TheOubliette

If all it takes to cause famine is one country no longer sending aid, you are extremely vulnerable to that country. The desirable alternative is food sovereignty - under conditions of international pressure there may be scarcity but not starvation.

Organizing means getting people together and educated to take action. To use strength in numbers. Boycotts are nearly always done as individualistic moralizing campaigns. They are not organizing and they are vulnerable to PR, as their primary basis of communication is already basically PR.

They can have good effects and can help agitate, but you are absolutely, 100%, not going to take on the haute bourgeoisie with a boycott. It will register as decreased demand and then a recession, something they are happy to preside over. A recession means they, being the people with money to weather the recession while smaller businesses fail, get to cut wages, discipline labor, and then finally expand or buy up failed businesses as the recession recedes. Many of these effects are why BDS is a good idea for impacting "Israel", as it needs to sell itself as a safe and attractive market for people to move and stay there as colonists.

To overthrow the bourgeoisie you need a revolution. This is not because anyone just loves fighting, but because the bourgeoisie will not leave you any other option. To organize for revolution you must join and contribute to a revolutionary organization.

The purpose of these aid programs is cynical: they are to create exactly this kind of dependency. It is why food sovereignty is considered a threat and is actively undermined by the IMF.

What we are seeing is what threat is being made when a country is made dependent on "aid": starvation. Same as in Gaza. This is the calculus the US and its cronies force upon the global south: submit to insecurity and become a dependency or try to go your own path and become villified and a target to be destroyed.

The former path is guaranteed death and suffering, which is why nations led by those with a coherent political program choose the latter and invest in food sovereignty as an anti-imperialist measure.

Thanks!

I would say that if a word has been misused for a century it actually just has a new meaning. And I'm not aware of it ever being used consistently.

Fun fact that runs parallel to your point: it's not terrorism if you only destroy property.

Terrorism is defined as using violence (or the threat of violence), against civilians, in pursuit of a political goal. All 3 requirements must be met for it to be terrorism: violence, civilians, politics.

Many people who only damage property are still labeled as terrorists by the powers that be. The dictionary can be quite misleading, as it does not really analyze inconsistent usage, particularly for political or propaganda purposes.

For example, "ecoterrorists". Classically labeled as such even when just destroying property. Or even sometimes just for slowing down logistics. Predominately First Nations protesters and activists were labelled "ecoterrorists" by Rick Orman, citing examples like chaining themselves to equipment.

The inconsistent usage has at least two means of biased use. I've already mentioned one, which is using the term for those damaging private property or slowing down enterprise, i.e. equating damage to private property as violence (when private enterprise seizes land or destroys water this is never called ecoterrorism). The other is in inconsistent application: it is a label only routinely used by the targets of capitalist-run states. When their states destroy entire cities and target civilians, it is not called terrorism. When their targets go after a politician insteas of strictly military installations, suddenly they are terrorists. Hell, they can be called terrorists even when going after only military targets. The actusl use of the term corresponds to the means used and the political and ethnic background of those engaging in the acts more than whether the acts are violence for political (isn't everything political?) ends. Terrorism is when a car bomb and not a JDAM.

The real meaning of terrorism must be understood through describing its actual mainstream use. Descriptivism not prescriptivism, lest we miss the reality of propaganda. This is important because the term will continue to be used as I described and to justify rounding up protesters that occupy buildings or block highways or burn down a Tesla dealership. It doesn't really matter ehat the dictionary says, tge law will say enough, the cops will arrest on orders of preventing "terrorism", the judge will convict and sentence based on calling a dumpster fire terrorism, and one might even get sent to a black site to contain such "dangerous" people, "terrorists".

And this is not new. Anarchists and other cool people were lazily labelled exactly the same way over a century ago for the same types of acts.

lmao trying to pretend that trying to leave a building you've been locked in by force, by cops, is protester violence.

You are, to put it mildly, full of shit. The only violence was the police beating and hurting protesters.

Please try to be more honest going forward.

lmao did you even read what I wrote about conflating private property damage and violence?

Sure, but let's step back and analyze it a little more.

Protest itself does not achieve political change. Its usefulness is in direct action or in recruiting those present into further action, education, and organizations. Liberal protests are state-sanctioned parades. Real protests tend to have an actual action to take, demands to be met, people to impact, costs to incur on others.

The terminology of "peaceful protest" is already poisoned and should be questioned. The media and politicians - and those propagandized downstream, all conflate private property destruction and violence. If a protest breaks windows, suddenly it is no longer "peaceful" and can be rejected by the propagandized as invalid and not to be supported. The US is full of such good little piggies, happy to align with the ruling class picking their pocket and doing actual violence because they exist exclusively in a world of capitalist propaganda.

Under these auspices, all direct action that the capitalist system wants to crush is, will, and has been labelled terrorism. It's already done this for private property destruction by environmentalists, peace activists during all major wars (except WWII, where American Nazis were coddled and of course did not damage private property), labor organizers, anti-segregation organizers, socialists, communists, Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, etc. They happily do it again against anti-genocide protesters, particularly because they can play on the islamophobic use of the terrorism label at the same time. Like all fascistic logic, they must frame themselves as the true victims, so they also happily call every critic of Israel an antisemite.

All of this bombards the US population 24/7. Americans exist in a haze of accusations and terms they barely understand, trying to slot it into what could only charitably called an ideology - the naked reactionaries in red and the obfuscated reactionaries in blue.

All of this is to say that the greatest barrier in the US is education, and education begins with agitation, e.g. these protests in any form. Get as many people as possible to show up to the next thing, to organize the next thing, and spread knowledge.

This is just pricing in the cost of tariffs for the consumer. Rather than pay a fee at customs and be surprised that your $40 order is actually $120 after tariffs and fees a week after you placed it, they estimate it and try to pay it for you. This is because the items come directly from China, cutting out the need for a ~~leech~~ middleman to warehouse it and take profit off the top.

Similar price hikes are coming for the things you buy. Or even larger ones. This is not limited to Shein at all. There eill just be a delay while the warehouses sell out all of their inventory.

Temu has a lot of overlap with standard, decent items you will find at large online retailers. They just cut out a few middlemen.

And they didn't really raise prices, they just priced in the tariff costs so buyers aren't surprised during the customs period.

PS this is going to hit all imports from China. It's just going to take longer to be so obvious due to the need to empty warehouses first.

They wanted to be Reddit again and boy are they still trying to do that.