I still need to finish Two Towers, Return, and Silmarillion. Ungoliant is maybe my favourite extended lore character. I kind of understand all the critiques about it being racist but I think it’s a pretty tired discourse. It is what it is and it’s still worth reading. It was a story written by a guy obsessed with legends, mythology, and languages who wanted to write his own.
America doesn’t feign diplomacy anymore, it just demands tribute.
Oh hey, this album was my shit back when I lived in Toronto and The Weeknd was just starting to get famous. Glad that other people also recognize it as his best one.
True, very true. I suppose that lately I’ve decided to focus on studying theory more now that I have the time, but also because I think I’ve hit the wall when it comes to getting liberals to understand that revolution isn’t something we have to totally make up from scratch. Plus I haven’t completed some key texts. I just don’t think that I could ever successfully play a role evangelizing libs to be leftists, since that is apparently what we’re talking about here.
Indeed. I fr think that the past 25 years of seeing chaotic imagery of the middle east on CNN has desensitized the vast majority of North Americans to violence that is outsourced. As someone whose childhood perfectly overlapped with that period, it applied to me too as much as it disgusts me now to admit it. Not an original thought of mine, but the US learned a very valuable lesson after Vietnam which is that as long as conscription is off the table and that type of interventionism happens via an abstraction layer of Proxies, the American public has a vastly higher tolerance for imperialism.
The Kamla stans demonstrate this by accepting(!) that some kind of genocide is going to happen and that Trump Is Worse in the reality where he wins. The version that Kamahalah practices is then implicitly more “under control” and better but it’s still a genocide. They are aware of this. They patently accept the reality that genocide must happen for their government and status quo to operate. If they didn’t do this math before endorsing the program then in their own words, caveat emptor.
Exactly. I never actually say “I heard all of this shit back when Kamala as POTUS was a laughable notion and Biden was considered our saviour from fascism” but I should probably start doing so. These lib cheerleaders have inherited their master’s desire to only acknowledge history if it somehow benefits their short-term goals. Maybe Trump getting elected will prompt them to think about fascism beyond Death Camps and being mean to minorities for fun. Probably not though.
Yes, I’ve had to reevaluate my own models of why American “leftists” do what they do this past year and engage in some self-crit.
Even after all this time I was still operating on the admittedly liberal logic that they just didn’t have all the facts and were propagandized and that our duty was to provide that information. I failed to understand that they’re only human and won’t turn on the ideology that’s provided them with what they materially want and need. It’s not that it’s impossible to convert them. I just think it’s likely that lib idealism eases their contradictions more effectively than ML ideology does.
The worst part about it is that I was also roughly on their level only 2-3 years ago. I know exactly what they think. They think that there will be some magic combination of elected representatives to defeat the SCOTUS and the parliamentarian and all the other obstacles and booby traps their system throws up to protect itself.
I guess the bottom line here is that history tells us that cooperation with libs holds very little promise of us getting what we want because they are not living in reality and as such will not behave realistically. I’m willing to be wrong if any comrade can explain why but I see no way to make them understand.
Agreed. I just don’t have any sympathy left. Seeing the fake leftists immediately get with the program as soon as the dems shed their skin and crowned Kamala really made me realize that USAmericans like them fundamentally don’t understand or care about the nature of their empire. The most galling thing I think is the Buying Time assertion, wherein voting for the dems will give leftists the space they need to work against fascism. Just don’t ask them what that actually entails, or what they’ve been doing since 2020 and 2016 when that talking point was also deployed. Nor should you ask how that can be true when the dems have been actively quashing free speech since last October, going so far as to legally codify dissent as anti-semitic “hatred”.
It’s extremely self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing thinking that conveniently lets them defer any serious political action until after they know they’ve gotten what they wanted.
I’ll remind you once again that that was what these same libs said in 2020 and I think we all know that they’ve pissed away all that time buying into poli-tainment as usual instead of “preparing” as they put it. I’m going to just start asking “buying time for what?” because I genuinely have no idea what they mean.
Western society has done a fantastic job at creating a narrative that the west recognized the nazis as a threat early on but wasn’t prepared for another world war and was in denial or something. The truth is that westerners loved the nazis lol. Churchill went gaga over how they ruthlessly crushed labour and physically attacked communists. The New Orc Times did the best it could to muddy the waters and give them the benefit of the doubt, and our own prime minister at the time wrote that he was a “mystic” and “liberator of his people”. And that was in his private diary, not even some kind of official communique where you could argue that diplomacy was needed.
Liberals (at best) always think that fascism is something they can hold in their hands, harness, and use to get what they want. But more often they’re functionally just fascists who are embarrassed by the label.
Ok. I don’t know who that is.
I really have no idea, I can’t say I spend much time in the same spaces online as racists.
Yeah, it sucks but we’re not therapists or priests. We’re leftists. We can’t give them absolution for the despair they feel about the fact that their way of life is threatened, or the guilt they feel about choosing to live in denial. Which is what I honestly think they’re looking for when they do the “well what DO we do except vote?!?1” thing. I had to hit rock bottom a couple times before deciding to change the way I think and dispose of old ideology so I guess that’s what it’s going to have to take before they maybe open their minds.
The contradictions are sharp enough now that simply acknowledging the terrible things the dems do/have done the past 4 years can provoke a full-blown chimp out. Trump Would Do Worse makes up the vast majority of everything I hear from them whenever they pester those like us who can no longer stomach the rat race. I think the reason they’re so aggro this cycle is because deep down they know that they don’t really have a leg to stand on beyond bluanon crap. They can’t accept the fact that you simply can’t claim to be anti-cop and anti-genocide and then not only vote for them, not only stump for them, but also bleat when we refuse to. It stresses them out to address that contradiction and call it out for what it is, self-interested fascist apologia. This is what happens when your only perception of what fascism is comes from Spielberg movies and other holocaust oppression porn.
If I were you I would probably either ignore them or corner them if you’re already stuck in a conversation and ask point blank if non-American lives are worth sacrificing to them to get what they want: Trump crying on election day so they can gloat and over-post about it for the next 4 years and go back to being blind, deaf, and dumb to geopolitics (whilst pissing and moaning ineffectually about SCOTUS and congress every day).
That’s a very mealy-mouthed statement for what is basically just “they decided not to invest in security so they could have more money”. It makes me sick as an infosec professional seeing publications like this that try and make us feel bad for the poor widdle IT corporation which had to choose between profits and protecting it’s own clients (which is the whole job!!). Like I give af.
Those poor mice and roaches must have been so grossed out at having to share living space with imperialists.
Damn. The government taking them down somehow would eliminate the very last shreds of doubt I had about no longer playing along with mainstream Canadian politics anymore. cAnAdIAn VaLUes are clearly just licking the boot of US capital.
I’m imagining Sol Ring as a cock ring
Exactly. It bugs me that some people put it in the same category as truly racist adventure/fantasy fiction like Lovecraft and the Tarzan books, where racism is the entire point.