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nihoneshi · 1 year ago

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Welcome to Aqua Rambles on about KFP

I just finished binging Kung Fu Panda 1-3 (not 4 yet) and man outside of a few secondhand embarrassment scenes, because there are a couple of them still for my brain, What I will say is this

god I do miss KFP fandom so so much but I also was REALLY young when I first found myself in that fandom, so like, It's only a matter of time before I found myself brainrotting the movies again and even shorter of time before I re-entered Fandom Space.

So let's get the obvious ones out of the way. God I love Tragedies and the whole prophecy that was laid out hundreds of years ago, I love how cohesive the Trilogy is (I think we all agree that KFP3 was the true end of the Series, since not even the VAs liked KFP4 and it was a glorified corporate cash grab, but don't worry, AUs exist (: )

Tai Lung and General Kai are definitely by far the two MAIN villains I vibe with the most given their situations (Tragedy Affliction & Bond Brother Give-Take disagreement) I do love Shen but my love for him is extremely nuanced on the fact he's a diabolical genocidal sociopath but he's also oddly fucking dramatic, theatrical and comedic of a villain DESPITE the 3 words I JUST called him.

But also the Wolf Boss.. God he's a bastard (affectionate) but EVERY TIME HE "INSULTS" PO HE JUST GOES OFF ON NON-THREATENING TERMS homie please stop being bisexual on the battlefield lmaO /pos.

The Will to write Tai Lung just like 13yo me wanted to has not changed outside of the fact that after a decade more of writing with extremely intricate and nuanced characters with complex tragedies and traumas, I feel like I could finally do justice with this Snow Leopard (especially with Redemption Arcs, because hee-ho I write Saren Arterius, you know. Mass Effect 1's big bad villain that is just as much as a tragedy as Tai Lung but unlike Tai Lung this idiot decided to try to get parasitical genocide machines to spare them and ended up getting indoctrinated against his will)

Now onto Main Cast. Just like kid me, Viper and Mantis were my two go-to idols for KFP1, my love for Crane's realism-centric attitude and Tigress' having second thoughts and a much more intricate wake-up call in KFP2 and on became so much more apparent, like, trust me I haven't watched any of the other animated content but you can tell like, these 6 have gotten so attached to one another (Monkey and Po, especially, literally best buds love that for them)

But the SHEER amount of times I have said this phrase "Viper, Please rephrase yourself" has been in the nearly every thing she has ever said she is so upfront and has misread the room every single damn time. and don't even GET ME Started on KFP2/3 Tigress, the sheer amount of character development she gets is insane

she goes from an asshole to deep down realizing that Po has fallen still due to mental turmoil SEVERAL times and isn't keeping Po down there with Ox and Croc because she doesn't want him getting in the way but BECAUSE She doesn't want him to get hurt like him freezing up both times has gotten him. And then further more watching Po teach everyone their own ways of Kung-Fu all the WHILE TIGRESS IS HOLDING ON TO A BABY PANDA THE WHOLE TIME, EVEN FIGHTING WITH THE KID. AND THEN SHE CARRIES THEM AROUND EVEN AT THE JADE PALACE AT THE END OF THE MOVIE.

And please I can't fucking believe it took Crane several MOVIES TO GET HIS FUCKING NECK FIXED AFTER WHAT TAI LUNG DID TO HIM, HOMIE HAD A CROOKED NECK FOR MONTHS. There were scenes in KFP2 and Early KFP3 where this man's neck was still partially FUCKED. Dude shrugs it off like it's nothing and then proceeds to heal his wing in merely a few damn days max.

The Theatrics, all of the animations, the voice work.. god damn I adore these three movies so so much. But there is one thing I was not expecting and honestly I should've seen it coming.

My eventual brainrot and emotional attachment to side characters and characters with very minimal screen time (I should've seen this with me Writing Volteer from The Legend of Spyro, Nihlus Kryik from Mass Effect 1, and many more)

Dude I LOVE Master Croc, I don't know why SPECIFICALLY him but like. I like how he looks so cocky wanted to kick Shen's shit in, even laughing to himself, how he's so so loyal to Ox after Rhino's (supposed death), like you KNOW these three were inseparable and it LOOKS like Rhino reunites with Master Ox and Master Croc at the end of KFP3 that's what I hope if it was even only for a couple of minutes following what was probably Rhino heading back to the Spirit Realm.

I really love Master Croc, it is not even funny he's such a character, a silly, perhaps.

but now my rambles go to something else, since it takes place in the era that it does.. and like.. my hoard of Dragon OCs and Dragon Characters (literally all the guys on this blog ARE dragons!~ ) Like.. what would be the general consensus of a Dragon popping up in universe? Since back then they're still hailed as deities (Like the Dragon Kings, and all the dragon deities in both Chinese and Japanese mythology)

I am so so curious. But maybe I should add more to my rambles later when I am not so tired but god I have ideas and WILL enact on them.

A tiny edit: I 100% support kaiway due to the context I now have from watching KFP3, homie you have spent all the time in the world holding up Oogway's Chi charm like you want him to see everything like, they def. had something going on pre-banishment

#out of paint: ooc #Kung Fu Panda #KFP #KFP2 #KFP3

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palioom · 1 year ago

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. This “Druckman is a genocidal Zionist so I need to put a lil blurb on my written porn so everyone knows this porn is FOR GAZA” stuff is so out of hand.

If you actually played the game, had an ounce of media literacy, and knew about the Israel/Palestine conflict as deeply as you THINK you know about it, you’d see that you are perpetuating the exact shit the game warms against. That the ISRAELI WRITER of the game warns against. Cycles of violence, from EITHER SIDE, lead to nothing but suffering. If you thought the game was this pro-Israel, fuck Palestinians, blood thirsty Zionist propaganda scheme-then you literally missed the entire point. In fact, if you think that I’d say we must have played 2 different games. It’s a pretty centrist idea, the whole “both govts are bad and have been doing bad things as revenge to each other and gets us nowhere” thing, but hey it’s better then if the game was actually like, made my a right-wing Israeli politician whose idea would be “let’s have Ellie just absolutely DESTROY Abby. And the fireflies. And anybody else. And then she can come back and expand Jackson all the way out to Seattle and everyone will be happy the end.” THAT would be fucked.

Something being made by an Israeli does not inherently make it zionistic or radical or immoral or bad. Especially when that thing is a piece of media that explores the suffering of both populations of a conflict and also of people in war in general.

Anyway, Joel is a Hebrew name that means The Lord is God and Miller is the 3rd most common Jewish surname in the states so Joel Miller is canonically a Jew™️ 🥳 Ellie is also a Hebrew name. Do with that info what you wish.

neil literally stands with israel, there hasn't been shit about the people in gaza. my dude, if you can look at what's happening and not feel the need to speak up, get the fuck out.

plus, i find it important to denounce neil and not give him any further attention or money for his creations because as i said, he stands with israel. i'm not telling people to do shit, but i wish people spread more awareness about what's happening, and i feel better to add masterlists and infos onto my fics, because they have been written already and might be my last joel ones.

also you equating this issue with jews, wanting to go on about how ellie and joel are jewish names when it's not even about that at all, shows me exactly what kind of person you are and how much you think you know.

it's not jews vs muslims, because that's what you're implying. no one even MENTIONED jews until you came in. guess what! there are jews and even christians in gaza that are getting killed just as the muslim population is! this is about a genocidal, occupying force pushing people into smaller and smaller "safe zones" just to bomb them when the world is busy watching the fucking superbowl.

i doubt you've seen the videos that i have seen, dead children, torn limbs, skeletal remains, cats eating the dead, or you wouldn't be coming into my mentions like this.

if you truly cared about what's happening, you wouldn't mind me saiyng i wish we raised more awareness, but as i said before, you showed me exactly what kind of a person you are and you, just as everyone else who thinks like you, can block me.

also no one says it's zionistic cause he's an israeli, don't put your thoughts into my mouth and pretend that's what i said. if he was supporting gaza and the end of the genocide, i wouldn't even be saying shit. but he isn't, so please look at what i actually said before you do all this.

#y'all are tripping fr #i will not be entertaining any further asks like this #don't even try #i said what i said #ask #anon

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thetardisisnotourdivision · 2 years ago

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Is it just me who's seriously worried about the fact that they're not even imprisoning the migrants in a secure, safe, on-land building, but on a boat? I have a horrible feeling about where this is going. They're literally imprisoning people who just wanted to be safe and live better lives, and on a boat, no less, which feels at best like a cruel joke ("they come over here in boats" rhetoric) and at worst feels like a setup for a horrific "tragedy"... I genuinely wouldn't put it past the Tories at this point to do something like that, and the scry thing is how many people would be unbothered. One of my mum's friends, who has always been generally left-wing, the other week said something about immigrants being WORSE than ACTUAL CONVICTED CRIMINALS. It's scary how easily people are falling into this trap, I've said it once and I'll say it again; it's terrifying how many parallels there are between modern Britain and Nazi Germany. THIS IS FASCISM. First prosecution, stripping them if their human rights, then "rounding them up" and putting them in camps. We know where this goes. We know what comes next. WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN.

It frustrates me how powerless I am - I can't even vote yet, so here I am desperately shouting into the void on Tumblr, hoping that someone with some semblance of power and influence will read this. Even without the "migrant issues", this country is falling to fascism - I've just started questioning my gender and I'm terrified by the new laws being put in place. Up and down the county, more and more people are in danger, are vulnerable, homeless, struggling, in poverty, in the town I live in - a very white, very middle-class town, so you can imagine what it's usually like (there's like four churches too, whatever you're picturing as the average citizen before the cost of living crisis is probably accurate) - people are having to shut off rooms in their houses and sleep in their living rooms because there's mould or damp or other things that are making their children ill. This country is in chaos, people are dying, there are fucking fascists in government and yet STILL PEOPLE INSIST THAT THERE'S NO POINT VOTING ANYONE ELSE IN. Let me tell you now - Starmer might not be great, but at least he's not a fascist - and his party are a thousand times better than the Tories. This country is falling apart.

If you live outside the UK, you might or might not know all of this. It's awful. It's chaos here, there's basically Nazi's in government and no one gives a shit. There are a few people who quietly talk about where this is heading, how we've seen this before in every genocide in history, but nobody else seems to care. We have a whole generation of people starving, unable to afford to live, and no one cares. Innocent people looking for a safe place to live are being forcibly imprisoned - their children are being stripped of any sort of comfort DELIBERATELY - for the crime of fleeing danger.

I don't know. I really don't know. I've forgotten what my point was. I hate this country. I hate these fuckweeds in government who think they can do what the fuck they like. I hate it I hate it I hate it. And I hate that there's nothing I can do.

#uk politics #britain #united kingdom

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vaelynx · 8 months ago

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Their solution to "end the war in Ukraine" is to withdraw aid and allow Russia to invade. It's literally pro-Genocide. So we're already starting out with the dumbest take possible. Not looking good for you.

