#(this is not to generalize all the usamericans but some of people there is just straight out dumb and ignorant asf *sigh* 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️)

[gxtzeizm]

well in case if people aware about me yapping about mobile legends esports these days, noticed that i literally slanders a lot about this one particular guy who is a pro player in north america region named mobazane who once slandered malaysia region as an "easy server" which in other words, degraded about our server region...which atp idgaf anymore about those slander, srg and malaysia already proved it wrong by winning two major international tournaments this year....but posting an insta story of a photo of malaysian flag when he arrived in klia airport then label it with "noob" on it is just absolutely vile and disgusting asf wtf💀💀💀

[puzzledemigod]

Ok I did the whole Barbenheimer thing and let me tell you, Barbie wasn't revolutionary or anything, but it did come up ahead. It did what it was supposed to do and, since I managed my expectations before going in, did it in a fun silly way that still left a bunch of possible deeper readings, even if they were sadly left unexplored (and were maybe unintended). Oppenheimer on the other hand left me very angry and disappointed, even if I went there knowing it was an usamerican warfilm so I wasn't expecting much.

I think Barbie and Oppenheimer were equally superficial and obvious with their intended messages presentations, themes and characters, and equally inconsistent with their story threads. But Barbie was about Barbies, was intentionally silly, and had more going for it than the story itself... and Oppenheimer was about one of the real life creators of the atonic bomb, about the ones responsible for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and about the subsequent cold war and the mess it left us today in regards to the existence and threat of atomic and H bombs.

I think I can safely say one had the responsibility to be a bit more nuanced and careful than the other, and that just did not happen. And no, i do not think there was any actual anti USA sentiment in Oppenheimer, as someone who lives in a Developing Country (TM)and is used to seeing usamerican propaganda all the time there was barely even a scratch of criticism buried in there; our knowledge of history and our own modern sensibilities and morality did all the heavy lifting in that front without the movie having to risk saying anything. Oh did he feel bad while the bombs were being dropped? Did they villanize a guy who went after him for uhh being better than him at public speaking? Did they say he was against the H bomb and was a pacifist now, actually (without showing it much but who cares, tell not show right)? He was still the hero. Not one Japanese person was shown. Not one civilian protest, not one appearance of the communists they were talking so much about after the scenes in the past, doing anything but talking the whole time. He still ended up with a "I love my country" tirade, there was still a haha nod to fucking Kennedy being the one to be on our hero's side. They still showed more scenes of women naked, drunk, cheating on their husbands and being negligent towards their kids than of them doing literally anything else.

The "nuance" and "anti-usa messages" was just a bunch of misplaced and inconsequential internal conflict that did not feel earned in any way, misogyny and random, boring and inconsistent jury scenes (sorry, "hearing" scenes or whatever they called so there wouldn't have to be consistent rules to follow). And the main character was so damn boring. And they didn't even represent the actual science parts well. And the editing was so weird and the flashing scenes didn't fit and were repetitive. And there was a happy ending for some reason?? It was a whole bunch of nothing with music building momentum that never went anywhere in the background of every scene for 3 hours and I wanted to leave the room for how angry it made me that this subject was treated that way and would probably get praised for it.

[yisanged]

the japanese-korean stuff is always just this weird elephant in the room.... idk. a lot of the times the stuff like in that one orv arc is just really uncalled for but at the same time it doesn't feel right ignoring all the bad blood there just to say oh this is hashtag problematic or whatever. idk it's not a topic i know as much about as i maybe should what with being a usamerican with parents that have made no great efforts to keep me super tied to korean culture other than just like. the food. but it's hard to get good information on it with all the polarized uninformed biased opinions out there. my parents themselves aren't the most impartial sources either. idk idk. whatever

[elbiotipo]

I remember I once got into an argument in a forum, where I said that from my observation on how the US military is revered and treated (both parties agree in two things: keeping the neoliberal order and funding the military), there is a very, very real possibility that in the not too distant future the military might just say "fuck it" and dispense with the whole pretense or democracy, or more likely, make it a supervised """democracy""" (like the Concordancia here in Argentina, or Frondizi who had his hands tied and when he went too far he was couped)

The Usamericans* argued back with me with an argument so silly that I was baffled it was their main one: that soldiers in the US ~make an oath~ to ~defend the Constitution~ and so they wouldn't do a coup, ever.

I can't even start to tell how stupid that was but newsflash, EVERY military around the world swears an oath, and most coups happen when they, in fact, use it as an excuse to "save the nation" from some enemy. Which the US military already does all the time, under "democratic" "supervision". If tomorrow, a bunch of generals decided they don't even care about the whole democracy thing anymore, every single soldier would fall in line, because that's what soldiers do. There won't be a Hero Moment where they would realize The Error Of Their Ways and try to stop the Bad General, they will obey orders. Because that's what soldiers do.

