Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The owner of OnlyFans took home a hefty paycheck last year. Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman, received more than $338 million in dividends in 2022, according to financial statements filed by the adult-content platform’s parent company, UK-based Fenix International Ltd, and obtained by PEOPLE. Radvinsky’s nine-figure bonus equates to roughly $1.3 million for each of the 260 working days in 2022 (tinyurl.com/7kax535y).

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It is no good targeting isolated faults within this society and attempting to fix them one by one. Many of its core structures, procedures, assumptions and values are mistaken and the focus must be on replacing the system with one that does not generate the present range of problems leading us to destruction. A satisfactory alternative must be some form of simpler way. We will get nowhere unless and until this is widely understood and willingly accepted (tinyurl.com/2tkr49fx).

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A harsh custom courses through rural China. If a woman marries a man from outside her village, she becomes a waijianü, or “married-out daughter”. Tradition deems married-out women can be stripped of their rights to land that legally belongs to them. The Communist Party came to power promising to emancipate women from feudalism. Today, the collective financial losses suffered by married-out women are growing (tinyurl.com/bdfkrjre).

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Almost thirty years after the end of formal apartheid ANC rule has come to a point of economic devastation with unemployment at over 40% and youth unemployment at over 70%. There has been no significant land reform. Hunger is endemic, there is pervasive violence, crises in schools and health care, collapsing electricity, water, rail and port systems, corruption on a staggering scale and ruthless political repression of struggles for urban land (tinyurl.com/4sz7kah7).

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Danish film-maker and provocateur Lars von Trier has defended himself from backlash after writing a social media post that criticised Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. “Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark, where he and Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, inspected the F-16s to be delivered to his country. Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear)” (tinyurl.com/3fj7k4x5).

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More than 1,300 people died while homeless across the United Kingdom in 2022, marking an 85 percent increase since 2019 (tinyurl.com/3ftb3y66).

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Ryan Knight @ProudSocialist •The cruelty of disaster capitalism on full display in Maui: “We can’t get aid yet they are serving evictions” (tinyurl.com/nj5favbp).

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As Staughton Lynd’s speeches, writings, statements and interviews demonstrate, there were coherent and persuasive arguments against the war in Vietnam based on U.S. and international law, precedents from American history, and moral and ethical considerations based on conscientious objection to war and an internationalism embraced by American radicals which said: “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind” (tinyurl.com/bdtdr2t2).