#like it's a wild thing to even consider thinking --especially as leftists | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hxhhasmysoul · 1 year ago

Note

Okay we're getting nowhere and I don't have the char limit in asks to counter properly but just wanted to make clear that when I said you were being rude, I didn't mean to me personally but in saying things like "gojou's fans know no cringe".

"I don't have the char limit in asks to counter properly" - then dm me.

"Okay we're getting nowhere" - i don't know where the destination is so i can only trust you on this.

as to that particular tag being rude, yeah, it absolutely is. this is some unfortunate coincidence that you haven't come across the posts or tags where i talk this way because i often do. and i'm being very sincere here, i do not expect people to know all my posts. it's just unfortunate that you weren't forewarned and got a wrong impression of me.

i have for a very long time expressed extreme exasperation with the juju fandom. i have written that it gives me brain damage. i compared it to toxic waste. these are rude things to say regularly, especially without caveats like "some people in the jjk fandom ... ".

but i also have an about section on this blog which very explicitly says that this is my personal hoarding blog. this blog exists exclusively to cater to me and my fandom experience. that's why i vent and rant on it.

for example i vent on in about how gojou, getou and stsg fans are making the fandom quite insufferable for me, a person who:

1. used to like gojou but liked him because i see him as extremely flawed;

2. despises getou as a person for being a fascist and supremacist but used to like his descent into that ideology, not the execution in 0 though,

3. who gave zero shits about them as a pairing, like never thought about it on my own.

thank so the fandom now i can't stand gojou, getou and their ship anymore.

i love kenjaku and the getou and stsg fans who constantly erase them are aggravating.

getou fans who consistently pretend he wasn't genocidal are aggravating, especially considering how anti fascist and leftist a lot of juju is. gojou fans who act like his shit doesn't stink are frustrating too. these two exist probably 80% as fanon on this website.

stsg and gojou fans who think every fucking panel and every fucking moment in jjk is a parallel to either gojou or stsg. that will flood the juju tags with these inane farfetched takes even on moments that are specifically about other characters. yuuji, my absolutely fucking favourite character in juju is probably the main victim of this. almost everyday i look at a post with a manga panel or screen cap of characters i like, click to expand the post just to read some absolute gibberish about how this particular panel, this particular moment is actually about gojou or getou or them together...

this is how the fandom feels to fans of yuuji, kenjaku, megumi and others. gojou and getou fans think the fandom revolves around them, that it's their job let fans of other characters know that their favs are nothing more than stand ins for gojou and getou. that their stories exist only as reference to gojou and getou's stories... instead of, and i know it's fucking wild, letting others enjoy their thing without having to be bombarded by characters they don't give a shit about.

my friend witnessed a situation when gojou fans literally invaded and spammed a jjk server. making everyone else in that server have a bad day.

idk if there are any yuuji or kenjaku fans who go into gojou or getou's tags to create posts about how gojou or getou moments are actually just reference to yuuji or kenjaku moments. is that an actual thing that happens?

what have we done to gojou and getou's fans? what is our fucking crime that we can't enjoy our parts of the fandom in peace?

there are so many blogs that love gojou or even focus on him. and you came to me, a person whose interest in jjk can be boiled down to:

i'm not normal about yuuji

i love the mindfuck that is kenjaku

i love all the leftist themes in juju, its convoluted magic system and the way the multiple parallel plots used to run

i thirst after sukuna especially in his true form

i miss nobara a lot

i actually like angel, hana, yorozu, uro...

a person who wrote things like: gojou die challenge, or how i wanted sukuna to graphically and gratuitously eat gojou at the end of this fight to compensate for the brain damage i was getting from reading text posts on this website. that i hope that if he dies his fans will rage quit the fandom and we will finally be allowed not to think about him.

a person who practically never reblogs individual art of him because i can't look at him anymore.

and you come to poke me, to insinuate that my subjective opinions are somehow lesser from yours which you apparently consider objective or whatever, dear gojou fan.

and now you come here sulking that this is going nowhere... what is going nowhere? what did you set out to do? evangelise to me about gojou? because it's not enough that the majority adores him? no one is allowed not to care about him or the crime dislike him? no one is allowed not to be impressed by him? no one is allowed to prioritise different things about juju than you?

please, for the love of the manga gods, what did i fail to guess that you want from me? and how am i responsible for that, dear stranger who approached me?

i'm so exasperated. this is not an excuse, this is an explanation. i vent my frustrations in a rude way, it is what it is.

#answering asks #i'm so tired #work is shit #and my hobby is now somehow about online strangers who think i owe them to be their polite audience #so they can inform me about their opinions and get idk what #i'm having two parallel discussion like this today #this is kinda unreal

8 notes · View notes

flagellant · 2 years ago

Text

After The Revolution Will Never Come

An examination on the realpolitik of revolutionary movements and the perpetuation of the iconography of violence. Originally written for my university final paper. 2,500 words.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

-Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains”.

There is an inherent seductiveness to being justified in your actions. To know without any doubt that you were right; that whatever path you chose was the correct path to take, now and into the future. It makes a world of complicated loose-ends and shades of gray into a perfect aesthetic of simplistic moral values. If you were correct, then it necessitates that something else was wrong; if your side is the right side, then whatever actions you took must also have been right. This is not to assign blame; life is a confusing tangle of messy and ugly truths intertwined with deceptions, many of which happen at the same time, or are even the same thing. To crave the shelter of simplicity, to want to feel the certainty that your idea of your own righteousness cannot be challenged, is perhaps one of the most honest parts of human nature.

Yet while this is an understandable instinct, it is not a good one. Jim Butcher elaborated on a fairly well-known idea of actions only justifiable by ourselves in his quote, “No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.”

My fear, however, does not come from the justifications that others do not give our actions. Instead I am more afraid of the normalization of violence that we can accept so long as those around us accept that violence. To be beyond reproach requires a community which believes that to be true of your character; inversely, to be irredeemable and monstrous is not something we choose to see for ourselves, but rather that we judge in how we see others. For Americans, I cannot claim to know the source, but I am certain of its consequences, when I look back even throughout my own short lifetime at the popularization of antiblackness, antisemitism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. Each of these philosophies are predicated on the understanding that an outside group is to blame for the violence being done against them, that there is a shared, unilateral complicity in corrupting evil which must somehow be vanquished.

I think often about the potency of symbols and iconography within the human psyche. Simple images which, through some miracle, have become more than what they could ever otherwise be. Icons are sanctuaries, places of holiness, of veneration. They cease to be mere images and become a representation of philosophies, ideals, and concepts, empowering whatever they represent like a focusing prism might strengthen the light and heat of a ray of sun to set a fire from a single perfect point. Meaning is found in the most illogical of things, but that does not reduce the fact that we find meaning in them nonetheless. So I find it concerning to witness within the modern American politics of the radical leftist revolutionaries what seems to be an unconscious commitment to perpetuation of the iconography of violence.

Consider the guillotine. There have been countless stories of its legend, its grim history attached to the shining blade. Its inventor was the Doctor Guillotin, who sought to create a more humane method of murder ordered by a ruling class of citizens–at the time, there were the options of a headsman or a gallows, both of which caused, ostensibly, too much cruelty in the ending of human lives by human hands. I do not believe that Guillotin would have envisioned the legacy of bloodshed he would allow, but I do not believe that anyone ever expected the bloodlust of the French Revolution to reach such awful heights.

They were awful, without a doubt. Over the course of less than a year more than fifteen thousand people were executed via the guillotine, with another twenty-five thousand being executed through other means. Looking not back to the words of the past, but instead to the philosophies of the present, I believe that the guillotine captures something in our imaginations like no other method of execution ever has. It is a clean, simple, perfected machine, tall and central in wherever it sits, confrontational in its exact function. The great equalizer of all men, Madame Guillotine, for we are all comrades in that we are mortal. And, of course, it is a more humane way to separate men’s ghosts from their bodies.

It is this concept more than any that I think is why the modern revolution’s iconography exists so strongly within the grip of the falling blade. We seek to understand ourselves not as murderers or tyrants, but as merciful victors, somber in our need to enforce justice and rules, refusing to relish the idea of suffering even if there is simply no other course but to kill. To torture, maim, and cause as much agony as possible for our personal delights would be truly ghoulish, unacceptable, and prove that we of course are no better than what we defeated. It is a very Romantic means of death; there is spectacle, but there is brevity. There is poetry to the righteousness of an impartial Sword of Damocles, yet we do not stoop to sully our community’s hearts with needless pain.

All of this is a lie. There is no community worth anything which seeks to root its foundations in the efficiency of ending human life. To kill another person as painlessly as possible due to perceived moral necessity is not a mercy, because it by nature must justify the action of murder. Morality ceases to be a function when the legalization of the taking of another’s life is the source of it.

But still, I cannot pretend I do not understand, or even that I do not want to agree, with many of my fellow anarchists. I see the symptoms of a system of government and commerce which has, with no metaphor or allusion, encouraged the permittance of treating human life as a resource to be extracted for profit. I see private citizens funding with personal billions upon billions of dollars the violent usurpation of a foreign nation to prevent their trillion-dollar businesses from being slightly less of a trillion-dollar business. I see leaders of our country witness the countless murders of black men, women, and children, and call for the communities of the dead to control their anger, instead of controlling the killers that remain unpunished or even become celebrated for the ultimate miscarriage of justice, that which ends in the destruction of human beings. I see my planet not even being granted a slow and limping fading-away as it is instead accelerated to apocalyptic levels of death due to the refusal of sacrificing profit for survival. How could I not understand the need for a means to prove to the kings of our kind that they, too, shall die–and by the hands of those they would continue killing, if need be?

Unrest has moved through our world and nation not as a wildfire has, clean and purifying, but as a plague which infects and sickens the hearts, minds, and souls of us and what we make. Our bitter fury at our own powerlessness to prevent harm being done festers and rots like mold in the pit of a peach, capable of killing everything sweet in the world as it lay just beneath the skin. There is a logic to why the guillotine has become such a potent symbol of change, but I do not want to admit that there is a justification for perpetuating that symbol. To venerate and lionize a means of murder and execution ordered by those in power is, I worry, not just to continue a cycle of violence and the reinvention of structures of suffering we live under now. I worry that, at its very core, it encourages an inability to think of any hope for change that does not glorify death and destruction. Perhaps every act of creation necessitates destruction; perhaps a violent upheaval in the loosing of shackles is inevitable for the future of humanity. Certainly it is difficult to envision a reality of realpolitik that does not begin and end with human death at human hands.

But just because it is difficult, or perhaps even impossible, does not mean that we should not shy away from the iconography of violence-as-politics, of murder-bringing-change. I think there is very little in our government and systemic structures that is worth salvaging, truly, but I think of something other than headless corpses piled in the city square when I try and imagine a better world.

Fire has always been an icon in human history; it predates history, and even predates humans. It is destructive, but its destruction is a purification and cleansing. Nothing remains but ash and charcoal, but because nothing remains, it means that you are free to take an entirely new path, with nothing in the past to shackle you. It appears in Creation myths as both creator and destroyer; the conflagrating Shiva, Lord of the Dance; the father of humanity, Prometheus, stealing flames to gift to the first cold and lonely humans instead of being hoarded by selfish Zeus; Coyote climbs the mountains of the sky to take for us fire from the giants, and now the tip of his tail is burnt black from it forever. It appears in the supernatural as divinatory and healing; the Oracle of Delphi inhaling the burning fumes of the gods; the priests of God lighting candles to exorcise demons; the tarot traditionally depicts The Tower, or The House of God, as lightning-struck and aflame, an omen of cataclysmic destruction and overwhelming catastrophic change. Wherever we look, we see fire and fear it as much as we love it, for it is the flames that both grant us life and warmth and kills all it touches with the same breath.

