[SpecialOlympian]

https://twitter.com/sahouraxo/status/1720113656992592088

We are in a murder/suicide pact with Israel and the only reason is that gerrymandering makes the most insane portions of the GOP electorate send people to Congress who literally believe that supporting Israel will bring about the end of the world.

And they think that Jesus coming back to cleanse the world in hellfire is a good thing and they are the good guys for speeding up warfare and genocide. We are getting nothing from our support of Israel except the masturbatory dreams of our most deranged and insanely religious weirdos in Congress.

The current Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, literally uses an app with his son to help them both monitor their porn usage. If the Speaker of the House jerks it to a video on PornHub titled "Stepmom With Greased Up Tits" his son gets an alert for it on his phone.

This is not a joke.

From the LA Times:

Covenant Eyes, which costs about $15 a month, takes one screenshot per minute, Wired reported last year in a story about what it called “anti-porn shameware,” which is a multimillion-dollar industry.

Johnson’s accountability partner, he said, was his teenage son Jack. Once a week, he said, he and Jack receive a report of what the other has been doing on his phone, laptop or tablet.

“If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice,” Johnson said. “It looks for keywords, search terms and also images. It’s really sensitive.” Johnson said he once got an alarm about Jack’s questionable internet usage involving a blurry image of two women. “I had to zoom in on it and unblur it,” Johnson said, “and it’s two middle-aged teachers.”

This is the consensus candidate of the GOP. Lmfao.

Mike Johnson is 51. I don't know what his white son's age is, but this is fucking creepy no matter if he's in his mid teens or his mid 20's. And a bible humper like Johnson absolutely did not wait to have children.

Mike Johnson also has an adopted black son he has never been pictured with. No wonder he was the GOP consensus candidate.

Just take my voice out of everything I've said, which is all 100% true and you can verify on your own. You don't have to agree with me or my politics. Just everything I've said is so insane, and independently verifiable, that you would think only the most fucked up and weird political party ever could possibly make this man their leader in one house of government.

He also successfully sued the state of Louisiana to help them fund a "museum" which is a "life size" version of Noah's Ark, complete with dinosaurs, because he is a Young Earth Creationist.

I hate Dems as mealy mouthed technocrats who don't want to help anyone without a marathon race of hurdles to be jumped over, but holy shit this guy is fucking insane and this is what the GOP could fucking agree on as a compromise candidate. Like what was the fucking disagreement? People who think the Flinstones were accurate vs. people who think 4,000 BC man living at the dawn of time rode velociraptors like horses?

[QatzelOk]

We are in a murder/suicide pact with Israel ...

Not to disagree with this point of yours, but what does it have to do with the blocade on Cuba? Is this part of the "murder" pact?

US Restricts Food Supplies in Dirty War on Cuba



The U.S. economic blockade of Cuba promotes food shortages and puts lives at risk. The U.S. public needs to know about, understand, and reject this blockade, its operation and impact. It’s no small task. The blockade proceeds automatically and quietly; human suffering is hidden.

Economic embargos are a form of war, writes commentator Nicholas Mulder, who adds that “voters in the sanction-imposing country are unlikely to observe or understand the full costs of sanctions on ordinary people abroad.”

Non-combatant victims of U.S. war-making in Gaza – the U.S. government supplies the big weapons – are on full display. Differences in scale and immediacy distinguish their plight from that of Cubans, whose supply of food and other necessities are precarious...

Killing people with sanctions or with non-stop bombing of their refugee camps... Is this really a "good look" for the biggest consumers of resources in human history (the West)?

[SpecialOlympian]

Not to disagree with this point of yours, but what does it have to do with the blocade on Cuba? Is this part of the "murder" pact

Nobody cares, nerd. The American government is a gerontracy. Nobody has given a shit about Cuba since the 60's. Which is why our Congress cares.

Open free trade with Cuba. I don't care what a bunch of old people in Congress think. Cuba won simply by continuing to exist.

And Cuba owns. They send doctors everywhere. I love that little Carribean island.

[QatzelOk]

Cuba won simply by continuing to exist.

And Cuba owns. They send doctors everywhere. I love that little Carribean island.