Yeah, I think I know what to expect here now and it certainly is nothing smart. But, let's start. There is no genocide happening in Ukraine now, there is *war*, and in fact, genocide wasn't happening even before the war started. What however happened was military action by AFU aimed against the civillian residents of Doneck and Lugansk people's republics, ignoring the ceasefire and Minsk agreements as a whole - so Russia rendered them aid, which they asked for, striking against the illegitimate Kyjev government in defense of their self-determination and in protection of their citizenry.

And if you point out that it is nations, not nationalities that have a right of self-determination, well, that used to be true before what happened with Kosovo, so it is very much your precedent Russia made use of.

Try again.

Tariffs are just going to make things more expensive for the working class and no one else. That manufacturing isn't coming home. It'll just move to countries other than China where it's still more profitable for major corporations and the supply chain.

Where have I heard this stupid argument last. Oh wait, all the neoliberal think-tanks. In fact, this is a rehash of the already idiotic argument against increasing the minimum wage, tooted by all the neoliberal think-tanks. Let's examine why it doesn't work.

a) The government can go around increasing tariffs against specific goods (it's easy if, at the moment, the countries in question aren't actually exporters, to prevent a *subsequent* move) right until the aforementioned countries run out of cheap labour to exploit.

b) Things aren't going to get significantly more expensive for the working class for the same reason minimum wage hikes don't lead to that. You see, if the corporations felt they could hike up their prices and make a greater profit that way, *they already would have*. Taking the cost of materials and manufacture and slapping a profit margin on top is how prices are generated in a socialist economy, not in capitalism, and this is a textbook example of demagogy - advancing a fallacious argument, not because the originator is fooled but because he believes his audience is.

c) Allowing manufacturing to depart abroad in the first place was perhaps the worst decision anyone could have taken as it neatly hollowed out US economy and is the very reason the working class has been pauperized and can't afford anything but the cheapest, which creates a vicious circle that you can't get out of without government intervention. And, again, Vance has correctly pointed this out.

Look, I can break this down further, but it's clear we're dealing with someone who has fallen down right wing talking points so badly that any discussion is useless. They think the GOP, the party where folks want to remove bodily autonomy and are mad about women voting, is somehow "left."

Nah, we're dealing with someone who isn't blinded by party slogans. And uh, don't get me started on bodily autonomy because weren't the democrats pushing for vaccine mandates *on an experimental product that was repeatedly lied about*? Doesn't sound like bodily autonomy at all. Furthermore, all I've seen from the GOP on a federal level is allowing states to decide on the matter, which strikes me as something which should be true on as many topics as possible in the first place

Finally, yes, I think the current presidential candidate and his crew are more left-wing than the democrats, since they're the only ones remotely circling around the idea of doing things to benefit the working class, and to rein in the big business that has been writing US policy up to now. They're not *very* left-wing, but distinctly more so than the wing of corporate democrats represented by Kamala, Biden, Clintons etc.

Leftists don't win by allowing extreme right wing candidates to win the White House. Instead you keep pressuring Democrats during their term and it works. Like Biden is continuing to work on forgiving student debt even though he doesn't have an election ahead of him.

Don't be absurd. Biden touted a student loan forgiveness plan before the last election, then plain out said he's not going to forgive any student loans and sent tons of money into Ukraine instead (which flowed mostly back in to the military-industrial complex, and to democrat kickbacks) and he's suddenly working on it again, with earliest mentions being like, eight months before the election. They say fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, and this is basically a showcase for this principle.

We know it works because that's exactly what the Republicans have been doing for 50 years.

Well... that's the thing. Democrats sabotaged Bernie Sanders, then, after an election failure, ended up, among other things, bringing in a couple actually left figures into the forefront... then for Biden's VP chose the candidate literally nobody wanted (based on her performance in the primaries) and now used a sleight-of-hand to give her the nomination without primaries. If you think this is a party that is interested in your opinion any... my condolences.

And don't listen to weirdos who try to tell you Donald "Finish the Job" Trump and JD "Incel Couchfucker" Vance are somehow leftist.

*applauds* I knew you weren't smart, but ending the post with a personal attack (and an incredibly unimaginative, DNC-prescribed one to boot), which also somehow includes calling a married guy with kids an "incel" shows that you're a plain idiot. Thank you for broadcasting it to the world, saves me some typing.

This is the thing with the "I won't vote for Harris" supposed leftists.

None of them will tell you how allowing Trump to be elected helps.

Because they don't have an answer.

Because they don't really care about anything other than how they personally feel.

Actual leftism involves making pragmatic moves. The public will for revolution doesn't exist, and we live in a two party system. If you want to fight that system, great. There are things like ranked choice voting and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact we need to be fighting for. But those are fights that have to happen year round, at the state level, and not just in an election year.

And in the meanwhile, you vote defensively and strategically, in an attempt to save as many people as possible.

Saying you aren't voting for Harris isn't taking a stand against genocide. It's putting your head in the sand and admitting you care more about your own comfort than making a difference in the world.

Why aren't you getting involved in your local politics? Why aren't you running leftist candidates at a local level, so you can move them up in the system and eventually move the political discussion left. You want to know why politics have moved right? It's because the right wing has been doing that for decades.

Your refusal to participate won't save a single life.

It only means you're abandoning everyone else.

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bisluthq · 1 year ago

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No offence but it’s not your right to say whether a country in the Middle East should be secular or not lmao. I too am not a fan of religious extremism but i at least recognise that my worldview is not an objective norm, and that it’s extremely paternalistic for westerners to decide what sort of governments they’d like to see in the Middle East. Or that they should be there at all. And it’s also not up to us to decide how much land Palestinians should have since all of it belongs to them. If you live in Israel you should be able to coexist with Palestinians, just like white South Africans were forced to have to interact with black South Africans after apartheid ended. You don’t get to call the fucking shots

idk I’m anti religious extremism - I gave a bunch of examples and specifically not only in the Middle East. I gave the example of certain American states following extremist Christian ideals, which I find morally repugnant and deeply problematic. Sure - everyone gets to decide what they want to do and who they want to elect and what represents them best but religious extremism harms people (often women and marginalized people in general). So yes I am anti religious extremism in any part of the world and of any kind 🤷🏻‍♀️ I don’t think it’s specific to one religion. Religious extremism generally leads, as I say, to measurable harm against women and queer people and often leads to genocides or violence against other religious groupings in that area. It’s not paternalistic to say that. It’s literally just a fact. Obviously though people get to make their own choices - if something works for them, okie dokes. Kinda sucks for the people it doesn’t work for but eh 🤷🏻‍♀️

regarding your point on land maaaan idk it’s really not as simple as you’re saying either. Firstly there is the issue of Palestinians versus Israelis in general. Israeli Arabs very much exist and occupy a number of senior positions in Israeli society. They are… Israelis… However, Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank (and here it gets even more complicated) are not Israelis. They are foreigners in Israel. So there’s yk that. Secondly, while it’s easy to call Israel a settler colony it’s not really that simple (West Bank is again a whole other issue and those are ILLEGAL settlements)? Israel is indeed a very racist place lol but it’s got a massive Mizrahi population (Jews who never left the Middle East) and who came to Israel as a result of forced expulsions from other Middle Eastern countries after the 1948 war. So like must a Jew of Iranian descent for instance “go back” to Iran? That’s not really gonna work lol I don’t think they’re gonna be very welcome there 😐 Like realistically it won’t work. So what exactly must happen?

I think it’s a VERY COMPLICATED ISSUE and no one is saying I - or anyone else for that matter - must “call the shots”. It’s also well and good to say everyone must coexist and sing kumbaya together but that takes us back to the religious extremism. If Islamic jihadists “win” they are, I can guarantee you, not going to want to sing kumbaya with the Jews there and where precisely do you want those people to go? Again, forget about like completely forget the Americans and let’s even forget the Holocaust survivors and the ex Soviet Jews who went there - where must the Mizrahi population go lol?

A two state solution would be ideal and fair or I suppose a one state secular nation where everyone coexists and sings kumbaya would be even better but while you have religious extremists ON BOTH SIDES - I’m not erasing the right wing Israeli parties - that doesn’t seem like it’d happen?

The comparison with South Africa is not the great one people think it is because those are 1) completely different histories 2) the ANC actually wanted to negotiate and when apartheid ended it was under a Government of National Unity and I’m not really seeing a situation where Bibi and Haniyeh and Abbas sit down and form something like that. Literally none of them are super reasonable people and none of them are especially interested in compromises 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ which is terrible because that just means civilians keep dying.

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gesternchen · 5 years ago

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Just randomly reviewing scenes from the movies no one remembers now. This week: Avatar (2009).

It’s not like everyone forgot James Cameron’s Avatar. Since we’re still getting some footage from behind the scenes of the sequel and news about the cast, at least someone takes pains to remind themselves of this cinematic experience from the year of 2009. It’s already been 84 (just kidding, 11) years and I’m still looking forward to at least watching the teaser (fun fact: I was 11 when Avatar came out, I’m 22 now). I even bought the Darkhorse comic book on Tsu’Tey’s backstory to, you know, investigate one of my favorite characters a little bit better (spoiler: the backstory wasn’t very much eventful but I noticed a nice detail there which I may talk about briefly a bit later).

Throughout the years Avatar has received a lot of backlash and more or less justified criticism, mainly for the plot and its problematic packaging. I believe, it depends on the perspective one watches a movie from. Of course, I wouldn’t call it an absolute gem of exciting storytelling, even though I truly enjoy it, as in majority its twists are undeniably predictable. However, I always disagreed with people saying relations in Avatar aren’t deep at all. Well, romance between Jake and Neytiri, which, let’s be honest, except for the scene of telling the truth, went too smoothly, and this is why I strongly believe clash of interests is inevitable in sequels. Their interaction remained the key one for the whole movie, and nothing is bad about that, people enjoy a nice lovestory, so do I. But 11 years after I’d like to focus on the disturbing conflict everyone prefers to ignore for some reason when recalling Avatar. For me it’s always been Jake versus Colonel Quaritch.

You guys may have already guessed which scenes I wanna talk about. Those really important ones that I consider climactic to the pace of narration. And what is more about them, they give us crucial details in character development and actors’ play to think through. The main message: Quaritch knew it was coming.

Let me firstly touch upon the scene of short conversation between Jake and Quaritch prior to Sully presumably leaving Pandora. While Jake is awating Quaritch in a large empty hall, he hardly seems to be calm about the talk, every nerve in his body is trembling, but why?

The way Jake’s drumming his fingers on the table makes me wonder if he’s okay.

Then Colonel enters the hall, grabs a chair and reminds that it had been more than two weeks since he got the latest report on how the misson was going. He knows, Sully is questioning reality, and no, he’s not ‘doubting his resolve’. He knows, the right moment to ‘terminate the mission’ is missed. He knows, he lost Jake. He knows, he’s talking to the deserter. Yet Quaritch speaks indifferent. He praises Jake’s effort and rewards him for that. With real legs he promised to him when they first talked. Quaritch hoped they’d trigger the realization in Jake. Which doesn’t happen. How sad he looks when Jake openly refuses to accept the reward.

