Couple weeks back, having realised that support for CDU/CSU and SPD were lower than ever, I was marginally hopeful, expecting some for of change in some near future. I didn’t think Germans were brewing with revolutionary potential or anything, I just saw a trend and had a vague feeling. A better read friend basically crashed me down to earth by reminding me that these circumstances usually breed that “3rd way” sentiment that gets Nazis elected. I suppose I’ve been hiding behind this notion I’ve been told a decade ago, that the Germans wouldn’t let open fascism win out, if nothing else because of the optics. Oh well.

I know this is a pipedream, little more than expecting the kiddies to magically rise above their material conditions, but I hope that it actually results is a reaction against AI and that being born into a world of slop gives a significant portion of the coming generation some 6th sense to tell slop better than we can.

I’m hoping for some idealist fantasy because if not, gen alpha and their successors won’t be disappointments, they’ll be downright incapable of coherent thought. They’ll let LLMs and other misapplied tools do their thinking for them in every aspect of life.

Promiscuous women are anti-Madonnas because they won’t fuck me

Non-promiscuous women want to be promiscuous but can’t because they’re ugly (but still this and that because they won’t fuck me)

Her upper teeth look like the lower set.

I completely agree with Adam here. China shouldn’t waste drones like this. Instead, these drones, and any others they’ve got, should be used to turn the Zionist entity into rubble. Aim for “military targets.”

I don’t remember the passages 100% so I’ll say “there’s a reading that” Leto was aware of this limitation of prescience. Something about thinking deeply about the venue of the wedding making him feel like the golden path was slipping away. If this is the case, and not just flowery language about diverging from the golden path while staying in the confines of his prescient vision, the worm may have chosen not to gamble what he saw as the only known chance for the survival of humanity for the benefit of relatively few. I think there was also something in chapterhouse about things being not exactly as Leto saw them.

I’ll add this on as something Herbert absolutely didn’t write and probably didn’t mean: What if these two fuckers only saw extremely inhuman actions as the only way to prevent total calamity just because they’re so far removed from humanity that they can’t imagine a similar outcome without suffering beyond measure?

Editing to add after seeing your other comment: Prescience being fundamentally flawed is at best a minor theme, within the story for all intents and purposes, it’s accurate. Moreover, Herbert may not have said the hard times, strong men drivel, but he absolutely believed that rough conditions made rougher, tougher people. Harkonnen < Atreites < Sardaukar< Fremen for this reason and it’s absolutely not rejected in the rest of the series.

I’ll preface this by saying Dune is absolutely one of my favourite series and GOED is one of my favourite books.

It’s really questionable and Messiah’s tales of Paul’s villainy are beyond hamfisted. In the first book, after defeating Jamis but before reaching Sietch Tabr Paul sees his last chance to avoid the jihad: Kill everyone there including himself and his mother. I don’t see anyone with common sense lining up to make a choice between an extremely inhuman action and incomparable atrocity.

I’d say that if Herbert was trying to make a point about JFK/charismatic leaders pushing their people into horrible acts, he didn’t succeed. He thought the same, so in the next book he literally had Paul compare himself to Genghis khan and Hitler and then say he killed way more. Subtle.

Mind you, the dichotomy I mentioned is a key theme in children and god emperor. In contrast to Paul, Leto could take those inhuman actions to avoid a worse outcome. And the point about teaching humanity a lesson they’ll remember in their bones is deeply idealistic, as are most of Leto’s monologues. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the character, and it may not be as idiotic and shameless as, say, Heinlein, but the part of my brain responsible for dialectical materialism didn’t stop pinging.

This comment got away from me but I hope the point is clear, a fascist reading of Dune is closer to the actual text than a Marxist reading, so I can’t begrudge Nazis or liberals for appropriating it. To the ghost of Herbert: America learned fuck all from Nixon, pal. They had a corpse drag them into another proxy war with a nuclear power. They lost fewer people in an attack than cigarettes kill every month, and they gave their govt the authority to do Watergate x300 million around the clock. You know what they did learn? Cronkite’s honest face taught them to trust their news. They fell for it when an ambassador’s actor daughter cried about some horseshit, they fell for it when someone shoved aluminium tubes in their face as evidence of something, and they fell for it when some lunatic said their enemies were committing a genocide without showing a single body. What a fucking lesson.

I can confirm I can see posts old and new, thank you very much!

Democrats have been sweet on Cheney as long as I’ve been aware of Usian politics and I’m not under the impression that they launched any kind of attack on Cheney’s brazen corruption in his time in office.

Endless urine on both their graves

Unlimited genocide on the first world

Polling, to the extent that it’s consistent, may say something, but not much and practically nothing looking at one poll. I’m sure one could move these numbers up or down by 20% by prefacing it with one question:

“Do you support unelected and unaccountable paramilitaries kidnapping working people in your neighbourhood?”

“Do you believe that the US should maintain control over its borders?”

The piggies deserve nothing better than the wall, but they’re not an aberration, merely an exaggeration. If usians truly gave a shit they’d be rising up every time their cities destroyed schools to funnel money to pig pens or federal govt cut social services to bomb brown people. And on the subject of what usians want, they want gun control, they want single payer healthcare, they’ve wanted this stuff for over a decade. Except they don’t show this desire in their actions, not even on that most holy day that comes every 2/4 years.

Many comrades here are outraged at the plainness of this narrative, why? The Anglosphere raises people who look at a photo of a man very safely standing in front of a tank, or a video of PLA soldiers slowly marching behind fleeing “protestors” without a hint of aggression, or a picture of bikes lying on the ground and shout “MASSACRE” without a single neuron firing inside their skull. They’ve been bastions of simplicity for decades.

Anyway unlimited genocide on the first world

Not that one need be particularly fair to a genocidal entity, murdering aid participants/workers wouldn’t make top 5 worst things that day.

Most moral army in the world™ defending the only democracy in the middle east™ btw

Heroes conflicted about or haunted by killing a mass murdering fuckhead << Heroes who rid the world of that nonsense and sleep like babies

Is it also the last step?

The game puts Revacholian nationhood and race theory both under fascism, but there’s a humourous distinction it draws between different brands of fascists Harry can become, internalising measurehead’s thinking gets you sober, while fascist talking points getting you to reaction gives alcohol bonus.

So the only true fascist route is to get all three and becoming an abomination, a mass of contradictions.

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Tinfoil: Establishment works perfectly well as an adjective, he just wanted to write Arian.

It’s literally not? You can get it by taking to Tiago on the church.

It is funny that you can only be convinced to go sober by talking to the hulking fascist or the crab-man.

I guessed this was in response to something and context doesn’t really improve it. Her campaign was neither trans-inclusive nor aimed for prosperity for all, even in the bounds of a limited liberal democracy.

There’s something to be said about being put into boxes by opponents, but really it’s we (the most important pronoun) Communists who have to deal with that, not someone with a billion dollar media campaign behind them. (not that important of a pronoun, apparently)