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watching Seven Samurai

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The supposed efficiency and effectiveness of fascism was always propaganda: in reality, fascist regimes were deeply inefficient, hobbled by interpersonal rivalry, had institutions weakened or totally subverted by the personalist nature of leadership, and were deeply corrupt and lawless.

So it really, really bugs me how so much speculative fiction and even casual discourse since has taken WW2 era propaganda about fascism at face value, and depicted authoritarianism generally and fascism in particular as an intrinsic tradeoff between the chaos and disorder of liberty and the order of repression. Fascism is not orderly! That was always a lie. There is a reason right-wing authoritarian regimes have mid performance at best and at worst collapse due to infighting and military defeat—they suck at running states!

Democracy is the ideology of order and stability. Democracy provides for stable succession and can sustain rule of law in ways personalist rule cannot. Democracy can create avenues of accountability to reduce corruption that authoritarian (or even one-party rule) could never contemplate. “Democracy is chaos” is a lie invented by fascists to try to discredit liberal principles, and the apparent “chaos” of interwar democracies was often caused by the fascists themselves because they did not believe in liberalism.

I think of this most often in the context of video games about politics where it is assumed that authoritarian governance gives you efficiency bonuses at some cost to happiness or freedom—but I think these mechanics are backward. Fascism and authoritarianism are good for the narrow ruling clique at the top, the people they personally enrich, but they make for brittle and weak states, and they often fuck over even the narrow ethnic group or core citizenry whose will they are supposed to be channeling. Starting World War II was very bad for almost all Germans and Italians!

By contrast political scientists debate if a consolidated liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated, and the biggest challenges to democratic systems of government have tended to come when those systems are illiberal (as before the American Civil War), or being sabotaged by most participants (as Weimar Germany, where neither the left nor the right were really interested in democracy).

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HOUSES as CHARACTERS in HORROR (1963-2024)

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i want what david cronenberg has

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wuthering heights retold as a series of airbnb reviews

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If I had a nickel for every time Massachusetts and Connecticut planned to invade Rhode Island for being cooler than them,

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Sorrows of Werther by Thackeray (as an allegory)

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So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:

Do the readings.

Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.

What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.

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In King Ludwig II’s defense, if I had basically infinite discretionary funds, was accountable to absolutely no one, and was king of a country full of picturesque landscapes, you couldn’t stop me from building myself a big gay fairytale castle on a mountaintop either.

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me.

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The Holy Trinity:

“Coleridge came in […] he had been attacked by a Cow.” - Dorothy Wordsworth diary entry, June 1802.

“Went to fish – caught none – strolled to river – saw a boy and a kid – kid followed him like a dog – kid could not get over a fence & bleated piteously – tried myself to help kid – but nearly overset both self & kid into the river”.  –Lord Byron, from the Alpine Journal; 20th Sept. 1816. 

“Shelley bought a squirrel (…) which bit him while trying to escape.” – Richard Holmes from Shelley: The Pursuit.

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nabokov king of dramatism

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Jarvis/Pulp - Rockin’ On ‘96, archived by Acrylic Afternoons

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RIP Ishmael, you would've loved Urban Dictionary, Sufjan Stevens, and Heartstopper

RIP Ahab, you would've loved moveable prosthetics, Life360, and anger management classes

RIP Starbuck, you would've loved the DSM-5, HR, and the phrase "shut the fuck up"

RIP Stubb, you would've loved ASMR YouTube channels, brain rot humor, and starting flame wars on Twitter

RIP Flask, you would've loved platform boots, saying "bro it's not that deep", and prepackaged sticks of salted butter

RIP Fedallah, you would've loved the gift of prophecy awarded to people on tumblr, not having a phone, and 2020 COVID lockdown

RIP Queequeg, you would've loved Obergefell vs. Hodges, sweatpants, and having personal beef with the Duolingo owl

RIP Tashtego, you would've loved cotton candy vape, trolling people on the internet, and calling things "white people nonsense"

RIP Daggoo, you would've loved not playing basketball (out of spite), offering "uppies", and work visas

RIP Pip, you would've loved child labor laws, kazoos, and water wings

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“It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more.” ― Bela Lugosi