In just one sequence Stephen’s face demonstrates the shift of all four feelings Quaritch goes through: dissatisfaction, melancholy, shame, disgust.

Quaritch sensed the moment when Jake expressed superiority to the mankind. Jake grasped that Quaritch knew everything, he played with fire, and that’s why he felt anxiety. And it lasted all the way until Quaritch stepped back for leaving the hall. But did Colonel really surrender? I doubt that.

The tension between them both feels electric, so it’s explainable why Jake’s transient smile is so awkward. Sam then heavily staring straight at Colonel's back suggests that up until now Jake regarded Quaritch as his enemy. The enemy he knew he would not be able to defeat.

I remember when watching this scene, I couldn’t get myself the answer to one question. The question was: which report did Quaritch refer to? ‘That report from two weeks ago’, but such information wasn’t satisfactory for me. To be honest, this small discovery became the actual reason why I decided to type this study. Let’s assume that this particular report which Quaritch mentioned was the videolog where Jake confessed that Omaticaya wouldn’t leave the Hometree. Here’s why.

The general audience is used to perceiving Quaritch as a cruel short-tempered military man who just waits for the starting pistol’s shot to destroy everything in sight. Again, nothing is wrong about this, the fact that his character was simply meant to be a generic personification of such type doesn’t leave us with any alternative impression of him. Let’s say, if he was given the order to ignite the operation of the Hometree’s destruction to screw the tribe out of the site, he would absolutely go for it (and so he does). He’s a man of his word after all. Let’s also say, if he was pissed off by Jake’s betrayal, he would transport himself to the mountain site in a blink of an eye, turn off the link and put Jake in jail right after the talk in the hall. Instead, Quaritch decided to wait and give Jake the last chance. Jake preffered unearthly wings to those more tangible, so Quaritch chose not to cut them so abruptly.

We’re moving to the next scene, taking place right before a toned down fight between Tsu’Tey and Jake (I’m saying so, because it’s actually one of the deleted scenes that got edited out of the final cut, and believe me, the pressure between two rivals there is way too intense). Quaritch is watching the record of Jake destroying bulldozer’s lenses with a stone. After that Jake’s face is zoomed and we watch Selfridge get frustrated, Quaritch looks pretty annoyed as well but doesn’t seem to be much surprised. What he’s feeling, is bitter disappointment in himself and knowing that he totally failed to persuade Jake to change his mind.

Just observe Stephen Lang’s performance here. He absolutely nails cold-eyed look, the fire burning slow inside of him is so palpable, and guess what, in a flash he flies off the handle.

Now, shall we check the ultimate scene, preceding the destruction of the Hometree. Though Grace versus Parker juxtaposition is central to this scene, the last time Quaritch confronting Jake face to face in his human body is essential to consider for making things clear.

When it comes to revealing to Selfridge the vainness of further negotiations with Omaticaya, isn’t it just interesting how fast Quaritch manages to find the correct videolog? It literally takes him not more than a couple of swipes to produce the proof. Here is why: he’s already watched the record and is completely aware of the Jake’s values having deteriorated.

You can tell, Jake knew he was under control, but he would rather like to ingnore this fact. His pathetic glance at Quaritch, who’s almost impending above his head, causes to think Jake would guess that Colonel could have watched this videolog. Rather, it was a mutual secret between the two of them until a turning point. But the moment of truth came, and Jake didn’t change his mind. Quaritch made sure of that and finally it was his time to triumph.

So how was it even possible to assume Quaritch may have watched the videolog I’ve been talking about for so long? Well, my explanation may be too easy to believe, but still: we can tell by Jake’s appearance and the date of the record that it is the vlog we need.

This telltale videolog was recorded 16 minutes after the another one, when Jake says that he’s uncertain, who he is anymore (LST abbreviation stands for Local Standard Time). Jake might have suddenly felt depressed and hopeless and got back to the camera while being too emotionally instable, and so must have forgotten to delete the final record.

I have one more note for you. If you check the videolog library Quaritch is swiping through, you’ll see that the latest important record, which he actually needs, is made in the interior of the mountain site block and dates back to August, 13. Other recent vlogs’ covers look nothing like Site 26 sequence. Jake may not have done any of these records at the mountain site. I still wonder though where those three or four ensuing videologs were recorded, the location seems to be red lighted, which means it isn’t blue lighting at Site 26. I may even assume he recorded some pieces at Hell’s Gate. Why would I think so? Probably because in those two scenes (dialog with Quaritch and confession at Parker’s office) Jake looks ten times better than before, he gained some weight at least and doesn’t resemble a living sceleton.

Selfridge gave Jake an hour to relocate the tribe, while gunships led by Colonel’s Dragon were already on full alert. Quaritch had no doubt that Jake’s peacekeeping mission would fail. He knew it from the beginning. Hence he sounds so sarcastic seeing Sully’s avatar tied.

Now Quaritch sipping his villain’s morning coffee tasting like fresh genocide doesn’t feel so cringy: he’s celebrating his victory over Jake (still I should agree with critisism on this point, it really is a stupid cliche and wasn’t intended to carry a deep meaning).

Now I should admit, it’s been a long journey to run this investigation and bring it to light by finally posting it. It took me around a day to collect my thoughts and express them by means of more or less readable English. Just would like to make a little side note: English is not my native, so I promise I did my best! Thanks to James Cameron for making a movie, which woke me up in the middle of the night to start reflecting, and to all the fans out there who still exist and remember this movie and so can read this essay. @avatarmovies I found your blog not so long ago and you guys say you enjoy headcanons (and movie reviews probably?..), so it would be nice if you reblogged this but I’m not insisting!!

#avatar #james cameron #james cameron avatar #movie reviews #avatar movies #colonel quaritch #jake sully #characters in conflict #gesternchen reviews

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gamesception · 4 years ago

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The Promised Neverland is kind of really good, actually? I mean, yeah, I’m late to the party as usual, but I just binged the first season of the anime, and then the manga from that point on (the site I was on didn’t have any of the second season, but apparently it diverges from the comic and gets bad anyway, so maybe just read the comic to begin with). And, I mean, spoilers, obviously, but I’m going to get into some extremely major spoilers here so if you haven’t read it or if you’ve only seen the first season of the anime maybe skip this post and read the manga, but...

...

I’ve tried and failed to write a big long post about all the ways it’s so good, how the main three characters are each so compelling, how its pitch dark but not cynical or misanthropic, with mortal stakes but not gore-porny, positive and optimistic without being trite or naïve, how choosing Emma out of the main three to be the primary protagonist and viewpoint character keeps the story from becoming a masculine militaristic power fantasy, how the antagonists are treated as characters and not just monsters - even the ones that are literal monsters, about how the story never supports or glorifies the idea of sacrificing the weak so that the strong can survive, about how empathy and understanding and a chance for peace are extended to every single villain without putting a burden to forgive on victims and without ignoring the need to fight those who refuse the offer of peace and uphold the status quo, how the story opposes oppressive hierarchies at every turn - not just those the monsters use to control the human children at the farms, but also how the monster elites use access to human meat to controller the lower social classes of monster society, and even to an extent within the human resistance.

But there’s just way too much to talk about to get it all into one big giant post, and I don’t have the stamina for a big extended ongoing project right now - or else I’d return to one of the like 12 I have on hold.

But, like, to pick just one thing....

ok, so eventually we learn what the monsters are and why they eat people. They’re a weird sort of organism that can temporarily take on the characteristics of things they eat. Eat a bird and grow wings, eat a bug and grow an exoskeleton, eat a human and gain a humanoid body and the intelligence to become self aware, learn language, form societies - for a while. But if they go too long without eating people, then they lose their minds and revert to a bestial form. In order to save the humans, the resistance leader Minerva plans to wipe out the monster society altogether. After all, they literally have to eat humans to continue being people, there is no possibility of peace.

Protagonist Emma, though, has seen not just the horrific human farms and their cruel and corrupt rulers, but also their towns and settlements, their families and children. She was even saved at one point shortly after her escape by friendly monsters who opposed the farm system, and even though it seems impossible, she wants to save both the humans and the monsters.

A more typical show, at least among those with premises as dark as The Promised Neverland, wouldn’t take Emma’s side in this. She would be forced to ‘grow up’ and face the fact that she can’t save everyone. Her naivety would get someone killed to break her heart and teach her to be hard and cruel as if those things are virtues. Or, more likely, she wouldn’t be the viewpoint character to begin with, she’d be a side character whose ideals would get herself killed in order to elevate the male characters’ angst and justify their violence. Either way, the message would be “Emma’s ideals were unrealistic and could never survive contact with the harsh reality of the world.”

TPN instead takes Emma’s Side. She finds monsters who maintain a humanoid body and intelligence without eating humans, and they’re able to spread that trait to the rest of monster society while the humans all escape to the human world. Now, as much as I don’t like the grimdark ‘there is no peaceful option’ hypothetical version of the story, this development could have been handled pretty badly. Like, just reading it like that, it sounds like the story raised a big moral dilemma and then chickened out of it. But that’s really not how it comes off while you’re reading it, for a couple reasons.

First of all, Emma meets the non-human-eating monsters early in the story, long before we get the explanation of how monsters in general work. So by the time we learn that the monsters must eat humans to maintain their self identity, the audience already knows that there are exceptions and that an alternative exists. The story never sets this up to be a moral dilemma in the first place, so when the issue is bypassed it doesn’t feel like it’s undercut itself.

More importantly, though, is the thematic & metaphorical content. Because the monster society is a pretty explicit metaphor for unjust human societies, and monsters represent the people who make up such societies. Not just the aristocrats who benefit from the unjust society, or those who directly enforce and uphold it, but also regular people. People insulated just enough from the suffering and death that their lives are built on that they can turn a blind eye to it, but aware enough of their complicity in that suffering that they construct excuses to justify their part in it, and by proxy excuse those at the top who actually benefit from and shaped the society as it is. People living lives simultaneously just comfortable enough to keep them docile, but precarious enough that they’re too caught up with struggling to maintain the tenuous grasp on the lives they have to feel like they can work towards anything better. Monster society in TPN is a cage built out of the corpses of humans cattle, but built to imprison and enslave the monster civilians who eat them.

Hanging the story on the fantastical element of monster biology would divorce it from that essential metaphor while also endorsing an outright genocidal worldview, and TPN explicitly calls out the plan to wipe out the monsters altogether as just that - genocidal. It never even pretends to entertain the notion that the audience should accept that plan as the right choice, even while it doesn’t condemn Minerva for pursuing it. When Emma is proposing her plan to Minerva, the deal she strikes with him is ‘I will try to make my peaceful solution happen, and if I succeed then you cancel your plan to wipe out the monsters’. Minerva is eventually shown to be lying when he makes that agreement, but Emma isn’t, and note the if there. If Emma’s plan fails, then she - and thus the narrative - accepts that Minerva’s plan to save the children is still better than leaving things as they are, even if it means wiping out all the monsters. After all, the society IS monstrously unjust, and even the lower classes within that society ARE complicit in that injustice.