Armies, if they exist at all, should be strictly controlled by a democratic goverment accountable to and serving the people. The US army is way beyond that, it only serves itself and someday, it will decide that it doesn't even need the whole pretense any longer. And if people don't resist now, it will be even harder when they take control.

*some of them ex-military, so they apparently really believed this

[what-even-is-thiss]

In English, North America and South America are two different continents but in Spanish they’re just one continent and continents are a made up concept and what constitutes as a continent has no useful definition that fits all of our regular lists of continents and why are Europe and Asia and Africa three different continents in the first place and is Australia actually just a very big island?

Anyways that’s why I don’t type things like USAmerican because in English they’re just Americans but I understand why some people do get annoyed with that but at the same time I’ve seen zero Spanish speakers in my personal life argue for speaking that way in English and I guess my point is that we should probably be more aware of how certain people see themselves and be respectful of that but also at the same time I’m an English speaking person in an English speaking country and if I use America to refer to what we call The Americas in my everyday life people will assume I’ve made a mental typo or that I’m being contrarian and if I tried to make that a thing in my everyday speech patterns I’d come off as a pretentious idiot. If I’m speaking Spanish that’s a different story. Then yeah there’s other words for US Americans like estadounidense. Or famously gringo, more colloquially.

I’m not looking to start arguments here. Like I said I totally get why people make that distinction. But there’s also like the nuances of the lived reality of living in certain cultural contexts that I think people forget about.

I’m not here to tell you to not make that distinction in your speech. I’m not even here to tell you that you’re not allowed to be frustrated about it. I’m just here to explain why I don’t do that and why most English speaking people don’t and why it’s not inherently malicious when people do. Like if someone fully dismisses your perspective on the issue and how you view your own identity yes they’re the asshole. But also generally in English it’s The Americas or North, Central, and South America. And yes maybe that’s stupid but so is the existence of Europe as a concept and we all seem to believe that Europeans are a real thing.

And to reiterate. I’m not trying to tell anybody how to speak or how to feel here. Just trying to insert some nuance into this conversation. Because people I call Americans and you might call USAmericans are only gonna call ourselves Americans. That’s just how we view ourselves, how we understand our own identity as a nation. And some people will be jerks about it. But many of us are also just living in the world we live in, referring to ourselves in the way we always have, not aiming to tell anyone else how they ought to view themselves.

I’m American. Soy estadounidense. Some stuff unfortunately gets lost in translation.

Also continents don’t exist. If we try to get rid of the concept of continents we’d all be too confused at all times to have these disagreements. Confusion superiority. We go by tectonic plates. California is on the same continent as Japan now.

[batmanego]

i'm personally unsurprised. but i am worried -- this election (like all previous) impacts not just the people in america but the world at large. some of the people most impacted by this election and american politics in general are the people in gaza. one such person is my dear friend nader.

nader is only 17 years old and is taking on the unimaginable burden of not just surviving the current genocide in gaza, but helping support his entire family as well. this is not something he can do alone. he and his family have been displaced over nine times, and were very recently incredibly close to heavy bombardment.

they're over halfway to their goal, but they cannot do this alone. if the election is on your mind, if politics are a concern of yours, please please please match my donation of €10. if you can't match that, donate €5 or even €1.

nader is my friend. i shouldn't have to say that in order to argue for his right to live and live unimpeded and freely. please help him and his family.

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

USAmerican Christians and anti-Christians alike need to get something in their heads: White male Christians are in the minority.

And I'm not even talking about people who claim to be Christian but I believe are "bad" christians. I mean out of people that claim the religion, white men are in the minority. In the States? It's black people, and in particular black women (can confirm just from experience as a black person btw). Followed closely by Latinos.

As of now, the title of "most Christian" continent is Africa, with Latin America next, and finally Europe (tho I am suspicious of this last one).

"In terms of population distribution, Christianity will be chiefly a religion of Africa and the African diaspora, which will, in a sense, be the heartland of Christianity.” - Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom.

As such, truly devout Christians have more in common with someone we would consider "inconceivably poor" than with someone from your own location, economic status, and political party who does not believe in Jesus.

And this is all very important. To quote Dr Gina A. Zurlo, "We have a lot to learn from people who live in greater religious diversity (Asia , I’m looking at you); from Christians who have lived and worked among Muslim populations for generations (sub-Saharan Africa, that’s you); from Christians who deal with the negative consequences of climate change most acutely (yep, Oceania, that’s you); and, well, Latin America, we have a lot to learn from you, too (especially your neighbor, the USA!)."