If we must move away from the perpetuation of violence in revolutionary iconography, I must respect the power of iconography at all. Power abhors a vacuum, and propaganda as a rallying cry is an eminent source of empowerment and strength for our convictions. I think of the wildfires of California, and the chaparral which must be burnt to cinders requires to grow and stay healthy as an ecological biome. Entire ecosystems have evolved with the understanding of their end by flame inevitable, and have tied their births to the ashes that are left behind. It is not in the homeland of my tribe that I see a possible replacement for the guillotine–there is no real romance in a pinecone–but I find it elsewhere.

There is a part of the Cape of Africa called the fynbos, or fine bush. It is a region of land where more than four in five plants are endemic to nowhere else except that miniscule hundred kilometer band. Fires rampage through it every decade or so, eradicating the lush beauty of the hills bright with flowers, each trying to attract the pollination of the sunbirds which live in the region and feed off of their nectar.

It is in the ashes and smoke of a wildfire which has left nothing of the old world that I find what symbol I see myself in. Four days after the conflagration, a single flower will have bloomed; the Cyrtanthus ventricosus, commonly named as the fire lily. These plants bloom only after the soil their bulbs live in are exposed to extreme temperatures; they are exclusively pollinated by a single species of butterfly; within two weeks, the flowers will have died as the rest of the fynbos explodes back into vegetation, and it goes dormant once more as a bulb, waiting for the next fire to come, as I suppose it must know it always will.

I want to be clear: I do not see this as an appropriate symbol because of the idea that it represents the hope of a future where justice has won. I think that the lie of victory over oppression is perhaps the greatest danger we face as Americans; we are too easily comforted by the idea that the fight for civil rights and humanity can exist in the past, definitively beaten, or only ever in the smallest dregs, never truly a threat anymore. The idea of history being something we create, as opposed to something which does not apply to us, is not seductive as righteousness is, but rather a terrified grip onto complacency: If we live in times where injustice must be fought, then that means if we are not fighting injustice, we are why it must be fought. The fire lily, on the surface, lives only after the revolution of fire. It is perhaps to others a sign of beauty, perhaps of hope, that life shall exist even after the most calamitous of change.

To me it is the knowledge that the fire lily did not come to life after the fire–justice does not live only once injustice is defeated. The fire lily is a lily. It is a plant which grows from the same bulb, flowering again and again, withering away each time and waiting for its moment to bloom. It is never dead, it may only be killed; otherwise, it is still there, just below the surface of the soil, unseen and ignored by many, but exists within the foundations of the world nonetheless.

The point in time where any of us will ever be able to say, “This is after the revolution”, will never come. The fight against human cruelty, against murder and violence in all its sizes and shapes and justifiications, against conflict and struggle and suffering–it is never something able to be won. We exist in a constant state of learning more about our fellow man, and our ideas of justice grow with each new thing we learn. To be alive is to change into something other than what you were mere moments ago; to be dead is definitionally to stagnate, unable to change yourself, merely to be changed by those around you. The fire lily did not grow after the revolution, it merely was most visible then. Fire happens when we grow rampant and green and far too comfortable with the idea of forgetting that, just like justice exists within the foundations of our societies, so too does injustice, waiting to strike. The only difference between the fire and the flower in this system of symbology, then, is merely what symbols we see in them, and what we are willing to do about it.

#my writing #my essay #long post

86 notes · View notes

gemsofthegalaxy · 2 years ago

Text

sdfghjsdhk im,

Noah is playing a video of a Debate Bro claiming that he "constantly shits on the concept of leftist debate bros and thinks we contribute nothing to the discourse. He (and others) think debate is inherently bad and that, in fact, defending your arguments is bad" when.. Noah has said in two separate videos that he specifically watches (or has watched), debate bro content, and he thinks there is a lot of value to be found it in. he literally recommended debate bro content. like, yes with some caveats, but he has said multiple times it's a valuable section of the community.

also- i watch a lot of commentary channels that shit on other people's content (we're talking misogynistic alpha male-to-incel pipeline tiktoks) and while i admit the premise of just dragging someone else's stuff through the mud is always gonna be iffy, at the very least, the Commentary Channels show clips of the people saying these things on their tiktoks. they have proof.

whereas this debate guy just. says "this is what Noah Samsen says in his content" with no proof? golly. i wonder how many of his vast amount of followers just. believe him.

and like. to be fair. He's just fucking wrong. debate IS an interesting thing to interrogate, especially because you need to first define debate. For instance, the clip being show right now is a guy streaming, talking to his chat- that is not a debate, so if he considers himself a debator based on that alone like he's not even "Debating" but whatever.

to me, debate is a specific format of arguing two opposing sides, and is usually formal. And, in my experience, who wins can be way more about Sounding Right and Sounding Better than actually having the more factual/better/logical answer.

and that's just due to how well you debate, not the logic or raw content of your words. humans like....... trust things that are "Articulate" and "Well Worded" and "Compelling"- things that can be super loaded. they will take into account way more than just the actual words said, or even how they're said and artfully put together, but also how the people are dressed, the colour of the skin, size/shape of body etc.

so calling into question how much WEIGHT we put on the idea of debate is actually very valid!! and being unwilling to consider that, equating any insinuation that "debate might have issues" to "debate, and therefore being able to argue and back up your points on things, is useless" is a fucking wild thing to do!!!

these Left Tubers who call into question how useful debate is are not saying it's bad to be able to argue a point or defend your stance, goddddddddd

1 note · View note

qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

Note

Hi there, I really liked what you had to say about the upcoming election. I was wondering if you have published any articles recently in regards to that? I know you said you were a historian.

Aha, thank you so much, this is very flattering. Alas (?), the book that I have just published is about the crusades, as I am a medieval historian by training. However, one of my main research interests is the role of the “imagined medieval” in modern culture, I have written a book chapter about the role of the crusades in post-9/11 political and cultural rhetoric, and I am developing a research project that examines the current crisis of public history through a medievalist perspective. That, however, is still in draft stages.

That said, I absolutely DO have a mini reading list for you (and a lecture to go with it, because as noted, I am an academic and this is how we function!) The topic of today’s class is “Why Accelerationist Ideology Is And Always Has Been Horrifically Racist and Genocidal Throughout History, and White Americans Only Like It Because They Don’t Live In Countries Where It Was Done (By America).” Not very snappy, but there you have it.

The reading list, to start off, is:

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia by Michael Sells

These are all hefty books (though the Maddow and Sells books are shorter) but they’re accessible and written for the layperson, and we always have time to educate ourselves. Why are they relevant to the 2020 election, you might ask?

First: the Cold War book lays out in great, GREAT detail the consequences of a global world order absolutely gripped by a competing standoff of ideologies (American capitalism vs. Soviet socialism) and how these two forces gulped up the politics of the rest of the world, destroyed numerous satellite states, and tried to rebuild them from the ashes into new ideological utopias -- precisely what a lot of people are suggesting now with the ridiculous “just burn everything down and it will magically fix itself!” theory that is somehow presented as the Moral Alternative to voting for Biden/Harris. You know what this caused during the Cold War? Yep. Human suffering on a massive scale, and absolutely zero utopian perfect states, whether capitalist or socialist. It also makes the extremely salient point that in the 1930s, German leftists and liberal democrats were infighting among themselves as to who was Less Morally Pure, and couldn’t agree on a candidate or a moral imperative to oppose the other guy, and figured that their flawed liberal idealists were “just as bad” as said other guy. Was that guy’s name Adolf Hitler? Why yes. Yes it was. Is there a lesson here for us? Who can say. Seems hard to figure.

Leaving aside the tragedy and pointlessness of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both fought as proxy battlefields between Americans and Soviets, let’s consider the Great Leap Forward, in China (1958-1962) under Chairman Mao Zhedong. The idea was to dismantle traditionalist Confucian Chinese society and rebuild it as a modern socialist state, which was the goal of a lot of twentieth-century old-school socialist/Marxist “people’s republics.” Mao took this exact “burn conservative society down and rebuild it according to Enlightened Leftist Principles” approach and it was... a disaster. A total and epic disaster that caused both short and long-term suffering to the Chinese people and, wouldn’t you know it, did not result in a utopian Chinese state. This is also the reason you cannot say anything complimentary about Fidel Castro, especially if you want to win Florida, no matter how “good” you think his socialist principles were in the abstract, because: Cubans and Cuban-Americans fuggin’ hated the guy. You know why? Because he also destroyed their lives.

Obviously, there is a ton of distance between old-school Communism in the 20th century and 21st-century modern democratic socialism such as that run in Norway (and the Scandinavian countries in general), no matter if your racist uncle on Facebook insists on conflating the two and howling about the Red Menace like it’s still 1962. But the point is that radical leftist accelerationist theory hasn’t changed from 1962 (or frankly, from Karl Marx) either. It still figures that by some miraculous principle, the entrenched systems and ideologies will either just disappear or be “torn down,” the Peasants will Rise Up and Overthrow the Aristocracy, and something something socialist utopia. Except that was tried multiple times in the 20th century and it always failed. More than that, even if it was supposedly “leftist,” it inflicted just as much suffering on its own people as fascist right-wing dictatorships. Americans have always been infused with the triumphalist confidence that they “won” the Cold War because socialism was bad, and it was the inherent flaws in socialism as a world order that doomed it to defeat, unlike rah-rah Red White and Blue American Capitalism. So capitalism, ignoring its own fatal flaws, went hog-wild in the 80s and 90s, establishing Reaganite deregulation as the core and unimpeachable tenet of the market, and we’re all living in the increasing wreckage of that economic system now. Obviously the right wing uses “socialism” as a bugaboo to scare us that Things Could Be Worse, but I haven’t seen the faintest trace of historical context or awareness from the particularly deluded breed of hard leftists who still cling onto the magical theory that a Perfect People’s Uprising Will Fix Everything.

On that note, let’s move to Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine lays out in similar excruciating detail how the U.S. systematically destroyed the economic systems of countries particularly in Asia and Latin America (and the entire shameful history of Uncle Sam in Latin America should be required reading for EVERYONE) and sold them a bill of goods about “free market economics” in the Keynesian model. Guess what resulted from this attempt to destroy entrenched societies overnight and rebuild them in the name of Ideology? If you guessed “massive human suffering and ongoing generational devastation and dysfunction” you’d be right again! This was accompanied with constant political interference from the CIA and the State Department to support right-wing dictators and military takeovers in a way that have left the politics and institutions of Central America in permanently broken disarray, because it turns out it’s a lot easier to keep exploiting those brown people in governmental systems that don’t allow dissent or democracy, no matter the exalted principles you like to preach about Freedom and Liberty. The U.S. likes to act as if the Central American refugee crisis is this unwarranted invasion of these dirty immigrants, as if it didn’t play a DIRECT AND LONG LASTING EFFECT in destroying the infrastructure of these countries to the point where they’ve become incapable of functioning as healthy democracies. If you think “banana republic” is the name of an upscale clothing store, I beg you, research the history of that term.

This hasn’t even gotten to the absolutely horrible history of Africa’s treatment at the hands of white Europeans (see the Kendi book for obvious anti-racism education and also how those racist ideas are directly built into the ideological infrastructure of America). Somehow white leftists, while professing to be allies of Black Lives Matter and proclaiming themselves Woke, have managed to overlook this, and I don’t know how??? (Answer: it’s racism Jan.) First it was the transatlantic slave trade and the large-scale kidnapping, sale, and chattel bondage of generations of people. Then it was 19th-century colonialism and imperialism, where Europe thought it could “civilize” the “Dark Continent” and rebuild it to an “enlightened standard.” This was not a right-wing project; this was solidly mainstream and it was enthusiastically advocated by many liberals and intellectuals who busily composed an entire academic and “scientific” literature to support it. Did the European wholescale destruction of traditional societies in an attempt to build a Perfect Ideological Utopia result in... massive human suffering, by any chance? Leopold II of Belgium might have something to say about that. Then when an overstretched Europe was finally forced out of its overseas colonies in the aftermath of World War II, guess what resulted? Did African society spring from the ashes and remake itself in a perfect image? Nope! It became subject to decades-long civil wars and bloody military dictators because its infrastructure had been so crippled (very deliberately so) by its departing colonialist overlords that it likewise had no sustainable model for development. It turns out when you break things out of the idea that they’ll magically fix themselves, they just stay broken and they get worse. Now we once more have the West acting like Africa is a hotbed of Primitives while ignoring its own role in destroying it (and the situation in the Middle East, but that’s a whole OTHER can of worms! So many cans! So many!)

