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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

    — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)





  • This feels like celebrating a neighborhood burning cause you got mugged once when walking through it.

    Then you and I have very different conceptions of a neighborhood. Neighborhoods contain humans and are good and bad as a correlate to their good or bad effect on people’s lives. Companies contain products and are good or bad based on how well they do or don’t serve the profit of shareholders.

    Moreover a company facing consequences for giving all of its power to a fascist intent on literally funnelling the world’s wealth to himself and turning us back to feudalism is not merely symbolic, especially since his wealth is still tied to it. Sucks to suck. They could’ve dumped him with the Cybertruck.

    Lastly, though bankrupting a company isn’t merely symbolic in this case, symbolic retribution is not worthless. If we made effigies of these people and executed them, lit them on fire, and dragged them through the streets, there would be real effects. The coalescing of the people’s anger, the fear of those who were burned in effigy, whatever steps that would be taken in response. Symbolic acts have power.