#polity classes

[vakilkarosblog]

Revolutionizing Politics: The Significance of Registered Parties" explores the transformative role of officially registered political parties in shaping democratic systems. It delves into how these entities drive political engagement and foster representation. In parallel, "Microfinance Company Registration" and "section 8 Microfinance Company Registration" touch on the regulatory processes and legal frameworks governing microfinance institutions. This interplay between political registration and financial regulation highlights the broader impact of formalized structures in both politics and finance, showcasing the vital role of legal recognition in driving positive change in these domains. Read More

[xaverie]

Y'all

I downloaded Xiaohongshu just out of curiosity and-

This was the TOP comment lmao. "I think the government uses anti-black racism to divide the social classes as a bulwark against revolution, do you agree?"

lmfao, yes. Bingo XHS user Rammstein from Shanxi, you mostly got it. I'm sure she was just expecting questions like "How do you do your hair?" and shit, but half the comments jumped straight to socio-politiical theory and class consciousness lmao.

But don't get too excited because the other half of the top comments were "You guys don't really think the new Little Mermaid is pretty... do you? If they HAD to make a black mermaid they should have picked someone pretty." Like goddamn. OP and other sisters fighting for their lives trying to explain that no, Halle is beautiful we love her. 😭 They were like "Oh... well I guess we'll trust your judgement. 🤨"

[communist-ojou-sama]

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly ascribing benign, or rationally calculating intentions to western powers, but malevolent and actively irrational ones to non-western powers, all while claiming to be jaded, and cynical toward all parties?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly ascribing a goal of benign truth-telling to western corporate media sources, while ascribing a character of total falsehood to non-western state media, such that truth can't even be mined from it by one who understands its biases?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly portraying western societies as all being pluralistic, awash with a a number of perspectives unfortunately drowned out by their ruling class, while portraying all non-western polities as consisting entirely of drones, utterly subservient to authority, with the Sole exception of voices that are pro-western and strive for the same goals in western powers, in their terms?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly placing the work of western and western-trained academics on a pedestal, and treating it as ontologically more valuable than the work of groups of global south scholars with similar qualifications, who disagree with the western consensus?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

[astral-herald]

arcane, populism, and why viktor is the odd one out (yet again)

as a piltover-anti, a silco criticizer, and a pacifist, i am very very interested in how arcane presents not just the political undertones of both topside and the undercity, but the characters/dialogue through which they communicate those undertones. allow me to use some political science bro lingo to air out some thoughts.

long, long post incoming.

there are 2 ideological struggles at war throughout s1 (and i can predict that the struggle will carry over into s2): neoliberalism and populism - in their broadest terms since we're talking ofc about a fictional show dealing with surface level political machinations. by neoliberalism, i mean a focus on the social, political, and cultural structures of a polity (piltover, for our purposes) refocused into a strictly economic vacuum. and by populism i mean a unifying belief that the existing political systems of a polity fail to adequately represent their constituents, so the masses choose to rally around a specific gripe or issue, i.e., class discrimination, xenophobia toward immigrants, etc. this, in turn, forms a populist party or movement. an applicable example i can think of would be Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s.

*i know these are weighty topics with very real world implications! i just want to separate the theory to apply to our favorite fictional world.

the political struggle in question is put forward immediately by piltover, who, though presented as a technocratic state, embodies crucial neoliberal ideals emphasized especially by up-and-coming counilor mel medarda, much like how fresh-eyed american economists blew up the economic scene in the 1980s with a revival of capitalist, free market enterprise. take how she seizes the advent of hextech, for example:

she quickly sees hextech's potential yet not from the solely intellectual standpoint that jayce and viktor do - for her, it is profitable, literally and in terms of international relations. her goal is for piltover to prosper, but she has no rose-colored glasses on; prosperity means capital gain, and she's willing to override piltover's political and social systems to achieve her goal. an important caveat is that she draws the line at ambessa medarda's progression into militant authoritarianism, which deserves a whole post of its own!