The multi-ethnic family of God/humanity is the entire story of the bible. Understanding that is crucial. Please for the love of God do not diminish your thoughts on Christianity to some fundamentalist baptist from the American South. This is the most diverse religion in the world, we ought to start acting like it.

Tl;dr: your conviction that Christianity is a white man's religion is racist and Euro-American centric. Christianity was born in the Middle East and went to Africa before it ever reached Greece or Rome.

[txttletale]

genuinely curious as to why you like catch-22. all i’ve got from fans is “it’s funny” so um. im wondering if u have anything more detailed than that bc as a hater i respect ur opinion

iu mean i hate to do this to you but "it's funny" is a big part of it. i guess to go into more detail i like it for similar reasons to alice, i like that it's a novel that treats language as a game, and i like the added layer here that there are some characters in the novel who absolutely cannot afford for language to be a game, characters in the novel for whom this game has real and permanent consequences. and it extends language as a game to warfare as a game, to economics as a game (milo explaining his stupid egg arbitrage is probably the funniest part of the book to me)--which i think is very insightful about, like, simultaneously the power of language and the way that power is only real if backed by actual physical power. much like alice it speaks to all of my experiences with people and institutions who have power over me and the bizarre logics they employ as well as just the general careless malice of them. and i also think it's insightful into a bunch of generic usamerican-specific neuroses

[aroaceleovaldez]

i'm so happy you brought back up the topic of rick's shitty writing of anyone even remotely non white / "white passing"

with that being said, do you think the shitty script he gave to annabeth in the show has to do with him just being deeply uninterested in adapting his story to include characters of color? bc it seems like once rick encounters a character that cannot be easily erased all ethnic or racial identity of to fit them into an usamerican specifically white ass narrative, he gets lost.

i just keep thinking how the only thing that "changed" about annabeth as presented in the show was her race but her plot relevance and her characterization got downgraded severely. meanwhile percy, whiter than before (wheres the mediterranean god look......................................), got half her functions. like i just look at rick in context and i wonder if he just gives so little fuck about characters of color he cant even write a decent character arc for an adaptation of a very established persona

thoughts? thank u!

I wouldn't be surprised if it's Rick (and the writer's room, since it actually seems Rick isn't all that heavily involved if much at all with the script itself based on some interviews) just has internal biases that he refuses to reflect on. It would be a consistent trend with the uptick in offensive writing in the books themselves (see: the troglodytes in general, all the Jewish kids in CHB being in Hermes cabin, etc etc). Rick seems to want to engage with these topics but refuses to actually assess how he's approaching it and his own biases while also overemphasizing his engagement with the topics. It's a kind of big talk/words vs actions type thing to me.

[this got a wee bit long so throwing it under a cut]

I was having a couple of conversations about this topic recently - one being group reading/discussion of WottG and how, allegedly, the slightly different characterizations in that book are inspired by the actors in the show. Annabeth is repeatedly and frequently described as motherly and maternal in the book, plus some other misc characterizations that make you tilt your head and go "Wait, what about Leah made you want to write Annabeth this way?" and concerns about it leaning into stereotypes. (It's also strange, because in the show Sally is MUCH more aggressive and less maternal, and this is painted like it's supposed to be a girlboss thing cause her being too soft and motherly was too weak or something? But now book Annabeth is now being described as all soft and maternal??? What. What is happening.)

Another conversation that i had with my therapist (cause we talk about pjo a lot lol) and later repeated and discussed more with other folks on discord more specifically regarding the show was a lot of discussion about the casting. Particularly casting choices and how the writing either is refusing to take casting into consideration to respectfully approach how things would be changed to avoid problems or are actively changing the script for characters in a way that is potentially if not downright offensive. Clarisse is the number one example i bring up because a lot of people say that the reason a plus sized actress wasn't cast for her was to avoid the "fat bully" trope. The thing is, there is ALSO a POC bully trope that is just as bad if not worse, so if they were actually taking offensive tropes into consideration one would expect them to avoid that too (especially since Percy was cast as a pasty white boy - which just makes it all look worse)? (Also other plus-sized characters like Dionysus and Gabe were also cast as skinny, same with Tyson. So it just seems like they don't want to cast plus-sized actors either.)

But also they're rewriting stuff that actively puts the casting decisions into worse tropes. Like hey, why is Percy (a white guy) the one who knows the "real" versions of all these myths and is expositioning them to Annabeth (a black girl), who in the books is supposed to know more than him? Why does he know better than her for some reason and have to guide her? Why is Percy teaching Annabeth about pop culture and how to be a kid? Not to mention stuff like the show constantly encouraging the viewer to doubt or distrust characters like Grover and Clarisse and Annabeth as red herrings as to who the traitor is. Plus there's no adjustments to stuff from the books like Annabeth initially being somewhat aggressive/antagonistic towards Percy, or Clarisse's aggression and bullying towards Percy to try and circumvent those being bad tropes in the contexts of the casting.