The Peter Frankopan book is an excellent exploration into the flourishing medieval trade networks across the East, the function of the Silk Road in bringing culture and commodities across the known world, and how Europe’s intervention and eventual ascendancy was marked by profound violence, the destruction of these networks, and the outright pillage of non-white people and riches. Which we know, but... read it. Europe and its heir (America) started the crusades, colonialism, imperialism, two world wars, and other conflicts that always contained a virulent aspect of spreading Ideology and getting people to Believe The Right Thing. These cumulative conflicts have devastated the planet repeatedly and we are still feeling their effects right up to this minute. They were all connected to Establishing Supreme Ideology and Supreme Whiteness (and Supreme Christianity). I’m detecting a pattern. The Rachel Maddow book explores how from the 1980s onward, America went absolutely hog-wild with the military/military ideology as a central way to solve its problems, which was tied to the Cold War, capitalism, and extreme individualism. All of which are tied to our current mess today.

Obviously, the most extreme examples of putting ideology above people result in outright holocausts, which is why you should read the Michael Sells book about Bosnia. Everyone knows about the WWII Holocaust of the Jews (and we have already seen how that is busily being denied along with the return of anti-Semitism, which never goes away), but the Bosnian holocaust was happening while most of us were alive. The West deliberately ignored it, because it was framed as the “last crusade” against Muslims in Europe and they needed to be removed in order to create a Pure Christian Europe; hence the Bosniaks were apparently an acceptable sacrifice in achieving this. I have some words on my tongue, I think they start with “massive human suffering,” and how that is constantly what results when an existing society, no matter how flawed, is attacked by ideological zealots who see huge amounts of death as an acceptable price to pay for their brave new world, as long as it’s not theirs (and sometimes even when it is). In fact, the accelerationist theory of social change is so profoundly racial and genocidal (and is indeed being used in exactly that way by the neo-Nazis and white paramilitary elements today) that it’s even more shocking to see supposedly progressive and moral people advocating so enthusiastically for it. It is a white supremacist Nazi wet dream of an ideology in which all the “flawed” people just vanish (spoiler alert, they don’t vanish, they are brutally murdered or allowed to die from deliberate and arrogant negligence) and the Aryans cavort in paradise. Just replacing that with some socialist jargon buzzwords doesn’t change the underlying framework.

And this is STILL NOT GETTING to America’s own history, and you know, the fact that this continent was occupied when white settlers arrived, declared it “terra nulla” or “empty land,” and set about slaughtering the existing advanced civilizations and their people in the name of! You guessed it! SUPERIOR IDEOLOGY! Funnily enough, destroying the Native Americans “for their own good” didn’t result in utopia for them. It resulted in.... yeah, I think we get it by now, but just in case, one more time: MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING.

Tl;dr: The accelerationist theory of social change (just destroy everything and it will magically rebuild according to our preferred ideology) is a racist and genocidal fantasy of orgiastic destruction that has caused untold damage throughout history. White Americans whether on the right or left are fond of it, because they have never lived in a country where this has been repeatedly and horribly done to them (often by America itself) and which has cost uncountable Black, brown, Muslim, Jewish, Latin American, Native American, etc lives. The deliberate or deliberately negligent destruction of society does not lead to regeneration. It leads to long-term and unfixable damage, and the people who profit the most from deliberate disaster are the capitalist corporate overlords that the left professes to hate. This country is a racist garbage fire and nobody denies that it needs to change or die, but buying into this theory about how you should just stand back and let it burn/obstruct efforts to work within the system and mitigate the damage IS BULLSHIT and RESULTS IN MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH. Which, so far as I know, wasn’t supposed to be a progressive value, but hey, I could be mistaken.

Learn some history. Wear a mask.

Don’t be a whiny pissbaby that makes the rest of us die.

Vote Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 2020.

#history #american history #history of racism #politics for ts #long post #anonymous #ask

116 notes · View notes

grandhotelabyss · 3 years ago

Photo

—Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (2014)

This sophisticated critique is not only the institutional left’s reading of Watchmen, it’s the institutional left’s reading of all the vital literary work from, let’s say, May 1968 to September 2001, the so-called postmodern period. (Walter Benn Michaels is the locus classicus.) Periodizing is inherently leveling: figures as distinct as Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare come to seem equally “Elizabethan” somehow, the way writers like Emerson or Thoreau or even Douglass, who might have spit at the sound of Jackson’s name, come in retrospect to typify Jacksonian individualism. So too does Alan Moore sound in the end like his arch-nemesis Margaret Thatcher, and other critics of the late 20th century have likewise found even Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon distinctly Reaganesque.

I criticize the critics, but I’ve made the same charge. It’s the easiest thing in the world to show how the “non-communist left” (phrase courtesy of our friends in Langley) isn’t communist. It does leave this left at a slight disadvantage, as witness the meagerness of Pynchon’s counterforce at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow—not a lot better than a Dickens denouement, with a small, good, familial community subsisting in the interstices of a still-corrupt, still-oppressive society, just the way, come to think of it, that Beloved ends too.

Yet the critique ultimately fails, and not only because mere intellection is always washed away by creative works as powerful as Beloved, Watchmen, and Gravity’s Rainbow.

First, why conflate neoliberalism’s sale pitch with its reality? Like any fraudulent ideology, it preys on legitimate values and real hopes. Neoliberals were entirely right to object to totalizing centralized systems that traduced both the individual and the smaller-scale and more organic community, the same way that communists were right to assail the industrial machinery that sometimes literally crushed the working class. But neoliberals, like communists before them, exploited these justifiable concerns to erect their own crushing and totalizing system, in this case, global corporate control. This doesn’t mean that global corporate control is the ultimate political content of late-20th-century novels sufficiently chastened by mid-20th-century totalitarianism to hesitate before suggesting newly absolute systems as the answer to extant systems’ failures. There are excellent reasons, as well as dubious ones, not to be a communist.

Second, there is the reliable misfit between art and institution, no matter the ideology of either institution or artist. Art takes shape under the creator’s hand even as the hand shapes it, an ungovernable mix of the rational and the intuitive. An artistic genius is not an especially commanding individual, someone uniquely able to realize an overwhelming intention, but rather a person supremely open to influence by ambient currents, an Aeolian harp. The institution, however, knows only rules and procedures, and judges spontaneity a threat. This is not some bias of the crypto-neoliberal hippie, but the actual difference between two situations: free individual or communal creation and procedural social maintenance.

Watchmen illustrates this schism better than most works given its clockwork formalist structure, meant by Moore to signal comics’ aesthetic seriousness to legitimating authorities, therefore art’s own internal institutionalization of one of its possibilities as governing procedure. These structural gears are abraded by the vagina dentata that erupts at the narrative’s climax, a figuration not for nature-as-fatal-woman, as I’d mistakenly assumed in my earlier readings, but rather for a rival artwork, the neoliberal leftist Ozymandias’s harnessing of wild aesthetic chaos to his own excessively systemic political end. Watchmen, therefore, its own form too cold, its climactic content (not to mention the bloodletting throughout) too hot, and both in service to power, incorporates a two-sided autocritique of irrational art’s assimilation to rational authority, of the institution’s desire to manipulate for its own end what seems its absolute exterior, even if that institution is art itself. Yet what one remembers from the book, what I remember anyway, are the looks on the characters’ faces and the work’s whole tone, emergent from but irreducible to its structure.

So the institutions batten on art, complaining all the while that it’s too anti-social, not a good fit, in violation of protocol. Fine for the rest of us, who are not looking for utopia’s floor-plan and HR handbook but only images, however fleeting, of intensity or beauty, transcendence or grace.

Further reading: essays from me on Watchmen, Beloved, and Gravity’s Rainbow.

#alan moore #literary criticism #literary theory #postmodernism

2 notes · View notes

things2mustdo · 4 years ago

Link

We are all too familiar with the SJWs’ “muh feelings” pose. We are also familiar with the Leftists’ manipulative stance, be it through their sanctimonious bullying, guilt-tripping, appeals to a pseudo-consensus, veiled threats, or constant emotional blackmailing. The maelstrom of emotions the Left plays with makes tempting to withdraw emotionally. We might be led to think that the higher good lies in “cold, hard facts” alone. But if we do so, we easily forget that cold facts do not prompt for any action, and if we merely describe while trying to get emotionally disconnected, we cut ourselves off the game.

Passions are part of the game

When the infamous Karl Marx wrote that modern capitalism “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation,” he had a point. The bourgeois world of classic modernity is emotionally lacking, and both the bohemian artistry and Communist radical politics stepped up to fulfill the void. This historical point is still relevant today. Conservatives fail to make stands because they are much more passionate about their personal interest than about defending anything they pretend to stand for. SJWs, on the other hand, went very far into shrieking and bullying because they are usually passionate for their points. Different motivations lead to different outcomes. And a strong motivation, not to say a deep or passionate commitment, greatly helps to build a strong character.

The far-left was able to pick up people’s passions because the bourgeois would not, and perhaps could not, do that. The bourgeois idea of progress was about people becoming farm animals, individuals reduced to the status of producers and consumers in a world where nothing really new or interesting could appear anymore. In such a world, there is no need for passions and no need for politics, isn’t it? Well, the individuals would not let themselves get boiled down to the status of mere economical agents, and many preferred embracing some ridiculous strand of new-age spirituality, worthless artistry or even becoming Communists than living through the bourgeois-conservative nothingness..

Rejecting the passions and emotions, or at the very least trying to put them aside as to ignore them, made men weak and unable to take a stance. It has also made women unhinged, shameless, and willing to do anything for short-term pleasure, as no men were able to give them a proper sense of boundaries. Plus, passions being powerful motivators, the far-left mastery when it comes to stirring some made it tremendously powerful as well.

We must face passions, not as an annoyance, but as a resource that has to be mastered. This is true for ourselves and others. First, when we are aware of our emotional states without being directly prompted (“triggered”) by them, we gain the ability to choose consciously what we do and want to do, and can follow our own intuitions instead of getting framed by an alien narrative. Second, when we are also aware of others’ emotional states, we can steer them in a specific direction.

The latter is especially true for women: today, they follow fashions and MSM approval, when not following their own sluttiness and attention-whoring… but if men were able to reward, shame, and inspire proper passions in them, they would follow us instead. If we want this to happen, we have to take over the empire of passions and stir up some emotions in the public’s hearts, be it through discourse, artwork, or daily conversations. Here are three emotions I think we should be keen to stir.

1. Empathy

According to Dr. Neel Burton,

Empathy can be defined as a person’s ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. It involves, first, seeing someone else’s situation from his perspective, and, second, sharing his emotions, including, if any, his distress. (Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.21, p.153)

As empathy fits well with maternal instinct and motivates nurturing tendencies, women are naturally prone to it. Up until a very recent time, they took care of babies and small children, participated to local charities, worked in shelters for the homeless or went through menial but important tasks as nurses. They did so because their natural empathy motivated them to act this way.

By contrast, a striking feature of feminism is that it destroys womanly empathy and nurturing tendencies. From a feminist point of view, men are enemies or at the very least potential oppressors and children are a burden. Feminism reverses the empathy, turns it into defiance or even hatred. Worse: after women have lost their ability to feel positively towards the men they should at least respect, cultural Marxism stirs their natural empathy towards “minority” identities. Thus we see grrls caring about thugs, invaders, or weirdos, who are all positively portrayed in the media, more than they care about what should be their community.