piltover's populism moment will come later. first, let's unpack silco, who is probably arcane's most blatantly political figure, and a masterclass in the merits and failures of left wing, class-based populism.

silco, having been spurned by the classism and xenophobia that piltover's elite proliferate, and assisted by his rampant shimmer operation, fills the vacuum that vander's pacifism opened up. though silco's methods are unilaterally cruel (argue with the wall), the undercity clearly invested faith in him at some point, especially as vander's credibility as a guiding figure wavered over the years. he was fighting alongside vander for zaun's right to exist as their own independent body. in other words, he was uniting the undercity toward a common cause because the existing political system failed their constituents. to quote councilor shoola: "they may not be our preferred constituents, but they're still our people."

the track record of populism in our real world frequently ends in the ruin that silco himself brought upon the undercity. the kingpin is too dedicated to self-preservation, sees himself as too central to the movement, which prevents both compromise and/or a necessary armed revolt (insert your own politics about self-determination here). see italy's right wing populism party, Lega Nord, as a real-time example of this phenomenon.

but arcane makes an interesting plot decision with jayce, a very unexpected and "unwilling" contributor to piltover's abrupt dip into right wing populism. the showrunners love foils!

in arcane lore, i think it's safe to say that jayce's moniker "the man of progress" is pretty tongue-in-cheek. both he and viktor have a bemused tone about it in the run-up to his speech, and jayce is taken aback by heimerdinger's insistence that he deliver said speech. but the glowing, savior-esque imagery can't be ignored, nor can jayce's quick switch into his councilor role, no matter how reluctantly he makes it.

jayce is confronted by 2 forces that he seeks to combat in his quick tenure as councilor: internal corruption and an ineffective governing body. the latter goal is inspired almost solely by viktor, playing into jayce's naivety as a fresh-faced political figure, but this will be especially important to note later on. the innocence he offers up to mel is quickly erased, transformed instead into an uncomfortable - and inexperienced - militancy:

important in the bridge scene to my analysis is the populist "out group," or the designation populists give to those whom they actively oppose, and this opposition serves as their basis for organization. in this case, it's the undercity (keep this in mind for viktor's role!!).

jayce's combined frustrations at the unrest in the undercity and the council's (namely heimerdinger's) refusal to act, to both save viktor and to deal with the undercity's looming violence, motivates him to act like silco for a short time. unsatisfied with the status quo, he unites a likeminded individual, vi, along with the enforcers, to undercut the political system he feels is unable to represent its constituents or act in an effective manner. however, UNLIKE silco, jayce's realizes the inevitable cost the method of violence has and refrains in the end. he returns to the council and capitulates to some of silco's demands in the name of a peace piltover and zaun always thought impossible.

jinx's complete undoing of this underscores the failures of populism, especially as an extended movement over time. she wasn't accounted for. it's common sentiment at this point that she didn't attack the council for political gain. she was not invested in zaun's independence. she did it out of her and silco's twisted parental bond, and thus undid piltover's brief instance of compromise and compassion.

so...where does viktor fit into all this? and what are his implications for neoliberalism vs. populism in season 2?

viktor is neither wholly within nor wholly outside the populist outgroup - though jayce unintentionally shoves him back there in the pivotal bridge scene. furthermore, viktor also makes use of piltover's technocracy. he seems to have had a "raise yourself up by your bootstraps" history in arcane, contrary to left wing populist insistence that neoliberal ideals make this impossible.

this compounds as a double alienation for viktor, who also is straddled with the complications of his disability. a lot of his story is searching for a fellow in arms, if you ask me, and he had that with jayce until the pendulum swung, hence his return to singed.

if we stop there, viktor represents the failing of these 2 very flawed political ideologies. he fits nowhere and arcane uses him adeptly as a symbol of the failings of binaristic ideologues and systems. but let's speculate some more!

