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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Just how much has Bongbong Marcos’ propaganda fucked up the Philippine people?

    I’ve talked to people from the Philippines who say that the Marcos family has made several propaganda movies of themselves, showing themselves as “regular people” (albeit with shittons of jewels and shoes way out of reach of the average Filipino) and benevolent leaders under Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship.

    This is the same Ferdinand that killed and tortured all his opposition with US support, and robbed ~$7 billion from the Philippines Central Bank when he was finally kicked out to Hawaii.











  • By ‘neighbor’, I presume you’re referring to UC Berkeley (hereon referred to as Cal).

    No radical ML organizations will officially form clubs at any university, even radical ones like Cal. Some orgs may meet on-campus, but it will be off-the-book. Any real work will be done in the wider community (e.g. Oakland) and not on-campus.

    This is due to university administrations’ historic hostilities toward student movements. For instance, the Free Speech Movement at Cal certainly was not organized through official school channels. In fact, university admin had banned all political activities and fundraising until students forced them to concede by chaining their doorknobs, locking them inside the admin buildings (which is why today all the doors on campus have only 1 doorknob to prevent chaining again).

    I would also warn that most UCs today in California have almost no radical energy anymore. After Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966, he brought in the National Guard to beat up students, shut down UC and Cal State campuses, and steadily cut public funding toward said schools to prevent the formation of a dangerous “educated proletariat” (his words, see here). California state schools were previously almost free, so this drop in funding forced them to charge more and more tuition, pricing out poorer students. This has caused a steady gentrification in students at the UCs. Today, most Cal students have affluent backgrounds (median family income = $119,900), compared to the 1960s when most were low-income (NYTimes). I think all the UCs have this problem (median income +$100k) except for UC San Diego, Riverside, and Merced (median income 60-80k)

    Any radicalism left in Cal today is due to the leftism of the city of Berkeley, not the UC.