Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.

Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.

Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.

On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a “persona non grata” and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the “Rodney Riots”, which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.

In 1972, Rodney published “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: “A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters.”

On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a “Commission of Inquiry” in Guyana that the country’s then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.

“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.”

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  • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    I saw a fucking hilarious comment on Reddit that said the only way to fix the housing crisis in Ireland was to wait for Putin to die. That’s the only solution. It turns out all landlords and vulture companies are actually Putin

    • DayOfDoom [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      “If you remove the Russian Army tomorrow and hoist the blellow flag over Kyiv Fortress, unless you set about the organization of the Liberal Republic your efforts will be in vain. Russia will still rule you. He would rule you through his socialists, through his landlords, through his financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions he has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

      -James “Epic Redditor” Connolly

  • buh [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    youtube sharts keeps trying to recommend jordan peterson videos to my dad but he immediately scrolls past because “his voice is annoying” michael-laugh

  • stigsbandit34z [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    I think large-adult-son said it best a long time ago. Sports should be a reward for a society that takes care of its own citizens

    This thought brought to you by fuck March madness gang. these college players are experiencing one of the highest forms of exploitation in not getting a single penny of the billions made off this dumbass event

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Someone who is good at tongues should tell me if this means that owls were not local to whatever region this language developed in and that’s why they hace a compound word instead of their own name.

      • bendan [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        My guess, pandas are also named this way, 熊猫 xióngmāo “bear cat”, but that could be because it’s a rare animal people weren’t talking much about, or that it historically was found in or beyond the southern regions that spoke different dialects or languages. But owls actually exist literally everywhere except the ice caps 🤷

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          Sussy ice caps what are their secrets?

          I bet those "proto indo european linguistic larping nerds have theories about how new words develop over time.

          Afaik we’ve only had cats pushing things off counters for ten thousand years, but ten thousand years is a really long time.

    • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      I have no idea how building a new PC works.

      Well, maybe I still don’t, but I recently saw someone doing just that with their own desktop PC and… Holy shit, all you do is just plug in the parts?

      Wtf?

      It looks soooooooooo easy.

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        Holy shit, all you do is just plug in the parts?

        Yeah. Things have been pretty fool-proof since the late 90s. Every hardware interface has its own slot, so generally if you buy the wrong parts, they simply won’t fit, rather than catching on fire. You need to take care when choosing parts to ensure you’re not wasting money on something which will be constrained by a bottleneck elsewhere (i.e. 64GB of RAM for a CPU which only supports 32), but even then it’s likely to work in a degraded state.

        Actually building the thing is probably the easiest (though time consuming) part. OS installation, tracking down the right device drivers and configuring everything is probably more complicated, though even this is a lot easier than it used to be.

    • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      It can compile Firefox in 6 minutes 20 seconds.

      sicko-power you have become the real target audience for Gentoo. I’m glad I know enough about Linux to admire fast compile speeds.

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      It can compile Firefox in 6 minutes, 20 seconds.

      Holy fuck, what unholy sacrifices are PC processor designers making to get this kind of performance

      I can’t even build Firefox on my fav machines and architectures anymore cuz it and Rust needs at least 4 gb of RAM to even build. I have hardware from the last few years that doesn’t have that much :(

      Anyway, I’ll just be here with my irrelevant and mostly-forgotten PowerPC Macs, SGI MIPS machine, and also my Pinebook Pro which I’m not using and regret buying lol chomsky-yes-honey

      • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        what unholy sacrifices are PC processor designers making to get this kind of performance

        Bit idea: QAnon for computer architecture nerds

        Just need to find a former-MIPS-engineer-turned-college-professor or someone similar to pill…

  • CrispyFern [fae/faer, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    space madness, deep sea madness, cave madness. Really the only place you can’t get madness is right on land in the safety of your home.

    second-plane I am being informed of something called “cabin fever” scared

  • HarryLime [any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Ten years ago, we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs…

    Now we don’t have any Cash, no Hope, and no Jobs.

    Please don’t let Kevin Bacon die!

  • robinn_IV@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Sent my econ teacher an (admittedly long) email about a lesson. The next class he pulled me aside and asked if I wanted him to read it. YES THAT IS WHY I SENT YOU THE EMAIL.

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    A lib on my timeline posted the poem “voting as fire extinguisher”

    In response to a thread about how even if you hate the west, a collapse of the American empire will be very bad for everyone and it will disproportionately affect third worlders and the marginalized and so you should fight to stave off collapse… by voting for democrats.

    And all I can think is that the joke there is that the fire extinguisher is empty. More than that, it was never filled in the first place. The company tasked with making them realized it’d be cheaper to make cans in the shape of extinguishers but without the fire removedant.

    For one, it should be obvious that everyone in the political class is beholden to the corporate and military interests that actually govern the nation. Two, even if that weren’t true, and Joe Biden or name any other democrat here genuinely wanted to stop the far-right, they just clearly aren’t the men for the moment. They are not going to, by force of will, alter the historical epoch that is unfolding. They don’t believe in anything enough to even try.

    Lastly, if America is collapsing, then the collapse began long ago. I might suggest the War in Afghanistan as the start, but I’m no historian. Even if Biden wanted to stop it, even if he was the man for the moment, the moment’s long past.