i'm convinced that viktor, due to his ambiguous 3rd party role in the story so far, will be one of the central villains (if not THE villain, if you allow me to be admittedly hopeful/biased) in season 2. consult the innumerable very well written theory/meta posts about the subject for more details, but one piece of evidence i want to focus on is this inherent physical, cultural, and ideological separateness that is innate to his character.

can we see him allying ever again with piltover, knowing that there's a split incoming? even without outside knowledge of league lore, singed's damning prediction ("if you take this path, they will despise you") cannot go unheeded. alternatively, then, can we see viktor allying with the supposed jinx-as-revolutionary side? no. personally, i see him as becoming increasingly unwillingly to compromise his a) immediate survival; and b) his ideals, especially after being endlessly sidelined in his attempts to express them in acts 2 and 3. he's also just a loner, guys.

there's some controversy on this point, but i'm convinced that the finger-printed cultists/followers we saw in the s2 trailer are devoted to viktor. starting with the shimmer addict he touched in the teaser, he is accruing a following all his own. and since noxus is here, touting their authoritarian militancy to replace piltover's outdated liberal ideals, nothing that jinx's revolution OR viktor's following does can be apolitical. to organize and to fight is survival under s2's raised stakes.

there aren't any binary spectrums when it comes to political theory in my opinion, so i am prepared to witness viktor introduce an entirely separate totalitarian narrative into arcane. where it will surely lack in militancy, it will make up for in its domination of the arcane. my biggest speculation is that, as they always do, piltover will fold and compromise at the last minute, perhaps yield to noxus, and invest wholeheartedly in taking down viktor's BBEG cultist regime. and by isolating his narrative repeatedly in s1, the writers planned this out expertly.

even if i'm wrong about viktor as third party, i like to think my observations still stand about the specific and qualifiable political divisions between piltover and zaun. the biggest hole this leaves for me is the question: will arcane ever take a stand? they seem very averse to making a blatant political statement, but i think their pervasive anti-police thread makes it clear that we're not meant to sympathize with piltover yuppies or their seasoned, jaded councilmen. let me know your thoughts!

also, as a jayce fan and a fan of arcane's overall story, none of this is meant as a CRITIQUE of him, mel, or silco. as silco said, "we all have our parts to play." i believe arcane's very greatest strength is their archetypal storytelling, and these distinct character roles are crucial to the success and vibrancy of the story.

if you read all the way to this point - ily <3

[bimboficationblues]

how is "nationalism of the oppressed" mythological

In a dual sense - 1) like all nationalisms, it relies on central myths, and 2) the idea of an innately revolutionary "nationalism of the oppressed" is itself mythical, not a useful analytical or political tool but basically a way of handwaving difficult tactical questions.

All nationalism is in some sense myth-making - it posits an underlying, intangible unity among a group of people with highly diverse and divergent interests and traits. This is part of the reason why nationalists so often talk in the abstract language of "national spirit" - abstraction is kind of the point. This intangible unity doesn't *have* to be ethnicity, it's frequently (for example) the highly nebulous concept of "culture." But the inevitable slide towards ethnicity - and I do think it is inevitable - is unsurprising.

If you identify the unifying force of a people, the thing that makes it a "nation," with something like language/religion/culture, those things are fairly fluid both in space (taking a variety of different forms across different places) and time (changing over time for any number of reasons). This is especially the case because those traits are basically "open," at least theoretically: other people can move in, learn a language, convert to a local religion, and/or learn the techniques and style of local cultural production (and in the process change the character of the culture). So the supposed unity of "culture" is very obviously made up. (It's also worth noting that, insofar as nationalism is coextensive with statecraft, we often see efforts to preserve or create a "national culture" or "national unity" that leaves out or represses certain groups and practices; figuring out what constitutes "the nation" is a highly arbitrary process.)

