Tyler Shipley

Man someone's gotta do something about cheese packaging, I shouldn't be this banged up from trying to access a block of marble cheddar

Truly a society humiliating itself, completely enslaved to a logic of capital (which it doesn't even fully understand because it is too terrified of its critics to actually read and understand them). Language models will (obviously) write garbage and (less obviously I guess) not support profits.

Liberals are so hard-wired to follow the rules that Trump says anything and they just do it, "stop measuring presidential approval" "ok" like they are constitutionally incapable of saying "nah fuck you man" no wonder they hate protestors so much

Since it would be simple to plan around this, and since Canadian airlines already have been doing this for years, the question is why are they cancelling these lucrative flights now? It is adverse to their material interests. The only explanation that makes sense is that they have been directed.

The only thing that is a stretch is the notion that Canadian airlines are somehow unable to plan their routes to refuel at other stops besides Cuba. Every other airline is able to do this. Do you think that planes refuel every time they land? Planes often make several flights between refuelling.

Cancelling flights is far worse business, and Canadian airlines carry enough fuel that they don't need to refuel in Cuba anyway. Airlines from other countries have found workarounds, not out of charity, just bc it's still business. Cdn airlines wouldn't cut themselves out unless they were directed.

Speaking of acquiescence, Canadian airlines are now cancelling all flights to Cuba, obviously at the direction of the Carney govt. Other airlines are making fuel arrangements, but Canada is going the extra mile in helping Trump starve Cuban people and destroy their revolution.

1000%

I support the Cuban Revolution because it still carries the possibility of hope, and because hope is hard to come by in this moment. Every time the empire chokes out another beacon of hope, they set back the timeline for the better world I desperately want to experience in my lifetime.

All of that said, we have to draw lines to distinguish between anti-imperialism and rival imperialism. The Russian state is not anti-imperialist, it is a rival imperial bloc, and there is no reason to believe that a successful rival imperialism would be any better than the current world order.

Even if I had qualms about Venezuela's trajectory after Chávez died, I still think the path to a just world got more difficult when Trump kidnapped Maduro and seized Venezuelan oil. A weak/flawed Cuban Revolution still gives me more hope than a defeated one (and is significantly better for Cubans).

But I also think we need to critically support past, existing, and future socialist projects with energy and enthusiasm, because unchecked imperial power - as Trump is illustrating - will destroy everything in its field of vision.

I can't get behind that position. I accept that the Cuban Revolution has been flawed (and that the Soviet Union absolutely devolved into a corrupt bureaucratic mess) and that we should be systematically analyzing these mistakes so that we can always make the next revolutionary moment more effective.

And even if the Cuban Revolution made other revolutions in Latin America (from Venezuela to Bolivia to Guatemala to Nicaragua) possible. And even if Cuba played a key role in the defeat of Aparthied. And even if Cuban doctors cared for people in the poorest places where no other care was available.

One camp of the left would say that the Cuban Revolution didn't go deep enough and shouldn't be celebrated by the left. They would also insist that the Soviet Union should be denounced and we should disavow any connection to it, even if its presence made the Cuban Revolution possible.

Cuba has struggled since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s. The existence of the USSR meant that Cuba had access to resources that the US wouldn't allow it, and some protection from further interference and intervention from the US. Today, Trump has a free hand to rain destruction.

Cuban socialism has had flaws, many of them along the way, some that were addressed and some that undermined its liberatory project. But it remained a beacon of hope for people who desperately want to believe that a different world is possible and we don't have to succumb to the reality around us.

Communist Cuba actively helped revolutionary movements succeed all over the world. Most famously (but only one example) Cubans travelled to Angola to help protect that country from an invasion by the racist Aparthied govt of South Africa (which had western imperial backing of course.)

The Cuban Revolution in the 1950s came as a shock to US arrogance and power and the fact that it survived so many attempts to overthrow it made in an inspirational example for anti-colonial struggles across the colonized world in the 20th century. And Cuba did more than just inspire revolutions.

This brings me back to Cuba. Cubans were fighting a revolution in the 1890s against Spanish colonialism, and were on the brink of victory when the US swept in, finished off the Spanish, and claimed Cuba for themselves. Cuba was taken as a playground for the American rich (a pre-Epstein island).

Those who reserve their support for genuinely socialist states obviously don't have much to support these days besides spontaneous mobilizations of people opposed to their governments, and spend a lot of their energy criticizing the states they perceive as inadequately socialistic (eg. Venezuela.)

Few leftists actually hold to those extreme positions but most of us are pulled towards one or the other tendency. It's not an easy problem to solve. Those who support any opposition to the US will often wrongheadedly back regimes like those in Russia or Iran that are deeply reactionary and harmful.

The North American left has been torn in the last decade between two tendencies - at their extremes, one group supports any state that opposes US imperial power no matter its internal dynamics, the other group is deeply skeptical of anything that isn't a perfect, fully-formed socialist movement.

The United States - with acquiescence and support from Canada and other allies - is seeking to murder millions of Cubans and destroy the Revolution that has carried and embodied so many of our aspirations for a just world. This is effectively genocide and must be stopped.

Interrogating the gender of my washing machine like JK Rowling

Crazy thing about learning the French language is needing to know if a telephone is a girl or boy

The big tech founder whose 417-foot, $500 million superyacht needs a 256-foot, $75 million superyacht to "shadow" it -- because the bigger yacht lacks a helipad -- had to cut his paper's newsroom almost in half, for reasons

All this disaster, just so students can cheat on their assignments

I'm sure there's some heinous shit I don't know about Firefox, but don't tell me right now because I'm switching all my browsers

Absolutely bloodcurdling headline. This is the Canada they want to protect; you ought to be disgusted by it.