Minerva’s problem isn’t even presented as a matter of him hating the monsters too much to see a route to peace with them. The story doesn’t frame the conflict between Minerva’s and Emma’s plans as hate vs. love or revenge vs. forgiveness. It’s instead more of ‘hierarchy and division bad, mutualism/openness/relying on each other good’. The point is to show how Minerva’s role as a figurehead who believes he has to project strength to uphold the hope that the other humans have placed in him has worn away his ability to rely on others or to be open to alternatives they offer, leaving him with rigid and inflexible thinking.

So when Minerva learns about the monsters who don’t need to eat humans, he doesn’t see an opportunity for a better outcome - potentially even an easier outcome since he doesn’t have to make enemies of the entirety of monster society - rather he sees a threat to his plan to starve the monsters back into an animalistic state.

And if that whole subplot isn’t explicit enough, Minerva’s internalized need to project strength also results in his physical body wasting away in secret from a condition he believes to be untreatable, but the moment he finally breaks down and admits he needs help Emma is able to point to a solution, one that again doesn’t come across as a cop out because again it takes the form of another character the audience was already introduced to a long time ago.

In a story arc that the second season of the anime adaptation apparently cut entirely, wow the more I hear about anime season 2 the worse it sounds. And after the first season was so good....

...

Anyway, I tried to pick just one thing and this post still turned into a colossal gushing word cascade, and there are so many other elements to talk about. Like how The ‘Mothers’ and ‘Sisters’ are menacing villains with seemingly no empathy for the children, but when Sister Krona realizes she’s lost the power struggle with Isabella she leaves the kids tools to help them, and then when Mother Isabella realizes the children have escaped, she covers up the route they used in order to buy them a little extra time to get away. It’s these little touches - just as much as the short backstories that follow them - that show us how, while they might uphold the system out of fear for their own lives, and might have rationalize their part in it in order to live with the horrible things they’re doing, the mothers and sisters don’t actually hate the children. Knowing that makes it believable when in the end Isabella does turn on the system, and every single one of the other mothers and sisters join her.

The bit when the fighting is mostly over and she tells the Mother at the house “it’s over, now we can just love them” and the other woman breaks down crying is so sad and human, it makes me tear up thinking about it..

Like I said, all the villains are characters, not just monsters. They all have motivations for the horrific things they do - sometimes irrational, often selfish, but not even the most unforgivable of the monsters are just evil for evil’s sake.

Again, I’m rambling. It’s just... I’m used to these sorts of pitch dark dystopias being, for lack of a better term, kinda fashy in their messaging? Or at the very least deeply cynical and misanthropic and just kind of mean spirited. And TPN is so completely the opposite of that, in so many ways.

#tpn spoilers #tpn #the promised neverland #anyway yeah it's pretty good #though again apparently the second season of the anime falls of the rails #like from reading reactions today #it seems season 2 drops or completely flubs literally everything I go into in this post #don't watch it #i haven't #and feel better off for it #edited because I misremembered a couple things #like the 'we can just love them' line comes after the fighting not before #the point remains though

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phoenix-reburned · 4 years ago

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The Eagle: An Alternate Take to the AnR Theory

Before I begin this post, I want to preface this by saying that if the AnR ending happens, I will be sad but not disappointed, this is simply a thought I had that I hadn’t seen anyone else propose. I won’t be discussing why people believe that the eagle is Eren, although I know that there’s a lot of symbolism regarding it. This is simply my own thoughts on how Isayama could have a tragic ending that destroys us while also keeping some people alive.

Spoilers under the cut for both the manga and season four of the anime, you’ve been warned. Also long post, sorry.

First of all, if you have not yet watched the Akatsuki no Requiem video, I highly recommend you do that before continuing to read this post. Here’s the video:

youtube

For those of you that don’t know, the AnR theory states that the eagle in this video represents Eren and that this video basically spoils the entire ending of AOT. But what if the eagle isn’t actually Eren? What if it’s another character, telling the story of how they ended a war through bloodshed and lost their closest friends on the way? What if the same person telling us this story in the video is the same person who’s been telling us this story the whole time?

I believe that the eagle in this video is actually Armin Arlet, and that this is him recounting how he stopped the rumbling. This mixes in some of the Lebouch (?) theory, but not in the way you think.

Let’s start with something most people overlook about his character: Armin is extremely manipulative when he needs to be. He was able to convince Pixis that Eren wasn’t an enemy, quickly became a strategist that even Erwin trusted, and told Bertholt that someone he cared about deeply was being brutally tortured to save Eren. In his current position in the manga based upon the 137 leaks, he’s been able to take control of some of the titans away from Ymir. Whether or not he’s really done this or this is apart of Ymir’s plan is up for speculation, but for now let’s just assume that he did this of his own accord. He was able to talk Zeke into dying for humanity, a literal nihilist who killed countless people. Armin clearly will get his hands dirty if it benefits his plan, as shown multiple times. He’s not innocent.

Something else that helped me come to this conclusion, although this isn’t necessarily a huge reason I believe it, is that Armin is the one telling us this story. He’s been our narrator since season one. If Isayama wanted to kill him, why not just have Eren be the narrator? If Armin’s dead it makes no sense for him to be able to tell us the story even if you take the paths into consideration, since you can’t interact with anything or anyone in there.

Last thing before I get into the video is that Armin is being treated like a god right now by the titans on Eren in 137. The creator of the trojan horse theory (@/localhangeluvr on twitter), which is another inspiration for my theory, made a thread showing this and the similarities between Armin and the devils in Ymir’s story. This shows that he is going to be extremely important to the ending, whether or not he lives or dies. This thread also discusses the idea of Armin being the eagle, but we came to different conclusions based upon that idea.

Now let’s get into the video. The first thing I want to point out is the appearance of the color blue. We first see this when the eagle cries and dyes the baby eagle(?) blue. Later on, it reappears on the butterflies. The character that is most associated with this color is Armin, through his love of the ocean. His eyes are also blue in the anime, although blue for the ocean fits better since they’re hazel in the manga. The first time we meet Armin, he’s also wearing blue. Maybe this represents him wishing for a simpler time, before the fall of wall Maria?

Another thing, the grave the eagle visits. Look at the symbol on it.

To me, it resembles a snake eating it’s own tail. This makes me think of Eren, someone who ended up becoming what he hated most. First in the form of a titan, then in the form of a mass murderer. This could very well be Eren’s grave that the eagle visits, meaning he could be crying because of the knowledge that he killed the person that was once his best friend.

Next, let’s examine the thing on top of the baby eagle’s head, which also reappears later in the eagle’s library.

This clearly is supposed to be the wings of freedom. If Eren was the eagle, why would he hold onto the wings? At this point, he’s completely abandoned the scouts. Why would he want to keep anything what reminded him of what became his enemy around? These questions disappear if this is actually Armin though, as he would have no reason to renounce the scouts.

Another interesting thing is that the eagle has blue eyes when he has the lizard/frog mask on, but his actual eyes are brown. As I mentioned before, Armin has blue eyes in the anime but hazel in the manga. This could be another subtle hint to the eagle’s identity.

Next, the lack of walls in the sky city, or the fact that this is what it represents. This is when the Lebouch theory comes into play. While I don’t necessarily believe that Eren wants to be stopped, I do believe that if he is killed and the rumbling ends, that this will create peace. A scene all the way back in season one makes me believe this. After Eren agrees to try to seal the wall, he takes a walk with Pixis. To paraphrase what is said, Pixis states that only a world ending event could truly bring humanity together. Well, I do think an attempted mass genocide would be world ending enough to do it. Plus, there’s the fact that if the alliance stops it, that would put Paradis and the eldians back into the world’s good graces. And if one of them gets their hands on the founding, there’s also a possibility that they could completely remove all titans from the world.

The family is another reason a lot of people assume that this is Eren we’re watching because of his and Historia’s possible relationship in the manga, if you believe that Historia’s child is his (which I do, but that’s not super relevant right now). But that’s not necessarily what’s happening here. If someone’s able to reverse the curse of Ymir, then this COULD be Armin and Annie’s family. If Armin and Annie’s feelings for each other wasn’t important, why bring it up right at the end of the story? At this point there’s no reason for Isayama to show us that they like each other UNLESS it plays a role in the prologue. Or, maybe it’s to make Annie’s death sadder if he does kill her, but since she’s still alive I’m sticking with option a. I’m not sure if the cat means anything, however black cats are usually regarded as an omen of death. This could be a reminder that Armin killed Eren.

Another clue is the library.

It’s shown to be very expansive, clearly showing that whoever owns it loves to read. Only one character comes to mind when you think about books.

The lizard family is next.

Notice that it’s a father, mother and child. Maybe Armin will have to end up killing both Historia and her child along with Eren? Or this could just show Armin’s regrets at the deaths he’s caused in general.

In the ruins, we again see the image of a snake eating it’s tail. Possibly representing the damage that Eren caused with the rumbling?

Now the butterflies. Possibly one of the biggest reasons why people believe that Eren is the eagle.

In total, we see 10 butterflies. I believe that this does represent the alliance as they attempt to stop Eren, and shows that about 5 of them will die. I believe that the first death is either represented by Hange or Zeke, depending on how you view it. Maybe Zeke, as he was an outlier to the group until his death. I believe that Levi, Reiner, and Pieck will be the last three deaths. To add to this, the ground shot also only shows five butterflies, meaning that more than likely the rest of the alliance will live.

Right after these deaths, the baby eagle is shown preparing to fight. I believe that this means that these last three deaths will happen in quick succession and drive Armin overboard, causing him to do what Mikasa won’t and kill Eren.

Next, we see both eagles in a field of graves, showing that Armin regrets not being able to save more people. Maybe he even blames himself for their deaths, wishing he had stopped Eren earlier.

While I know that Mikasa is the one to wake Eren up from under the tree, maybe this shows that Armin is the one who says ‘see you later’ before she does?

I believe that this represents Armin realizing that, without Eren’s destruction, they never would have gotten peace. I believe that him dropping the arrow represents him feeling a kind of gratitude towards him, in a weird way?

And then the end of the video just shows us again that, while Eren did ultimately bring about peace, it came at a heavy price.

A few more things to mention:

1. The lyrics DO tie into chapter titles, while I won’t list them here going through the comments of this video will show all of them to you.

2. Armin’s last name literally means eagle.

That’s the end to my theory! Basically, I believe that Armin will kill Eren and that peace will be achieved, however it won’t be a happy ending for anyone involved.

There’s a few things about the video that I can’t necessarily explain, like the eagle’s lost leg. Though maybe, if they do rid the world of titans, if Armin is injured while killing Eren he’ll end up losing it? It’s something I’ll keep an eye out for over these last few chapters. Another thing is the revealed last manga panel. Most people do believe that it’s Eren (for good reason), we never get that confirmation. If this is after another time skip, that could be another character, hell maybe it’s even Armin talking to his and Annie’s child.