The lack of empathy is also a problem among white men. Though black men often exert violence against each other, the majority of them always bonds when it comes to attacking the depleted white majority. The same goes for any community out there: they empathize with each other more than they would ever empathize with us. We, white men, are the only ones who do the exact opposite by being hypercritical against each other when we should actually be supportive and look at the positive rather than the negative.

There should be a lot more empathy towards us than there currently is. Others should be more sensitive to our plight, suffer when we suffer, or at least feel compelled to suffer when we do. We are the proximate [prochain?], not the Big Other. We, too, should have more empathy among ourselves: nice guys, for example, should not be considered as “jerks” or “bastards,” as say some red-pilled guys who seem to have internalized a negative framing, but as misled victims who proved some nobility by trying to conciliate “respect” for women with the healthy desire to get a deeper relationship. Along the same lines, the working- or middle-class average Joe who got disenfranchised should be painted on a positive and humane light so that wealthy liberals cannot ignore or merely sneer at him.

2. Hope

Here is an emotion the Left has really abused from. Remember 2007-8, when the first “black” president was supposed to end the racial tensions in the US as well as the neocon foreign wars? Democrat activists at that time wrote without batting an eyelid about their hope for a world without losers, for an outcome where everyone would win. Then, the racial tensions have never been so high, the white majority is more dispossessed than ever, and the same liberals who were trumpeting about a world without losers have no shame calling us losers—from their choices and politics. Hope has been abused from, and we have to take it back. In fact, we have already started to.

Hope can be defined as the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening. It is the anticipation of something desired… To hope for something is to desire that thing, and to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the probability of it happening, though less than 1, is greater than 0. (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.14, p.103)

Trump is a wild card who comes with no guarantee, for sure. He still gives us something no Obama could ever give us—hope. The Alt-Right, manosphere, and the whole flourishing of high-quality dissenting intellectual efforts give us hope as well. Someone wrote that “the Alt-Right represents the first new philosophical competitor to liberalism, broadly defined, since the fall of Communism.” Someone else, here on ROK, noticed that more and more women were fed up with misandric grievance-mongering and longed to become mothers. These trends are more than interesting: they seem to point towards a better future that we still have to conquer.

On the other side, the liberal status quo and Hillary in particular mean pure hopelessness. If Hillary gets elected, we will have even less jobs, anti-white and anti-male organized groups will attack even more, the wealthy globalists will get fatter at our expense, and so on. Interestingly, liberals today use arguments of a conservative kind: when they shriek something as “the 5 last US presidents tell you not to vote for Trump” or “the Alt-Right and deplorables are un-American,” they look more like McCarthyists than hippies. They are the establishment clinging to the status quo and worsening. We are the embodiment of hope for a positive change.

3. Love

While hope should be spread among any decent people and is pretty straightforward once we agree on the intrinsic value of its object, love appears a bit trickier. In a relationship, whoever loves the other most is dominated whereas who loves less has more room to take action. If a man falls in love, he falls in the sense that he gets dumbed down, pedestalizes the girl, who in turn will get bored and look for a more challenging partner. Thus, seduction must be used to stir love in women: they must love us as well as their children. Both as a mistress and a mother, both as sexual and nurturing, a woman exerts love.

In men, love must be exerted in a more distilled and thoughtful form: when we protect our dear ones, toil for them, care about their interests, these efforts are an expression of love as well—although this form of love must be more distant as to allow ampler room for action. In any case, the feminine element must love the most and more directly.

It should be added that masculine and feminine can be conceived, not only as absolute, but also as relative terms. Esotericists consider that we are all “feminine” when considered under a higher point of view: the most fierce, courageous and risk-taking warrior remains “feminine” relatively to a genuine spiritual authority, and any human is “feminine” relatively to God as the ultimate Father. The Bible compares the good ones to a bride that shall get married to God (Revelation, 19). Hinduism recommends bhakti or devotion, i.e. religious love, to those belonging to the warrior caste, whereas the spiritual authority is more “masculine” as it enjoys a higher and more direct knowledge of God. These considerations might seem a bit far-fetched, but they were already highly relevant before the tiniest stint of modern degeneracy was born. Just remember that being in love is acceptable for a man as long as it never equates to pedestalizing a woman.

Conclusion

Passions and emotions matter. If we set them aside as irrelevant, someone else will push our emotional buttons—and the girls’—and spin us in no time. The philosopher René Descartes wrote that “all the good and the bad in this life depend from the passions” and that we had better be able to use them wisely. Ironically, the word “Cartesian” now denotes a logical, rationalistic, supernatural-denying mindset. This is accurate for the young Descartes, who was among the top scientists of his time, but tosses aside an important twist: the philosopher eventually lost his only daughter, Francine, and the sadness he felt while mourning her made him aware of the power of emotions. Yet, instead of being dominated by said emotions, Descartes strove to gain cogency about them, and he wrote a very interesting little treatise to expand a whole theory of the “passions of the soul.”

Our case is the same. Most if not all of us have been blue-pilled since infancy. Cultural Marxism was shoveled down our throat by school teachers, media figures, movies, social pressure. At each step of this process, our emotions were stirred and directed by spinsters so that, for example, we would feel a high empathy for so-called minorities while ignoring the homeless “white males” dying of cold at winter.

Ride the tiger of your own emotions and of (some) others’ as well if you don’t want sinister globalists to.

https://www.returnofkings.com/11010/how-to-control-your-emotional-state

We all have our ups and downs. Some days you feel on top of the world, you ooze a sexy masculine confidence that women love whereas other days you couldn’t be bothered to shave — you scowl at the thought of doing anything interesting and avoid all outside contact. Many guys accept this with a “que sera, sera” mentality. They feel it is just the natural ebb and flow of things, that taming your emotional state would be too chaotic of a task.

Those who do wish to change usually use hokey terminology talking about “energy” and the “universe.” They’ll seek guidance from another source so that they do not have to take responsibility for letting their emotions get out of check. People also seek a quick cure for a continual state of happiness, but what they do not realize is that happiness is transient.

I do believe there is a way to wrangle your emotions that relies on you, your habits and the power you have to respond to various stimuli. Essentially you must minimize the negativity and maximize the positivity in your life by altering certain habits.

Minimize Habits That Lead To Negativity

Take a moment to think about any time you’ve lost control of your emotions. When did you last get angry, depressed, hateful, etc.? What do you do when you’re out talking to girls that hurts your success? Do you have unreasonable limiting beliefs? Do you believe you always need to be happy to be successful? Do you get frustrated when you have anxiety because of any of the above?

If you think about the above long enough and are mindful when such emotional states occur you will begin to notice a trend in what triggers them.

For me the biggest habits that lead to a negative state of mind, in which I lacked motivation, was depressed, and stayed inside all day, were my nutritional habits. I started to recognize a pattern: I’d go out drinking or eat highly processed foods, I’d wake up the next day tired and dehydrated, then I’d stay inside all day watching movies because I didn’t want to go to the gym or talk to people. The cycle would just endlessly repeat until the natural ebb and flow of things took me to a high point.

Maximize Habits That Lead To Positivity

Repeat the exercise above. When was the last time you felt on top of the world, when did you last feel invincible, when did you last have no anxieties? When were you on fire when talking to girls, what were you doing that made you so successful? What were the thoughts running through your head?

Again if you pay attention you will begin to see patterns. You’ll start to realize what habits lead to a great mood.

For me I felt the best when ‘rewarded’ with something. Whether it was having great sex, sharing something with a friend, new PRs in the gym, busting my ass in the library and getting a good grade, or learning a new skill.

The Keystone Habit

Roosh brought up keystone habits in a recent article titled “One Approach A Day.” Essentially it is an innocuous habit that has a much larger effect than planned.

For me I started a few keystone habits: I started the day off with a nice cold glass of lemon water and my vitamins. In doing this I started drinking more and more water leading me to be less dehydrated, more energetic and making better food choices.

I also made a rule that as soon as I start talking myself out of something reasonable I would force myself to do whatever it was I was trying to rationalize my way out of. Maybe I’d start thinking “I’m kind of sore and I still haven’t seen the new episode of Game of Thrones, I think I’ll go to the gym later.” I know I wouldn’t go to the gym later so I would immediately get up and put on my workout gear. Just by doing this I started getting in the mood for lifting — I’ve also heard of guys packing a gym bag every night and leaving it in their car.

The peaks and troughs of our emotional state should not define us. As a man, whether it be through eliminating negative triggers or forming positive habits, you should be fully in control of your emotions. Use the power of a keystone habit to enact much larger scale change so you can be in a perpetual state of positivity, or at the very least, neutrality.

Read Also: How To Change Your Bad Habits

1 note · View note

elbiotipo · 5 years ago

Note

Ok so elecciones time en Argentina, and I have a the feeling you know more than I. I was considering the FernándezX2 formula, but I honestly can't take out of my mind the fact that they supported Maduro and probably still do, what proof can we have that they won't go down that route? what do you think of the other candidates?(if you're not comfortable answering its ok just ignore this!!! It's just I heavily distrust like, every single candidate)

(Sorry for the long post, I just REALLY like to talk about politics)

I understand. Elections are a wild time, especially here on Argentina. (I will answer in english because the ask is in English).

I don’t support Maduro either, despite (in fact BECAUSE of) my leftist leanings. I know Cristina and many Kirchnerists supported him, and I think that supporting him based on the legacy of Chávez, while the Venezuelan people suffers and cries for freedom is wrong. However, I also believe that any solution for Venezuela MUST start with dialogue, by the simple and pragmatic fact that Maduro still holds power there, despite the opposition.

Also, Alberto Fernández has took a more pragmatic stance on this. You can read his opinions here: https://www.infobae.com/politica/2019/07/05/tras-las-criticas-de-macri-alberto-fernandez-reconocio-que-en-el-regimen-de-maduro-hay-abusos-y-arbitrariedades-del-estado/

He isn’t alone on this. Uruguay and México have also called for dialogue, as well as many other countries. Now, I think even with this, he is too soft in this, but I also think the current strategy of the Lima Group of cutting all dialogue with Maduro has evidently failed, and another approach is needed.

…

However I will be very clear and strong on this: the Argentine right-wing is using the real suffering of the Venezuelan people as political manipulation and it’s disgusting. The fear of “Becoming Venezuela” is being preached 24/7 in an attempt to spread fear and division. It’s unfounded, stupid, and uses an actual humanitarian crisis to manipulate public opinion. It humilliates the Venezuelan people and does not help towards a solution. They don’t really care about Maduro or Venezuela; only the political points they can extract from it.

We cannot “Become Venezuela” because we are, well, Argentina… Venezuela is the classical example of a single-export nation, in this case oil, that has little local industries and mostly imports all other things, from food to consumer goods. Argentina, meanwhile, has a midly diversified economy; while our main production and exports are indeed agricultural products and food such as soybean, we also have (for now…) a consumer industry, and we produce all of our own food.

Compare and contrast; these are Venezuela’s exports by renueve in 2016:

And these are Argentina’s:

Brown is oil and fossil fuels, yellow is foodstuffs and associated products. The rest are various industries: services, consumer goods, automotives, construction, industrial parts, and so on.

Now, exports don’t mean everything a country produces, but they give us a pretty good idea of the complexity and nature of a national economy. Argentina is a net food producer with a relatively good national industry (again, for now…). Venezuela is a oil-exporting nation that is sensitive to changes on the trade of that commodity. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem: Oil-exporting economies can grow and work very well, but Maduro’s incompetence and corruption has ruined the nation to an unprecedented state in history, and that’s why the crisis has become so deep.

But no nation is inmune to political mismanagment, and certainly not Argentina. Even with that, could we come to a point like Venezuela with the return of Kirchnerism?

From me, the answer is a confident no.

