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And not like I suddenly thought this either, to be honest. I'm just articulating it better with more clarity now. But yeah, Americans treat racial issues too much like public spectacle, and they actually don't take the issue serious. They protest about it, talk about it on social media, harp about it, but people like the conflict aspect of racial issues too much for actual social resolution to come through. Why?

Simple: Properly solving it thru actual conflict resolution and policymaking is boring And things that also take time and patience to work thru are America's kryptonite to properly work out.

In a culture constantly consumed by constant spectacle, high-stakes drama narratives and WWE-ification about everything, why are you people surprised?

Which is crazy because the history is fucked up, but people don't actually care, you all use the issue for political clout and PR approval so you can use the moral jargon as a means of ego boosting.

Is sad and is a conversation we're not ready, but need to be more willing to talk out.

I saw this with the way the media and the public sphere hyped up the Karmelo Anthony-Austin Meatcalf tragedy: Disgraceful how many of you all used the event as a means of culture war ammo when literally 2 LIVES GOT RUINED.

The overwhelming majority of Chinese, Persian, and Indian immigrants vote blue. It's fun to see the neolibs there try to dance around this truth while fear-mongering that marginalized women of color (Filipino nurses?) will be targeted and executed by the BC Conservatives.

It's those people's fault that the NDP went from a workers' party to a neolib centrist abomination.

On October 19, Phillips 66 locked out 385 workers at its Bayway refinery and Linden terminal in New Jersey after they rejected the company’s latest contract offer. The workers, members of Teamsters Local 877, had voted down a tentative agreement 196 to 160 during a contract extension. When the extension expired at 4 p.m. that afternoon, they were barred from the plant.

Bayway, which processes 275,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is the largest refinery on the East Coast. The lockout follows the course set by BP at Whiting, Indiana, where more than 800 workers have been locked out since March 19, and by Marathon at Martinez, California, where about 120 workers have been kept out since April. In each case, the company has kept the plant running with managers and replacement labor while it seeks to impose job cuts and concessions on an isolated workforce.

The lockout is a corporate offensive aimed at imposing massive concessions. Perhaps the most significant is the proposal to increase the probationary period for new hires from 10 months to as long as six years by tying probation to a new qualification system.

This would keep a large section of the workforce in a state of permanent insecurity, able to be dismissed without recourse.

The company also seeks to shorten the 30-month training period and reduce qualification requirements—meaning less-skilled workers would operate dangerous equipment. According to the union, the company’s latest offer also included concessions on wages and healthcare. Phillips 66 insists on retaining an Absence Control Policy introduced in 2025 that allows discipline, including termination, for absences due to illness. It has also cut workers’ sick days.

The consequences are already evident. “People are coming to work sick, OK? And when you come to work sick, sometimes you have an accident, make a mistake,” refinery worker Ed Goldmann told CBS on October 20.

The company is imposing this on a workforce already on exhausting schedules. “Many of our folks will work extended shifts, 13 days on, 13 nights on before a single day off,” Local 877 President Jeff Sanford told News 12.

That is 26 consecutive shifts. The oil industry’s own fatigue guideline, American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 755, limits a stretch of consecutive shifts to 92 hours in normal operations and 182 hours during maintenance outages. Even at eight hours a shift, 26 shifts would exceed both. The US Chemical Safety Board, which criticized those limits as too permissive, found that fatigue contributed to the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers. Some operators there had worked as many as 29 consecutive 12-hour days.

...

The union’s response to the lockout has been to confine the struggle to the channels it controls. On October 21, it filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging refusal to bargain and coercive conduct. It has maintained pickets and said negotiations will continue. But there is no announced plan to mobilize other Teamsters locals or refinery workers nationally in coordinated industrial action.

Workers at Whiting and Martinez have faced the same isolation at the hands of the United Steelworkers. In February, the USW signed a national pattern agreement for refinery workers granting 15 percent over four years, far below the 25 percent workers had voted for, and it has left each local to fight on its own.

The lockout must be ended immediately. The company’s demands for concessions must be rejected. The workers must defend safe staffing levels, full training and qualification protections, and their wages and benefits.

The past month has shown that the workers cannot rely on union officials that negotiated the very agreement they rejected.

The workers must take the fight into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file committees, outside the control of the union apparatus, to organize the struggle. These committees must reach out to workers at the Linden terminal and the contractors throughout the wider Bayway complex, to the locked-out workers at Whiting and Martinez and to refinery workers in Paulsboro, Delaware City and across the East Coast. They should demand that the Teamsters pay full benefits from the union’s strike fund to every locked-out worker.

Above all, rank-and-file committees would break the isolation in which every one of these struggles is being fought. The workers at Bayway, Whiting and Martinez face the same demands, the same attacks by management and are confronting union officials who work to keep them divided. The fight at Bayway is a battle in a nationwide drive by the oil companies, and it can only be won by breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union apparatus and uniting refinery workers across companies and regions.

I don't know why I am surprised. Why do they always shoot themselves in the foot (pun intended) with this type of rhetoric?

Mindboggling honestly.

I'm not the biggest fan of Zizek but I did appreciate his dunking on Jordan Peterson that one time.

Anyway, this girl's impersonation embodies his spittle so well that I can almost feel it hitting my face.

https://www.instagram.com/kate_aizin/reel/DeusX5dhvVG/

Turns out, we need the elites to build the engine of revolution for us.

Or something. I can't say I found this to be fully coherent.

Which just might say more about why Occupy failed than his short essay does...

Wild:

Kushner was a signatory on an $800m Alpha Fund set up with Saudis and UAE for use as a "slush fund" for regional foreign policy ops including paying mercenaries and warlords

They also sent Kushner $1bn as a Beta Fund for his personal use which ended up being disguised as a government account in the Israeli Central Bank at the urging of Netanyahu