They also won by actually *caring* about one another, something that most imperial nations (like mine and yours) end up losing.

One a powerful nation convinces its citizens to "not care about the people we're killing," those same citizens stop caring about one another as well. And then the internal barbarism starts to exceed the external barbarism (but not by much).

[Dimetrodon]

The United States should really remove the sanctions from Cuba. I do find it anger inducing when older right-wing men act like Cuba is this massive threat to the American people.

And I do agree with the OP on this. It is a resilient country, that's for sure.

[QatzelOk]

The United States should really remove the sanctions from Cuba. I do find it anger inducing when older right-wing men act like Cuba is this massive threat to the American people.

And I do agree with the OP on this. It is a resilient country, that's for sure.

Even if Cuba was a really bad country, how would "starving people to death" improve things for them?

The sanctions say more about the USA than they do about Cuba, in the same way that a child's broken bones from parental disciplinary measures says more about the parents than they do about the misdeeds of the child.

[SpecialOlympian]

They also won by actually *caring* about one another, something that most imperial nations (like mine and yours) end up losing.

One a powerful nation convinces its citizens to "not care about the people we're killing," those same citizens stop caring about one another as well. And then the internal barbarism starts to exceed the external barbarism (but not by much).

American citizens largely don't care or realize their have no affect on US foreign policy, which is bad. They still care about people around them.

Like you're ascribing a lack of object permanence to an entire nation because of economics, which is just fumbling pieces of shit you learned in college into an essay that wouldn't get a C- on an Intro To English 101 class.

[QatzelOk]

American citizens largely don't care or realize their have no affect on US foreign policy, which is bad. They still care about people around them...

You mean they care about the people in the cars next to theirs?



I don't see this, and I grew up in different parts of North America. Perhaps you are imagining a "village" that doesn't exist anywhere in North America except in TV studios? The Brady Bunch type of Americans who have potato sack races and smile all the time while cracking jokes?

Replacing the real suburban world of parking lots and weight gain... with the simulated world of media fakeness... takes us farther and farther away from where we need to be (community and cooperation).

Perhaps the Cuban revolution's most important accomplishment was to prevent car culture from destroying all their communities.

[Tainari88]

You mean they care about the people in the cars next to theirs?



I don't see this, and I grew up in different parts of North America. Perhaps you are imagining a "village" that doesn't exist anywhere in North America except in TV studios? The Brady Bunch type of Americans who have potato sack races and smile all the time while cracking jokes?

Replacing the real suburban world of parking lots and weight gain... with the simulated world of media fakeness... takes us farther and farther away from where we need to be (community and cooperation).

Perhaps the Cuban revolution's most important accomplishment was to prevent car culture from destroying all their communities.

Well Q, let me sum up my commentary about Cubans in a city like Mérida Yucatán that has a lot of ties to Havana, Cuba. There are Cubans galore in this city. Sofia Rodriguez my lawyer for immigration stuff here has a lot of Cuban clients. I asked her what happens to the Cuban immigrants who arrive in Mexico and want to stay here? She answered succinctly...most of them go back to Cuba. I asked her what the reasons were for their return? She said, 'They miss their families. Badly. Their neighbors, their friends, the routine they had in Santiago or Trinidad or Camaguey or Santa Clara or La Habana, etc. They miss Cuba and the communities there. They are not Mexicans. They are not used to working hard for low wages, and rent pressures paying for rent every month, and having to go and start over in some new place. Immigration is hard for the Cubans. If they could bring their entire towns with them? They would make it in Mexico. Most of them do not like leaving behind their moms and dads and friend and siblings, and children. It is too much for them. All of them cry over their families Tainari. I got sick of telling them, Mexico is a free country. No communism here. You work your ass off and have to pay rent and bills for the rest of your life. You have to be educated and very very astute to make business work. But if you know nothing about banking, credit, capitalism and working and setting up micro businesses and you compete with other established Mexican families you will lose out on that. The USA is speaking English and expensive stuff. You have to go and fight it out for years in the cold and go and pay even higher rent over there than you do here.

