archaeocommunologist

[archaeocommunologist]

“I’ve really tried to understand the Israelis. I used to work on a farm in Israel. I speak Hebrew. I watch their news. All the time they talk about fear. How they have to run to their bunkers to hide from the rockets. How their children can’t sleep because of the sirens. This is not a good way for them to live. We Palestinians don’t talk about fear, we talk about death. Our rockets scare them; their rockets kill us. We have no bomb shelters, we have no sirens, we have nowhere we can take our children and keep them safe. They are scared. We are dying.”

— Mohammed al-Khoudry a Palestinian farmer in Gaza. (via champagnefather)

[archaeocommunologist]

i think being a semi-ironic maoist standard english, 'read settlers', card-carrying third worldist constantly talking about jdpon as any kind of western socialist but esp. as a white usamerican is corny and embarassing beyond belief. it just feels like a way to totally displace any responsibility to engage in serious political action innit, no substantive difference to all that "going to punk shows and house parties is the revolution" schtick that such people (rightly) make fun of

[archaeocommunologist]

everyday on this website it's like... well i agree with what i think this post is trying to gesture at, but the actual words on the screen are stupid... but if i point this out too sharply then there's an 80% chance they'll take it as some personal attack... but if i'm too subtle they won't understand the point i want to make... but if nobody ever challenges poor reasoning and stupid rhetoric within the left then some people will end up with deformed inbred dog ideologies that will get torn to shreds on contact with an intelligent right-winger...but can i create hte perfect response while sitting on the toilet at work....

[archaeocommunologist]

Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that gaslight gatekeep girlboss meme, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think modern feminism has been co-opted by corporations. But what you don’t know is that that meme is not from Instagram, it's not from Twitter, it's not from Tiktok, it’s actually from Tumblr. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in January 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss." And then I think it was a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e, wasn’t it, who reblogged it with an image of the phrase edited over a piece of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art? And then gaslight gatekeep girlboss showed up in the feeds of eight different Twitter repost accounts. Then it filtered down through Instagram and then trickled on down into some tragic “alt side of Tiktok” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that meme represents millions of notes and countless Tumblr users and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from Tumblr when, in fact, you’re wearing the meme that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”

[archaeocommunologist]

It’s a problem if it’s a problem. This was actually a description of alcoholism, I forget the source; the idea being that the criterion for “addiction” isn’t really something you can specify in terms of amount consumed, or habitual behaviour. Rather, it’s a problem if it’s a problem - you start treating something as an addiction if it’s having a deleterious effect on someone’s work or family life. I don’t know if this is a good or bad way to deal with alcohol or substance addiction, but it does strike me as a better way to think about what we’re told is an epidemic of diagnoses of ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. It’s quite likely that nothing much has changed in the population, there is no issue of overdiagnosis, but the world itself (particularly the economy) has changed in such a way that the underlying conditions are more likely to cause problems in dealing with it. The sentence that makes me regret having started these paragraphs in bold. Related to the above, I still wonder about the relationship between two phenomena with respect to the US economy. On the one hand, high productivity and long working hours compared to the rest of the world. On the other hand, very high consumption of stimulant drugs. I don’t necessarily want to defend the description “take adderall and cope or take fentanyl and die” as the prevailing US economic model, but that sentence has been stuck in my head for a while now, and so here it is for you.

[archaeocommunologist]

like we really hate to hear this - but power is in every human relationship. unless you are the exact same as your partner in age, class, race, ethnicity, religion, language, nationality, citizenship status, gender, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, salary, education, etc, you have to negotiate the problems material power differentials pose to love, to treating others well. the response to this seems to have been to make certain points of difference - like age - load-bearing, in a way that erases others - class would be my example: far bigger a power disparity than, say, a ten year gap in age between adults is class and inheritable wealth, but you almost never see that acknowledged in the same way. and even if you were at parity in all those areas (gay twincest sweep??) there is still the emotional power that someone’s love and desire for you gives you over them. you can’t get rid of it. you cannot find the perfect relationship where it doesn’t exist by steadily winnowing down your “ethical” options via widening designations of “problematic relationships.” you have to confront the power you have over other people and think how you will wield it most lightly. sorry!