Why? Simply because the Kirchnerist era was a lot more moderate than what media sells us.

Neoliberals and “economists” tells us the catastrophic tale of rampant spending, national intervention, closing of trade, lack of employment, and other disasters encompassed under the scary word “populism”. If you believed them, you would think Argentina was a Soviet-bloc country that needed to liberalize and privatize everything to refloat again (and go ask them how it worked there…)

In fact, while there were many economical missteps like the “cepo” and the INDEC manipulation (that Alberto has already recognized and will not repeat), Argentina… had a quite moderate and coherent economical system? Tariffs were high, sure, but it’s normal to have high tariffs in key exports to have higher income (and the rich agricultural owners can certainly pay it). Protectionism in key industrial and high-tech industries is necessary for a relatively mid-level economy like us, and is, in fact, one of the reasons economies like South Korea and Japan had their amazing successes once they developed critical size for those industries. The so feared by the economists mass nationalization didn’t happen either, except for YPF, some trains, and Aerolíneas, and I believe there is little argument against our oil resources being back in hand of the state (and Macri is certainly enjoying it thanks to Vaca Muerta, one of the few industries currently growing). Taxes were high and yes, some social plans were mismanaged, but Argentina has an important public education, healthcare, science, social, cultural, and public works sector (not to mention the salaries of the massive police/gendarmerie forces, which nobody wants to talk about apparently…), so obviously relatively high taxes are needed. While I admit some things might be better, I don’t know about you, but I (well, my family) have gotten my taxes back through education, health, roads, and I am proud that my country has, despite all, such a strong scientific and cultural tradition. And of course, labor rights are *strict* (depending where you look…) thanks to a long legacy of worker’s struggles, but are we really gonna lower them just to bring foreign megacorporations to take advantage of us? I think not, thanks.

In fact, besides somewhat high taxes and tariffs, and of course corruption (but that’s a whole other deal…), Argentina during the Kirchnerist years wasn’t the insanity they say. Maybe not an investors paradise, but wasn’t the socialist (lol, another scary word) mismanagement disaster the media sold us, and still sells us. And even in those years we had investments from all over the world. 4 years of Macri and economic “liberalization” and there have been no promised “lluvia de inversiones” for all the destruction of our own economy.

I believe you could compare your own quality of life in those years with right now, but that depends on the particular case. I KNOW my quality of life has descended since Macri took power.

Now, with the current inflation, desindustrialization (there has been a record THREE YEARS of industrial decay on Argentina, and the few factories still open operate at less than 50%), primarization of the economy (the main winners of this economic model are big agribusiness and financial enterprises), historical debts (some to be paid A CENTURY from now) and a nation dependent from the IMF and thus the whims of USA politics, which economic model has brought us closer to collapse, in even less years?

Tarea para la casa.

…

As for the other candidates:

I believed I explained plenty why I never voted for Macri and I won’t vote for him this time either.

I think Lavagna is out of touch, and couldn’t even keep his coalition together, so I doubt his leadership skills; his “centrism” offers little to me. The other progressive parties have no managed to make a coherent option either.

I sympathize with Del Caño and the Left, but they don’t have the leadership and support to make their promises come true, their parties are always fighting between themselves, and I can’t afford to vote for them, not in this crucial election.

Espert is a neoliberal flirting with anarchocapitalism, defending the worst of the Menemist era, his response to our problems would be accelerating privatization, “liberalization” and the destruction of the economy. He’s also a misogynist pervert, and inmature like his followers. I have a strong dislike for the guy.

I would also take this opportunity to say RIP Unión Cívica Radical (1891-2015). While they were the greatest rivals to Peronism and I never voted for them, I have the outmost respect for those radicals who fought for democracy and civil rights. Unfortunately, the UCR joined the right instead of keeping to its social-democratic ideals (did you know the UCR is an official member of the Socialist International? no, no es joda), and the PRO has chewed and spit them. A sad ending for such a party.

The other far-right and far-left parties are irrelevant, but I hope bazofias such as the Frente Patriota get as few votes as possible.

And of course, there’s Romero Feris, a corrupt, nearly feudal character who those from Corrientes know well, who has used necromancy to revive the Partido Autonomista Nacional, the party of Julio A. Roca. No only it’s corrupt, regressive and racist, it’s also probably haunted and I don’t want ghosts running around my goverment.

I’ve always been a zurdoperoncho, but as it stands now, FernándezX2 is the best option. Alberto is a coherent, disciplined and skilled man, who has proven himself during the Néstor presidency as a good leader, he’s even a little too moderate for my tastes, but the rest of his coalition balances that. Regardless of what you might think of Cristina, she’s the most important political figure of Argentina, and her prescence and leadership is needed for a sucessful progressive political project. The rest of their coalition (except for Massa, who I hate) also have the support and ideas to make their goverment sucessful.

Like with all politicians, I have my objections to some of their positions, and I don’t think they are saints. But I think they are not only the least worst, but indeed the best option we have. I will vote for them with conviction.

9 notes · View notes

scifimagpie · 5 years ago

Text

Political Oroboros: Why Marx Is Not Enough

First of all, I realise the title of this piece is inflammatory, so let me lay out some caveats.

I am absolutely not conservative. (One of the first things to know about leftist fighting and discussions online is that 'liberal' has two different meanings; the broad sense in which conservative commentators use it, and the more specific and technically correct sense that leftists sometimes use it - as well as the tertiary sense of, "anyone who isn't quite radical enough.')

I wouldn't necessarily call myself a liberal in the sense of condoning a capitalist system; I do find the most common ground with proponents of democratic socialism. However, some elements of communist ideology do seem solid, although I tend to like many of the ideas I've seen from anarcho-syndicalists more.

Confused by those terms? You're not alone, but some of the hippest trends among the youth of today are not just trap music and street wear - it's political and philosophical discourse. Different streams of communism and anarchism and debating the concepts of idealists through the ages is pretty great, but treating those ideas as a firm road map and, perhaps, the only acceptable solution or map, is not so excellent.

After several weeks of careful surveillance and investigation, I also came to some unsettling and unsavory conclusions.

Source

There's a weird and disconcerting mix of progressive and regressive ideas in this new wild west of a political movement; using "gay" and "retard" as insults in this year, and talking about second-wave feminist gender concepts (Penis = man! Vagina = woman! are not scientifically validated ideas anymore, even if they have held sway for a long time) as though they're based on reality is...a special kind of confusing, frankly. The person mentioned below isn't actually the "leader" of Antifa (antifacism is a general belief and approach, not an organization; the Black Bloc is something different) but the points they're making shouldn't actually have to be made. And yet, here we are. (To clarify: this person's opinion is, as far as I'm concerned, correct, because it's a summary of historical facts.)

We can try to tweak the perspective on things and change the way someone is seen, but facts have this tendency to assert themselves. And when those facts take the form of thousands of dead bodies, politely covering them up or scootching them out of the way is a bit harder. In the case of leaders such as Winston Churchill, it's been easier to laud their successes and forget the death toll because they were victorious, but it doesn't erase his contributions to the Bengal Famine and his decision to test gas weapons on Kurdish villagers.

Yet even when we debate the value and leadership of dictators, history tends to reassert itself.

“History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always—eventually—manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve.” ― Terry Pratchett, Mort

Nobody is good enough

Of course, just because someone agrees with history (!) and is willing to unflinchingly consider mass murderers as guilty of their crimes doesn't mean they'll avoid participating in the cannibalistic discussions of leftist politics. A particularly difficult issue has been criticism of the Youtuber Contrapoints, who has both been lauded for her very real effects in de-radicalizing extremists, and criticized for fumbling her way through understanding non-binary genders (and struggling to deal with the flood of online criticism afterwards.) But merely liking a figure who is problematic (or worse, Trash, if they have failed one time too many) can be grounds for a friendship breaking up or the sort of extremely tense, stressful discussion that keeps one awake for hours afterwards.

As I said on Facebook one night, "Whiny comment of the night: it would be easier to unite the left if the radicals weren't so dead-set on everyone just converting to their beliefs as much as possible.And Seems like you can learn about Marxism, cultural history, feminism, and all of that...but it's impossible to unlearn American cultural hegemonic approaches and seeing violence as the default/best option." But to clarify, this isn't speculation without sourcing. I did a bit of an investigation into a few leftist pages, and it was really unnerving to see the number of pro-gun and "eat the rich" and "fetch the guillotines" sorts of remarks and posters. The thing is, we've all done that dance before, and it's going on in other countries at the moment. Riots and protests are excellent when they work, but sometimes, they don't - and we don't talk about what happens when they don't.

The risk of small government

At the risk of sounding like a cranky old lady, smaller governments are still governments. People who think some military junta of kids with guns can replace all the architecture and organizational levels of "the state" are welcome to try working in a city planning office as an admin assistant some time. Having done that myself, I would welcome anyone who wants to just replace and rewrite all those land laws, which by the way exist for reasons, to maybe take a civil engineering course or two.

And if you DON'T want to replace all that architecture, just get rid of the bad stuff - congrats, that's actually just reformism, which is still a far cry from "just accepting things the way they are."

As a fan and casual scholar of cults, I've had many opportunities to see examples of small, ideologically-driven communities turn rotten. Frankly, I wouldn't trust my own town to just secede and govern itself, even though I'm very pleased with our mayor's decisions. I know too much about white people and sociology and Christianity (as well as other religions and groups) to trust that small, self-governing, autonomous groups will be fine on their lonesome. We're kinda in a globalized society with many, many supply chains. If you don't like that, get working on a time machine.

Yet even if one were to travel back in time, we've always had international trade and whatnot, and isolationism has never worked especially well. Also it's how you get fascism in the first place, so...history says it's how you make the exact monster you're trying to fight. Worst of all, these defenses of fascists and murderers do nothing but divide us along sectarian points of conflict.

Sometimes I worry the Revolution will just be online and never actually get offline

— 🏴🛡Justin🛡🏴 (@sharkle82) July 19, 2019

What do we do?

Honestly, my approach lately has just been to ignore Leftbook and debate spaces and not engage. Trying to discuss theory and concepts has led to some arguments over the applications of violence that have, honestly, made me stop trusting and just lose certain friends altogether. One otherwise brave and locally committed person said, "violence is neither good nor bad. It's a tool." Although I agree that self-defense actions are not exactly violent, I just don't think we should glorify aggression, or be eager to shed blood. It tends to lead to bad results, and it's uncomfortably similar to the stance we're opposing. My take?

Personally, I don't trust anyone who thinks the problems will all be fixed if we just kill a few of the right people.

The people who sit around day-dreaming about 19th century revolutionaries aren't necessarily the ones helping to, say, actually fight the battles that need fighting here and now. It may seem ridiculous to say, "hey, watch out for this," and also, "but you can basically ignore it," but frankly, that approach has worked extremely well for me in real life.

The key is this. What do you want to accomplish, in practical terms? Forget about "praxis" and "theory"; what are the concrete, fundamental changes you want to see, and the results you want in society and your community? Every change comes incrementally. Evolution is unavoidable. However, we have an existing system that we can use - and dare I say it, that we can apply our strength to if we're determined enough.

How to change the world

Writing actual letters to politicians in my city, province, and country, engaging in the community fight for preservation of a local Safe Consumption Site, signing petitions for various environmental protection causes, and applying pressure to politicians, as well as keeping an eye on actual local white supremacists, fascists, and extremists has done more and had a greater impact than anything in my decade or so of arguing with people on the internet.

My only regret is that I didn't start using my skills in the real world much, much sooner. It turns out that all the people who insist that those in power won't listen to "us" are, unequivocally, wrong. And while I do have white and cis privilege to thank for some of my results, I would also argue that we on the left must not presume our own helplessness and confine ourselves to training arenas online. Get out there. Talk to politicians. Stay up to date on the news and follow multiple sources, rather than reading 150-year-old essays. And above all, embrace the power of both individual actions and solidarity.

