#it’s supposed to be communist propaganda vibes….

[formulanni]

Carlos communism poster

Taglist: @st-leclerc

[straynoahide]

this kind of bullshit arguments is why (mostly white) leftist fifthcolumnists can unironically defend october 7th as "resistance" and spend every second of their western lives shitting on the west, with barely no opposition in "progressive spaces". israel isn't exactly part of the west, the jewish democracy isn't exactly liberal democracy, but our enemies certainly are the same... pro-terror, yes, this is what this is, but also something worse.

what's this great anti-western resistance stand for?

the CCP seeing taiwanese gay marriage as a casus belli and reeducating muslims? juche's trigenerational punishments? fossil fuel oligarchs and ruscist bureaucrats that still praise stalin enforcing conscription of native siberians? the theocratic ummah and arab imperialists that do not at all envision human trafficking in some neo-caliphate for kafir girls? failed narco-states and femicides in latin america's powerhouses? more jihadism done by black people against each other, or the zimbabwe experience in africa? endless civil war? what is it? what is our salvation? socialism in one planet?

what else am i supposed to applaud, as an european, to deconstruct whiteness and embrace this multipolar future, to get a medal for being with the resistance (ie the imperialism of some other awful regime or proto-totalitarian nightmare) and not with the "american empire"? how great 9/11 and how bad the pax americana.

yes let's go back to elder councils that rule out a woman raped is solved by the prepetrator's sister raped and that dancing boys are great entertainment cos if they're poor nobody will complain they get serially abused by patrons. let's pretend anti-american sentiment and the taliban help afghans more than democracy would.

or maybe, i don't know, let's pretend traditional cultures aren't hit-and-miss half of the time with unscientific, anti-scientific, obscurantist explanations and prescriptions. how great stone age justice is in the name of cultural relativism. chemotherapy and antipsychotics are just as good, or worse, than bear bile, cos cancer is just bad vibes and the shaman will cure you.

liberal western hegemony my ass. just look the fuck around and see what humanity is doing and it's not that hard to see what's up, life isn't a boogeyman economic system and 'structures' it's also people and values and some fucks don't engage the former besides out of touch abstractions nor would know the latter if it hit them in the face.

leftism is just postmodern soteriology. it's empty, and it is braindead.

also btw rainbow imperialism and anti-antizionism are the best praxis for progressive values.

LGBTIQ rights belong in every little recess of every nation i don't care it's "traditional" to stone bottoms bc that culture has 6 genders and the elder council decided sth else. i literally don't care. and i don't care how traditional and nationally sensitive jew-hatred and anti-israel propaganda seep into the multipolar discourse, either. if every country says one (1) nation/ethnoreligion is to blame for every bad thing humans do then fuck every country and their big lie.

fuck all of that. all of humanity needs to drop bullshit beliefs if we're gonna live on the same rock, whether we like it or not, and i'm not going to pretend the taliban's voice or some deluded communist monarch in north korea should have a say in it as loud as mine because the west is "just as bad or worse". the nazis didn't get a say in rebuilding europe. they won't either and if that's through liberalism and america then so be it.

The thing with 9/11 is that no one cares that much about the death and destruction itself. Buildings fall down and people die all the time, including in the US. Like at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic you had entire 9/11s worth of USamericans dying on a regular basis. If all that damage was caused by an earthquake or faulty building practices or whatever, there wouldn't have been nearly as much fuss about it. It's not as if the insane response from US population was a matter of "two building fall down"

The reason why 9/11 was so upsetting to the US population was their widespread feelings of Imperialist Chauvinism and the subsequent outrage at seeing it so openly and violently defied. The US was at the height of its Imperialist power at the turn of the millennium, a hegemonic superpower that was dominant in some way over more or less the entire world. Whether they'd phrase it in such a way or not, most people in the US were very well aware of this; as far as they were concerned the US was truly the greatest country on the Earth. For some this was a point of pride, for others it was a simple fact of the world. This made them feel secure; bombings and mass killings might happen in those "shithole nations" of the earth but it couldn't happen over there. The US military could wipe entire cities off the map and like maybe that was good, maybe that was unfortunate and maybe it meant nothing at all. Either way that was normal; the violence flowed from the Core to the Periphery.