And there's an ongoing trend of characters who are antagonistic towards Percy in the books being divided into two groups: those who continue to be antagonistic towards Percy in the show, or those who are tweaked to suddenly become kinda silly-goofy and significantly less threatening. Gabe, Dionysus, Ares, and Hades are all examples of characters that should be antagonistic towards Percy but are softened SIGNIFICANTLY and played for laughs in the show. Echidna is played as a twist antagonist because she initially because she approaches the kids as very sweet and helpful. And they're all cast as white! Meanwhile other characters like Clarisse, Luke, Zeus, etc, are still antagonistic towards Percy (plus also like Annabeth initially and again, Grover being painted as a major red herring). Plus some new additions like Hermes, Mr. Lin Manuel Miranda himself, being wholly introduced into the plot when he's not supposed to appear until book 2, and all he does is sabotage the quest. Like, it's weird! That's a weird writing decision!!!! I get wanting to get that sweet sweet LMM cameo money, but, why is Hermes an antagonist here???????? he's not even supposed to be here yet!.

We also have stuff like Poseidon (who, like many of the god/major kid pairings so far seems to have been cast to match each other appearance-wise) saving the day for Percy and being this weirdly good dad, versus the books where we get the iconic "I am sorry you were born" line and Percy and Poseidon's tension is part of their arcs. Notably, Poseidon does this by ceding to Zeus, who is actively about to start a war. While Gabe is rewritten to be a total loser, Sally is MUCH more aggressive and her yelling and screaming at young Percy is supposed to be sympathetic for some reason? If Gabe were acting like Sally does in the show, he would actually be significantly more like his book counterpart! The show is making active decisions to paint these characters the way they do!

Admittedly, part of it may just be they got overzealous with their casting (not inherently a bad thing! diverse casting is good!) and then proceeded to not consider how that casting affects the way the characters are perceived. It also doesn't bode well for certain guesses we can make going further into the show - Thalia is very at odds with Percy initially. She's a very aggressive character. They fight a lot! Also Annabeth's description already implies that they're tweaking Thalia's character to be more "tough love" versus the books where she's significantly more of a bleeding heart when she first meets Annabeth. Like, I'm very happy about Thalia's casting, her actress seems amazing, but also I'm VERY concerned with how they're going to approach her character to make sure it doesn't end up wildly offensive. Athena is similar - we can guess based on casting decisions so far that they're going to try and cast Athena as similar in appearance to Annabeth/Leah. The show has already painted Athena has antagonistic and uncaring towards her daughter. If projected trends continue, these things are not gonna be great.

And the show does seem to rarely want to engage with these topics - like the scene with the cop in the train. You can tell what they wanted to address by having Annabeth be the one to confront him. The thing is they were too cowardly to actually have that conversation! They paint the kids as being unreasonable and getting unnecessarily upset when they aren't directly being accused of destroying a room, therein painting the cop as the one in the right in that situation. The implication seems to be a little bit they were going for "Oh, this is Annabeth's hubris getting them into trouble" but. that's such a bad way to do it! That's like the worst way you could have done it! (This is also a trend in books from HoO onwards, more or less - Rick tries to engage with certain topics, often using characters of specific demographics, and then proceeds to do a really bad job of it.)

There are also some aspects that are just like - in the books, Luke being a middle-class blond-haired blue-eyed pretty white boy is relevant! Because the fact that he has privilege from that particularly in how he's perceived is part of how he came to where he is and why he acts the way he does. Percy not having those same privileges, and having aspects like constantly inherently being labeled as a trouble-maker just based on his atypical (neurodivergent) behavior and coming from a lower socioeconomical background play heavily into his character!!! Percy being both a poor and disabled kid (and implied potentially POC) plays DIRECTLY into why he feels so strongly about standing up for other disenfranchised kids (in SoM, explicitly including other disabled kids and kids of color). It directly relates to his experiences and standing up for kids who are like him because he didn't have that, versus Luke whose perceptions and goals are very self-oriented. Now, in the show, we've essentially swapped Percy and Luke's appearances, and that paints a very different narrative. And that's important to acknowledge!

[drdemonprince]

This is kind of late re: the culture conversation but I feel like I have a kind of weird perspective on this general idea of cultural appropriation re:embodiment. I’m Italian American, and indigenous South American but I was born in the US and when we immigrated to the US my South American ethnic group is so small and my parents were in Japan so long they culturally assimilated and I was raised in the Japanese immigrant community and literally went to Japanese day school.

