#neo western action

[verocd]

[could-they-be-a-pro-wrestler]

How successful would Raylan Givens…

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[schlock-luster-video]

On September 3, 2010, Machete debuted in Canada and the United States.

[oceanusborealis]

Trigger Warning - Movie Review

TL;DR – When things click into place, this can be quite an entertaining film. Unfortunately, a lot of the connective tissue is full of awkwardness that holds it back. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3.5 out of 5. Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film. Trigger Warning Review – Okay, so I am going to be upfront with you right from the…

[goryhorroor]

masterpost of horror lists

here are all my horror lists in one place to make it easier to find! enjoy!

sub-genres

action horror

analog horror

animal horror

animated horror

anthology horror

aquatic horror

apocalyptic horror

backwoods horror

bubblegum horror

campy horror

cannibal horror

children’s horror

comedy horror

coming-of-age horror

corporate/work place horror

cult horror

dance horror

dark comedy horror

daylight horror

death games

domestic horror

ecological horror

erotic horror

experimental horror

fairytale horror

fantasy horror

folk horror

found footage horror

giallo horror

gothic horror

grief horror

historical horror

holiday horror

home invasion horror

house horror

indie horror

isolation horror

insect horror

lgbtqia+ horror

lovecraftian/cosmic horror

medical horror

meta horror

monster horror

musical horror

mystery horror

mythological horror

neo-monster horror

new french extremity horror

paranormal horror

political horror

psychedelic horror

psychological horror

religious horror

revenge horror

romantic horror

dramatic horror

science fiction horror

slasher

southern gothic horror

sov horror (shot-on-video)

splatter/body horror

survival horror

techno-horror

vampire horror

virus horror

werewolf horror

western horror

witch horror

zombie horror

horror plots/settings

road trip horror

summer camp horror

cave horror

doll horror

cinema horror

cabin horror

clown horror

wilderness horror

asylum horror

small town horror

college horror

plot devices

storm horror

from a child’s perspective

final girl/guy (this is slasher horror trope)

last guy/girl (this is different than final girl/guy)

reality-bending horror

slow burn horror

possession

pregnancy horror

foreign horror or non-american horror

african horror

spanish horror

middle eastern horror

korean horror

japanese horror

british horror

german horror

indian horror

thai horror

irish horror

scottish horror

slavic horror (kinda combined a bunch of countries for this)

chinese horror

french horror

australian horror

canadian horror

decades

silent era

30s horror

40s horror

50s horror

60s horror

70s horror

80s horror

90s horror

2000s horror

2010s horror

2020s horror

companies/services

blumhouse horror

a24 horror

ghosthouse horror

shudder horror

other lists

horror literature to movies

techno-color horror movies

video game to horror movie adaption

video nasties

female directed horror

my 130 favorite horror movies

horror movies critics hated because they’re stupid

horror remakes/sequels that weren’t bad

female villains in horror

horror movies so bad they’re good

non-horror movies that feel like horror movies

directors + their favorite horror movies + directors in the notes

tumblr’s favorite horror movie (based off my poll)

horror movie plot twists

cult classic horror movies

essential underrated horror films

worst horror movie husbands

religious horror that isn’t christianity 

black horror movies

extreme horror (maybe use this as an avoid list)

horror shorts

[o-the-mts]

90 Movies in 90 Days: El Mariachi (1992)

I’m kicking off 2023 by trying to watch and review one movie every day for the first 90 days, most of which will be 90 minutes or less. Title: El Mariachi Release Date:September 15, 1992 Director: Robert Rodriguez Production Company: Columbia Pictures | Los Hooligans Productions Summary/Review: Robert Rodriguez’s debut movie is a crime/action/thriller set in the Mexican border town of Ciudad…

[sayruq]

Several key architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq 21 years ago are presenting a plan for rebuilding and “de-radicalizing” the surviving population of Gaza, while ensuring that Israel retains “freedom of action” to continue operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The plan, which was published as a report Thursday by the hard-line neo-conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, and the Vandenberg Coalition, is calling for the creation of a private entity, the “International Trust for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction” to be led by “a group of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates” and “supported by the United States and other nations.”