Until one day it didn't. One day a group of people from that Periphery, from some shithole group of nations, struck back. Now the sorts of destruction they'd seen on TV were happening right outside their window; the US got the smallest taste of the sort of brutality they had long inflicted on the rest of the world. And they did not like that taste at all. The US people as a whole went mad with grief and rage, not at the death of any people but the death of their sense of unquestionable safety and superiority. And the only hope of getting that feeling back was to inflict a revenge so terrible that no one would dare resist or retaliate again.

If bloodshed was how they'd built their empire, only more bloodshed could keep it safe. And this time they didn't even have to feel bad about it. It's not as if the US empire had ever given the world any peace, but now they had the perfect pretense to escalate it to levels not seen in decades. If they talked about this isolated and comparatively limited attack as though it was some great invasion, the US government and its supporters could take all the moral high ground of "self defence" even as they slaughtered impoverished peoples on the other side of the world. So it made sense to treat the 11 September attacks as though they were the greatest tragedy of all time. 9/11 didn't break the US psyche, it just made them express it in a more shameless way. It's not as though genocidal Imperialist violence was anything new to the USA. Afghans were just the new Apaches; the "Middle East" a new "Wild West"

[jackiesartden]

Modern Call of Duty is Ass

I know I am late to this party, but I bought MW3 when it was on sale for 30 bucks, so I played it only starting a month or whatever ago.

Holy shit, this game is ass.

Where to even start? I do unironically enjoy this series, as much as its grating hyper-individualized uncritically pro-military USA propaganda is annoying to me. Call it a guilty pleasure, I suppose, but it still is a fun shooter and it's not like my individual purchase is going to make a meaningful difference to the affect it casts on impressionable tweens, teens, and adults. I am a sucker for 'immersive' types of games with dramatic cinematics, narrative and fun casual gameplay.

But damn, are they trying to ruin this series. The imperialism propaganda meter has been turned up to 11 since MW2019, having the fucking gall to reframe real life American war crimes as other countries, emboldening xenophobic vigilantism as long as it's in the best interest of 'what's right' AKA the West and especially the USA. The Black Ops storyline is as uncritically anti-communist as always, but they're getting bold with the 'heroic' portrayal of Ronald Reagan in BO: Cold War and I'm cynically looking forward for how they'll manage to overtly rewrite history to embolden the 1980's and 1990's CIA in Black Ops 6. You can't make the CIA look good without being seriously dishonest or ignorant, and given the franchise's past ties to the actual US Military, I'm expecting a whole lot of the former.

In the MW reboot, they've taken what you could earnestly call a classic, if a bit goofy (and subtle propaganda) storyline into a mediocre (and blatant propaganda) rehash with dwindling levels of effort being put into the campaign, something especially noticeable in MW3. I remember hearing rumors that MW3 started off as a DLC, and man does it feel like it. Several of the missions are basically a mini DMZ session with some exposition thrown in, which feels like filler content that was quicker to make rather than a thought out plan of gameplay. Playing thru MW2019, MW2, and MW3, I think there's a clear slow decline in care and effort put into the campaign, and then a swift smash into a brick wall for the latter game. I won't do spoilers, but the way certain important plot elements of the original games were recreated were, to be generous, undercooked. The 'big thing' comes out of nowhere, feels underwhelming, and extremely contrived.

How about the multiplayer? It's...ok. I play it, I enjoy parts of it. But I've noticed that the classic maps that have been ported over seem to not fit the overhauled gameplay. I don't hate the movement as much as I've seen some complain, but I would personally prefer something closer to the classic mechanics, with just sliding here and there. I will say though, I do think the 'omnidirectional movement system' as they call it in the Black Ops 6 beta is an improvement. It feels like a more refined version of the same vibe, and I look forward to playing more of that game's multiplayer when in comes out late next month.

