mycorrhiza they/them

fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens

Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.

Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

Hot take but I also dig creative brutalist buildings like Boston City Hall and the Boston Government Services Building. I just like how permanent it looks, like cold war architects were reminding people to think of the future. But I’m probably in the minority.

It would be cool to spend some of my time gardening and landscaping to make the community look better. Having greenery around me and seeing public spaces that look cared for and lived in always puts me in a better mood. For that matter, we could bring back some of the skilled decorative trades and start embellishing buildings with stone and wood carving, tile work, tapestries, rugs, relief sculptures, and stuff like that. Maybe we could develop some new aesthetics instead of copying ostentatious old buildings. I just like when you can tell someone put attention and time into a building, and it’s not all disposable prefab that will get torn down in twenty years.

They are also working. They are performing skilled, useful labor that actively benefits other people. A landlord is not. Working a side job unrelated to landlording does not suddenly make landlording a job that deserves pay.

Your boss works one regular day a week and covers the occasional shift for a sick employee, but the rest of his income comes from the labor of his tenants and employees. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. I’ve had nice bosses and landlords. But there’s a pretty unequal exchange of labor here. With surgeons and most other high-paid workers, the high wage pays for student loans and years of unpaid student labor.

Your mother’s tenants paid for your undergrad, and their kids probably took out student loans.