In addition to granting Israel license to intervene against Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Gaza, the plan calls for security to be provided by the Trust’s leaders and “capable forces from non-regional states with close ties to Israel,” as well as “vetted Gazans.” The Trust should also be empowered to “hire private security contractors with good reputations among Western militaries” in “close coordination with Israeli security forces,” according to the report. The task force that produced the report consists of nine members, four of whom played key roles as Middle East policymakers under former President George W. Bush and in the run-up to and aftermath of the disastrous Iraq invasion in 2003.

[infamouslydorky]

I'm about to put this senator in public view for his opinions

Hey bud, it's not antisemitism to want to stop Isreal from using illegal weapons like white phosphorus on Lebanon. It's not antisemitism to call the country out for killing journalists and medical personnel, like the red cross, for trying to report and help the people of Gaza. It's not antisemitism to acknowledge that the IDF is actively destroying family lines of Palestinians, which very much qualifies as genocide. It's not antisemitism to call Isreal out for striking Beruit, a highly civilian populated city, and destroying apartment buildings with bombs designed to obliterate bunkers. It's not antisemitism to point out that Isreal has sabotaged beepers, used only by emergency personnel like doctors, and rigged them to explode upon beeping.

It IS antisemitism to blame Jewish people specifically for the actions of Isreal BECAUSE they are Jewish. Isreal, as a nation, does not speak for every Jewish person and neither does Netanyahu. Isreal never shared the land with Palestinians as much as Isreal forced Palestinians out of their homelands beginning in 1948. Now, historically, Jewish diaspora is and was very much a real thing, as consequence of a largely antisemitic western society, which forced the migration of Jewish people and displacing them from their original homes until they were once again driven out of any given country until after WW2, and westerners decided to shove all the Jewish people in what is now called Isreal. Fun fact: originally, the UN wanted to put displaced Jewish people in Uganda.

In more precise words, this is another form of colonization that capitalized on the suffering of misplaced peoples that lived in a society that largely scapegoated them for their problems instead of treating them like people and now the country of Isreal is doing the exact same thing to Palestinians.

What remains in the United State's interest in keeping support of Isreal is an easy access base of operations for resources like oil as well as military influence in the region. It is neo-colonialism in a claiming antisemitism trenchcoat.

So, no, it is not antisemitism to hold Isreal accountable for their actions.

It is, however, Islamophobic and racist to continue to state that Hamas beheaded babies with no evidence of such claims.

Also, a devastating hurricane destroyed massive amounts of the state of Florida as well as states like Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee with another two potentially on the way and no amount of support from the federal government because FEMA has no money but we sure as hell see it shipped off in the billions to kill innocent civilians for the military industrial complex, I tell ya hwat 🙃

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The Five-Factor Model of Personality

Culture is transmitted to people through language, as well as through social norms which establish acceptable and unacceptable behaviors which are then rewarded or punished (Henrich, 2016; Triandis & Suh, 2002).

With an increased understanding of cultural learning, psychologists have become interested in the role of culture in understanding personality.

The 5 Personality Traits According to this Model

OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE

Refers to a person's imagination, feelings, actions, ideas

LOW score: More likely to be practical, conventional, prefer routine

HIGH score: More likely to be curious, have a wide range of interests, be independent

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

Competence, self-discipline, thoughtfulness, goal-driven

LOW: Impulsive, careless, disorganized

HIGH: Hardworking, dependable, organized

EXTROVERSION

Sociability, assertiveness, emotional expression

LOW: Quiet, reserved, withdrawn

HIGH: Outgoing, warm, seeks adventure

AGREEABLENESS

Cooperative, trustworthy, good-natured

LOW: Critical, uncooperative, suspicious

HIGH: Helpful, trusting, empathetic

NEUROTICISM

Tendency toward unstable emotions

LOW: Calm, even-tempered, secure

HIGH: Anxious, unhappy, prone to negative emotions

Applicability

The idea that personality can be described and explained by five traits (OCEAN) has important implications, as does the fact that most personality tests were constructed and initially tested in Western countries.

Western ideas about personality may not apply to other cultures (Benet-Martinez & Oishi, 2008).

2 Main Cultural Approaches for Researching Personality

Etic traits - considered universal constructs that are evident across cultures and represent a biological bases of human personality. If the Big Five are universal then they should appear across all cultures (McCrae and Allik, 2002).

Emic traits - constructs unique to each culture and are determined by local customs, thoughts, beliefs, and characteristics. If personality traits are unique to individual cultures then different traits should appear in different cultures.