There are some major gripes I share with others in the community, though. For one thing- please get rid of fucking SBMM. It's just annoying, and sucks fun out of what should be a fun casual game. CoD has always been a fun game to play casually. It is not at its best as a hardcore shooter, and I think that the 'hardcore' gamemodes and ranked queue should be cleanly separated from the mass player group who plays it casually. I saw a dev claiming that SBMM has always been a thing in the classic games. But here's the thing- even if the basic system was present, there is no way it is anywhere near as strict as it is now, and every reasonable player knows that. Most people do not want to grind skill rank; we have Counter-Strike, Valorant, Rainbow Six: Siege, and plenty of other well-balanced, better-made games for that.

Another thing that annoys me but seems hit or miss as a complaint from others, is the netcode. I'm not quite sure if it's peaker's advantage, lag compensations, or whatever other combination of multiplayer netcode terminology, but it just doesn't feel good to me. When I kill other players, it feels like TTK is long and I'm mag-dumping, but when I get killed, it feels like they locked onto my head instantly and took me out with like two shots. Then, when I watch the killcam, they had five business days to slowly move the crosshair towards my direction and destroy my face. It's hard without insight behind the scenes to know how much of this is perceived, and how much is actual latency issues or whatever, but even if it's just a presentation problem it still sucks to play with.

Am I still gonna play CoD? Yeah. I'm still playing MW3, and I pre-ordered BO6 and enjoyed the beta multiplayer overall. But I can dream of games being better and less pumped with shitty messaging. Something something no ethical consumption under capitalism

[justsomeguycore]

i feel like i don’t dance from hsm 2 has the same vibe as those USSR/China communist brotherhood solidarity propaganda posters. like i feel like you can’t POSSIBLY have been trying to make this gay. but how is anybody supposed to interpret it any other way

[atimefordragons]

[ T S E S A R E V N A  ... ]

My incomplete audition for Gem Quest, didn’t have the time to participate properly, let alone finish my audition from all the other groups (yeah, I don’t know what time management is and have no idea how to pace myself). 

“В небе далеком горит звезда, | In distant heaven star shines Не одинока и не одна | It's not alone and not the one Каждый себе выбирает путь | Everyone choose their own way И она не даст свернуть | And star won't allow them to turn Не закрывай глаза | Don't close your eyes Смотри она ведет тебя.. | Look, it leads you...”

-  Звезда (Dima Bilan ft Anna Belan)

Real Name: Yekatrina “Katya/Rina” Anatolyevna Raevskaya

Age: 26

FC: Alia Bhatt

Species & Class: Dragonborn & Mage-Knight

Guild: Moonstone

Description of In-Game Powers: (what their fantasy species lets them do, basically, and all the associated drawbacks)

A dragonborn is a cross-bred species, born from the bloodline of either a human or an elf, and a Great Dragon (highly evolved, ancient dragons that can cast spells, and shit, and even speak the human tongue). Because great dragons are rare, most dragonborn are second generation or later. In the case of Tsesarevna, an ice dragon and a human (not a first gen).

Dragonborns have a natural affinity for magic, particularly elemental, even more specifically for the element of the dragon type whose blood they inherited, in the case of Tsesarevna, frozen water related magic, ice, frost, snow.

Place of Birth: Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation

Appearance: (optional textual description/notes of wardrobe, features not represented by fc, etc)

Places Most Likely to be Found In-Game: Level 20 - A Midwinter Night’s Dream (I see what you did there Ayz) and Level 38 - Murias Pass (the snow reminds her of home, ya know. The cold never bothered me anyway), also sometimes Level 39 - The Dragon, but she’s technically stuck on that level because she refuses to kill the Dragon, issa zaldrīzo ānogar.

Current Inventory:

History Book: The Dragon King Festival

Strongest character trait: eurovision knowledge Confidence (in herself and some others)

Strengths: Katya is almost surprisingly determined, it contradicts with the rest of her “I’ve never had to work hard to get what I want in my life” type personality, but she is persevering and stubborn, when she wants something, she won’t stop until she gets it. Which in her real life was never very difficult getting.  