All the past advantages that Cuban refugees got in the past are mostly gone. You will be competing for visas with the Venezuelans fleeing chaos in Venezuela. Poverty is everywhere. In Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, Guatemala. Capitalism or socialism it makes no difference. You have nothing to invest in our societies and you have a lot of economic hardship. Everyone is leaving a lack of social mobility and a lack of consuming and a lack of real paying jobs.

Sofia summed it up. I said nothing. I told her, the American Dream is waiting for them with racist rednecks in the USA thinking that the world revolves around buying a car and living in a boring cookie cutter suburb and that real family feelings and community life is about watching TV in the neighborhood block party.

Cubans have no fucking idea what life is like in many nations Q. They never lived there.

[QatzelOk]

...what happens to the Cuban immigrants who arrive in Mexico and want to stay here?

...most of them go back to Cuba. ... 'They miss their families. Badly. Their neighbors, their friends, the routine they had in Santiago or Trinidad or Camaguey or Santa Clara or La Habana, etc. They miss Cuba and the communities there. They are not Mexicans. They are not used to working hard for low wages, and rent pressures paying for rent every month, and having to go and start over in some new place. Immigration is hard for the Cubans. If they could bring their entire towns with them? They would make it in Mexico. Most of them do not like leaving behind their moms and dads and friend and siblings, and children. It is too much for them. All of them cry over their families...

When I left my comfortable suburban bungalow at age 18 to move to a slummy apartment in the city with neighbors and people all around me... I was so happy to finally "exist." Living in a suburban home made me feel like I was in suspended animation - isolated and kept away from other people.
And in the mid 1500s, French pirate Jacques Cartier kidnapped two Iroquian sons of Chief Donnacona and took them back to France to teach them French and literacy.

They came back and wrote similar things as your Cuban neighbors say about Mexico. They said that they couldn't believe how Europeans (in Paris) were willing to sacrifice friendship, kin and community in order to acquire gold.

Today, the only question is: How far will this sacrifice for gold go?

As I said, it's good for Cubans that Fidel kicked out the industrial mafia when he did or Cubans would be as lost and lonely as we are...

[Tainari88]

When I left my comfortable suburban bungalow at age 18 to move to a slummy apartment in the city with neighbors and people all around me... I was so happy to finally "exist." Living in a suburban home made me feel like I was in suspended animation - isolated and kept away from other people.
And in the mid 1500s, French pirate Jacques Cartier kidnapped two Iroquian sons of Chief Donnacona and took them back to France to teach them French and literacy.

They came back and wrote similar things as your Cuban neighbors say about Mexico. They said that they couldn't believe how Europeans (in Paris) were willing to sacrifice friendship, kin and community in order to acquire gold.

Today, the only question is: How far will this sacrifice for gold go?

As I said, it's good for Cubans that Fidel kicked out the industrial mafia when he did or Cubans would be as lost and lonely as we are...

I believe in balance Q. I think community and love of family and kin should be the core of all human societies. I also think that people if they want a new sofa or nice dishes or some little luxury items and normal things Q? They should be able to acquire that. You work and you can buy this or that. Nothing abnormal or exaggerated.

But the core of life should be human relationships.

Each person should develop themselves well. They should be able to get decent educations, and be able to work in a profession they like and chose for themselves, get paid enough to pay all their needs and save too for the future. Luxury items are not necessary but they should be able to travel and relax for a vacation after a stressful set of months on the job. Have security bendito. That is normal.

I grew up in Puerto Rico. The hurricanes and the chaos made the consumer lifestyle pushed on us kind of impossible Q. Now, my friends and relatives say the same thing about Puerto Rico. That the island has gotten a community feeling back that was eroding with the Costco and the Sam's Clubs and the consumerism. With the change in reliable electricity and high unemployment and expensive consumer costs people stopped doing that for a few years now. Now, there is far more communal kitchens and beach get togethers. The Boricuas with the love of community that was always there before....that was waning...is back.

In places like the Caribbean you can have that. In places like Siberia not really.

Here people when they think of Christmas they are always talking about sharing food and good times. No one talks about presents. Most families do not have that kind of consumption in general. Just a lot of tradition.

I love that about Latin American life. That sense of community. It is the main reason why I love living here.