Using an Etic Framework

Cross cultural research of personality uses an etic framework and researchers must ensure equivalence of the personality test through validation testing.

The instrument must include equivalence in meaning, as well as demonstrate validity and reliability (Matsumoto & Luang, 2013).

Example: The phrase feeling blue is used to describe sadness in Westernized cultures but does not translate to other languages.

Differences in personality across cultures could be due to real cultural differences, but they could also be consequences of poor translations, biased sampling, or differences in response styles across cultures (Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, & Benet-Martínez, 2007).

Personality Test/Measure Used: The NEO-PI

Most of the cross-cultural research on the Five-Factor Model (FFM) and Big Five (OCEAN) has been done using the NEO-PI (and its subsequent revisions; i.e., it is an assessment tool developed to measure the 5 dimensions of personality according to the FFM) which has demonstrated equivalence, reliability and validity across several cross-cultural studies (Costa & McCrae, 1987; McCrae, Costa & Martin, 2005).

Research using the NEO-PI found support for the entire Five-Factor Model in Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, German, Australian, South African, Canadian, Finnish, Polish, Portuguese, Israeli, Korean, Japanese, and Filipino samples, in addition to other samples (McCrae, Costa, Del Pilar, Rolland, & Parker, 1998).

NOTE

Personality tests rely on self-report which is susceptible to response bias like socially desirability responding.

To evaluate this possibility, McCrae and colleagues (2005) recruited students from 50 cultural groups and modified the NEO-PI to be in the third person (i.e., he, she, his, her):

The research participants were asked to complete the form on someone else that they knew very well (McCrae et al., 2005).

The same 5 factors emerged in this study.

These results provided empirical support for the FFM and for the use of self-report instruments when conducting cross-cultural personality research.

There was no reason for the students to respond in a desirable way because they were answering questions about someone else.

Sources: 1 2 ⚜ Writing Notes & References

[dchan87]

A year ago today, Hamas butchered 1,200 Israelis, triggering a war in Gaza and another one across Western institutions, campuses, and social media. At American Dreaming, we’ve extensively covered the discourse post-10/7, from the depraved joy the “decolonize” left felt at news of Jews being slaughtered, to the obscene double standards imposed on Israel, to the explosion of full-blown leftist anti-Semitism. We’ve published articles about the young progressives who hate Biden and love bin Laden, the disturbing redefinition of “genocide”, and the absolutely unhinged Western pro-Palistinian activist movement. And after a year of discourse, one thing has been made crystal clear: the political left has an anti-Semitism problem. Everywhere I looked, over these past 12 months, far-left protestors not only tolerated but actively propagated centuries-old anti-Semitism, including celebrating the October 7th massacre and even praising Hitler. It was equal parts disgusting and confusing. How could a movement that, in theory, is supposed to oppose bigotry and racism have so openly embraced it? How did we end up with left-wingers attacking synagogues, creating lists of Zionists, canceling events with “Zionist” participants, defacing Anne Frank memorials, and protesting Israel outside of Auschwitz? How could only half of young adults, by far the most left-leaning age group, disagree with the statement “The Holocaust is a myth”? How did we get to a place where good progressives openly display swastikas, tell Jews to go back to Europe, express the desire to gas them, and perform Hitler salutes? The rhetoric was much the same as it had been for centuries: that Jews are violent, bloodthirsty, imposters — not even Semitic, but a bunch of Europeans playing pretend. Demonstrators held signs with a Star of David in a trash can next to the words “Keep the world clean.” Classic anti-Semitic tropes like the blood libel resurfaced. All of this happened within far-left movements, who now sound eerily like the far right. It’s no wonder that far rightists blend right in at pro-Palestine protests. But why? Integral to the left’s worldview, elaborate theory aside, is solidarity with the underprivileged, be it the poor, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc. Logically, the left should be sympathetic to the Jewish people, given their long history of persecution. At a glance, there should be no reason for the hard left to behave functionally the same as neo-Nazis. And yet they do. 

Sadly, anti-Semitism, as one of humanity's oldest hatreds, has never been confined to any one ideology. To understand the history of left-wing anti-Semitism, we must first look back to before the concept of the political “left” even existed.