Ethnicity is also fake - it is a "myth of common descent" - but that quality counterintuitively makes it a more stable foundation for a nationalist political project, because it is 1) derived from something in the past, making it harder to contest or observe, and 2) an immutable trait within the myth's context. You can't identify or convert or learn your way into being a part of the ethnos, you either are or you aren't. This makes for a much more stable boundary line around who is included or prioritized within the polity and who isn't.

As for why "nationalism of the oppressed" is mythological: it is not a meaningful historical category. When people invoke it they are collapsing a bunch of different projects and movements, some of which are conservative and some of which are revolutionary. I also reject the idea that nationalism's goodness is contingent on whether it is practice by an oppressed or oppressor group and nothing else - lest we forget that Zionism was once considered a kind of "nationalism of the oppressed."

For the socialist or the revolutionary, nationalism should be considered a kind of tactic; it is not a good in itself. Any revolutionary or liberatory movement is going to have to make decisions about what they want the movement to look like - its positions, rhetoric, propaganda, goals, etc. Nationalism is a historically popular means for doing things like rallying people to your cause, establishing basic principles for statecraft, cultivating a new political and social culture, etc. This is basically Frantz Fanon's argument in Wretched of the Earth - consistent with his arguments in his previous book, Fanon rejects the notion of a prepolitical national unity. He does not want to wade around in the primordial soup for a "true history" for colonized countries to return to or emulate. But nor does he reject nationalism as a strategy for combating colonialism on the field or in the body. Rather, he wants a class-driven national culture that is emergent from within the process of anti-colonial resistance and that ultimately gives way to an internationalist, universalist humanism once its purposes have been achieved. It's an extremely qualified kind of argument. I don't totally agree with it, but it's an argument that I can wrap my head around and endorse in the broad strokes, because above all it is talking about nationalism as a means towards something.

The kind of people who bastardize Fanon and try and recuperate him into their insipid microwaved politics have this entirely fictional idea of nationalism as an innately revolutionary end, that if you put nationalism in the hands of the right people it will automatically gravitate towards liberation and will not introduce the same kind of problems that the nationalism of colonial powers or capitalist countries has. This is just demonstrably not true (*gestures vaguely at cross-pollination between black nationalisms and black conservatisms, the historical relationship between nationalism and liberal statecraft, the success of right-wing religious or ethnic nationalist movements like Hindutva or Ba’athism in post-colonial countries, etc.*), and is basically just weird, idealist nonsense about how being oppressed makes you morally virtuous.

It also has the effect of obfuscating class politics - ironic, since the people that most frequently utter this line are ML(M)s. There are quite a few "nationalisms of the oppressed" that presume the working-class of a country or a group has more in common with its local bourgeoisie or professional-class counterparts (frequently the spearheads of nationalist movements, if we wanna talk about "class character") rather than the working classes and oppressed groups of other countries.

What the "nationalism of the oppressed" myth does is effectively evade hard strategic questions. Instead of asking "how will this help the cause? what problems might it introduce? does this conflict with long-term goals and are the short-term victories going to be worth it?" it just assumes from the outset that none of those questions are worth asking. It assumes that nationalism is an automatically better foundation for a movement than humanism, or cosmopolitanism, or internationalism.

[liquified-oxygen]

Friend and I were bored in school so I decided to pull up Umberto Eco’s 14 points for a fascist country and see how many of them apply to American right now

Here are the points:

-"The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

-"The rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

-"The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

-"Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

-"Fear of difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

-"Appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

-"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

-Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

-"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

-"Contempt for the weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

-"Everybody is educated to become a hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

-"Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality".

-"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".

-"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

We decided that 10/14 of the points could be used to describe America right now and, keep in mind, this is from an outsiders perspective, neither of us live in the US this is mainly what we’ve seen on the news and social media. History is repeating itself and it’s fucking terrifying

[universitysunflowers]

rapid fire nonsense thoughts from the Epic listening party (Ithaca saga took me out)

so glad they got the stream set up they were all so excited?? love them so much the introductions are so cute (telemachus are you ok??); love that his parents are there it really is a family activity

they went on a whole odessey to get there its so fitting

"they don't know that they're stuck with me"

the matching sweatshirts they are literally so sweet this is the highlight of my day

the energy in this stream is unmatched i was not expecting prop acting but im here for it

Mico???

he cant see his wife and son with all those glasses

🥬

just chucked his own son off a wall s i r

they are committed to the vibes (the lighting? the rowing? the quick thought lights? spectacular.)