This tension between who is “allowed” to participate in a culture or identity has always been deeply fraught for me in a way that has kind of bulldozed my understanding of cultural ownership. Not being “ethnically” Japanese has led to many people deciding for me what the appropriateness of my cultural participation is. And being indigenous South American complicates my relationship to standard cultural alignment with latinidad more broadly.

I have a lot of friends who are white USAmericans who are progressive but also deeply concerned about the boundaries between themselves and the cultures they studied in college and the countries they taught English in as migrant workers. I had a conversation with one of my friends who worked in China and he was talking about how he didn’t mind being legally disenfranchised because he was a white American migrant and didn’t feel it was necessary for him to have the same legal rights as Chinese citizens. And I had to point out that he was living in the same disenfranchised conditions as any other immigrant and there was no reason for him to downplay it. I don’t think it’s disingenuous or appropriative for him to have Chinese art in his house or cook Chinese food or participate in Chinese culture. Not because he lived there or had a complicated legal status in the country or somehow crossed some imaginary threshold of true and genuine cultural appreciation but just because culture is what you do its not a given fact of who you are. It’s a seamless part of his life and just because he sought it out doesn’t make it less genuine to me.

I think because of my complicated upbringing I have spent a lot of time with people between cultures, reconnecting, adopting new ones and feel very strongly that if there is no biological tie to culture people can incorporate whatever they want into their lives and it’s a VERY US American perspective to be so self critical and political about it.

And this isn’t to say cultural exploitation doesn’t exist but when it does happen it’s usually underpinned by a capital motivation to sell an idea of a culture and not a weird white guy who got really into Buddhism or a several generations totally removed Italian American incorporating Panettone into their Christmas celebrations. When people cross the line it’s cringe and inauthentic but it rarely goes beyond that.

When I was in college I had a professor who studied my indigenous ethnic group and I took a couple of his classes. Once I brought my grandmother and mom to campus to speak with him in our indigenous language, and my grandmother spoke to him for three hours straight. He was a white man from Michigan but also one of my only connections to my culture, a person to practice and share my language with, to connect with my family. And all because he thought South American indigenous groups were interesting and got a job with Amnesty International to investigate the dictatorship to get down there. He is the kind of man people wag their finger at and he was one of the most important cultural elders I had.

This is a long way to say basically I just really believe we are allowed to make our lives whatever we want and make ourselves whatever we want. The phenomenon of white Americans in search of culture exists for the reasons you listed below and outside of these political discussions about its appropriateness and its moral boundaries there are just people doing and embodying that cultural fluidity and exchange for a million different reasons that aren’t worth litigating. The small town gay kids who move to big cities and hang out in the leather scene, getting into punk or hardcore or goth scenes, even converting to a new religion function under the same mechanism of the kind of cultural immersion that gives you access to the community and membership in the culture that weebs who immigrate to Japan to teach English, or international students coming to America, or inter cultural or inter faith partnerships undergo.

Anyways thanks for listening to my treatise. So to whoever’s reading this take the dance class or the traditional craft class or learn a new language or learn to cook new kinds of food make all different types of friends and make new traditions out of old ones or old traditions out of new perspectives. Culture isn’t a sacred part of who we are it’s a sacred form of the things we do and embody and connect with others through :-) <3

this is an incredible, wise, compassionate message. Thank you so much for sending it. You've said so much here about the problems of tying cultural identity to a race, ethnicity, or blood, or to regard it as static or isolated. And how much the standard racist American conceptions of racial and ethnic identity make structural discussions about disenfranchisement worldwide hard to have. Said so so much far better than I could, thank you!!

[thespectrehauntingfodlan]

I feel like a lot of people, and this is really more for Usamericans than those from other countries who don't have any exposure to the internal affairs of this particular nightmare country, truly do not grasp the scale and significance of the problems and horrors here?

Literacy will be mentioned and downplayed, but a full 20% of people living here are illiterate to a degree where they cannot interact with even basic writing. That's one in five people, or almost the population of the entirety of the United Kingdom. And that's only the population that either cannot read any words at all or cannot parse sentences, an equally large amount of people can only read at a very basic level, and can't interpret and extrapolate information from text that's not direct. This is not some cry about media literacy, this is about basic functioning in society and how many are left behind from a society that increasingly isolates and diminishes them.