An Extremely Brief History of Anti-Semitism

In 132 CE, during the apex of Roman imperial power, the Bar Kokhba revolt broke out in the troublesome Roman-controlled province of Judea. Emperor Hadrian solved it with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. In an outright genocidal war, he utterly crushed Jewish resistance, slaughtering large numbers of Jewish civilians and devastating many towns and villages. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE tends to be more remembered by Jews themselves as the beginning of the diaspora, but the events of 135 were when the Jews truly lost their homeland. Although a small population remained, most fled throughout the Middle East or Europe. 

Hadrian’s actions were not anti-Semitic per se — Rome was just as brutal to any rebellious subject — but it set the Jews up as a people without a land, a people with nowhere to go whose religion and customs made them visibly other. With the rise of Christianity, the relative religious tolerance typical to polytheistic societies faded away, and the Jews faced constant oppression, at best living as second-class citizens. Of course, Christians have a long history of treating their fellow devotees with murderous contempt if they happen to be the wrong kind of Christian. The massacres of the First Crusade that included Christians as well as Muslims and Jews, the expulsion of Protestants from France, the bloody Anglo-Irish conflict, the Anglican church's persecution of Puritans, and so on. Now imagine what it would mean to openly belong to another faith, one deemed heretical by the Church, the supreme arbiter of morality.

Jews were widely barred from “honest” work — leaving niches in fields considered less savory, like money lending, clerking, pawnbroking, and lawyering. Making the most of the niche they had been forced into by these discriminatory laws — although far from all Jews did such work — led in turn to the stereotype of Jews as greedy, bloodsucking parasites who hated and exploited honest Christians, which, of course, led to even more persecution. Jewish populations were expelled from countries multiple times, or faced savage butchery. There were the brutal Rhineland Massacres of the First Crusade in 1096 CE that saw 800 Jews killed, and expulsion from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Spain in 1492. It was a vicious cycle of violent intolerance. 

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

In the late 1700s, the birth of European liberalism changed everything. The French Revolution and Napoleon both offered a greater level of religious tolerance toward Jews, making new inroads toward coexistence. After Napoleon’s downfall, despite a rightward reaction, Europe slowly began to liberalize, incorporate Enlightenment values, and move toward democracy. By and large, Jewish people naturally drifted leftward — the monarchist right wing of the 1800s was no friend to them. When socialism made strides decades later, Jews were an influential part of the movement, such as the Bund, a socialist Jewish party in Russia. 

At the same time, many Jews were understandably fed up with the still-rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, and started to dream of returning to their ancestral homeland, and so began the seeds of modern Israel. 

So far, Jews seemed like natural allies to the left, as an oppressed, marginalized underdog if ever there was one. But anti-Semitism is a powerful, deeply rooted force. Vladimir Lenin forcibly dissolved the Bund in 1921, and all those who did not join the Communist Party were forced to flee abroad or face persecution. It only got worse under Stalin, who systematically eradicated Jewish influence wherever he could find it. His Doctors Plot, in which Stalin invented false charges of treason and espionage toward nine doctors, seven of them Jewish, resembled nothing so much as a classic anti-Semitic purge. Indeed, between 1939 and 1941, the Soviet secret police deported tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Despite Marxism’s pretensions to antiracism, Soviet anti-Semitism, from Party leadership down to the common comrade, was pervasive, and often intertwined “anti-Zionism” with negative stereotypes about Jews.

It was not until after the Holocaust had been exposed to the world that anti-Semitism finally began to become unfashionable, as humanity took a cold, hard look at the logical conclusion to such hatred. But anti-Semitism did not disappear from either end of the political spectrum.

In the 1960s, James Baldwin explained the pronounced anti-Semitism among the black community in the US, which he tied to attitudes of anti-whiteness and an oppressor/oppressed mindset. In the 1970s, influenced by Soviet propaganda, which relentlessly demonized Zionism and Jews, the Australian Union of Students, dominated by young Trostkyites and Maoists, began following suit on Australian university campuses. When Jewish groups protested, they were physically assaulted.

The ferocious “anti-Zionism” of the Western “New Left” was widely seen as a cover for Jew hatred. In Germany, far-left groups in the 1960s and 70s celebrated the deaths of Israeli civilians in terrorist attacks, engaged in anti-Semitic violence, and schemed to bomb a synagogue. In the famous 1976 Entebbe Raid — in which pro-Palestine terrorists hijacked an Air France plane at gunpoint, then released the non-Jewish and non-Israeli passengers to hold the Israelis and Jews hostage — two of the hijackers were German leftists.