I have more to say about this topic, but instead of creating another series, a few essays may be cropping up. Until then, however, I have real work to do, both in the political world and out of it. For one thing, books aren't going to finish themselves!

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

#politics #discourse #tactics #leftism #liberal #how to #debate #activism

0 notes

zucca101 · 7 years ago

Text

Response: The 2nd

I again ask of my viewers and followers NOT to attempt to seek this person out or cause them any inconvenience. This is my thing to tackle and had they not blocked me, I would be able to respond within the confines, but I felt it was neccesary to allow this debate to be in the public forum.

It's funny how you still try to worm your way out of having to accept that maybe, just maybe, you fucked up. Democrats aren't even fucking leftists, and never were; historically they were the more conservative party all around, over the course of the 1930s to the 1960s the parties' relative positions switched around, today they're liberals. Every other country in the world considers liberalism a right-wing ideology, at best a centrist one for a reason (hint: it has something to do with being vehemently pro-capitalist)

Incorrect. That is a pernicious and commonly held myth that does not hold up to scrutiny.

<div class="tumblr-post" data-href="https://embed.tumblr.com/embed/post/ZxD-qUmiewEE0H0tTone4Q/163463839262" data-did="da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709"><a href="http://zucca101.tumblr.com/post/163463839262/the-political-parties-in-the-1860s-are-not-the">http://zucca101.tumblr.com/post/163463839262/the-political-parties-in-the-1860s-are-not-the</a></div> <script async src="https://assets.tumblr.com/post.js"></script>

Also, Sargon, left of center? Reads-the-headlines-and-nothing-else-of-the-articles-he-cites Sargon? Constantly complains about The Left™ like you do and constantly apes the same rhetoric coming from the far right Sargon? That Sargon? Yeah, no.

He is on the Left. He’s become disenfranchised with the Social Justice angle it’s adopted and the Islamophilia as well. And God only knows, there’s enough I disagree with him on to fill a book, but someone who actively challenged him and pored over his vids, found one thing Sargon got incorrect, and it was something he had already retracted.

I don’t agree with him on everything. But I trust him due to his intellectual integrity. Same with Teal Deer, same with the others I watch.

"And I CHALLENGE YOU to show me where I said that women should not have access to healthcare. Or even hinted at it." That's not even what I said, and you damn well know it. My implication was that you're in favor of restricting healthcare access to the poor, which guess what, if you're going to be in favor of repealing shit that makes healthcare more accessible to them, basic logic would dictate that's going to happen. You manage to go off on an entire tirade about abortion when what I was addressing was the supposed line of thought behind it.

Fair to say, but that’s not what I’m in favor of either. The Affordable Healthcare Act was like a shiny used car sold by a constantly smiling, charming salesman. It ran fine for the first stretch, but broke down after you got around the bend. Libertarian that I am, I believe such an act was foolish because it was nothing more than a scam by the insurance companies lining up to get all the business they could ever ask for because signing up for healthcare became COMPULSORY. Which is bullshit.

Also? I hate to be the one to give you the newsflash, but jobs aren't going to save society. We already work far more than we need to to keep things going, or even to afford a high living standard - most jobs that currently exist do because either it's marginally cheaper to severely underpay people for them rather than to automatize them, or otherwise only exist as an artifact of capitalism itself - many different corporations that require management, marketing that simply wouldn't exist under literally any other economic system.

I’d love to see citation for that which doesn’t reek of Socialist claptrap. Automation is progressing, to be sure, but progress is progress, right? That doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be had if you either look for it or try to find it outside of your comfort zones. I had to work at a Wal-Mart of all places, but I swallowed my pride and I did it. Didn’t enjoy it, but I did my job.

Between this and the ongoing trend towards atuomatization? Those jobs are going to disappear, and there aren't going to be new ones in sufficient numbers to avoid giant swathes of people in permanent unemployment. That's not me doomspeaking, that's a logical consequence of what's going on today.

It tickles me something fierce that you don’t actually address the automation. You think SOCIALISM would fix that? By making things so shitty that automation isn’t an option, perhaps. No, Socialism would cram everyone into a job and regardless of whether they want it or not, they MUST do that job.

By the way, speaking from years of first hand and second hand experience here: unemployed people don't actually sit on their asses all day, contrary to what you've been led to believe by people who have a vested interest in keeping everyone working for scraps.

Speaking from second hand experience myself, I’ve had friends and friends of friends who NEVER got real jobs and instead collected food stamps they bartered for room and board. I’ve known people who have chosen to panhandle and beg on the street rather than go to a job. (And to be fair, that’s non-taxable income…) So I’m afraid anecdotal evidence from either of us is not enough to conclusively prove this one.

Therefor…

http://www.epi.org/publication/missing-workers/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-the-jobs-numbers/

Jobs aren't the only way to contribute to society, most artists do work that can't support itself under capitalism (and that logically the artist themselves wouldn't be able to keep themselves fed on without at the very least some sort of social safety net), and if we only kept going with that art that proves to be profitable enough to support someone, thereby only appealing to the lowest common denominator?

And…. And you think COMMUNISM or SOCIALISM will let you art the way you want to? At least in Capitalism, an artist can make money for their work! Hell, the internet and Patreon has made it easier than ever for someone to make a living with their art or at least supplement their living. I know HUNDREDS of artists who balance art for its own sake, art for income and a normal job. And they’re not unique in that sense. Art enriches a culture, absolutely, but when it’s dependent on the government… then why would one go BACK to a normal job if they can make a period blood painting, throw it on the wall and demand money from the government? Art should be independent of governmental meddling.

And if you ask Joe Average if he would rather be COMPELLED by the government to pay forty bucks every month to contribute to art or fill his car’s gas tank, buy a few bags of groceries for his family or get used shoes at the Thrift Store, what do you think he’d do?

Art flourishes when free of meddling.

You’re an artist, yes? Suppose you got a check from the government for creating art… but suppose your art did not hold up to some arbitrary definition? It’s taxpayer money after all. So you would have to create art… but only as the government sees fit. Which is no different than making art by commission… except for the fact that under capitalism, you can create art as work, you can create art after working hours, you can create art just to make someone smile. You aren’t beholden.

I can tell you right away this world would be an immensely darker place for it, and all that precious inflation art would vanish overnight.

Heh, the one I had in mind at the top of my list when mentioning those hundreds of artists is a very prominent one. He works a daily job, he makes money with his art, and he makes art for its own sake.

Take a look at this picture…

https://zucca-xerfantes.deviantart.com/art/Berlin-Wall-piece-from-Reagan-Library-612126840

Riddle me this…

The side you see if colorful and full of art and vibrant colors and the other side is matte gray, untouched.

Take a WILD guess which side was the Commies’…

In addition to that, it's beyond unethical to force people who can't work to beg for scraps from charities that both A) impose their will on them (like the Salvation Army), and B) even if all perfectly good natured, wouldn't collectively have the resources to support everyone anyway, especially not when it's entirely within the state's means to give those people a decent standard of living.

Uh, I think I already said that I’m not against government assistance for those who are literally unable to work.

As for your examples, the Salvation Army’s policy is NOT to deny service to trans or homosexual people. A same sex couple can be permitted, but as separate individuals. I don’t hold to that part, but hey, their house, their rules, and they’re not turning them away outright. Now while it’s true that SOME SA people refuse service, that is not the organization’s policy. And considering they saved the life of an IRL trans friend of mine, I am STRONGLY disinclined to believe smear stories.

As for the second, See first paragraph in this section.

"Constantly pretend to…. universally bad…? WHAT….?" You know damn well what I was talking about. The constant "oh, Muslims throw gay people off of buildings all the time! You should be thankful!" takes? The kind of bullshit that you spout to propagate hate against them in the name of "protecting us" when you subsequently turn around and support people like Mike Pence who wishes we'd all vanish, one way or another? I see you, and your cutesy "but I have black friends" argument doesn't fucking work here.

If you can prove me wrong about how Islam as a whole feels about homosexual people and transsexual people, then I will apologize right now. Imams view the murder of homosexuals as A MERCY for fuck’s sake. That is some kind of bona fide evil. Yet for some reason, your fluffy Social Justice Totem Pole places a Death Cult’s feelings above YOUR RIGHT TO *LIVE* SO JUST EXCUSE THE SHIT OUT OF ME FOR CALLING IT OUT.

And supporting Mike Pence….??? I couldn’t give less of a crap about him if I tried. The dude is an advocate of conversion therapy, which does not work. Case closed. Frankly I think Trump picked him for the same reason Obama picked Biden. Assassination prevention! ‘You might kill me, but SERIOUSLY, look at THIS guy… you want HIM instead?’

Jokes aside, I don’t agree with Pence. If, God forbid, he became president, I’d support the office but if he started making life harder for the gay people for no reason, then I’d be fundamentally opposed.

Again, you know this, but damned if you’ll permit that to get in the way of a good strawman whoopin’, eh?

And I find it ASTONISHING that you lie to yourself that Pence is the one to be feared when there is nothing he can legally do to hurt you, but the Death Cult wants you to actually die and are SANCTIONED in such acts.

Pulse Nightclub ring a bell? Fifty innocent people murdered by a guy whose religion told him that his only salvation for his sins was to become a martyr.

By the way, you also don't get to decide who's actually trans and who isn't. Trans people detransition or don't bother transitioning for any number of reasons. Doesn't mean the person underneath isn't transgender, most of the time it's just because society is so fucking harsh against us that they decide living in the wrong body and being seen the wrong way by others is less painful than the outright hostility we can expect on a daily basis.

I’m speaking real here… I cannot possibly understand what it’s like to be Trans. I cannot appreciate the struggles that a trans person is forced to go through. A friend of mine lost her wife and her children because she transitioned. And she’s one of the most gentle and decent souls I’ve ever known.

But she is a real Transsexual. Not some idiot child enamored by the idea of being Transsexual. Not some teen who wants to piss off their parents, or some snowflake who wants to be that much more special. What they do is an INSULT to the Trans people who struggle with it. Who, as you have pointed out, have a ton of shit they have to put up with without their struggles being trivialized..

I’m not of the notion that Trans people have it easy because PC culture has elevated them above others (Except for the fanatical Death Cult that wants to kill them) or anything like that.

I disagree with that notion which is held by a large number of YouTube personalities I watch regularly.

However… in the same way I have nothing but contempt for idiotic children and childish adults who pretend to have Multiple Personality Disorder because they think it’s some kind of fun game where The Doctor and Loki play around in their head, I can’t stand the same kind of idiot children who think they can switch their gender like a toggle and to be SUPER SPECIAL AWESOME have a fantasy word to describe their nonexistent gender.

But oh no, I’M the scientific illiterate. >_>

As for "you don't have the right not to fuck a trans person" (lol), literally nobody is actually saying that - those takes are about dismissing the idea of having sex with someone who's trans out of hand, not saying no if the opportunity were to actually come up.

…

Honest question, you haven’t heard of Riley Dennis, have you? Very prominent Trans YouTuber who has numerous videos now shaming straight people for not wanting to get into a sexual relationship with a trans person.

Riley is of the mind that straight people don’t have a right to refuse, lest they be bigots. >_>

And if you think that’s an absurd thing to say, then bless you. We’re in agreement.

And if it were just Riley, that’d be one thing, but here on Tumblr and on Twitter, there are posts saying much the same, but not in the weasely, round-about way Riley did.

Do I think that’s the majority opinion? No.

But it is not a case of ‘Literally no on believes that’.

And if Christians have to be lumped in with wretches like the KKK and Westboro, well then... what’s good for the goose ought to suffice for the gander, hm?