Manufacturing will be mentioned, and the thought most will have is that American production has been gutted and outsourced (usually leading to hostility to places like China or Vietnam), which has some truth but much of American industry has been transfered from "free" workers to prison slave labor, with some states not paying prisoners forced to work at all and the most ""generous"" states paying them a seventh of the already laughable federal minimum wage, and with the government actually subsidizing this by giving corporations a $2400 tax credit per prisoner they "employ"

Prison will be mentioned but the sheer inhumanity and brutality will never be grasped even when people recognize elements of it (usually for what passes as comedy) the totality of it will never register. One out of five of all people incarcerated on Earth are in prison in America, subjected to conditions which regularly and frequently kill them or break them, and there's not even a consistent reporting measure for people who die in prison or jail, to say nothing of the police killings which dwarf the amount of people executed by the state, which has even less of a standard for reporting. One county was simply burying the people they killed in unmarked graves nearby and never reporting it or recording it, only being discovered after years almost on accident.

Homelessness is rampant but the numbers and methods for assessing the size of the unhomed population are pitiful at best and laughable at worst, regularly undercounting and diminishing the severity because those who are homeless are barely considered people to not just the government but in the perception imposed by society.

And none of that is touching on the scale of the imperial war machine which ravages the rest of the world, how there's no way to even know how many bases the US even has, how many people it kills, how many wars it fights, who it even supports. None of us touching on the non-military methods of support and control the US provides to its proxies and cronies who prop up its hegemony.

The scale of it all is just mind breaking and I have seen excellent writing and interrogation of parts but I don't feel like the overall picture is ever even glimpsed.

[apas-95]

why do usamerican anarchists even want to cook bathtub insulin like regulations on drug manufacturing just arent exploitative relationships

the only reason anyone ever does anything incorrectly is the profit motive. if you took away all safety regulations and threw a bunch of random people into a machine shop and asked them to build medical equipment they'd do so perfectly safely and correctly, because why would they Want to do otherwise?

i joke, obviously, but that's the thought process - it's fundamentally an extension of idealism: for a politics that otherwise completely ignores the material necessities and restrictions placed on political organisation and the measures they require to apply to the real world, in favour of, essentially 'if everyone just agrees with us our ideas will win', it shouldn't be that surprising that that extends to production.

in reality, of course, there are factors outside direct human control, and the implementation of safety regulations and inspections are an incredibly obvious and necessary measure - *but*, once you accept that, the question is then 'what good are safety regulations without any form of enforcement?', which, for anyone concerned with simply the task of bettering life for the working class, would prompt a response of 'oh, you're right, we'll need some form of enforcement, then.' for a lot of people, that's the end of their relationship with anarchism.

however, the underlying motives that generate these politics - as, in general, idealist political philosophies disconnected from reality don't simply spring up by themselves - aren't about the task of bettering life for the working class. fundamentally, the interests of these worldviews are those of the small-producer, the middle class: they promote a utopia where everyone is a small business owner (whether in a commune or a 'free market'), and, providing no real method to achieve these utopias, function mainly to drive these middle classes away from their character as labourers, and towards their privileges. the question of 'authority', a nebulous concept, has always been specifically the existence of any authority *over the small-producer's enterprise*. it's for *that* reason that, when the idea of 'authority' comes into contradiction with the task of improving the lives of the working people, some *do* decide that 'authority' is more important.

there is no such thing as a definite 'left' and 'right wing' - there are left wings and right wings of individual classes, but they both share more in class interest than they often do with their counterparts of other classes. libertarianism, in all its forms, is a middle class ideology, and shares its flaws - any jab against libertarians works just as well, 'who'll build the roads', 'would you need a driver's license', 'how will you ensure medicine is produced safely', etc.

when faced with these problems, people not married to the need to avoid 'authority' will simply accept the ideology is flawed - there are people who are pre-emptively 'anti-state', but fundamentally, their opponents are not 'pro-state', just practical. the anarchists are the only people coming to the table with a pre-existing, overriding position about 'authority' and the role of the state, and they're willing to abandon all practicalities to support it. functional regulations on medicine production *have* to be considered authoritarian, because that's the point of the ideology.

[radicalitch]

so i get a lot of religious content on Instagram bc i find it all interesting, and a few months ago i stumbled across the account of this man in his early 20s who was all about being a ‘traditional Catholic’ (usamerican Catholic who has absorbed too much evangelical fundie shit, imo).

anyway he was always posting excerpts from papal bulls, scripture, and other stuff directly from the Catholic Church, yet one of the things he posted about more than once was his stance on abortion. obviously, he was pro life—nothing new there, the Catholics were some of the first to get up-in-arms over abortion.

but this man posted, more than once, about how he believed ALL women who got abortions should get the death penalty.

which told me, immediately, that the Catholic Church was not the most important part of his life as he’d proclaimed: misogyny was.

for those not in the know, the Catholic Church is notoriously anti death penalty. from official church theology/morality books to pop culture pieces like ‘dead man walking.’ i was pumped with more anti death penalty propaganda at Catholic school than i was anti abortion propaganda. catholic majority countries, such as many in South America, have really low max prison sentences and often no death penalties because of the church’s influence.

