tbh, their funtion isn’t all that objectionable. Mixed use buildings are cool and good, actually. But the fact that they’re made of cardboard and duct tape, look like ass, and are signifiers of gentrification are what suck about them.

I don’t think it’s that complicated

:3

“The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

• Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

This is pretty straightforwardly an accelerationist tactic. It might not have been called that at the time, but strategically pushing crises over the tipping point, in order to take advantage of their fallout, wasn’t invented by the boogaloo boys in 2017.

Mao and Stalin (though to a noticably lesser extent) actually had insightful things to say though. Mao’s essays on epistemology are genuinely really fantastic. And that can be true alongside all of the show trials and sparrow murder which was genuinely really fucking bad.

Pol Pot meanwhile admitted to never having really ever read Marx, and his faction of the Communist Party of Cambodia was more concerned about Khmer ultranationalism and anti-Vietmamese sentiment that had been brewing over the course of French colonialism, then with anything to do with building socialism.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that we ought to take a nuanced, grounded view of historic socialisms that accounts for their success and failures, and doesn’t fall into either mindless exoneration of awful shit, nor reflexively screeching “TANKIE TANKIE!!!” Every time anything vaguely socialist oriented comes up in discussion.

They do that because of Firefox goes, Google is open to being trust busted. Killing Firefox would be literal suicide for Google

Watching major social media websites actively kill themselves has been nothing if not an experience