[archaeocommunologist]

In 2015, before the Great British Decline had become so obvious that everyone in the world knew about it, before Brexit, Johnson, COVID, etc. but most importantly before the austerity policies of the 2010s – the Big Society of David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition – had really shown the most of their devastating effects, Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt accidently told the truth. On the topic of yet another slashing of Britain’s wobbling state, a ‘reform’ of tax credits, which had been one of the pillars of 2000s New Labour social neoliberalism, Hunt explained to the press: “We have to proceed with these tax credit changes because they are a very important cultural signal. My wife is Chinese, and if we want this to be one of the most successful countries in the world in 20, 30, 40 years’ time there’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer which is essentially: are we going to be a country that is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard.”. That’s right! His wife is Chinese. He did once call her Japanese, by accident, but she is Chinese, and she had clearly demonstrated to him, prior to this moment, something of the ancient wisdom of the Eastern Sages – Hunt, whose name was very apt, had discovered from his Chinese wife, apparently, hard work, “the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard”. He was widely mocked for this, for the suggestion that noble Britons should lower themselves to the level of the sweatshop workers and oppressed dictatorial subjects of the Communist Party of China; but in fact, in the blundering way of a politician in a declining system whose training and ability are lacking, whose motivation is not enough for message discipline, he was only pointing out what is key to understanding both British and American and indeed worldwide attitudes to the decline of western capitalism, what motivates Musk and Trump’s chainsaw double-act, and as well Keir Starmer’s desperate resorting to continuing and perpetuating the disastrous Big Society austerity of the 2010s. This key is rooted in late-Qing China, in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, and in reform and opening up, the motor of all Anglo-Saxon perceptions and notions of China – the fear and trembling induced by the idea of decline.

How nice of me to come across this just as I was looking for the actual issue that the "Abundance Agenda" needs to address, is this the enemy of the Abundance Agenda or a part of it?

[archaeocommunologist]

So as I understand it the Mammoth Resurrection Project was driven by a desire to "see midwestern farmers gored by the thousands, their crops and livelihoods trampled beneath the feet of these reborn gods"

That's right Piers

[archaeocommunologist]

[archaeocommunologist]

It's funny in a way, as things get worse (and oh boy are they getting worse) I actually feel more sympathy for the esteemed members of the Tumblr DNC. They really don't understand what's happening, and their analytical frames are largely useless to them. In fact, they've spent the last several days blaming South Park, a TV show, for the monstrosity consuming US political life. South Park! Because it inculcates the idea that "caring about things is cringe." That's why jackbooted thugs are detaining and brutalising green card holders. Because of a cartoon.

It's sad. And it's harder for me to be angry with them, because it's so obviously a coping mechanism for a frightening situation that they don't comprehend. So they try to do "critical media analysis" with the wolf at the door.

[archaeocommunologist]

surely there’s more examples that i’m just not aware of but afaik the closest you’ll get to a n vietnamese perspective on the war is viet thanh nguyen’s the sympathizer (fiction and actually mostly takes place in america) and ken burn’s vietnam documentary series which actually interviewed pavn & vietcong soldiers for the first time maybe ever in american retrospectives of the war. i’m sure there’s more out there but it really is insane that it’s such a drop in the bucket compared to american-centered stories about how actually it really fucked me up to napalm your kids

[archaeocommunologist]

"m/m ships are more popular than f/f ships because society thinks men are better than women, which is misogyny." more bangers from the transfeminist brain trust, everybody!

[archaeocommunologist]

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

— anne carson, gloves on!

[archaeocommunologist]

I haven’t listened to this podcast, but the trailers are devastating

[archaeocommunologist]

Absolutely ridiculous that CNN would even have him as a guest. Absolutely mind-blowing that Jake Tapper just.... moved on.

[archaeocommunologist]

“I killed kids and now I feel sad because I Had To Do It” genre of movie but it’s from the pov of a Soviet soldier after a Red Dawn type scenario where he shot American child soldiers

[archaeocommunologist]

Yet another poor soul without theory of mind. It is "cowardice" to speak frankly to your harassers, but it's "bravery" to call someone a bitch and then block them. It would be funny if it weren't so desperately, desperately sad.

Cry harder about how patriarchy makes you the designated aggressor when you say violent sexual shit about women. Cluck your tongue more about how you can't even threaten women and call them ugly anymore without wokescold puriteens telling you not to call people kikes and trannys.

It's interesting because, if I were sending messages like this to a woman, you would immediately accuse me of being a rabid misogynist. But you feel totally justified in harassing me, calling me crazy, and threatening me with violence. That's because you are a low-IQ hypocrite. Sad! But also not my problem.

It's also bizarre to see you accuse me of things I've just never done. I've never used those slurs. I'm not threatening anybody, woman or otherwise. In fact, the only person using those slurs is you! The only person being threatening is you. You are the violent one, not me. You are the "creep," by your own metric.

Obviously, you've decided that none of that matters, because I'm "fair game" based on the crimes you imagined me to commit. You have no theory of mind. I pity you. Honestly, I do.

Looks like you blocked me, very sorry to see you go. Hopefully you can learn how to think better thoughts!