[Unthinking Majority]

American citizens largely don't care or realize their have no affect on US foreign policy, which is bad. They still care about people around them.

Voting Biden vs Trump vs Liz Cheney vs Bernie Sanders is a choice with yuge consequences.

[Unthinking Majority]

And Cuba owns. They send doctors everywhere. I love that little Carribean island.

Except that they're slaves.

[Unthinking Majority]

When I left my comfortable suburban bungalow at age 18 to move to a slummy apartment in the city with neighbors and people all around me... I was so happy to finally "exist." Living in a suburban home made me feel like I was in suspended animation - isolated and kept away from other people.

You should have tried opening the door and walking down the street. Growing up I had many friends on my street, we played together, had sleepovers, built forts...

And in the mid 1500s, French pirate Jacques Cartier kidnapped two Iroquian sons of Chief Donnacona and took them back to France to teach them French and literacy.

Link or this is a lie.

Anyways...

[Rancid]

You mean they care about the people in the cars next to theirs?



I don't see this, and I grew up in different parts of North America. Perhaps you are imagining a "village" that doesn't exist anywhere in North America except in TV studios? The Brady Bunch type of Americans who have potato sack races and smile all the time while cracking jokes?

Replacing the real suburban world of parking lots and weight gain... with the simulated world of media fakeness... takes us farther and farther away from where we need to be (community and cooperation).

Perhaps the Cuban revolution's most important accomplishment was to prevent car culture from destroying all their communities.

Did you pick that image intentionally?

Tamiami Trail is a road that cuts from the west coast of Florida around Naples to the east coast right through into downtown Miami. Tamiami trail becomes 8th street (or Calle Ocho as the locals call it). Calle Ocho is at the heart of Little Havana. Hence, my question. It's an image with a relation to the topic of this thread.

[Unthinking Majority]

@QatzelOk has a point about community and human interaction. However, when I was a child everyone on my street had a car but they all also had children, and our families all interacted with each other, mainly because all the kids wanted to play with each other.

So maybe the issue is also that people don't have many or any children anymore to bring people together for interactions.

[Tainari88]

@QatzelOk has a point about community and human interaction. However, when I was a child everyone on my street had a car but they all also had children, and our families all interacted with each other, mainly because all the kids wanted to play with each other.

So maybe the issue is also that people don't have many or any children anymore to bring people together for interactions.

UM, Cuban culture is warm and communal and family oriented. It is very gregarious in general. It is African influenced and also Spanish and has an Indigenous part as well. Latin America has those three different cultures mixing for centuries. Indian, African and European.

Cuba is not an exception to that rule.

Cubans are not slaves at all. They are educated people. Very few Cubans are illiterate for example. The vast majority read and write well and have at least 12 years of schooling. That is not common in many nations of South America and Central America. I have met and interacted with a lot of Cubans over my lifetime. The ones that lived in Miami, the ones who lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the ones who lived in Mexico here in Mérida, Yucatán too. The big issue for them is they want to have a middle class life. A nice house, a new car, a job that pays them well, and ambitions of travel and position. That is a very hard thing to find in Cuba. Most consumer goods are highly restricted and sold in dollar stores and so on.

A typical Cuban is a person who reads and writes a lot, and who knows their math, science, and social studies, history and can be either rural or urban. They are used to not consuming much. They are used to long lines for coffee, or sugar, or bread or chicken or beans or rice, or something. They are well developed musicians, or intellectuals, scientists, or artists, or whatever passion they have in life to pursue. But, they can be waiters or taxi drivers and they have advanced degrees in biology or in economics.

Again, they do not consume. They do not get to go to a big box store and pile things up in the car and go and consume at home. They live with the bare minimum and always have to get creative to live.

So, they are well developed individuals with NO MONEY, NO ABILITY TO BUY A DAMN THING. They are also used to living with many other people, socializing a lot, and going to sports events, cultural events and giving their opinions on different subjects. They avoid dealing with the government.

Cuba is very safe. There are no mass gang shootings over drug dealing traffic points in Cuba. No one I know from Cuba says to me, the drug kingpins are having shootouts in the street and hanging their victims from bridges, like it happens in bordertowns in Mexico. Stealing from tourists and or kidnapping people for ransome is something that does not happen in Cuba either.