Weaknesses: Where to even start? Spoiled Princess Brat (she has never not gotten what she wants in her life, and it shows), impatient, impulsive, not exactly a team player (I mean, she is now, but that shady shit she pulled back when she first started playing kinda got her a rep), arrogant, prideful, kind of a bitch (doesn’t really think of it as a weakness, but ya know, it’s hard to make friends), dragon obsession (refuses to kill dragons, even in order to advance the game, got herself and party members killed early on in the game ‘cause of it), kind of an adrenaline junkie, and reckless af. She doesn’t really consider the consequences of the game, wholeheartedly believes her dad, fam and connections in the real world will get her out soon enough, so has no problem running head first into fire (”I��m too hot to die in a video game”).

Player Stats: (on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the weakest, 10 being the strongest. try to balance it out!)

STRENGTH: 9

DEFENSE: 7

CHARISMA: 3

PSYCHE: 5

WILLPOWER: 9

CAUTIOUSNESS: 2

AGILITY: 5

ENDURANCE: 7

INTELLIGENCE: 8

LUCK: 4

Personality:  “Haven’t you ever seen a princess be a bad bitch before?”

Haha, yeah, but mostly, she’s just a massive nerd. She’s such a fucking nerd. Bitch learned Quenya and Sindarin just for kicks, and her own amusement. Literally no one else in her irl circle even fucking knows what those two things are (Elvish tongues in Tolkien).

As the baby of a two large families, and the only daughter of a Russian oligarch, Katya is incredibly spoiled, and very much self-centered. Something of a downplayed celebutante, she is not quite as present at every single high society, high fashion event in Russia, or elsewhere in Europe, she only goes to a handful. And really only for the free stuff, she loves stuff. Katya maintains a somewhat disinterested high social status, as she is the daughter of a major industrialist, and friends with other, higher profile wealthy Russian heirs and heiresses, and there are benefits (so many), but she isn't quite interested in attaining spotlight or attention. However, she also perceives it as something that is just naturally part of her life. She uses a lot of hand gestures when speaking, and tends to give off a naive-princessy vibe who seems to think the world revolves around her. Which, to be fair, it does in her house -she does know that it doesn’t actually, but ya know, can’t quite turn off that bitch, I’m a princess mindset.

“I don’t skate through life... I walk through life. In really nice shoes.” - Alexis Rose (Schitts’ Creek 3.04)

Notably, she speaks with a vocal fry when speaking English. She says “like” a lot, has a bit of a condescending tone, but, she like, does care. About a lot of stuff, but also humanity in general. Spoiled baby she may be, she does have a moral compass, and was amongst the public figures who signed an open letter against the Saint Petersburg Anti-”Gay Propaganda” bill (it’s some bullshit about “protecting” minors from “non-traditional sexual relationships”). She believes in doing the right thing, that the goal of any organization or even person should just be to decrease the net suffering of humanity, but also, she is a super proud Russian. Very anti-american, thinks they’re all stupid, always says shady shit in Russian whenever she runs into americans online. However, it’s not like she’s a fan of United Russia (Putin’s party), they’re right-wing nutjobs, she does not like them. Her main political party is A Just Russia, who are much less then left than her (officially, they be centre-left), but they’re the only ones (of her favoured parties) who have seats in the State Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly, Russia’s legislative body - the Duma is like parliament, or congress, I think, I don’t really know what congress is tbh, house of representatives maybe? Idk, the place where Nancy Pelosi is charge, equivalent to that). Katya also supports Patriots of Russia, a socialist, left-wing party, but they only have seats in regional parliaments, and only one seat in the Federation Council (similar to the senate, the upper house of Russia’s legislative body). There’s also Russia of the Future, but it’s not been formally registered yet. In the 2018 election she voted for the communist party’s candidate just for kicks (it’s different in Russia, there’s was zero possibility of Putin losing, come on, grow up).

As a side note, if this helps with the explainary-stuff, I basically envision her as a slavic-desi cross of Alexis Rose from Schitts’ Creek, and Gina Linetti from Brooklyn-99, also this hindi song; Sheila ki Jawani. The song is basically about owning the fact that you’re super sexy.