That’s it from me though. Let me know what yall think, if you think it’s plausible or tell me that I’m wrong, I don’t care lol. Proofs to either disprove or prove this would be great if yall find any! Thanks for reading my longass post.

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autumnblogs · 4 years ago

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Day 14: The Ultimate Reward

https://homestuck.com/story/2404

Movies are one of the main vectors that culture uses to transmit itself in the modern day, and if it sounds like I’m describing this form of cultural reproduction like a virus, you’re not wrong. The concept of the viral video has been around for about 15 years, if memory serves, and Homestuck’s self-referential format closely recalls the snowclone and advice animal type memes of the late thousands. Meme itself is a word coined by Richard Dawkins to describe the basic unit of cultural reproduction and transmission. While the lines related to memes from Metal Gear Solid have become memes themselves,

John and Karkat’s lives are both shaped by memes, transmitted to them through movies. John’s ideas about romance and family are shaped by his movies, Karkat and his ideas about romance and family are shaped by his movies.

https://homestuck.com/story/2406

The narration insists that Feferi and Eridan are made for each other, but their romance almost immediately disintegrates. The narrative is training us to be skeptical of the Troll’s preoccupation with Romantic Destiny. The idea that you have one soulmate, a person you were just destined for who it’ll work out with, is bogus.

https://homestuck.com/story/2435

Something about this sequence has inspired me to talk about Society with a capital S. Both Hobbes’ Leviathan and Ginsberg’s Howl talk about Society with a capital S - the indistinct entity, the system which arises seemingly unbidden from the gestalt of myriad human interactions, parables about social systems.

Leviathan is a founding myth for the social contract and liberalism in general. As one of the petite bourgeoisie who benefits from Liberalism, it is of course in Hobbes’ interest to defend its existence and provide justification for the material conditions he benefits from, but Howl is considerably less charitable. Referring to the same entity as Moloch, Ginsberg describes it as an incommensurable monster, consuming the lives of the men and women who make it up to further its own agenda.

Authoritarians have always used the threat of cultural extinction in order to justify unjust material conditions and social hierarchies. Fail to fall in line, and Western Civilization is doomed. Glub Glub (who I refuse to call anything else, Feferi’s Lusus, you know who I mean) is the physical manifestation of this threat, an unbearable burden foisted upon troll society by their overlord, Lord English, to force them to participate in a system that guarantees their inability to produce ethical behavior. Their choice has always been a choice between murder and extinction.

https://homestuck.com/story/2439

Eridan is fascinating to me. I don’t know if he predicted the Incel movement, or was merely an agglomeration of school shooter, neo-fascist stereotypes, but boy is he absolutely spot-on - the fascination with military history, the emotional theatrics, the possessive and entitled attitude toward the women in his life.

https://homestuck.com/story/2441

Feferi’s a sweet girl, but she’s still one of the people who benefits from Alternian Society. The problem has never been that the Condesce is a brutal evil woman, the problem is the way that Alternian Society is structured in the first place. I’ll have more to say about this whenever we get to Openbound, since Feferi’s rule is discussed more there, and I’ll definitely have more to say about it when I eventually write the companion piece that I intend to about Hierarchy, Patriarchy, and so on and so forth. That one might be a long time coming though, because a lot of Homestuck is devoted to examining it, and I think it might end up being my longest essay. It’s the theme I think is the most directly applicable to real life, hence the import.

Feferi’s caretaking attitude and controlling predilections are also juxtaposed with Jade’s in the same way that Kanaya’s maternal instinct and green thumb are juxtaposed with Jade’s. Could it be that as the Witch of Space, Jade Harley is the ultimate mom?

https://homestuck.com/story/2448

Man, as long as I’m comparing Eridan to neo-fascists and Feferi to the political establishment, this relationship between the two of them - the way that Feferi views her enabling of Eridan as actually curtailing his worst excesses - really smacks of the kind of unity and compromise rhetoric that liberals always seem to spout in order to justify their decision to adopt moderate right-wing policy instead of actual left-wing policy.

I’m probably reaching here, but the thought popped into my head unbidden, and I’m trying to keep this liveblog as stream of consciousness as possible.

https://homestuck.com/story/2458

People think about us way less than we think about ourselves.

https://homestuck.com/story/2467

Just as I’m not here to defend Eridan (he’s a piece of shit who knows what he did), I’m not here to attack Feferi, or to excuse her. Characters in Homestuck are frequently both abusers and victims.

Feferi’s relationship with Eridan is complicated. For starters, she isn’t really curtailing the worst of his excesses, not the way that she thinks he is. Feferi has authority, one way or the other, and by being emotionally available to Eridan, she has enabled him more than she has prevented him from doing wrong. Cutting him out of her life earlier could have sent a clear message to Eridan that his genocidal ideation is not okay, but instead, she has afforded the luxury of her presence.

The aforementioned preoccupation with Romantic Destiny probably made it so much easier for her to wait, too. As the Heiress, Feferi enjoys all the benefits of being in troll society while having to put up with almost none of the downsides. The suffering of other people - the extra pointless emotional turmoil she puts Eridan through by stringing him along, the suffering of the trolls whose lusii she has employed him to murder - their suffering is all theoretical to her. It’s not something she’s ever had to encounter herself (something she shares in common with Jane - if I remember correctly, Andrew’s commentary suggests that he picked up some of the ideas he was originally exploring with Feferi to explore with Jane).

(Some of these ideas are from a conversation with @bladekindeyewear with whom I was having a conversation on Discord while I was writing this).

https://homestuck.com/story/2475

Instead of indulging Eridan’s emotional theatrics (he continues to make other people’s suffering about himself, via his pretension of nobility) I want to call attention to the fact that, as a chemical coping mechanism, Homestuck compares Trolls’ use of Soda to humans’ use of alcohol.

I don’t know if sugary beverages have a similarly potent physiological effect on trolls as alcohol has on humans, and it doesn’t matter if it does - the parallel is being drawn nevertheless. I’m only making this point, because later on it will become important: Terezi and Rose’s respective addictions (Rose’s alcoholism and Terezi’s... sodaholism?) directly mirror each other.

https://homestuck.com/story/2516

The fact that Vriska’s narration here describes these sidequests as pointless is, I think, another clue into Vriska’s overall character. By all accounts, she and Tavros actually seem to be having a blast together. She’s not going for the gold, she’s not skipping right to the end, the two of them are just screwing around in her magical land, going on adventures. Okay, she is literally going for the gold in the sense of treasure hunting, but in a more figurative sense, the Vriska we’re more familiar with would probably be a taskmaster, using the scourge of her overbearing personality to drive the team forward to victory over the main final boss. Instead, she’s most in her element here when she’s not doing anything remotely important at all, just hanging out with someone she likes(hates? Troll friendships are complicated.)

Abusive relationships are rarely as obvious or simple as one person harassing and berating the other all the time. Tavros is clearly having a blast here too, and throughout this whole sequence.

https://homestuck.com/story/2521

The problem is that there are two Vriskas (at least), the Vriska who lives inside of her, who she’s only comfortable bringing out around people who have no expectations for her, and the Vriska that Scratch, and Spidermom, and Sn0wman are egging her on to be, the Ideal Troll who cuts through the bullshit, cuts to the chase, and becomes the most important person in the universe. Later on, they will be literally bifurcated by John’s retcon shenanigans.

Homestuck uses the language of alternate selves and ultimate selves to discuss a question that is applicable to real life as well. “Who is the definitive version of a character for whom different choices and versions of themselves are possible?” And when applied to real life, the question becomes something more like, “Could I have chosen to do something else instead of the thing that I did? Are my intentions important, or only my actions?” I don’t think it answers clearly, but just getting us to think about it might be sufficient.

https://homestuck.com/story/2531

The Black Queen is just one of the many malign influences in Terezi and Vriska’s lives, and while she’s not literally an abusive parent to both of them, by egging them on to indulge their worst excesses (Egging Terezi on to persecute people pre-emptively or overzealously, egging Vriska on to take away other people’s agencies), it’s safe to say that her voice is just one of many doing the same thing for the two of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/2543

Oh man. The memoes are some of my favorite conversations in all of Homestuck. They’re funny, but with the exception of one or two of them, I’m not sure how much useful info we’ll get out of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/2567

https://homestuck.com/story/2575

Karkat and Terezi may not have literally had sex, but whatever their secret encounter was is effectively symbolic of a consummation of their relationship. She knows what color Karkat’s blood is. They have been in a pail together.

The two of them can hardly be more intimate with each other.

Too bad it doesn’t work out.

But then, it’s probably for the best - the fact that it doesn’t work out for the two of them is the retrospect we need to be able to say it was never going to work out for the two of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/2576

Something different does it for everyone.

https://homestuck.com/story/2578

What does it for Vriska is having the shit beaten out of her by Aradia.

What is Vriska’s big takeaway from this beatdown?

Maybe if we continue to read Aradia as being Vriska’s doppelganger, being savagely beaten by one of her own victims, and one who is so like her in terms of her feelings of helplessness, her feelings of being at the whim of a cosmos that is out to get her, Vriska realizes that the thing she lashes out to attack in other people - the weakness loathed by troll society - is what she hates and fears the most in herself.

https://homestuck.com/story/2587

Aradia is starting to lose her tolerance for scenarios that involve being manipulated by those very same actors that are making her feel helpless.

https://homestuck.com/story/2593

Aradia interprets Sburb as being a challenge to come between any prospective gods and the ultimate reward. Perhaps that is the case. Assigning intent to Sburb to me seems possibly flawed, since it is, after all, only the reproductive organ of a universe. But perhaps it does have some intentions of its own. Are those intentions uniquely Sburb’s? Perhaps specifically Skaia’s. Maybe they are even, more generally, the intentions of Paradox Space itself. But Sburb itself seems more ambivalent to its players than anything. The vast majority of sessions, it seems, kill their players outright, or at least produce null sessions that never give rise to universal reproduction.

https://homestuck.com/story/2625

And that is where we shall conclude for this evening.

Cam signing off, Alive and Not Alone.

#liveblogging #commentary #politics #hierarchy

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completely-zucked · 4 years ago

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Kazakhstan: The Greatest Country in the World

I'll readily admit that my knowledge of American history (particularly when it comes to the oppression of BiPOC) is a little sketchy in places. So I conflated Juneteenth (the fact that certain places didn't emancipate slaves for 2.5 years after they should have) with the Tulsa massacre. However, I hope it counts for something (however small) that I at least knew it was something horrific to do with racist and oppressive BS, that noone in their right mind would be so callous or insensitive to wish anyone hapiness/celebration while remembering that. I wonder how many white Americans can honestly say the same. It seems that I am at least one step ahead of them. Most just take what they learned in K-12 and accept it as the whole truth. K-12, though? That strikes me as a class for advanced students. It seems to me that the average American isn't much more intelligent/educated than the average K-9. (It's one of the reasons why I'm proud to not be an American.)

