I Think The Fundamental Problem I Have With The Way People Talk About Neurotypical People Is That A Lot

cooing & stroking the neighbourhood cats but shaking my head the entire time so everyone knows i don’t ideologically agree with outdoor cats

Could you recommend other Latin American communists than José Carlos Mariátegui?

I should preface this by saying I’m mostly familiar with Mexican Marxism.

Ricardo Flores Magón and Enrique Flores Magón (extremely influential, communists in the rest of Latin America basically saw them as the ideologues of the Mexican Revolution),

César Vallejo (poet and associate of Mariátegui, his political writings are neglected),

M.N. Roy (very influential for the development of international communist anticolonial strategy),

Tristán Marof (was cooking some kind of insane things about Tawantinsuyu but interesting because of that),

Aníbal Ponce (historian and critic of education, a big missing piece if people only look at European critical theory and some of his takes on it precede Paulo Freire),

Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is one of the greatest poems about the Caribbean)

José Revueltas (great analysis of the world significance of the Mexican Revolution and the repression of the social revolutionary elements of it),

Che Guevara of course (you’d be surprised how little Anglophone people actually read anything by him),

Walter Rodney (Groundings with my Brothers is a great book)

Pablo González Casanova (great sociologist, a lot of what he wrote goes well with Henri Lefebvre, influenced the EZLN),

Ruy Mauro Marini (one of the greatest dependency theorists, does a lot of interesting things with Marx’s Capital),

Beatriz Nascimento (one of the main theorists of the Movimiento Negro in Brazil and influenced a lot of the reassessment of maroons),

Michael Löwy (great for connecting critical theory, Latin American Marxism, and the concept of utopia),

Gustavo Esteva (critic of developmentalism and one of the better radical democracy theorists), René Zavaleta Mercado (also a great theorist of radical democracy),

Andaiye (formerly worked with Walter Rodney and influential for the development of feminist social reproduction theory),

Álvaro García Linera (one of the theorists who I think is the most consistent defending Lenin’s position on governance, for better or worse, and a meeting point between autonomist Marxism and indianismo), and

Aníbal Quijano (great work on the world historical significance of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas)

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (revolutionary decolonial theorist and critic of North American academic decolonial theory, has some very interesting interpretations of abstract labor and language)

Holding Firm

The banner you hold may change and flow but the great black bird will help you lift any you have above your head.

Melanistic Maned Wolf

Moss-mimic Bugs from Ecuador

All photos by Andreas Kay

1. Caterpillar, Saturniidae 2. Katydid, Championica sp. 3. Inchworm caterpillar, Geometridae 4. Stick insect, Trychopeplus thaumasius? 5. Grasshopper, Sciaphilacris sp. 6. Mantis, Pogonogaster latens? 7. Unidentified caterpillar 8. Katydid, Anaphidna sp.

fucked up in the club (reading all the wikipedia articles for indigenous north and south american dog breeds)

answering a couple questions i got on this post since i realized ppl genuinely wanna know:

tl;dr:

israel lets very, very little aid get into gaza. even the UN can't get in as much as they want to. funding individual families, gazan led initiatives, and mutual aid collectives operating out of gaza ensures gazans can provide for themselves and pay for the extremely expensive aid that is available.

with all the civil infrastructure destroyed by israel, the situation on the ground has devolved into unrestricted capitalism, driving up the price of aid (that should be free!). this makes it more urgent for people to have funding for daily survival.

the post linked above has examples of how donating to individual families can help a lot. if you want to help more than one family at a time, there are many gazan-led initiatives focusing on rebuilding their infrastructure and distributing aid fairly that are worth donating to instead of large charities that already get the majority of donations.

as i mentioned in the last post: @/careforgaza on twitter is a nonprofit started by gazans, it's been endorsed by multiple palestinian journalists.

the sameer project is a collective organized by diaspora palestinians offering emergency shelter to gazans.

ele elna elak is a project aiming to bring water, food, shelter, etc. to gazans and has been promoted by bisan owda.

and the municipality of gaza itself is fundraising to rebuild water infrastructure.

all of these organizations are active inside gaza right now and are being run by gazans. if anyone knows of other gazan-led mutual aid projects, nonprofits or charities feel free to link them in the notes! hope this helped!

long answers under the cut!

if you wanna donate to a charity that's absolutely fine, but the thing is most charities (and even the UN!) are unable to make it into gaza in the first place, leaving aid rotting at the egyptian side of the border or subject to israeli settler attacks

not to mention, charities and nonprofits also maintain a paternalistic colonial relationship with the indigenous people they are trying to help, determining what aid they need for them instead of returning power to them and letting them make their own choices

i'm not here to say that one option is better than the other, just that they achieve different things and are equally legitimate. there's an attitude among people who question the legitimacy of these gofundme campaigns that somehow the people promoting them are telling them not to donate to charities. nobody is stopping you from donating to charities. we are just asking that you do not dehumanize the very real gazans in your inbox just because their method of asking for aid is more direct and risky.

unfortunately that's exactly what has happened. because israel destroyed all of gaza's more formalized infrastructure, it seems that organized crime and rampant inflation has taken its place. aid is supposed to be free, but in order to save for evacuation or the cost of living, people have started selling them at an inflated price. and aid that is truly free attracts intense, large crowds that are dangerous to navigate.

this was posted on abc a few days ago

it's pure, unrestrained capitalism. i've had multiple palestinians describe this situation to me confidence. that's why everything's so expensive now. why people have to rent out tiny plots of land for their tents to sit on, why my friend @siraj2024 still has to buy tarps to cover the broken windows of the overpriced bombed out apartment he rented, and why a bag of flour can cost a thousand bucks in the north.

even before israel closed and then bombed the rafah crossing, the egyptian hala travel agency was only allowing people to cross the border if they paid a hefty $5000 USD per adult / $2500 USD per child bribe. it denies doing this, but the hundreds of stories from palestinians say otherwise.

with regard to the economy, here in america we saw something similar happen in the wake of hurricane helene and milton. the podcaster margaret killjoy describes how she saw dual economies rise after asheville was fully cut off from the rest of the country - some people offered each other supplies for free in a sort of mutual aid honor system, and some people required payment when they lent supplies because they themselves needed to buy stuff for their families. these dual economies exist in gaza too. and this means they all still need money to survive.

I love vague labels that make people go "but that's confusing" or "but that could mean anything" Good. Keep guessing lol

im proud to present my own little phasmid i just finished making! shes a special cryptid

The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that's really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that "I'm me! No! No!" as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course