Biography: Katya is half-Russian, half-Indian, born to a Russian father, industrialist (and oligarch) Anatoli Ivanovich Raevsky, and an Indian mother, activist and journalist Mishti Syeda Khan. Her parents eventually separated, though technically are still married, when she was about 14, and her mother moved to Manchester in the UK, while Katya remained in Russia with her father. Katya is from a large family, on both sides, and at the time of her birth, was the first baby to be born in quite a few years (the elder cousins were like tween-teen, too old be constantly coddled and cuddled, and too young to make babies), so she was hella spoiled by everyone. The problems her maternal family had with her mother marrying a non-Muslim white boy? Well, we still hate him, but look how cute Rina is.

Despite the... complications between her family members - the whole religion/marrying a shada (white) boy thing, not to mention that Mishti herself is like agnostic at “best”, in general, as the baby, Katya (or Rina as her mother and maternal family call her), get along - well, okay, there’s always the shady auntieji’s, and bullshit drama, but like, that’s just brown families yo. We like that. We’re all 100% those bitches (see ya at Eid Nanu [grandma], ya messy bitch). While there is some distance between Katya and her mother, metaphorically and literally, she really does look up to her mother and her work, and followed in her footsteps, studying journalism at Moscow State University, and moving on to work at Известия (Izvestia), the “national” paper of Russia, formerly the state newspaper of the Soviet Union. Currently, she’s a glorified fact checker, and maintains the website with a handful of other colleagues. She’s also authored small “puff pieces” for Nedelya (a weekly Friday section about leisure actives, culture, that kinda stuff).

Katya is not exactly an avid gamer. She likes games, but it’s not like a 24/7 thing, whereas she is 24/7 thinking about like ASOIAF or Stars Wars (fuck you JJ, you were supposed to destroy the Sith R*ylo, not join them), not to mention Eurovision. Anyone who thinks Eurovision only lasts for a week is a fake fan, and anyone who thinks it’s a one day thing is an american. Ziben ziben ilulu motherfucker. Anyway.... she prefers immersive, high fantasy worlds, she likes the story and plot, so her types of games are The Witcher and Dragon Age Series, Elder Scrolls, that sort of thing. She doesn’t put in daily hours, ‘cause she got other stuff to do, but will dedicate weekends to leveling up her characters in order to accomplish quests and missions quickly and not waste time to get to the story cut scenes. She hates, hates, hatessss microtransactions and those stupid fucking mmorpg phone games which are literally just farmville repackaged with a dragon or an orc; FUCK YOU. What a fucking waste of time, quit advertising as having a plot and story, or cool character customization, ‘cause you don’t have any of that you basic ass bitch!

Gem Quest was regifted to Katya by a coworker, who had gotten it as a present, but didn’t have a VR set (of course she had one, she’s rich, and also she needed it to play Batman: Arkham VR - she’s still waiting on a game that’ll let her make out with Nightwing while playing as a custom character). She got a bit of a bad rep (understatement) in the beginning of the game. Katya hates being stuck because she doesn’t have enough exp or whatever, so she always levels up in the beginning of a game before taking the time to fuck around and do whatever, which, in the case of Gem Quest, means teaming up is the easiest way to do that. So, whenever a party member was holding them back from leveling up, she would straight up kill them in order to move on. She killed her own irl friends, to be fair, she doesn’t do that anymore, that was just in the beginning, but ya know, the rep of being that bitch kinda hard to get of.

G.’s announcement didn’t particularly freak out Katya. Whatever kind of evil Kaiba Corp execs bullshit he was pulling didn’t matter, he still had a body out there in the real world, and there’s no fucking way her dad would let die in a fucking game. There’s perks to being Oligarchs in Russia, and even if she did die in-game and was unable to return to reality, wherever G. and his real body were, motherfucker will die in excruciating pain. Polonium-210 ain’t pleasant, and the Novichok series is so much worse.

