. It takes a special form of brain rot to not see this.

Any Western reporting about how much Russia “meddles” in the affairs of others is laughable because the US and the Western European powers have done so much more, for so much longer, and far more effectively. If the goal is to stop meddling, try dismantling the West first, then go after the smaller threats.