Teagan's little message are you kidding me???

this song is so good-

I-

Luke???

No baaaah dee

🥞

Cooking class????? Jorge????

so many pancakes

survive and remember them are some of the best songs you cant change my mind on that (the remember them animatic is one of my absolute favorites)

the lighting matching the saga is just *chefs kiss*

my goodbye is one of those songs that i listened to enough times that now its one of my all time favorites

stevens message these people are so amazing

storm never fails to give me chills

109,200 people watching this live are you kidding me

how many floating islands eury

"in private" sir thats a corner- ... did he just get slapped??😂

i love the trash bag wind bag the props add a level of sophistication to production

stevens entrance gets me every. time.

the fork trident 10/10 🔱🔱

the pink lighting for circe its so perfect🩷

are we getting the full cast audio??? you're telling eurylochus what??

Jay and Talya hes so gone for her this is odysseus level wife devotion

Hermes!!!!!!!!

guys its his roommate

troy understood the assignment his energy is unmatched (the absolute perfect hermes)

Janani as the chimera the girls are working together we love to see it

Jay and Talya the cutest combo he is so gone

all we hear are screams

Polities??? ghost Polites????

his mom 😢

mason you absolutely nailed the creepy dead vibe spot on

🦉

the slow dancing??? baby boys

rar rar rar

122,200 people this is the turn out they deserve

🦖

12 years ok then

Odysseus is dr doofenshmirtz?

the end of different beast is so good are you kidding me

the rules state what now-

jays face poor ody

scyllas entrance 10/10 just perfect

the mutiny intro its so good nvm the whole song is so good that music is amazing

the bromance ends in tragedy (Armandos little head pats i cant)

☀️🐮

Poor JP

⚡️

thunderbringer oh my god Luke is so perfect as Zeus

the lighting behind the cast they know how to set the mood

that animatic is so good oh my god i love it (luke is having the time of his life)

Ayron!!

Mico as Telemachus amazing perfect no notes i wish he could have been there

Argos the bestest boy

the animatice for little wolf is the best so perfect

the art for we'll be fine is so beautiful are you kidding me

that might be the cutest song in the entire saga

gigi's art is such a vibe its so pretty

"shes my wife" 😮

ody screaming athena's name kills me every time

Jay fangirling over the cast in the chat is so adorable hes so happy to be there

didnt even try tequila

luke looks so done

athena holding baby telemachus is the sweetest thing ever i cant

is she dead???? i need that answered???

Barbara as calypso is so perfect Not sorry for loving you is so sad im still not over this song

Hermes!!!!!

Dangerous is such a good song Troy absolutely kills it

love hermes just vibing while ody is fighting for his life thats their whole relationship in a nutshell

Princess Winion!!!!

Charybdis is so good one of my favorite songs

hes back our boy is back

"ITS STEVEN" jay trust me we are right there with you

return of the fork trident hi fork trident

I will never get over 600 strike never in my entire life

were so close to ithaca saga im not ok

"next to my wife" that line oh my god

Steven thank you for your service (that is a broken man)

oh my god i am unwell

Penelope???