Relationships: (OPTIONAL, fill out whenever you want to)

Silverwing - rn. Anastasia “Anya” Gagarina (fc: Anna Belan), a fellow moonstone, and real life friend - well, the younger sister of an ex-boyfriend whom she still gets along with (the sister, not necessarily the ex).

Inferna - I don’t really have any plotting ideas, but Inferna’s whole; “It’s very important that I am both cute and powerful” is so relatable (to me and Katya xp)

Enthroned -

Morningstar -

Extras/Trivia (aka unnecessary information):  

Her mother, and thus maternal family, are from Kolkata, in the state of West Bengal in India, thus making Katya fluent (relatively) in Bengali as well (well, a dialect of it - West Central, you’d think as an actual Bengali person, I’d know the proper name of it, but nope. Idk, shudobasha maybe, but I think that’s for people from Dakha, which is in Bangladesh, not India. Whatever. Not like my dad will check this and be disappointed in me.)

Apart from her native Russian, Hindi, and Bengali, she speaks English, and Japanese (100% learned it because she’s a weeb), as well as the fictional languages; Quenya, Sindarin (and can use the Tengwar script to write them), High Valyrian, Mando’a, Dovazhul, and Klingon. As a teenager she also created a dictionary for ancient “Black Speech”, an in-universe constructed language in Tolkien’s legendarium, but her version is not canon, so it doesn’t count - she’s also forgotten a lot of it. She was a baby, she still has the hard copy she made somewhere in the Raevsky Manor in Saint Petersburg.  

After graduating from MSU, her father bought her, her own apartment in the Kudrinskaya Square Building in Moscow, adjacent to the ones he owned already, which she had lived in when she moved to Moscow for school. 

Katya’s family is religiously mixed (well, she’s the one who’s mixed), her maternal family are largely Muslim, some Hindu (very few though, like, you can count them on one hand), and her paternal family are either Orthodox Christian or atheist (usually depending on how long they were alive and how into the Soviet Regime they were). Katya’s parents are agnostic (Mishti), and atheist (Anatoli), Katya herself is also atheist, but sometimes she’ll say she prays to the Seven or R’hllar, or Lord Jashin, or some other made up nerd ass religion (’cause she that bitch).

But for real, she can be a real bitch about religion. The Soviets got a lot wrong, but banning religion was not one of them <- so she says. She gets super pissed when someone brings up religion during a politics chat, that fake shit should have nothing to do with running a country. 

hates starbucks with every fibre of her being, it’s such an american staple and the first time she saw one in Russia, she nearly had a heart attack.

Will die mad about:

The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker; the fuck was that bullshit? We trusted you JJ! 

the garbage show’s gaslighting and murder of Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, First of Her Name, Rightful Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men. Queen of Meereen, The Prince who was Promised, The Unburnt, Slayer of Lies, Breaker of Shackles, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and Mother of Dragons.

Hrithik Roshan still being so fucking hot (he’s 45, please like chill a little, holy fuck)

Catarina de Lurton dying 

Former american politician John McCain constantly saying “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country” - bitch, we’re a thousand years old, how’s your 250 year old failed experiment of a garbage nation going? 

Freud.

Links:

Playlist

Pinterest

Urstyle Collection (aesthetics, and other shit)

Social Media

[apexart-journal]

Mimi Lipson in Montevideo, Day 23

Roundup of Monday and Tuesday:

Pilates (oof), then a trip to the Museo de la Micraciones in Ciudad Vieja. 

This museo confused me. I was looking for a tribute to the immigrant populations of Uruguay, as my schedule indicated, but the space was sparsely filled, and I kept looking for more. The main room had a curiously staged exhibit about a meat-processing plant owned by a Belgian/British company that opened in 1924 and supplied canned meats to the world. 

From what I gathered, this plant turned a small town into an instant city of immigrants from over 60 countries. In other words, the Uruguayan Detroit. So I suppose that was the immigration hook.

In the temporary exhibit space, there was a show called “Sala del Subsuelos” (which apparently means “subsoils room”)—portraits by the artist Agustina Olivera.