Too Little, Too Late

Honestly, more white Americans know the history today than did a month ago, and more knew last summer than did the year before, which is definitely … something in the right direction?

Yeah, it's fucking sad, and infuriating, though. Your schools don't teach you this shit, or about Tulsa, or about Rosewood, or Rosa Parks, or about the legacy of lynching, or anything much beyond "slavery was really bad and then we fought a war to get rid of it and then it was mostly better and then Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech and made it all the way better". (Sometimes it's even worse. I know someone who had a friend who grew up in the South and though he admittedly didn't pay a ton of attention in history — with no serious repercussions because he's white — it was at least into his twenties before he realized that the Confederacy lost. He thought that they must have been fighting to end slavery instead of keep it! I mean, how problematic and appalling is that?!)

You don't teach kids about indigenous genocide, either. They don't learn about how their government has (sometimes quite literally) stabbed them (and the first nation's people) in the back over and over again. Growing up, I didn't learn about how Lincoln ordered the largest mass hanging in US history, executing 38 people who had fought because they were starving as a result of their lands being stolen (not just their original lands but part of what they had been forced onto, too) — and that a bunch of the names we saw everywhere like Ramsey and Sibley were dudes who were heavily involved in that "conflict", but I was taught the gist of the attrocities committed by men like Custer when the West was lost.

Your shit's fucked up from top to bottom and side to side.

Your whole education system is garbage, not just your History. Your countrymen (collectively) can't spell, have poor reading comprehension, struggle to identify their own country on a map (never mind anyone else's), are still stuck in the 1960 as far as race relations go, have no grasp of basic Physics or Biology, lobby against teaching evolution in schools (as opposed to Creationism), ad infinitum, ad tedium … Yet I, an individual from a Third World country, have a better education (Cambridge syllabus) than the average individual from what is allegedly The Greatest Country in The World™ Hmm … Something doesn't add up here (but then again, my country's Maths literacy is a known weakness). #JustSaying

Honestly, if my country of origin was one that once housed the thousands of minds that successfully worked out and executed the challenge of going from near-Earth orbit to manually landing a craft on the moon and getting it back to Earth without incident in less than a decade (using technology less powerful/accurate than the average pocket calculator, nog al); a feat so statistically improbable as to be practically impossible … to this sordid state of affairs, I would either retreat to the backwoods and whittle while seriously contemplating my ancestors' poor life choices or I would dilligently apply myself to getting a proper education through online courses. I certainly wouldn't run my mouth about how great my nation is when it's clearly appallingly and embarrassingly backward. Only an idiotic, ignorant, arrogant motherfucker does that. This is far beyond something rotten in the state of Denmark. So yeah, I'm very much anti-American and I'm definitely not ashamed of it.

Now, I realise, of course, that generalisations are generally wrong and not every American is an illiterate and poorly-educated backwoods hillbilly, but fuck me, the smart ones are needles in the haystack (and it's a very big haystack).

Perhaps if your government spent as much on mitigating its education, housing, medical aid (health insurance), unemployment and potable water shortage crises as it does on exploring the Universe and persecuting/murdering BIPOC (particularly non-Christian ones) around the world while claiming to be "liberating" them of anything other than natural resources (particularly gold, diamonds, oil and tungsten) and their lives while foisting cheap crap on them, I might not be such a harsh critic. But don't mind me; I'm just an anti-consumerism anarchist with no idea of how the world really works.

Having worked for some morally bankrupt organisations myself, I'm certainly in no position to criticise, but I do think it's at least a little hypocrytical for someone who worked for Baby Killers International to wish BIPOC a restive and peaceful Juneteenth.

The idea that it's made a holiday is all well and good, but the government still allows cops to murder minorities. It's a consolation prize and a hollow one at that. Not teaching why it's even a holiday in the first place is all sorts of problematic, but only in America. The government has been scared to death of its people (all of them) since the 60s (which is a good thing). Now, they're seeing a lot more whites side with BIPOC than did back then. The only thing keeping them safe is their brainwashed right-wing. This is beyond disturbing.

The Greatest Country in the World

"We're The Greatest Country in the World™", you cry? Maybe sixty years ago you could broadly claim it was heading there and maintain a straight face (if you ignore a lot of problematic shit like abusing Oppenheimer's genius in order to commit war crimes). It certainly isn't any more. Why; what the fuck happened to a nation that used to be an inspiration? Well, you didn't just rest on your laurels; you destroyed them. Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggled and persevered to become what you once were. Unfortunately, we bought into the nightmare of consumerism and greed you packaged and sold to us as The American Dream™.

So, in short: Fuck you very much! Enjoy your fucked-up holiday. Coke (which used to containe cocaine), nutrient-devoid cardboard "food" and heart-attack-inducing "energy" drinks white America!

https://vimeo.com/134492436

#juneteenth #USA #us army #your fave is problematic #amerika

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radramblog · 4 years ago

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National Sorry Day

Look, I’m regrettably less aware than I probably should be about the mistreatment of indigenous Australians by the colonising population and past governments. I know we fucked them over in a lot of different ways, but I’m not too clear on the specifics. When all the schoolkids learned the sanitised version, I was over in Malaysia, so I missed the whole disillusionment process entirely.

So when I looked over at my calendar and saw May 26th listed as “national sorry day”, I just had to ask…really? That’s what we went with?

I guess this is like 2 weeks early, but it’s on my mind now, so suck it up.

For the non-Australian readers I’m sure I have about 3 of, turns out there were already people here when a bunch of stuffy English and Dutch cunts turned up and said hey look at all this land, perfect for prisoners and shit. Standard practice at the time, to be honest- happened in the Americas, happened in a bunch of pacific islands, happened real bad here. A whole bunch of genociding, but at least down under, we didn’t quite stop there.

See there was a whole policy around the 20th century (up until the 70s, even!) where people would just take indigenous children by force from their families- without really any justification- to “assimilate them” into white culture by forcing them into institutions or foster families. This is, obviously, completely fucked, and supposed “benefits” of doing so obviously didn’t manifest, and the government’s still not really done all that much to make up for it.

The first National Sorry Day was in 1998. 6.5 months before yours truly was born, so they’ve done 22 of them at this point. Thing is, it wasn’t official or anything at that point- it was a community thing, people showed up but this wasn’t government-led or anything like it should have been. Official stance at the time was like…ehhh wasn’t actually us that did it right? Because turns out the Howard government did literally one good thing ever and this wasn’t it. A year after said PM made a “Motion of Reconciliation”, which pointedly was an apology, that never actually said the word Sorry? And I’m not sure who he was trying to fool. It wasn’t until the 2008 Rudd government- and god Rudd wasn’t perfect but we can’t help but miss him given current circumstance- that the Australian Federal Government actually apologised for, you know, fucking over several generations of innocent people for reasons that were racist at best.

And the formal apology is nice, but where does that actually take us? Because we still live in a world where indigenous Australians are severely marginalised. And the government we’ve had for the past 9 years clearly doesn’t give a shit. Turns out, when you keep in the party who didn’t do anything about this for several decades, they will continue not doing anything about it. They defunded the Recognize campaign 4 years ago, and they clearly aren’t doing anything about deaths in custody.

I guess it isn’t really my place to comment on this. I’m a white bloke from WA, and I don’t know shit. But I feel like even with a formal apology, and some programs set up by the last Labour government 10 years ago, I don’t think we’ve done enough to make up for 6 decades of cultural genocide. There’s a phrase that always goes around right-wing circles, that because the current generation wasn’t purposely involved in slavery, or genocide, or whatever, that it’s not our problem and we don’t have to worry about it. But first of all, the effects are still felt today, and second of all, that doesn’t mean we don’t have to be aware of our history. I know so little about the Australian half of my family heritage that I might have family members complicit in the Stolen Generation. Most of us probably do. And I think we in the present ultimately are responsible, at least somewhat, for cleaning up the mistakes of the past.

#ramble #political #australia #gonna look into protests and such when I have time so i'm a bit less of a slacktivist

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

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Pluralistic: 24 Mar 2020 (Nebula Awards move online, Make America Well Again stamps, Data is the new toxic waste, Stock Jump, Grandparents Optional Party, Quarantine Book Club, the Party of Death, financial stability vs economic stability, quarantine vs workforce automation, bailouts and moral hazard, MIT's open source ventilator)

Today's links

This year's Nebula Awards will be held online: It's $150, and raising funds to bail out corona-shattered writers.

Make America Well Again stamps: from the artist who brought you the Trump Zero Cents stamp.

Data is the new toxic waste: It never was the "new oil" (my latest podcast).

Stock Jump: A ski-game that lets you play the stock charts of cratered businesses.

Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP: Terrified old people are the turkeys who vote for plutes' Christmas every four years.

Join me on the Quarantine Book Club: April 1, 3PM Pacific.

The Party of Death: It's a good time to buy exterminism futures.

Financial stability vs economic stability: Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.

Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis: Augmentation isn't replacement.

Bailouts and moral hazard: If we never teach big business, it won't ever learn.

MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator: Now in FDA testing.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

This year's Nebula Awards will be held online (permalink)

This year's Nebula Awards weekend is moving online, thanks to decisive action from SFWA and Mary Robinette Kowal.

https://www.sfwa.org/2020/03/22/announcing-the-transformation-of-the-2020-nebula-conference-and-covid19-relief/

It'll include "panels, solo presentations, conference mentorships, workshops, forums, chats, and virtual room parties (including a dance party hosted by John Scalzi)." Part of the proceeds will go to relief for sf writers who are in covid-related financial distress.

It runs May 29-31, including a livestream of the Nebula Awards banquet. Registration is $150 and comes with a year of access to archived materials and the SFWA Bulletin.

Make America Well Again stamps (permalink)

I bought some of Ben Hannam's Trump No Cents stamps in 2017 and never looked back. I still put 'em on letters.

Now he's got a Make America Well Again stamp, which you can lick (if you dare) and stick for the duration. Remember, USPS is profitable and unsubsidized and Trump's swamp-dwellers want to shut it down and replace it with donors like Fedex and UPS!

Data is the new toxic waste (permalink)

My latest podcast is a reading of "Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill?" — a column arguing that data was never "the new oil" – instead, it was always the new toxic waste: "pluripotent, immortal – and impossible to contain."

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/secure-futures-magazine/data-new-toxic-waste/34184/

Data breaches are inevitable (any data you collect will probably leak; any data you retain will definitely leak) and cumulative (your company's data breach can be combined with each subsequent attack to revictimize your customers).

Identity thieves benefit enormously from cheap storage, and they collect, store and recombine every scrap of leaked data. Merging multiple data sets allows for reidentification of "anonymized" data, and it's impossible to predict which sets will leak in the future.

These nondeterministic harms have so far protected data-collectors from liability, but that can't last. Toxic waste also has nondeterministic harms (we never know which bit of effluent will kill which person), but we still punish firms that leak it.