Today’s left ought to be unburdened by such bigotries, at least in theory. Unlike their forebears from previous eras, they did not grow up in a social environment where racism was normal and casual prejudice ubiquitous. The average modern far-leftist is highly educated, affluent, and conscious of systemic biases. They ought to know better. So why don’t they?

Like any complex phenomenon, it has no single explanation. Unlike the far right, which has anti-Semitism encoded into its ideological genetics, leftism is not inherently anti-Semitic. But in true horseshoe fashion, they nevertheless end up in the same place.

The Horseshoe of Anti-Semitism

First, the political far left shares an uncomfortable number of basic assumptions about reality with the far right. Both believe that:

A class of moneyed elites control the government, and democracy is a sham maintained by these vaguely defined, malicious elites.

Proper far-left or far-right beliefs (depending) would naturally take root in society if not for an aggressive campaign of materialist propaganda pushed by these shady elites to distract the masses from realizing their true destiny.

Their cause is one that is so vital and so obviously true that any approach to further it is legitimate, whether that means lying, propagandizing, or committing violence.

The liberal West is evil, degenerate, cruel, and exploitative, and must be crushed at all cost to realize this vision.

This antisocial, conspiratorial worldview is inherent to the far left, to a greater or lesser degree. Name a popular myth about how the West is evil, and a leftist will believe it — whether it’s that the US invaded Iraq to steal oil, or that all Western economies are built purely on the exploitation of developing countries, or that our media and government is controlled by sinister three-letter organizations. Such a mindset is incredibly vulnerable to conspiracy theory — and all conspiracy theories ultimately come back to anti-Semitism. 

If you believe the government is controlled by moneyed elites and that the evil force of Zionism has its claws deep in the US government, then the leftist is already 90 percent of the way to being in full agreement with the Nazi. This is how we get university lecturers saying, “Zionists are straight Babylon swine [...] Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” It’s how we get progressive screenwriters complaining that “the entertainment industry is ran [sic] by Zionists.” It’s how you get left-wing musicians like Eric Clapton saying, “Israel's running the show, running the world.”

Israel-Palestine is a Uniquely Sore Issue

Second, Israel-Palestine is singularly inflammatory. It takes every problematic tendency the far left already has — shallow performativity, radicalism, narcissism, subordinating truth to ideology, and viciousness toward perceived opponents — and dials it up to eleven. Palestine offers the leftist a classic oppressor-oppressed binary, one that fits the Marxist image of the world perfectly: a cruel, settler-colonialist nation, brutally oppressing a native population, neatly including a white-vs-brown layer of oppression. It also offers a religious layer, where Israel is painted as both a theocracy and a fascistic ethnostate no different from Nazi Germany.

Of course, there are many facts that one must ignore to believe these things. One must ignore that Israel began with legal land purchases, and that among both Israelis and Palestinians you can find people passing for white as well as people who would not. One must ignore that anti-Semitism is on the rise, and that 48 percent of Israel is of Mizrahi (meaning Middle Eastern) origin. One must ignore that Israel is a democracy with Arabs in its parliament, and that the Palestinians harbor many deeply regressive, misogynist, and homophobic values out of touch with modern progressivism.

The Left is Just Too Successful, But Still Needs a Revolution

Third, modern leftism is no longer the struggling worker’s movement it began as. In the early 1900s, the left struggled with real, material problems, such as genuinely unfair wages and labor power imbalances in which employers held all the cards. Protesting for better pay, fewer hours, and more benefits and vacation were real, concrete improvements to fight for. But with these and other battles won — with an eight-hour workday and five-day workweek, with vacation and sick days taken for granted, with LGBT acceptance and racial equality both legally enshrined and culturally mainstream, the modern left had to pivot. Their crusades became less about tangible change in the face of injustice, and more about an opportunity to display righteousness by advancing an incredibly shallow worldview divided between the morally pure and the wicked, with no in-betweens. The ethos of no bad tactics, only bad targets thereby became bad tactics and bad targets.

Jews Just Aren’t Oppressed Enough

Finally, the far left is captured by a narrative in which the underprivileged are the center of attention. There is a foundational leftist belief that the world right now is not only terrible, but actively getting worse due to capitalist exploitation. In this understanding of the world, everything is defined by class struggle between the wealthy, parasitic capitalists, and their victims, the workers, whose labor is exploited for pennies, deliberately keeping the lower classes down. 