As for where you're anti-science? Ho boy, where do I begin. Those hot anti-climate change takes of yours are a good start, dismissing everything that happens in that regard as "just the weather" when sea level rise, melting ice in the polar areas as a result of it, and year after year of hottest yearly average temperatures have not only been happening for at least the past century, but have also been accelerating more recently. I'd know, I literally live in one of the places directly affected by this. Most of this country is below sea level, we keep having to build up our dams and dunes even higher to avoid flooding the damn place like what happened back in 1953. To dismiss all that as "the weather" is beyond foolish.

I never said Climate Change isn’t real.

Nor have those I’ve reblogged.

The notion of manmade Global Warming is what is contested.

See, there was a smart way to go about spreading the message and a stupid way to go about it.

The stupid way was to let hypocritical hacks like Al Gore dominate the stage.

The smart way would’ve been to appeal to everyone’s common need to save money and how many green tech save water, electricity and gas bills.

But nope…. Shaming was WAY more fun and satisfying. And now it’s become politicized.

I’m a wildlife conservationist of a sensible variety. Sharks, whales, rhinos and cheetahs are being driven over a cliff and it needs to stop.

And there are more than a few Conservatives on the same boat. Michael Savage, radio host, for instance.

But stereotyping and shaming is SO MUCH MORE SATISFYING TO THE BASE URGE OF APPEASING ONE’S INNER RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION.

ISN’T IT?

"Capitalism gives everyone the same shot at living" is an even more ridiculous take if I ever saw one. Yes, I'm sure my disabled, mixed and poor ass has the exact same chances as Reginald who can simply ask daddy for money to start up any business he likes, or hell - just live off of that, put it all in stocks, hire some people to make sure his investments don't go to waste and be set for life! He doesn't even need to work! At all! No rich person does!

Step away from the Marxist teacher, amigo. They are NOT your friend…

You’re full of shit.

I’ll out and say it right here.

You are so full of shit on this one that your eyes are turning brown.

You’re just barfing up the same politics of envy nonsense that every single frakking Socialist hack barfs up.

“I can’t work because there’s some rich guy out there who has more stuff than I do!!!! HARUMPH!!!!!!!!” Do you hear yourself...?

Does the nature of your disability preclude you from doing ANY work? If so, then that is a case wherein you should be lent aid.

But if you have your hands… you can work. If you have your legs, you can work. If you have your eyes, you can work. If you have your wits, you can work. If you can’t find work, look harder. Or make your own. That’s what I did. I was destitute only seven years ago. And I’ve built myself up. And that was all done with clinical depression weighing me down like lead.

Self-determination? Ah yes, being forced to slave away at a minimum wage job because you simply can't get hired elsewhere for the rest of your life, or starving. That's self-determination in the same sense that having the choice between following orders and maybe be allowed to live, or don't and be killed when someone holds a gun to your head is. Venezuela, or any other socialist country in the world is/has been hardly perfect, but you know what's not helping?

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WORK AT A MINIMUM WAGE JOB FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Sorry, sorry… you’re like the fiftieth person whose thrown that at me and it gets cringier every time I hear it… I apologize.

But seriously, if you think that min wage is for life, you’ve not made very good decisions.

You start at the bottom and work your way up. Just because you spend a few years flipping burgers doesn’t mean you’re stuck there!

Fuck… you can apprentice with a plumber and be making SIX FIGURES in FIVE YEARS!

I kid thee not!

Fascist protestors literally burning supplies that are already hard to get by. Action taken by the US to undermine pretty much any socialist country that has ever existed. As for more internal problems? Guess what, those can be improved upon. It's an economic system, not a religion.

Can be? Doubt it, but maybe.

Will be? No.

And as for being an economic system and not a religion…

That’s a mighty tall claim, considering the fact that Socialism tends to butt out religion and replace it with itself. Take China for example. All their rich culture, their ancient heritage, their majestic architecture, their thousands of years of history and artifacts…. FUCKING RUINED BY A LITTLE SHIT WITH HIS LITTLE RED BOOK.

The very basic premise you utterly fail to process here is that this shit is subject to constant rethinking and revision, something made impossible when some strongman figure decides to take power, no matter what side of the political spectrum they're on - that said, the right loves those far, far more than anyone left of center will, as a matter of basic principles that define either side.

Which is one of the fundamental flaws in Socialism and Communism. You can’t build off of that when the foundation is garbage. And how many MOUNTAINS OF CORPSES do you wish to produce before we ‘Get Socialism right’?

Thanks, but Capitalism has existed LONG before Socialism.

Otem from the Mountain People went to Trajk of the Plains People because the Plains People make masterful spears. He traded a basket, which the Mountain People make better than anyone, including the Plains People, for a spear. Both people are wealthier as a result.

And that also leads us to why I consider right-wingers universally shitty people: plainly speaking, they simply are.

And you call ME the bigot…?

It's at best ignorant, at worst astonishingly hypocritical as can be to act like you care about the poor, only to deliberately make their lives harder using the political apparatus in place.

You know that is not the motivation of capitalists. And if that’s what you think, then you are simply incorrect.

You can't say you care about groups of people, then vote for those who are all too happy to take their rights away.

I DO care and I disagree with the ban. While I find it iffy to put people who deal with what Trans people do into severely high-stress situations, if they believe they can hack it, I believe they have a right to stand proudly beside the other defenders of the country.

Actions speak louder than words, and actions that affect an entire country weigh far more heavily than those taken on an individual basis - giving money to individual homeless people simply doesn't counterbalance supporting the people who make sure they can't sleep anywhere by putting spikes out in public places.

Spikes out? It’s the LABOR PARTY in the UK who want to fine homeless people a thousand pounds for sleeping in public.

See my above points for further rebuttal. I’m not repeating myself.

Don't bother acting like I'm saying all this out of ignorance either - I've been there myself. I've had a right-wing phase, I only need to look back at my own past actions to see the hypocrisy that lies underneath.

I’m not going to say that everyone one the Right are Saints. You know that’s not my position. I also don’t think everyone on the Left are foolish. Fuck, I don’t even think the majority of them are bad people at all! I think they’re people whose hearts are generally in the right place, but feel rather than think. But you are, inversely, able to forgive EVERY sin of the Left while, and I quote, labeling every right-winger as universally bad people.

That is some FRIGHTENING SHIT right there, amigo. That you can de-humanize EVERYONE on the opposite political spectrum because you’re so high on your own moral superiority that you’ve willfully blinded yourself.

And while ignorance itself is forgivable, you've repeatedly shown not to care in the slightest for anything that would lead you to reconsider your ideas, nor do you have any interest in actually putting your money where your mouth is on the grander scale with just about anything you mentioned in your post.

HAH… if you only knew…

So yeah. Come back to me when you've learned to genuinely care about other people beyond those in your direct personal sphere.

So you’re moving the goalposts, huh?

I contested that I’m not the evil strawman you have created and now you’re saying ‘Well, you may care about the people around you, BUT WHAT ABOUT EVERYBODY ELSE?!’

Friendo… I can’t care about everybody else. Everybody else are adults, or will be someday. Then everybody else can care about everybody else. They’re my neighbors and I genuinely wish them well. I’ll help a stranger’s reasonable request just for the asking. But I am not Atlas. I cannot take on all the problems of the world. I can voice my opinion on how they should be dealt with, to be sure. Because I have that freedom.

I care for my country and fellow citizens, and I will vote according to how I believe they can best be helped. But it is *not* my responsibility to solve all of their problems for them.

Even if I could, I would not. Because it’s our problems and our struggles that make us grow.

The butterfly cannot fly if it doesn’t struggle its way out of the cocoon. A well meaning person may peel the cocoon away, but that dooms the butterfly to a flightless life.

Buddha said that life is a struggle. And he wasn’t wrong there.

But while we can help our friends, our neighbors and even strangers, that does not mean that it’s relative across the board.

Poverty in the West is a child asking his father why he’s crying as he weeps over a stack of bills on the table. Poverty in the third world is emaciated children with rice-bloated bellies.

Both are heartbreaking, but both are unique to their places of origin and therefore are not comparable.

You can lie to yourself all day about who I am, what my motivations are and what my heart is like.

But if you found out who I am, what I’m like, how I behave, then you may be willing to face down your other prejudice against an entire group of people you have frighteningly labeled as universally evil.

1 note · View note

makingstuffup · 8 years ago

Text

So, that happened.

I’m not going to rehash the details, because I trust most of you know what happened and are sick of hearing about it by now. I’m focusing on where we can go from here to try to prevent things like this from happening in the future.

I absolutely do not blame any individual for falling for this person’s lies - this post is not meant to victim-blame. I sympathize with those who trusted her, especially those who felt kinship with her because they thought they shared marginalized identities in common. I hope those of you who did trust her, who saw her as a friend, are getting the support you need to deal with the pain of this betrayal. The blame for this rests solely with the person who lied.

But I think there are community factors in the exclusionist community, and in social justice communities in general, that created an environment where this could more easily happen.

Bullies, manipulative people, predators, etc. - all the way up to people who do unforgivable acts - are going to exist in any human culture. Some humans want to do things that are bad, for whatever reasons, some somewhat understandable and some not. That is a reality of life on this planet.

But the community around those people is what makes it easier or harder for them to gain influence and escape consequences. That is what phrases like “abuse culture” and “rape culture” refer to - a culture that enables predators, that makes excuses for them, that rewards them and punishes their victims. I’m reminded here of the fact that my Native culture historically did not reward rapists. Only people like the ethnic fraudster Andrea Smith assert that rapists just didn’t exist in North America pre-Contact, but that’s not the same thing as not having a rape culture. A community collectively can stand against predators and stand for communal welfare.

This person, along with being a liar who presented herself as an authority on various marginalized identities she did not belong to, used slurs she had no right to reclaim, and spoke over people who actually did belong to those identities, was a vicious bully who never admitted she was in the wrong.

Many people were afraid to stand up to her when she used bullying tactics - including when people on our side, in our community, were bullied by her. (Does anyone remember when she bullied the original tiredofcishets off the site for disagreeing about who could reclaim the d-slur? Does anyone remember when she shut down brehaaorgana’s fact-checking of something false she posted with “Just admit you want [n-slur]s back in the fields, you racist”?) Many people saw red flags that suggested that she was not who she claimed to be, and were afraid to say anything. I was one of them - and I’m not in any discourser friend circles, and I have less than 50 followers so anything I said would likely be ignored. I’m not speaking from a place of pride here.

How did someone who was so vicious, who used marginalized identities she pretended to belong to as a shield from any and all criticism, gain a place of prominence in our community, and gain a loyal following who would rally behind her no matter what she did? I want all of us to think about this question.

I don’t have any easy answers or solutions, but I have a few suggestions that I would like everyone to consider.

Remember that we’re ultimately all in this together. We’re here because we want the best for LGBT people and an end to homophobia and transphobia and all forms of oppression. We should not support bullying, even if we like the bully or agree with some of the things they have to say. If we see someone being bullied, we should call on each other for support to oppose the bullying.

Don’t make a habit of asserting things without proof. Don’t get mad at people who ask for sources or debunk a false claim. Auntbutch’s “cite-your-sources feminism” is good practice. Inclusionists have spread a lot of lies, and we are against their movement because of that. We need to have better methods than them, to strive to have a healthy respect for truth and facts. This person did not - she shut people down for fact-checking things she said. We should not support those methods, and we should support each other in fact-checking.

Don’t let people use a marginalized identity as a wild card to do whatever they want without consequence. If the rules of a community say that people can do that, people are going to abuse that.

Also be mindful that people can lie about their identity online, and you never really know who you are talking to (did you know a lot of leftist communities have been infiltrated by cops?). Don’t be a jerk and question everyone’s identity for no reason, or question people’s identity to shut down discussions of marginalization, but do keep a healthy skepticism and listen to your intuition if it says something’s not right. Try to learn from the cases of fraud and infiltration you have seen, and observe patterns. I am absolutely not saying that individual people who have trouble with this are at fault, but as a community, we need to develop the skills to better recognize and respond to these things.