so for this dumbass to be posting about how he thinks women should be murdered by the government for having abortions—no exceptions for rape, incest, health, etc—is fundamentally against the ethos of the church he sucks off all the time, and shows he doesn’t understand Catholicism nor the church. he’s just looking to justify his misogyny.

not that any of it is surprising, really. I just usually see this shit from fundies, and it’s weird to see Catholics inching more toward fundie ideology, because, well, in instances like this, shit doesn’t add up.

these fundie-Catholic influencers (usually young and recently converted/recently started taking the religion seriously) also LOVE to shit on atheist/agnostic or otherwise critical people who went to Catholic school bc ‘just because they went to Catholic school doesn’t mean they know everything about the religion.’ like, please, i completed all my fucking years of CCD, went to mass regularly for years, come from a family that’s Catholic and attended Catholic schools for generations, and attended one myself but you, twenty year old trad Catholic influencer who went to mass for the first time last year, are more educated on the church than i am. ok.

(unsurprisingly, last i saw the dickhead’s profile, he was single and looking for Catholic women)

[pelleas-at-castle-nox]

I'm surprised I haven't really seen anybody talking about the food sourcing theme in dungeon meshi. Like, the very first thing it made me think about when I started reading the manga was like "oh yeah, this really makes you think about food, where it comes from, the work needed to create enough food for one person, let alone a small group, to eat comfortably and nutritiously. Laios even specifically calls out that 'regular' food is also made using shit and dirt, intentionally grounding it in reality and subtly asking the reader to introspect on the food they eat and where it comes from."

Like, it's fair to say kui has the old "world builder's" spirit, it's easy to extrapolate a whole world when you're willing to both ask "how does x mundane task work?" And being willing to give it as fanciful or grounded an answer as you feel is appropriate, food is the central theme, but that sort of thinking extends to every corner of the lore and world building where you can practically begin to trace back a lot of world elements to these basic questions, like "what would happen if there were people who lived for 500 years, what would happen if you fought a creature with two heads" and I think that's really cool-

But like, that core question "where does the food that sustains you come from" is like such a relevant question that we should all be asking ourselves. I suppose it's just that I think about that often, both when I'm world building, and in modern and historical contexts.

In a lot of ways it's alienation of labor, most USAmericans (to keep it at least slightly contained in scope) don't get to know where any of the food they eat actually comes from. At best, you might buy your own groceries and maybe even be able to google some information as to the conditions at the place this food was grown, maybe you're lucky/resourced enough to grow some of your own food in like a garden. At worst you get your food premade and prepackaged and you're even completely divorced from the preparation aspect.

A major symptom of this is clearly shown in dungeon meshi's opening and especially in kabru shuro and even the canaries: when food is taken for granted, it becomes easy to neglect. The party initially wiped simply because they'd not considered how suicidal it was to press onward while exhausted, Kabru is so dissociated and focused that he shuts out most of his own biological signifiers of hunger, Shuro starves himself, equating food with leisure instead of a vital practice to sustain life and energy, and of course there's mister no desires.

It's no mistake that in all of the above cases, it's seemed to be heavily implied that food is either an after thought, or someone else's responsibility, or a simple logistical concern. Senshi's whole rant (in volume 1!!) about "oh the youths of today just buying prepackaged meat wine and bread" is especially tied in to this main theme of "do you know where your food comes from?" By taking it to the next level and asking "do you know why you're eating what you're eating?"

To take a personal side tangent, I was recently diagnosed as diabetic, and it's completely changed my relationship to food on a pretty fundamental level, but I'd say I'd always had a pretty good and healthy relationship with food (after I stopped having an eating disorder but that's a story for another day) so it was an easy enough adjustment to have to start actually thinking about how much of my diet was carbs and things like that, it just became a matter of considering what I was eating and when and why. I'm still not perfect at it and it's still a learning process but I'm working on it.

Anyways, my main theory as to why I've not seen it being pontificated on is just that in general people really hate being asked "do you know what you're eating?" Around these parts in a general fashion, but like, especially with weaponized starvation going on and very real issues of things like food desserts in America, and the fact that we all have to pay for just about every little meal, I think it's important for leftists to contemplate the political implications of meals.

An army runs on its stomach after all. Rant over

[elbiotipo]

I am not in a position to tell Usamericans who to vote for, not only because both options are terrible for me in the Third World, but because after years of hearing about US political stuff I've realized just how WEIRD their political system is.

Out of all representative democracies (as a system of government, not an ideal) I know of, the United States really is the strangest to me. Two parties that are practically state institutions, a supreme court that basically operates as an all-powerful council without any oversight, the sharp divisions between Republican and Democrat states (which I think is mostly artificial), the general apathy (with exceptions) towards protest and mobilization that I don't see in any other country, and more importantly, the absence of any powerful socialist movements...