When taken to its logical end, we are left with a movement that resents success. So where do Jews fit into this? Well, from this grievance-focused, eternally victimized perspective, the Jewish people are just a bit too white, a bit too financially successful, and a bit too well-integrated to be seen as truly oppressed. Rather they are seen as oppressors. Just as Asians are now “helping white supremacy” because they’re more financially successful than other groups on average, Jews are just not persecuted enough. The far left resents success, and the Jews have shown extraordinary perseverance in their achievements. Indeed, the archetypal Jewish businessman, lawyer, or doctor fits perfectly into the petit-bourgeoisie stereotype the far left so intensely loathes.

What’s left is a movement deeply committed to performative role-playing while eschewing achievable goals, pragmatism, and principles. It’s a dreadful state of affairs. There ought to be room for a left-of-center movement to express a sane pro-Palestinian worldview, but it’s been hijacked by radicals who are as ignorant as they are venomous. Any healthy, open society requires a variety of perspectives represented, but they need to be rooted in reality — not collective guilt, group resentment, and unhinged conspiracism punctuated with Hitler salutes.

In the span of one year, the anti-Zionist far left has done serious and lasting damage to themselves. If they are to avoid becoming simply an inverted variant of neo-Nazism, utterly fringe and dismissed, they must reckon with and expel their radicals, not celebrate them. Is protesting Israel worth trafficking in old anti-Semitic tropes? Is it worth lowering yourself to the level of a fascist? Is it worth an entire political movement with over two hundred years of history? Because if things continue as they are, the left will be left behind, with all sane and decent people having shied away in disgust. Perhaps that’s one faint silver lining of this past year, that the radical left have lunged toward their far-right counterparts on the great trash heap of history. It’s where they belong.

[a-very-tired-jew]

They let X happen, why are they doing Y?!

So this is an argument I see in some form in Leftist spaces regarding the response of college campuses to protestors in recent days. Often it's used as "Sure, they'll let neo-Nazis on campus with no problem, but the moment we have a peaceful protest they call the cops." Except here's the problem. It's not a peaceful protest. It's also not a one time thing like the neo-Nazis. Every campus I have ever worked at or attended has had neo-Nazis show up and march around. They were booed and counter-protested. They stood there grinning with their slogans, took their pictures, and then went on their way to post on the internet about how they "owned the libs". Neo-Nazis do not have a prolonged presence on campus and they do not protest weekly for 6 months straight at campuses across the country. Sometimes there's altercations and violence, and sometimes there's not. Usually it makes the news in some capacity and that's it. Compare this to the Western Activists who have been protesting since October. Many campuses have seen weekly, if not daily, protests where protestors have held signs supporting terrorist groups, justified the actions of 10/7, chanted antisemitic rhetoric, and engaged in a whole host of concerning activities that have continued to escalate in some way. This escalation has culminated in different ways across these campuses but has resulted in Jewish students being attacked, Jewish dorms and student centers being defaced, bomb threats, attempted arson, stabbings, and so on... All of which has now led to these same groups, whose members have committed the aforementioned actions in some capacity, to established encampments on their college campuses. Think about that. Your peaceful protests are more violent that neo-Nazis showing up to college campuses. That's why the police have been deployed. You can delude yourselves all you want, but there are clear incidents over the course of these 6 months that show why this is happening, and you have no one to blame but yourselves. We have told you since the beginning that you need to address the antisemitism and radicalization present in your movement, but instead you ignored Jews and claimed Zionists were using claims of antisemitism as a "weapon to silence criticism of Israel". Well, it turns out we were right and your movement is now regarded as a violently antisemitic one by the authorities. Instead of accepting this and correcting it, you have continued to blame Jews Zionists. I would not be surprised if we see this escalate further into violent protests with things like cocktails being thrown, and even then I know you will blame the Jews Zionists for your own actions. Take a step back, breath, and think. Your peaceful protests are more violent than neo-Nazi protests. A Jew should not be saying this. A Jew should not be going "hey, those neo-Nazis? Actually less violent than what's going on right now." It should not take a Jew to point out the sheer ridiculousness of this entire situation. That should be a red flag that something is very, very wrong.