#ace discourse #rape mention

7 notes · View notes

things2mustdo · 4 years ago

Link

In one of the most nauseating displays of overt racism ever seen in modern times, Jesse Williams, an overpaid actor who pretends to be a doctor on TV, spewed venomous bile which showed hatred towards his own mother as much as it debased an entire race while accepting a BET Humanitarian Award. It’s yet another chapter in the reality is stranger than fiction world of social engineering we have entered over the past several years. Here is an excerpt from his speech, which is loaded with race baiting and villainization.

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo. And we’re done watching, and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us. Burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil — black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them. Gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is, though, the thing is, that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.

Williams also figuratively sent people who won’t agree with his ideals to the back of the bus.

If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest, if you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.

The studio audience went wild. They loved it, as the speech clearly touched a nerve with them. But, it also touched a nerve with other people who were left aghast at its insinuations. Telling an entire race of people they’re an invention and don’t really exist is one thing. But how could Williams say that whiteness is an invention, denigrating his own Swedish mother? And with the knowledge he is half white himself? Does that mean blackness is also an invention? What does the rest of this diatribe even mean? Most of that paragraph seems rhetorical. Ask yourself a question. What if an overpaid white actor got up on stage at the White Entertainment Awards and said the following:

We’ve been floating this welfare state on credit for generations, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called blackness uses and abuses us.

I think the country and media would rightly be preparing for World War III after a comment like that. But Samuel L. Jackson lauded the hateful Williams speech as he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award.

That brother is right and he’s true. Make sure you vote and take eight more people with you. We gotta fix this. Don’t get tricked like they did in London.

Making this entire fiasco even more unbelievable, Jackson told blacks to vote for an old white woman who is going to “fix” what 7 1/2 years of a black President couldn’t? What does he mean? Jackson’s comments capped off a bizarre turn of events at the awards show that raise more questions than answers.

Predictably, the Marxist media hailed the Williams hate speech as wonderful. The New York Times wrote How Jesse Williams Stole BET Awards With Speech on Racism. BET wrote Jesse Williams Spits Knowledge Like a Seasoned MC. CNN lauded the race hatred with a headline stating Jesse Williams’ speech stole the BET Awards. And USA Today rounds out the echo chamber with Jesse Williams takes racism to task in powerful BET Awards speech.

What kind of world are these media people living in writing headlines that praise a man who tells an entire race they don’t exist, and conjures up mental imagery of Evil White People and the Evil White Man rather than seeking unity? You can see why I left The Twilight Zone that is the mainstream media behind. Meantime, the media jumped all over Justin Timberlake for offering this timid rebuttal on Twitter.

Oh, you sweet soul. The more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation.

The knee-jerk reaction shouting Timberlake down and attacking him for daring to make a comment that calls for healing racial divisions shows us the real agenda of the puppet masters who control the media marionettes. There is a segment of society that is not into equality as much as getting their turn to oppress. This speech and the media reaction to it marks a worrisome shift in the narrative, one that has already become increasingly hostile to one group of people, singling them out as the enemy of every other race in the world.

Racial Bolshevism

Communist revolutions are often accompanied by atrocities such as genocide, which scapegoat certain groups as “oppressors”

The push to broad brush white people as villains must be seen for what it is as a socialist revolution proceeds through America and Europe. Speeches like these are intended to be intimidation and marginalization tactics, indicitive of a type of Racial Bolshevism that has developed within the current socialist revolution in America. I featured the idea of Racial Bolshevism last December with this commentary by Jack Borroughs, even before the Beyonce Black Panther Super Bowl, the targeting of Trump supporters by ethnic rioters, Black Lives Matter violence, and other racial pot stirring that has taken place in 2016.

That’s why contemporary Progressivism should really be called Racial Bolshevism. The psycho-political profile is identical: whereas the original Bolsheviks believed that the Communist utopia could not be achieved without the elimination of the bourgeois class, the contemporary Racial Bolsheviks believe that the multi-cultural utopia cannot be achieved without the elimination of white people–especially white men.

That doesn’t mean that they’re *planning* to kill you. That’s not how mind control works. They think they’re just “seeking justice” for non-whites. But of course they will never define in concrete terms what “racial justice” actually is. It’s all kept tantalizingly abstract for a reason–namely, so that there is no end game, ever. That means that they can never stop. Every defeated injustice yields a new racial injustice on the horizon, which must then be defeated. Finally, the unacceptable injustice will be the very existence of white people.

After all, the only way to truly “stop white men” is to kill them. Right? Because if you don’t kill them, then they can always keep right on acting white, and doing white things, in that white way that you hate so much. But if you just kill them, then the problem of whiteness is permanently solved. And then the world will be saved! See how that works?

The Williams speech stripping an entire race’s humanity as he collected a “Humanitarian Award” marks the beginning of a new narrative that does exactly what this prescient statement warned us about—it makes the very existence of “whiteness” or white people an injustice that must be defeated. Already, the left is coming after white historical symbols—taking Jackson off the $20 bill is only their first volley. This speech marks the beginning of a new offense to debase your entire existence if you are of European descent. Could Black Lives Matter or a group like them be the new Khmer Rouge? Socialist revolutions are often accompanied by atrocities such as genocides. A quick refresher on the Khmer Rouge:

The organization is remembered especially for orchestrating the Cambodian genocide, which resulted from the enforcement of its social engineering policies. Arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements are considered to have constituted genocide.

Money was abolished, books were burned, teachers, merchants, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered to make the agricultural communism, as Pol Pot envisioned it, a reality. The planned relocation to the countryside resulted in the complete halting of almost all economic activity: even schools and hospitals were closed, as well as banks, and even industrial and service companies. Banks were raided and all currency and records were destroyed by fire thus eliminating any claim to funds.

During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who they believed were enemies of the state or spies or had the potential to undermine the new state. People who they perceived as intellectuals or even those who had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses, would also be killed. People would also be executed for attempting to escape from the communes or for breaching minor rules. If caught, offenders were taken quietly off to a distant forest or field after sunset and killed.

All religion was banned by the Khmer Rouge. Any people seen taking part in religious rituals or services would be executed. Several thousand Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians were killed for exercising their beliefs.

Almost all privacy was eliminated during the Khmer Rouge era. People were not allowed to eat in privacy; instead, they were required to eat with everyone in the commune. All personal utensils were banned, and people were given only one spoon to eat with. In many cases, family members were often relocated to different parts of the country with all postal and telephone services abolished.

Save a few minor details, the play by play of the Communist Khmer Rouge’s activities as they conducted a socialist revolution which marginalized religious people, teachers, doctors, and intellectuals could easily be seen as playing out any day in the United States and Europe. Indeed, some aspects of the atrocities that happened in Cambodia are already here – the elimination of privacy, for example, or the marginalization of religion by Christophobic leftists. The largely white middle class would likely be the target of a new revolution in America. We are beginning to see a lot of smoke signals telling us some kind of fire is being stoked which plausibly could turn into the targeting of one ethnic group as scapegoats.

Brexit has already made today’s Communist and globalist revolutionaries show part of their hand in the poker game, as the European Union moves to create a European superstate that echoes the Soviet Union in a last ditch effort to create one of the linchpins of world government, which would run all of Europe out of Brussels. Indeed, world government of the type we are beginning to see the picture of as the puzzle pieces fall into place was championed by none other than Marx himself. One must wonder if the intent of those pushing centralized world government follows Ayn Rand’s analysis:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism — by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Since instituting world government with the vote is obviously presenting problems for the elite as people wake up en masse, are we seeing the stoking of racial fires and class warfare as a backup plan, that if needed, will enslave the world by force instead of by vote? Make no mistake, this speech marks a turning point in the popular narrative, and with other world events taking place, it is nothing to be dismissed. It truly makes one wonder if a new genocide is an agenda item of the globalists.

Why else would they be pouring salt into old wounds and targeting an entire race for the crime of “whiteness”?

https://www.returnofkings.com/48402/the-drunk-girl-in-public-scandal-makes-both-feminists-and-the-mainstream-media-look-foolish-but-who-was-behind-it

THE “DRUNK GIRL IN PUBLIC” SCANDAL MAKES BOTH FEMINISTS AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA LOOK FOOLISH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO96JFxLAnU

Within the past week, the feminist movement and its many outlets that claim to be “news” attempted to make another viral propaganda push with “Drunk Girl In Public (Social Experiment).” The video’s objective was to show men as prowling jackals yet again, with the parameters of the self-proclaimed experiments being fairly unrealistic.

Recently, however, it has been revealed that it all was apparently a hoax. The guys in the video saw it themselves later and were understandably pissed about being asked to do something under a false premise, and more importantly, portrayed as potential rapists by feminists all across the internet for their compliance.

As hilarious and satisfying as it is to see the feminist movement blow their load, unashamedly backpedal in their argument, and create even more elaborate routines of mental gymnastics, the whole thing seems off and has brought a number of questions. The questions are in no way to make any claims or insinuations, and are purely from personal speculation that are felt needed to be shared as food for thought:

1. What are many of the outlets that claim to be news to do now? Will they at issue an apology at least to their followers, for the failure to check their sources as they claim to be a source of news for them?

2. If this is the matter of them failing to check their sources before perpetuating the articles, what does this scandal say about the legitimacy of the claims made against them in regards to the ethics and practices exposed by Gamer Gate?

3. More importantly, what exactly is the role and the motivations of the creator of the video, Stephen Zhang, since he is the one who produced and originally released the video?

And that is where most of the interest lies. Stephen Zhang, the owner of HYGO, Inc., seems to be the linchpin in these events, and he is refusing to comment even though hoax claims and slandering the men in the video paint him as a dishonest asshole to everybody. From what is gathered, Stephen seems to be running a pretty successful company and has been in the marketing industry for five years. Impressive, considering he’s only 20.

HYGO, being his current venture, is primarily focused on social media optimization and it has a few portfolio examples to show the success of his company’s effectiveness for maximizing social media traffic and using it to yield a profit. However, he states that due to the elite status of his company, only 6, 7, and 8 figure contracts are the only things they work with.

This brings about other questions. Why did Stephen create the Youtube account that the video was originally posted, only recently, on 11/3/2014? And why did he add 3 other random videos a day beforehand, label them as pranks, then just a day after upload drunk girl and label it as “social experiment” instead, then cease all activity?

Since no statement has been made, what could the motivation be to fund, produce and promote this video? Anybody with a hair of business understanding would deduce that it’s unlikely to be just for shits and giggles. Going off that assumption, there are only two logical possibilities: 1) This was a part of some strategy within HYGO to increase their reach and revenue 2) HYGO or Stephen was commissioned to produce and distribute it, possibly with a non-disclosure agreement.

If this video was, indeed, commissioned, who then could possibly be the client? Who could possibly want to contract a business that specializes in the return of investment on social media, to create a video that depicts only men trying to take advantage of a drunk girl? Why would this video come out so quickly after the Catcall video, with the same framework of trying to demonstrate that men are degenerates?

Was it supposed to be that in this video, the appearance of the men’s race and socioeconomic status just happens to conveniently show a more diverse and varying demographic, one of the major argument against the Catcall videos? What does it mean in one of the messages they sent out among the men in the video after they began protesting, when they’re talking about the future success that this video is going to bring about?

Now, there are a lot of ifs and hypothetical scenarios that these questions are asking, and no one else has presented a similar opinion yet that I have seen. But given the course of events this year, I feel that this is not completely implausible. This video and its revelation that it was a hoax seem to allude to the possibility of being a part of a larger picture, one that they are more than likely going to try sweep under the rug.

Or maybe the questions have no grounds, imply a crackpot conspiracy theory, and I’m full of shit. Because there’s no way that various journalists, writers, content creators, social justice advocates, advertisers, and whoever else could be collaborating with each other behind the scenes to make some tangible gain off the target audiences of various industries under the guise of social justice and feminism. That’s just misogyny.

0 notes