Waiting until the laws change to purge your data is a bad bet – by then, it may be too late. All the data your company collects and retains represents an unquantifiable, potentially unlimited source of downstream liability.

What's more, you probably aren't doing anything useful with it. The companies that make the most grandiose claims about data analytics are either selling analytics or data (or both). These claims are sales literature, not peer-reviewed citations to empirical research.

Data is cheap to collect and store – if you don't have to pay for the chaos it sows when it leaks. And some day, we will make data-hoarders pay.

Here's the podcast:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Here's the MP3:

https://ia801406.us.archive.org/9/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_334/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_334_-Data-_the_new_oil_or_potential_for_a_toxic_oil_spill.mp3

And here's the link to subscribe to the podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Stock Jump

Stock Jump (permalink)

Last week, those of us lucky enough to have retirement savings joined the rest of the world, because our 401(k)s all cratered and all the promising stocks (teleconferencing, guillotines) are all way, way overpriced thanks to panic buying by Republican Senators.

But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.

Enter Stock Jump, a ski-jump game whose courses are procedurally generated by the stock charts of shares from around the world.

It's really fun! If you can see through the tears.

http://stockjump.sos.gd/

Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP (permalink)

A thread by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Making Light crystallized a thought that literally had me tossing and turning all night, about Trump's decision to risk the lives of ~20% of elderly Americans to goose the stock market.

https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016643.html#4402672

The thing I find baffling is how short-term this thinking is.

Not for Trump, of course, who is legendary for his view of life as a game of running across a river hopping from the back of one alligator to another before he can get his leg bitten off.

But for the right-wing establishment, whose whole schtick is "rationality" and "long-term thinking" and "self-control" (think of the gleeful repetition of the discredited Marshmellow Test and the rhetoric about the "poor life choices" that lead to single parenthood, addiction, and inadequate retirement savings or health insurance).

How is it that these self-congratulatory long-game-players can't see that murdering one in five American seniors is a self-limiting move when frightened old white people are the primary source of turkeys who can be counted upon to vote for Christmas every four years?

The right has an antimajoritarian, elitist agenda. Right-wing thought is essentially the belief that some people are destined to rule, and others are destined to be ruled over by their betters, and the world is best when the right people are atop the pyramid. Splits in the right are about who should rule: Dominionists want Christian men in charge; libertarians want bosses in charge, imperialists want America in charge, racists want white people in charge, etc.

Antimajoritarian projects struggle in democracies, for obvious reasons. When your platform is "only 1% of us should be making decisions" it's hard to win 51% of the vote. That's why the right focuses so hard on gerrymandering and voter suppression, and why the otherwise untenable coalitions — finaciers and young-Earth Creationists, say — persist.

But the biggest source of ballots in support of rule by elites is frightened people, especially frightened bigots who think that the elites will promote their interests ahead of the disfavored minorities (think: Dixiecrats).

So murdering 20% of the most reliable source of votes for elite rule is a farcically shortsighted thing to do.

I am terrified of a Biden candidacy not merely because I think his policies are poor, but because I think he is really bad at being a candidate, and will struggle to win.

But Trump murdering 20% of his base might just be enough to make him lose. It may be that while he could murder someone in the middle of 5th Ave and get away with it, he can't sentence 20% of US pensioners to gruesome deaths and get away with it.

I'm not gleeful at this prospect. I am totally aghast. I barely slept last night, waking up dozens of times with this genocide playing out in my imagination.

But I am incredibly surprised. How does the self-declared Party of the Long View not see that this is going to destroy it?

The stock market is circling the drain and obviously this is very distressing for the donor class, but almost no Americans own any significant stocks, because most Americans have NO savings. The idea that rescuing share prices by killing the elderly will get the turkeys out to vote for Christmas is clearly wrong.

For more on antimajoritarianism and the right, read Corey Robin's outstanding book, "The Reactionary Mind."

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1234117673316782082

Join me on the Quarantine Book Club (permalink)

I'm going participate in a session of the Quarantine Book Club on April 1 at 3PM Pacific, where we're discussing my book Radicalized. Tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

If $5 is a burden for you, you can get in free with the code ALLAREWELCOME.

Hope to see you!

The Party of Death (permalink)

In his 2017 book Four Futures, Peter Frase uses science fiction to sketch out four ways our society could go as capitalism ruptures, from communism to exterminism, this being the expression of bosses' fear and dependence on workers.

https://boingboing.net/2017/01/06/four-futures-using-science-fi.html

Frase posits a possible mass-automation event that makes workers superfluous (I'm skeptical of this: climate change guarantees 2-3 centuries of full employment, e.g., relocating every coastal city).

But in light of the Current Situation, he imagines a different form of exterminism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-economy-public-health-exterminism/

It's not just the GOP's willingness to murder 20% of seniors in the hopes of rescuing the Dow.

Plutes and their bootlickers have been calling for mass-deaths as a preferable alternative since the crisis first manifested, as when Tea Party founder Rick Santelli suggested "Maybe we'd be just better off if we gave it to everybody."

And of course, there was Boris Johnson and Dominick Cummings' plan to infect all of the UK to create "herd immunity." As Cummings said, "if that means some pensioners die, too bad."

Now Trump wants to potentially murder 20% of American seniors to rescue share prices, and the GOP is going along with him.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1242444277264740353

The Republicans have become the Party of Death, with establishment figures like Thomas Friedman providing ideological cover (""let many of us get the coronavirus, recover and get back to work").

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opinion/coronavirus-economy.html

Frase: "The ghoulishness of this strategy will become apparent when it is too late, when the hospitals fill and the health care system and the economy both collapse."

"Those in power will be held blameless, and those with wealth will sadly lament the foolishness of the lesser orders."

"Socialists have always insisted that human needs should take precedence over profit, that the stock market is not the economy, and that we need to utterly transform an economy that is immiserating working people and destroying the planet. That message will only become more urgent as our opponents across different parts of the ruling class come to the conclusion — mournfully for some, gleefully for others — that in the contest between loss of profit and loss of life, they choose death."

Financial stability vs economic stability (permalink)

Michael Hudson is a fascinating thinker, an expert in the history of debt and debt-forgiveness. See, e.g., this:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#jubilee

In a new interview, Hudson delves into that history: interest-bearing debt was invented in the third millennium BCE, and quickly kings learned that they had to have periodic debt forgiveness, or compound interest would render all debts unpayable.

https://digitalfinanceanalytics.com/blog/debt-and-power-with-michael-hudson/

Greeks and Romans did away with the practice, and so had to live with six centuries of debt-revolts, as ever-larger fractions of their populace ended up in a form of debt slavery.

Greek Democracy was created to allow commoners to serve in government and so vote to cancel debts. Roman emperors conquered Greece and did away with debt-cancellation, creating an increasingly unstable oligarchy.

That's not far off from where we are today. 90% of debts are held by the richest 10%, and these oligarchs own the political process and refuse to countenance debt-cancellation.

Obama promised to write down mortgages, but instead he bailed out finance, who kicked us all out and bought our houses out from under us, and then rented back to us. Since then, the Fed "has created $4.5 trillion of credit to support prices for real estate."

"The aim has been to make housing more expensive, enabling the banks to collect on their mortgages and not go under. Credit keeps the debt overhead in place, thereby keeping the financial system afloat instead of facing the reality that debt needs to be written down."

Trump's gonna do it again, giving $50b to airlines/Boeing. Since 2008, Boeing has spent $45b on buybacks. Trump's message: "Spend 92-95% of your income to buy your own hares, and the government will print money so you can do it again, because our priority is stock prices."

"Financial stability" is incompatible with "economic stability." Financial stability means never writing down debts so that the bad loans oligarchs made never turn into bad debts. Economic stability requires debt write-downs so that people can be productive.

Obama's bailouts increased big banks' Too Big to Fail status. That's why since 2008, "GDP per 95 percent of the American population is actually shrunk. All the growth in America's GDP has occurred only to the wealthiest 5% of the population."

Today, plutes "hope to use the crisis not to revive the economy, but to just pound it into debt deflation, leaving the debts in place while bailing out the banks and the landlord class."

Here's what "financial stability" looks like: "you have to pay this exponential growth in debt, [and] have less and less to buy goods and services."

Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis (permalink)

Automation-based unemployment has always been overhyped. Any work that robots take over merely frees up human workers for the 2-300 year project of climate remediation, including relocating every coastal city in the world.

But automation is also vastly overhyped. Take the oft-repeated claim that "truck driver" is the most common job in America, and first in line to be automated. It's just wrong.

First, because the BLS "truck driver" category includes long-haul truckers, delivery drivers, couriers, and dozens of other subprofessions, most of which are far, far away from being automatable.

https://hbr.org/2019/09/automation-isnt-about-to-make-truckers-obsolete

(More importantly, though: the most automatable category is long-haul driver, and an automated long-haul truck in its own dedicated lane is just a shitty train).

The overhyped nature of technological displacement is on perfect display during the pandemic quarantine. As many "low skilled" (which is to say, "low waged") workers withdraw from the workforce, the economy has ground to a halt.

So much so that the right is now prepared to throw 20+% of seniors into the volcano to appease the market gods.

The category error committed by automation-fretters is to confuse "automating a job" with "augmenting a worker."

"We know that robots are great at repetitive work. they can do that forever. What's not so great is anything with a human-centered context, a cultural context." -Julie Carpenter

https://www.wired.com/story/robot-jobs-coronavirus/

Bailouts and moral hazard (permalink)

It's been barely a decade since the USG bailed out big businesses and the fact that we're here again reveals some of the glaring failures in the last bailout. Any new bailout should correct those errors by putting restrictions on bailed-out companies.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-whatsapp/#peoples-bailout

There have been some good proposals on these lines, like those from AOC and Stephanie Kelton:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/21/most-dangerous-ghost/#peoples-bailout

(whenever I write about this in public, I'm inundated with angry tweets from sociopaths with "investor" in their bios)

We're running out of time to get this right. DC is so filled with money-hungry lobbyists that they can't practice adequate social distancing, and they're collectively seeking trillions in string-free public money for their paymaster.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/rule-number-1-for-government-bailouts-of-companies-make-sure-voters-and-taxpayers-share-in-the-upside

At a minimum, any bailouts should come in exchange for convertible corporate bonds that let the USG take an ownership stake in any business that fails to repay its public debts. That's a minimum, as is a ban on stock buybacks for bailed out companies.

We need very strict limits on lobbying by bailed out firms: "If we are not to finance our own bamboozlement, any company receiving bailouts must be required each month to file full reports on political contributions and lobbying expenditures to candidates and parties."

This goes for dark money contributions, including 527 funds, and corporate/exec contributions to trade associations and other lobbying fronts, think-tanks, and other political influence vehicles.

"Unlike last time, when Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke failed to give the public a serious share of the upside, the bailed out firms should be compelled to issue convertible bonds to the government."

"Those bonds should make the government the senior creditor to the firm for the value of the principal as long as the debt is unpaid…As firms and the economy recover, the shares can be sold on the open market, yielding a handsome return to the Treasury."