It's a really strange system of goverment, which only seems normal because of their status as a superpower, but if you examine it closer as I've done from years of getting news and talking with people from there, it's not what you would see in any other country. By this I'm not saying other countries are better (I think burgeois liberal democracy is flawed and unfit for representing the working people or facing the challenges of this century), just that the United States is strange, and things I'm familiar with in my own representative republic, like powerful union movements and popular mobilization, are not found there.

I would call it some kind of "Two-Party Capitalist State", where the official ideology is capitalism liberal-conservatism and nothing outside that is admitted at all. There is no perspective of socialist change in the United States because it's not a position that is represented either on goverment or society, it simply doesn't exist, it's not allowed to exist.

If I lived in the United States, I wouldn't know who to vote for because not only none of the candidates or parties are good or represent me, but also because the whole system simply doesn't work like it supposedly does. I have to say it's a problem they need to fix themselves somehow, but I don't think "GO OUT THERE AND VOTE" is good enough.

[fitsofdespair]

i have hesitated to say anything before now. in part because i removed myself from fandom discourse and really from actively discussing iwtv a year ago. i consider it all a lose-lose situation.

but also because i’m generally of the opinion that black fans don’t need people to be their white saviors, least of all me. black people have never been saved by white people. they were never just given anything when it comes to strides in equality, they fought for it and still fight for it, against constant violent pushback every step of the way. only instead of the good ole’ days when racists just called those fighting for equality uppity, they’re now “bullies” for daring to call you out on your shit after the repeated condescension and the resulting harassment you’ve exhibited towards them.

in this day and age the word bully has zero meaning anymore. i mean come on, melania trump calls people mean about her husband bullies. elon musk thinks he’s being bullied by twitter users, though he clearly holds all the power and is absolutely the problem. its become a meaningless word that goliaths use to call davids because they won’t use the real word they actually want to say. some of these popular blogs are not being bullied, they’re being held accountable for their own actions.

it’s pretty disgusting the number of you who decided to identify strongly with these users that not only fail to question their own racial biases but have gone so far as to suggest black people don’t face racism anymore. this is so fucked. tbh it can be argued in many ways white people, especially in the deep south where i’m from, are inherently raised steeped in racism, even if its not direct. just because your family aren’t ostensibly racist doesn’t mean they didn’t bake their own little prejudices into your upbringing and being raised in your environment didn’t encourage them. even if you don’t see yourself as racist, you have to unlearn all this shit, even if it never once occurred to you that you are part of it. just cause you believe in equality and don’t hate people for their color or cultural background does not make you free of perpetuating microaggressions against them. this applies to fans across the world of course. (like for you white euro iwtv fans, you may say you have no problem with black people but i’ve heard some wild things some of yall have to say about the turks.)

i understand that probably half or more of you are not usamericans. but no matter what environment you live in, no matter where you were raised, there is no excuse for your behavior. just because YOU don’t see racism in your day to day life or are in the more likely situation, too blindly comfortable in your place in society to notice it right in front of your face, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist as a constant presence in other parts of the world or isn’t deeply ensconced in online rhetoric.

so for you white iwtv fans who can’t be fucked to mention let alone defend people you, in many cases once called friend, against the absolute horseshit your current comrades are spewing wrapped up in their nice safe cocoons of victimhood, i hope you do some serious soul searching to figure out if this is who you are, a person too cowardly to call out a friend because it might cost you their friendship. a person quick to condemn others on hearsay because you couldn’t be fucked to wonder am i on the right side of this? and if you do manage to get wise and change your mind, remember its not unforgivable to say, you know what? i was wrong. i wrote in an old post that the hallmark of being a functional adult is changing your views accordingly when you learn new information or even just ruminate on what you know (i myself was a little bitch about ep 5 when it first dropped until i had to sit down and ask myself why i was actually feeling some kind of way about it). dying on a hill is not all its cracked up to be. being told you’re wrong is not always a personal attack and its often an opportunity for improvement if you can be bothered to genuinely hear other people out. an alarming number from all walks of life never figure that out. for my part, i am still learning and hope i never stop learning.

while that sentiments all nice and gooey (i mean them, but i understand its still sacharine to put out there), i am still guilty for not having directly written anything about this until now. and thats on me and i earned any flack i get for that. again, i am more of the mindset that black people don’t need white spokespeople, but that doesn’t mean they'll mind allies. and as a sidebar, going out of your way to say you are rising “above the noise” or “ignoring the drama” is absolutely your right, but it does not make you superior. it just makes you complacent with the status quo. i mean as long as you get to squee!! about anything and everything who cares about other people, right?