Many of these were labeled with places of origin: Java and Portugal and the like. Then, out back, there was a large hangar-like space—constructed to look half-constructed, with steel girders and a partial roof.

I found myself alone, looking at some vitrines of artifacts from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

Out here, the substrate of Montevideo is revealed. Is the beam leaned against that wall with purpose? Are these various street surfaces part of an exhibit? I couldn’t tell.

It turns out that this space is an archeological site, where (as I read when I got home and finally looked at the pamphlet from the front desk) “one can appreciate the longest stretch of the old city’s wall yet found.” This is curious to me. Is it not known where the wall was? The text makes it sound like the hanging gardens of Babylon. Yet found…  are they anticipating more discoveries? But I suppose so much was built on top of and around the old wall that it is a minor miracle to find this much intact.

Only a week left here in Montevideo. How is that possible? Visits to Ciudad Vieja are beginning to feel bittersweet. Who knows if I will ever find my way back here? I want to remember the particular light, and shipping containers and cranes peeking up these streets from the port--which, by the way, I have not explored. 

Agustin and I talked about Ciudad Vieja and how there are so many beautiful houses there. 

He said there’s too much crime for the neighborhood to be popular with the moneyed classes. I don’t have a sense of where the crime is, but it seems odd to me anyhow that CV has not been colonized by the rich.

I had a couple of panchos (hot dogs) at a joint on Bartolome Mitre that I like. (Cheap, served with a runny horseradishy/cheesy slime that comes disguised in mustard bottles.) And then I hoofed it through Plaza Independencia and a couple of blocks up 18 de Julio, back to the theater where Lucia and I saw the zarzuela, for a screening of Sergeant York, which was playing as part of a Howard Hawks festival.

The theater was full of grey heads. I think the average age was in the 80s.  If I had been choosing, I probably would have gone for Ball of Fire (with my beloved Barbara Stanwyck), which was the second feature, because I don’t generally get all that excited about war movies, but in retrospect I’m really glad I saw it. The war part is only in the second half. Sgt. York is a bildungsroman of a movie. The bulk of it is a sappy but deeply satisfying pastoral, set in a lush simulacrum of the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. Gary Cooper plays a (bizarrely superannuated) sharp-shooting mountain boy who finds God and then is drafted to fight in WWI, despite his effort to be deferred as a conscientious objector. He single-handedly captures over 100 German soldiers and returns to his Tennessee sweetheart (the radiant Joan Leslie—half his age, but whatever) with a chest full of medals. 

It is, amazingly, a true story, and it has the reassuring blandness of wartime Hollywood propaganda. It came out in 1941. I would not be surprised to hear that it changed a lot of minds about getting into the fight. Watching it with this audience, I wondered how much of that subtext was obvious—and how that unabashed American earnestness plays in South America. They clearly were lapping it up in any case. They especially loved all the shenanigans at a roadhouse that is half in Tennessee (dry) and half in Kentucky (den of iniquity).

Anyhoo.

My morning engagement with the mysterious YouHub Coworking / Sistema B was called off. I was going to go explore the Carrasco neighborhood, where they have their offices, but I just couldn’t leave the house, so I decided to mop that up on my free day (tomorrow).

This afternoon I walked a block down the street to the movieplex to see a screening of a performance of I Due Foscari—a Verdi opera staged at La Scala in Milan. Placido Domingo sang the part of the elder Foscari.

A few observations:

1.  I realized that the interior of Teatro Solis looks like La Scala: the balconies, painted in cream-colored semigloss, and the sprays of houselights.

2.  I was at first disappointed with the look of the opera, which was not in any obvious way innovative. But there was a strange, ritualistic way that people moved on the stage, and sometimes froze in tableaux vivant. And a masked ball that felt more like a meeting of a secret society. I got a decadent and creepy vibe.

3.  I expected to be bored out of my skull. I even secretly was plotting to sneak out early. I am not an opera buff, and the story, which I read in a synopsis, is very dull—practically a nonstory. I won’t bore you. But I did not, ultimately, want to leave. I sat in the dark feeling, just riding the waves.