The right likes to harp about "moral hazard" as an excuse for cutting aid, to, say, single mothers ("It only encourages them"). But what about businesses that needed trillions in 2008 and now need trillions more? What lesson are we teaching them?

(Image: Alex Proimos, CC BY)

MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator (permalink)

At the end of last week, a crowdsourced design for an open-source hardware ventilator entered testing with the Irish regulator, a week after work began on the project.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/20/pluralistic-20-mar-2020/#oshw-breathing

Now, hot on its heels, an MIT open source hardware ventilator team has submitted its design to the FDA for testing and approval, under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority.

https://e-vent.mit.edu/

It eliminates many possible sources of failure by replacing an electric pump with a manual one, which can, in turn, be operated by a separate, very simple, Arduino-controlled system (which can be readily swapped out for a human hand if it fails).

As Hackaday points out, "Almost as interesting as the device itself is the comments people are leaving about the design."

https://hackaday.com/2020/03/23/mit-ventilator-designed-with-common-manual-resuscitator-submitted-for-fda-testing/

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Record sales up, P2P sales up — RIAA's story doesn't add up https://web.archive.org/web/20050822053404/http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5631698.html

#15yrsago Octopuses dressed up as sea coconuts sneaking on two legs https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/050321-14.html

#10yrsago Pooh vs Alien: Webcomics realize their full potential at last http://godxiliary.com/alienvspooh/

#10yrsago Airport worker caught photographing screen as female worker passed through naked scanner https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/24/airport-worker-warned-body-scanner

#10yrsago UK record lobby: democracy is a waste of time https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/corporate-lobbyists-no-need-for-democracy

#5yrsago How medical abortion works https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/medical-abortion/

#5yrsago ACLU sues TSA to make it explain junk science "behavioral detection" program https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-and-aclu-sue-tsa-records-discredited-behavior-detection-program

#5yrsago Randomized dystopia generator that goes beyond the Bill of Rights https://www.harihareswara.net/dystopia/

#1yrago Man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills, which the companies dutifully paid https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lithuanian-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-100-million-from-google-facebook/

#1yrago Chelsea Manning is being held in prolonged solitary confinement, a form of torture https://xychelsea.is/?page_id=28

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Tor.com (https://tor.com), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill? https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Upcoming appearances:

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#pluralistic

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leviathan-supersystem · 6 years ago

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i feel like people need to get a better understanding of how certain reactionary memeplexes, particularly those relating to conspiracy theories, work.

okay, remember how westpal shut up real quick when i mentioned that his avatar was from the cover of Behold a Pale Horse? i suspect that’s because he has some level of self awareness, in spite of it all- here’s a brief summary of the book’s relevant segments, swiped from wikipedia:

In Behold a Pale Horse Cooper proposed that AIDS was the result of a conspiracy to decrease the populations of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals.[8] In 2000 South Africa's Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang received criticism for distributing the chapter discussing this theory to senior South African government officials.[13]Nicoli Nattrass, a longtime critic of AIDS denialists, criticized Tshabalala-Msimang for lending legitimacy to Cooper's theories and disseminating them in Africa.[10]

UFOs, aliens and the Illuminati

Cooper caused a sensation in Ufology circles in 1988 when he claimed to have seen secret documents while in the Navy describing governmental dealings with extraterrestrials, a topic on which he expanded in Behold a Pale Horse.[6] (By one account he served as a "low level clerk" in the Navy, and as such would not have had the security clearance needed to access classified documents.[14]) UFOlogists later asserted that some of the material that Cooper claimed to have seen in Naval Intelligence documents was actually plagiarized verbatim from their research, including several items that the UFOlogists had fabricated as pranks.[15] Don Ecker of UFO Magazine ran a series of exposés on Cooper in 1990.[16]

Cooper linked the Illuminati with his beliefs that extraterrestrials were secretly involved with the United States government, but later retracted these claims. He accused Dwight D. Eisenhower of negotiating a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954, then establishing an inner circle of Illuminati to manage relations with them and keep their presence a secret from the general public. Cooper believed that aliens "manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult", and that even the Illuminati were unknowingly being manipulated by them.[6]

Cooper described the Illuminati as a secret international organization, controlled by the Bilderberg Group, that conspired with the Knights of Columbus, Masons, Skull and Bones, and other organizations. Its ultimate goal, he said, was the establishment of a New World Order. According to Cooper the Illuminati conspirators not only invented alien threats for their own gain, but actively conspired with extraterrestrials to take over the world.[6] Cooper believed that James Forrestal's fatal fall from a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Hospital was connected to the alleged secret committee Majestic 12, and that JASON advisory group scientists reported to an elite group of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations executive committee members who were high-ranking members of the Illuminati.[2][3]

Cooper also claimed that the antisemitic conspiracy theory forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was actually an Illuminati work, and instructed readers to substitute "Sion" for "Zion", "Illuminati" for "Jews", and "cattle" for "Goyim".[3][17][18]

okay so you get the gist here. the usual dumb shit you see in the right-wing conspiracy theory zone.

now, to be clear, i’m not dismissing the idea that people, and the ruling class in particular, might, at times, conspire- indeed, i’m about to go out on a limb here and suggest there may in fact be something to the notion that AIDS was deliberately manufactured, or at least that the government was guilty of severe purposeful neglect.

this is not synonymous with believing in illuminati or UFO crap without evidence- though the purpose of this book, i suspect, is to try to tie those two things indelibly together in people’s minds. not to mention the obvious barely disguised buildup to antisemitism at the end there.

the purpose is twofold- the first to discredit any investigation into there being more of a story behind AIDS, the second to try to lure left-wing leaning people toward right-wing extremism, the mechanism being obvious- first, they’re lured in by wanting to know more about the possibility that AIDS was deliberately engineered to target black and gay communities, something which obviously would have more appeal to those on the left. once lured in, it hits them with the alien bullshit, as well as the inherently reactionary illuminati nonsense, then tops that off by presenting literally the entire text of the protocols of the elders of fucking zion to really start bringing them into the reactionary worldview- but, knowing that the person reading is likely from a left-wing background, an extremely weak effort is made to disguise the antisemitism- “oh, it wasn’t about jewish people, oh no, it was about uhhhhhhhhhhh illuminati” and then if they swallow that, it’s only a short hop from there to “nevermind, it was about jewish people after all.” it’s a tactic used to gradually acclimate people to antisemitism. manipulative “milk before meat” tactics.

you can see the results of this play out in action with Tila Tequila- obviously she didn’t pop out of the womb seig heiling, and there was quite a bit of buildup in the form of new-agey anti-illuminati conspiracy theorism before she became a full-fledged genocidal neonazi.

and the thing is, if there had been an intervention at the right time, she could have been saved from that, before becoming completely conditioned into an ideology which is immensely harmful to so many people.

so, if possible, it’s good to try to ascertain how deep in someone is- have they been completely re-conditioned into a hardline reactionary? or is there still time to help them see what’s happening to them, and stop it?

for example here: [link] this person is clearly deeply in the clutches of reactionary psychological warfare, but it seemed to me like there might still be some hope for them, so i tried to intervene to help them get a better understanding of the nature of the ruling class and so forth.

but, if you’re going to intervene in this way, you need to do some background research first- just going in there and shouting “illuminati fake!” won’t cut it, especially because there was, in fact, an actual historical group called the illuminati, and to effectively grapple with this kind of thing, you’re going to need to have an understanding of what that group’s history was, and how they became such a boogeyman in the reactionary narrative in the first place. to explore this, let’s look at what Behold A Pale Horse has to say about it- which, interestingly, is shockingly little- the name “Weishaupt” (the founder of the actual irl illuminati) appears only 10 times in the whole text:

Adam Weishaupt, a young professor of canon law at Ingolstadt University in Germany, was a Jesuit priest and an initiate of the Illuminati. The branch of the Order he founded in Germany in 1776 was the same Illuminati previously discussed.

the “branch” in question is actually just. the illuminati. it wasn’t a “branch” of a larger pre-existing movement, as Milton here is claiming, and indeed, he never provides any meaningful evidence of any pre-existing illuminati before weischaupt’s group. in fact, he points to the lack of evidence prior to then as proof of how strong their oath of silence was. of course he does.

Weishaupt advocated "abolition of all ordered national governments, abolition of inheritance, abolition of private property, abolition of patriotism, abolition of the individual home and family life as the cell from which all civilizations have stemmed, and abolition of all religions established and existing so that the Luciferian ideology of totali- tarianism may be imposed on mankind."

In the same year that he founded the Illuminati he published Wealth of Nations, the book that provided the ideological foundation for capitalism and for the Industrial Revolution. It is no accident that the Declaration of Independence was written in the same year. On the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States the wise will recognize the all-seeing eye and other signs of the Brotherhood of the Snake

this is interesting here because there’s a strange tension between the anti-communism of contemporary reactionism, and the anti-liberalism and anti-republicanism of the earlier reactionary movements, which anti-illuminati ideology is an echo of.

the first anti-illuminati conspiracy theorists was the reactionary monarchist priest Agustin Barruel, and all anti-illuminism traces back particularly to his book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. inerestingly, he did not at any point in this book accuse them of ruling the world, or wanting to establish “totalitarian” rule! quite the opposite in fact- the illuminati and other enlightenment movements of the time were accused of "conspiracy of impiety" against God and Christianity, the "conspiracy of rebellion" against kings and monarchs, and "the conspiracy of anarchy" against society in general. if you understand anything about Augustin Barruel’s politics, you’ll understand that Augustin was if anything, profoundly in favor of “totalitarianism”, particularly that of the king and the church. he wrote angry screeds against the illuminati precisely because they were anti-totalitarian, and espoused democratic values.

but over time, this reactionary social current had to change with the times. thus the strange tension between accusing weishaupt of both wanting to abolish private property and being behind the publication of Wealth of Nations.

for the record, no, i can’t find any evidence that weishaupt published Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations- but that accusation is nonetheless much more in the spirit of Augustin Barruel’s original accusations that the illuminati were behind the spread of enlightenment values, while the accusation he was against private property sits as an obvious later attempt to incongruously graft anti-communist reactionary talking points onto framework which originated in a reactionary anti-republican pro-monarchist context.

its interesting to see how a rectionary memeplex which was, in it’s origins, overtly pro-ruling class, and overtly anti-populist- as anti-illuminism was in it’s origins in the work of Augustin Barruel- over time get dressed up more and more with the character of a kind of artificial class-consciousness, where a short-lived progressive discussion group has been mythologized into this sort of decoy mirage stand-in for the ruling class, to divert people from developing any real understanding of the actual capitalist ruling class.

at any rate, it’s important to understand the origin an nature of this reactionary social current if you want to effectively help people who are caught up in it- to show them this history so they can see how, in their attempt to oppose the ruling class, they’ve been suckered into a reactionary ideology which is, in both it’s historical origins and contemporary functions, engineered to uphold the ruling class.

#longpost #antisemitism

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