cabbage

Since we’re on a decentralized service, you won’t see every post of a user unless you go to their profile on their instance. You’re responding to a Mastodon user, so most of her posts will be invisible to you because Lemmy does not support microblogging. It’s a bit of a confusing quirk on the Fediverse - you always have to visit people’s own instance in order to see their full profile.

A quick look on Mastodon discloses that she’s been posting punk and anti-fascist content for years. :)

“HUDUDIDOO DE DAA DE DOO! HODEE DEE HOO!!!”

“Oh, yes, the beautiful song of the sirens”

One relevant fun fact is that the French constitution started out in one of those tennis courts, as the founders were prevented from meeting in a more suitable space.

Where I live I can pick up amazing stuff for free from recycling stations all over the city. Incredible old items keep popping up there more or less every day as people get rid of their old solid wood furniture in order to replace it with something more fashionable from IKEA.

A man whose allegience is ruled by expedience.

Tom Lehrer is sadly ever relevant.

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department”
Says Werner Von Braun

A man whose allegience is ruled by expedience.

Tom Lehrer is sadly ever relevant.

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department”
Says Werner Von Braun

If you’re this principled you should be boycotting Amazon anyway. If you’re not, give the driver $5 if it costs you nothing.

For sure, the American left were blue eyed in regards to what was happening in the Soviet Union during McCarthyism. I just find it hard to judge them too harshly for that, considering their experience of being prosecuted at home for no good reason, and their first hand experience of how American capitalists wage a full-on war against organized labour.

My way into Guthrie’s thinking is through the songs he wrote, and what emerges through that is a man who absolutely has his heart and brain in the right place. I have no doubt he had his shortcomings as a human, as we all do.

At the height of McCarthyism, I think anyone would be a fool to believe anything told by the American government or official narratives.

Unlike Pete Seeger, who died in 2014, Guthrie died in 1967 with Huntington’s disease so severe he hadn’t been able to talk for a good while when he died. It’s also a fact that Huntington’s disease affects your mental state, and Guthrie did to some degree go crazy before he died. He got the disease from his mother, and her reaction to the illness is the origin of the family tragedies that made it so natural for Guthrie to write about his hard travelling.

There’s also accounts Guthrie was a real jerk in the final years, which again can be attributed to Huntington’s disease.

As for Korea, America had no fucking business there.

Scotland and Norway have the right to roam, where there are land owners but they do not have the right to keep you off their land. As far as I’m concerned that’s the bare minimum for a decency, even though it’s a long shot from communism.

But Guthrie was a communist. This was before Stalinism and a lot of the bad connotations given to communism since - I doubt he would have embraced much of what have happened in the name of communism. But he was a union man.

Yup.

He did not believe in expensive private property rights.

This land is your land.

Wikipedia cites the book Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein as a source, but a bit via via. Seems legit though.

How is it hard to be nice about this? What a weird take. Sharing music is so great it’s hard not to be nice about it.

Not to forget the verse about property rights:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, saying “private property”
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me

Arlo is also notourious for his recording of The City of New Orleans. He didn’t write it, but he made it famous, and it has since been recorded by just about everyone.

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

— Woody Guthrie on copyright

I’d recommend all Americans to check out the verses they don’t teach you in school.

There’s several versions, but they go something like this:

One Sunday morning in the shadow of a steeple  
By the relief office I saw my people  
As they stood hungry, I stood there asking  
Was this land made for you and me?  

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me  
Sign was painted, saying "private property" 
But on the back side it didn't say nothing  
That side was made for you and me  

Shipping out to Boston is not even forgotten in the taperoom - in all likelihood Guthrie never recorded it.

There’s a bunch of songs Guthrie wrote but never recorded. His estate keeps track of all of them, recorded or not, on woodyguthrie.org.

Wilco teamed up with singer Billy Bragg to release three volumes of previously unreleased Guthrie songs under the title Mermaid Avenue. They’re amazing albums.

One of the most interesting songs, and related to this post, is titled “All You Fascists”. After the release of the Wilco version in 2000, they discovered a wartime Guthrie recording from the BBC, so we now have access to the original as well. But the cover version was released first.

The whole Mermaid Avenue series is worth a spin. Lots of fun upbeat stuff as well, not only about defeating fascism.

I agree the quote is not a particularly good addition, and the framing of “what happened” would be better answered by just telling people what happened. I just think it’s good to call on people to rethink economic structures, though arguably a Hayek quote foreshadowing crypto might not be the best way of doing it.

It’s a site compiling a bunch of random graphs explaining how the American economy went to shot after the end of Bretton Woods, despite most Americans not realizing and living on as if their country still cares about them?

I don’t see the libertarian angle here so much. To me this is all speaking for Keynesian economics if anything.