4.   In Sergeant York, our hero is presented with a conflict between theoretical and practical compassion. He tells the Major that he killed the German machine gun division to save lives. “That, Sergeant, is the most amazing thing you’ve told me,” the Major replies. (Paraphrasing.) In the opera, the elder Foscari--a Venetian doge whose son has been accused of murder--faces a similar dilemma: uphold the law, to which he is sworn, or plead for his son’s life. He chooses his ideals, and it breaks his heart. I was trying to think of a movie or play or opera that celebrates protagonist’s allegiance to a pure ideal over the relief of actual suffering. I guess that’s what saints’ lives are for.

So then after the opera, I went over to the Universidad for a talk about a photo book documenting the life and times of the Rambla.

I wandered around the University looking for the hall, riding the birdcage elevator up and down. 

This town is lousy with great old elevators.

I didn’t understand more than a few words, of course. The authors seemed to be distinguishing their work from beauty photography (though the photos they projected were quite beautiful) and “touristic” photography. I slipped out after half an hour and flipped through the book at the merch table. It didn’t have that luxe production that I’ve come to associate with photo books. It’s more textbook-style, on paper that feels a little like magazine stock, with rounded edges.

Nice night walk back to the boulevard to catch a bus.

Karl Marx and Uncle Ho are decorating the Communist Club (where I photographed Lenin and Che last time). Tonight the club was open. I saw a Soviet flag when I peeked inside, but then I skittered away. I kinda wish Javier would set me up with the comrades for an informational tour. 

My phone has not been getting a signal for a few days, and I was pleased with myself for getting there and back on unfamiliar buses with no problem.

And… scene.

[psychotrenny]

The funniest thing is that the sort of "similarities" they talk about are so broad that you could just as easily apply them to Liberal Democracies as well. A classic example is how you'll see claims that both Communism and Fascism are "populists" because they claim to represent "The Will of the People", even though Liberal Democracy itself regularly justifies itself as representative of the populace through ideas like "the consent of the governed". And considering the that way Communism is rooted in giving control over state processes and the means of production to the Proletariat (a concrete social class of people bound by shared material interests) while Fascist "populism" is the claim of serving some magic racial spirit, the loose and idealistic conception of "the people" that Liberalism serves has much more in common with the Fascist definition than the Communist one.

Other common examples of shared "Authoritarianism" are just policies that broadly speaking are common to the vast majority of 20th century states and political groups. Stuff like the production and dissemination of Propaganda, use of force (i.e. censorship, imprisonment, outright killing) against political opponents and employment of a secret police force are all very much features you can find in a Liberal Democracy. Like you don't even have to know all that much about history to realise this; even a brief familiarity with McCarthyism/The Red Scare (even one as shallow as "has played Fallout 4") or the experience of living through the aftermath of 9/11 should make it clear that the USA, the supposed centre of Freedom and Democracy, happily uses the sort of tactics that gets foreign regimes classified as "Authoritarianism". Even if you consider such things terrible mistakes or necessary evils, "not Real Democracy", you have to admit that they very much exist and have (at least broadly speaking) similarities with the tactics employed by oppositional groups.

Now you could go full anarchist and decry all states as being functionally the same but I wouldn't recommend this; I used to follow this ideology until I recognised it as the politically incoherent dead-end it is. Rather I would suggest discarding the Idealistic view of politics; instead evaluating political actions in terms of the material motivations that drive them, the material conditions the occur in and the material effects they have on the world rather than going off of whatever vibe or aesthetic you associate their ideology with. You can strip any politics of its context to dress it up and present it however you want; make vastly differing actions look the same in order to serve rhetorical ends. But you're not going to get a realistic view of the world if you engage in such behaviour or fall for these sorts of tricks. Don't take political rhetoric for granted; look into the material reality that lies behind it. Only then do you have a chance o understanding the world as it really is

I love Liberals going "This communist thing is actually the exact same as a fascist thing because I think they have a similar vibe". Like they never offer any real material analysis to back up their horseshoe theory bullshit it's always some idealistic nonsense