People do not have new cars and traffic jams are non existent with cars like Q posted. That generally does not happen in Cuba either.

What do people want to change in Cuba. They want the young people to be able to practice their chosen professions without having to kiss ass to some Pro Revolution committee, criticize the government without being worried about being tagged as subversives, and having freedom to read, write and express themselves openly without any worry about being challenged by the government representatives.

They want to make enough money to buy new furniture, and have normal trade relationships with the rest of the world. They want access to credit to build small businesses and to be able to travel internationally without worrying about how to pay for it.

They want development that is sustainable. They want better medical facilities and supplies. They want to be allowed to trade openly with the entire world. In agriculture they want to be able to have modern but sustainable and efficient distribution of the food produced in Cuba.

Culturally they are doing well. The music, dance, literature, and art of Cuba travels well in South America, Central America, Spain, Italy, France, etc.

They want to see Cuba being able to give all those educated Cubans who do not have crazy violent crime and crazy desperate begging and gig jobs as you see in Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, etc. a way of living a middle-class life.

They want a middle-class life as they see in the movies from the USA and Canada that is sold to them as the normal life of people of the USA and Canada.

Rarely do they understand that often not even in the USA or Canada people who are born and raised in the USA and Canada get a middle class life. There are a lot of people who do not own their own home, and who are not given automobile loans to buy a car or lease a car due to not enough credit.

Mexico has a lot of stores of all sorts, Coppel from Canada, Sears, El Palacio de Hierro, Liverpool, Costco, Walmart, Sam's Club, etc. Many Mexicans can't buy shit either because their wages are low and you can only pay basic expenses and nothing left for consumption.

Life is not a bed of roses in Latin America financially. But each nation is unique and has certain problems what has to do with their history, their economic structures and policies, and their international relationships and how they are treated by the international financial institutions and the USA and the EU and Russia and the PRC too.

Low wages and bad economic situations leads to masses of immigration from Latin America to Canada and to the USA. If you do not want that kind of mass immigration the logical thing is to make sure the other nations in Latin America have the best shot possible at creating good paying jobs and stable communities that can give a middle class life to a good chunk of those populations.

Cuba has a lot of literacy and a lot of people reading books and writing and doing art and doing stuff. They are not a society with high illiteracy and huge groups of people who are living hand to mouth with armies of beggars. That is not Cuba.

Each society needs to deal with the salient issues it goes through every single day of their nationally shared experiences by their own citizens and prescribe solutions according to those contexts.

But, YOU saying Unthinking Majority that the Cubans are slaves or some derogatory thing? It is not true.

The Cubans love deeply and they are very human and warm people. They listen. They are people who have suffered and who struggle for their existence every day. Like many others in Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, Chile, Venezuela, El Salvador, etc.

There are many people who have so many great things in common. Yet, a small group of very unethical and greedy people use politics to stop progress for others. In mutual cooperation and mutual working together without any kind of need to step on the other cultures and nations dignity and respect....anything that is wonderfully improving can be achieved.

It starts with humanizing the other group of people. Because they are human. They deserve again universal human rights.

[Unthinking Majority]

But, YOU saying Unthinking Majority that the Cubans are slaves or some derogatory thing? It is not true.

If you live and work in Cuba and aren't allowed to leave the island by the government to go live and work in another country then yes you are a slave. That's why so many Cubans have had to defect to other countries or flee across the channel to Florida to escape.

Cuba has recently loosened some of these rules, especially since Fidel's death, which is good.

[wat0n]

Chile hosted the Pan American games earlier this year, some Cuban athletes defected and are requesting asylum. Why?

https://english.elpais.com/internationa ... games.html

[KurtFF8]

If you live and work in Cuba and aren't allowed to leave the island by the government to go live and work in another country then yes you are a slave. That's why so many Cubans have had to defect to other countries or flee across the channel to Florida to escape.

Cuba has recently loosened some of these rules, especially since Fidel's death, which is good.

Cubans are allowed to leave the country, this is just false.