[verocd]

[morrysonando]

My (real) first attempt at an AU (go easy on me lol), "Undertale Yellow: Inherited Justice"! This is an AU of Undertale yellow that assigns roles to certain characters to see how the world of Undertale yellow would operate under the characters leading different lives but still retaining most of their personalities and (most) their species. Starlo takes on the role of martlet in this AU as the royal guard member (or leader is his case lol) that assists you in your journey, here are some details about him:D - Based his personality on fantasy novels instead of westerns in this timeline - Became a royal guard because of this fact and rose up the ranks to leader - Doesn't believe he deserves the role but does his job enthusiastically as he wants to keep others happy and doesn't like disappointing others - Never met the feisty five -Cerobas favorite customer - His family are all blacksmiths in this timeline and he gets along with them well, regularly visiting them to tell tall tales about his escapades - Killed martlet incidentally out of panic and desperation and has never forgave himself to this day - These feelings of guilt guide his every action, feeling as though he will never be able to repay what he took that fateful day - Believes he was also responsible for clovers death and blames himself even more for that too and doesn't have the heart to tell Salvia the "truth" until later on - He wasn't actually responsible for clover's death, he just believes he was because he doesn't know the full story - "Hates" mooch and what she's done to Neo Waterfall, vows to stop her reign of terror every day - Secretly finds mooch captivating in an odd way - Depending on the route he also takes a liking to dalv -says that if he trains hard enough he'll one day achieve "the ultimate sword magic" no one knows what that means. - Has millions of adoring fans in the Forlorn Isles

[schlock-luster-video]

On March 19, 1999, John Carpenter's Vampires debuted in Turkey.

Here's some new Thomas Ian Griffith art!

[oceanusborealis]

The Stolen Valley (Alta Valley) - Movie Review

TL;DR – While it starts strong, it unfortunately runs out of gas after the first act as the storyline becomes convoluted. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.Disclosure – I was sent a screener of this film The Stolen Valley Review – Today, we are looking at a film that is wearing its influences on its sleeves. That is not a bad thing. In fact, just…

[edwad]

it’s not that you think marx should be read primarily as an economist. it’s that your project of contextualizing marx in terms of the economic thought that both predates and follows him is valuable, but it runs up against hard limits in terms of both explanatory power and ability to generate practice that you can only solve by situating marx in the context of the actual political movements that both produced and drew from him and the concrete actions that resulted (cont.)

you wont find the key to a systemic analysis of capitalism purely in the realm of ideas, whether they be economic, philosophical, or political, you need to connect your analysis to some sort of concrete political reality for it to have any teeth. sure, no movement has succeeded at ‘achieving communism’ but they have made undeniable gains in the anti-colonial struggle and general social welfare (cont.) the latter thing, despite what you say frustratingly often, is not simply reducible to social democracy, and it shows how little understanding you have of the actual material history (as opposed to ideological), that you think western social democracy is comparable to the social welfare achievements of socialist countries, and that’s without even taking to account that the former is directly predicated on imperialism and neo-colonial exploitation of the global south

im finally getting around to this 3-message wall of text which i should realistically ignore because its not really productive and its clear by the end that youre just typing your frustrations at me, but it gives me a chance to say a bit more about a particular angle of what im doing with marx.

you say:

"your project of contextualizing marx in terms of the economic thought that both predates and follows him [...] runs up against hard limits in terms of both explanatory power and ability to generate practice that you can only solve by situating marx in the context of the actual political movements that both produced and drew from him and the concrete actions that resulted"

what limits? and what explanatory power is lost here? you dont say, although your immediate pivot toward the need to "generate practice" implies that youre suggesting some sort of practice-oriented information. frankly, i dont really understand why this enters here. if marx is totally wrong (which is further than i would go!) and nothing can be salvaged from him whatsoever, you would be upset because this critique of him wouldnt generate immediate practice? on what grounds could that desire for practice even be justified? marxist ones? some new, un-marxist one which can only come out of this (assumed to be, for sake of argument) successful critique of marx which still, for some reason, is immediately interested in the development of practice (sounding an awful lot like marxism btw)? or is your problem simply that it fails to account for actual marxisms after marx? if its the last option, then thats a non-criticism if part of my point is that i am trying to say something new about marx. the fact that he might've been received otherwise would only work as a refutation of my criticism if it weren't a necessary part of the criticism itself (ie, id be wrong for agreeing with myself).

whichever one of these it is, it misses the point. however it works as a segue to what i imagine you really want to talk about, which is concrete struggles. your initial way of getting there is to try and make me reckon with a proper contextualization of marx in his political environment as well as those he influenced. the latter, as ive just said, isn't necessarily damning (because it is part of my point), but the former is definitely worth lingering on.

so you say in your second message

"you wont find the key to a systemic analysis of capitalism purely in the realm of ideas, whether they be economic, philosophical, or political, you need to connect your analysis to some sort of concrete political reality for it to have any teeth"

you seem to think i fail to do this. ironically, i see my chief criticism of marx to be that *he* fails to do this. he tries to identify the development of political economy out of patterns of class struggle, but he constantly gets the facts wrong on both counts. yet even if we could take him at his word and assume he got all of these things right (which is definitely necessary for coming to terms with the nature of marx's project as he saw it), then i would argue that he actually saw his political environment as being shaped, in large part, by the reception of political economy in the workers' movement. this is already clear from the radical/popular economic literature which, in his eyes, arose and declined alongside (and, to some extent, within) the ricardian school, which is why he deals with it at length in theories of surplus value (in a deliberately historical mode, for the record). the socialist appropriation of economic categories to explain the ills of capitalism is something which animates much of his work beginning in the 40s. for example, in the poverty of philosophy, he announces at the outset that he aims to "protest" the "double error" of seeing proudhon as a "good German philosopher" or "one of the ablest French economists" on the basis of marx's being both german and an economist. this goes to show the economic terrain of marx's approach to his socialist rivals and how significant the economic angle was to him and to the movement around him more broadly. the critique of his rivals (especially proudhon) as economic thinkers appears again in capital, as william clare roberts has demonstrated in his work.

but also, at a different level, he very deliberately intervenes in engels' anti-dühring by contributing a single chapter which is *specifically* designed to take dühring to task for his critical history of political economy, in large part (as reading the text makes obvious) because marx alleges that dühring gets the history wrong. this was because, among other things, dühring's work was having a large influence on the german socialist movement and several of marx and engels' peers. this wasn't some apolitical intervention, it had meaningful stakes for marx's practical work. clearly, the critique of political economy and the ability to properly account for the history of economic thought was politically significant for both marx and the socialist movement around him. if i am being accused of over-estimating this angle, then that would only serve as another criticism of marx himself.

however, you continue (or, really, you pivot entirely, but you continue talking)

"sure, no movement has succeeded at ‘achieving communism’ but they have made undeniable gains in the anti-colonial struggle and general social welfare[.] the latter thing, despite what you say frustratingly often, is not simply reducible to social democracy, and it shows how little understanding you have of the actual material history (as opposed to ideological), that you think western social democracy is comparable to the social welfare achievements of socialist countries, and that’s without even taking to account that the former is directly predicated on imperialism and neo-colonial exploitation of the global south

this has absolutely nothing to do with what im dealing with here, and its bizarre of you to include it in the first place, not least because you seem to think that by me criticizing communists around me for not having a political horizon capable of overcoming social democracy, that i am overly critical of socialist experiments in the 20th century for feeding themselves. if anything, i think the point of political theory should be to achieve the greatest possible "good" (whatever that might be taken to mean) for the greatest majority of people. despite their obvious flaws, i count the 20th century socialist experiments as among the greatest examples of social organization ever achieved and if communism were proven to be impossible tomorrow, i would be a dogmatic social democrat (ive actually said this for years).

im not the cartoonish ultra leftist that some of you think i am, as if i care more about establishing some magical bar for communism than i do about the people who are supposed to reach it and live in it. i dont say any of those things "frustratingly often", and youre unable to correctly attribute my own views to me, which i think is pretty telling. if anything, the things i try to talk about here dont stem from an allergy to anything less than whatever perfect ideal i might hold in my head, its out of a frustration with communists who dont even recognize that they might as well be social democrats. thats not necessarily an insult (ive worked with a lot of good social democrats in my life and will continue to do it as long as it produces worthwhile results), its just supposed to clarify the stakes and what i see as the limits to their analysis of the system (which ought to matter to them, even if i dont get much out of it!).

my focus on the history of economic thought as it relates to marx's critique of political economy, is admittedly pretty far removed from some of this stuff, but i dont take that distance between the two as a problem of my ability to reckon with the global south or the success-rate of communist movements around the world, i take it as an issue which only results from the overexertion of your stretched criticism to try and get me to talk about something else. next time you want my opinion on something other than what im posting about, you can just ask!