150,000 people on this stream yes exactly

oh my god this song is so good

the suitors???

i am in love with this song are you serious

NO YOU CANT DO THAT WHAT IS THIS

song 37 oh my god

Ayron is giving me chills and mico is missing what is happening

only the ocean and i will know are you serious

*speechless*

WAIT WHAT

oh my god oh my god

"i built it" *screaming*

NO

ARE YOU SERIOUS

TELEMACHUS MY BABY

IS ATHENA WITH HIM????

oh my god

odysseus

oh

my god

...

baby boys back together look at them i cant

this saga is going to kill me

Jay hugging mico im dying are you kidding me

NO

OH MY GOD

ATHENA???

song 40 is about to be the death of me

the one time he says everything he does and its to Penelope this is just

the animatics in the background????

this song is giving me chills are you serious

the music i cant handle this

im crying i love them so much

i cant believe its over i need to go process this what just happened

[azspot]

But Machiavelli went further. Like most republicans in the Roman tradition, he assumed that the greatest corrupting influence on the state—and on independence of thought itself—is money. Money makes people selfish: if their wealth is tied up in land or commerce and they have a personal stake in the way these things are taxed or regulated, they are hardly going to be impartial judges of the public good. The wealthy magistrate must not be allowed to bring their own financial interests to bear in the process of lawmaking, nor to bend the law to provide “special favors” to their allies. A polity in which lawmakers organize a city “according to the needs of their own faction” is, for Machiavelli, little better than slavery. The art of politics therefore consists in finding ways to cultivate the virtue both of a citizenry that is equipped to withstand the siren call of populism and of a lawmaking class that governs with a view to the common good rather than the good of a particular faction or interest.

Machiavelli Would Hate Trump

[fallowhearth]

Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire, most of whose names have been lost over the centuries. The Assyrian Empire was just one of the many aggressive polities that has produced victims by the thousands over the past several millennia: The Romans did no better in Gaul or Dacia. Alexander the Great razed Thebes on his way to far more expansive conquests. The crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1099 waded ankle-deep in blood, Timur Lenk left behind towers of skulls marking his conquests. Pizarro slaughtered the Inca by the score. The Nazis left behind millions of corpses. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences, just like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter.

But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.

Patrick Wyman, Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future Substack, 2024

[fatehbaz]

Coral today is an icon of environmental crisis, its disappearance from the world’s oceans an emblem for the richness of forms and habitats either lost to us or at risk. Yet, as Michelle Currie Navakas shows in [...] Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, our accounts today of coral as beauty, loss, and precarious future depend on an inherited language from the nineteenth century. [...] Navakas traces how coral became the material with which writers, poets, and artists debated community, labor, and polity in the United States.

The coral reef produced a compelling teleological vision of the nation: just as the minute coral “insect,” working invisibly under the waves, built immense structures that accumulated through efforts of countless others, living and dead, so the nation’s developing form depended on the countless workers whose individuality was almost impossible to detect. This identification of coral with human communities, Navakas shows, was not only revisited but also revised and challenged throughout the century. Coral had a global biography, a history as currency and ornament that linked it to the violence of slavery. It was also already a talisman - readymade for a modern symbol [...]. Not least, for nineteenth-century readers in the United States, it was also an artifact of knowledge and discovery, with coral fans and branches brought back from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to sit in American parlors and museums. [...]

---

[W]ith material culture analysis, [...] [there are] three common early American coral artifacts, familiar objects that made coral as a substance much more familiar to the nineteenth century than today: red coral beads for jewelry, the coral teething toy, and the natural history specimen. This chapter [...] [brings] together a fascinating range of representations of coral in nineteenth-century painting and sculptures.

With the material presence of coral firmly in place, Navakas returns us to its place in texts as metaphor for labor, with close readings of poetry and ephemeral literature up to the Civil War era. [...] [Navakas] includes an intriguing examination of the posthumous reputation of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean-André Peyssonnel who first claimed that coral should be classed as an animal (or “insect”), not plant. Navakas then [...] considers white reformers [...] and Black authors and activists, including James McCune Smith and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and a singular Black charitable association in Cleveland, Ohio, at the end of the century, called the Coral Builders’ Society. [...]

---

[H]er attention to layered knowledge allows her to examine the subversions of coral imagery that arose [...]. Obviously, the mid-nineteenth-century poems that lauded coral as a metaphor for laboring men who raised solid structures for a collective future also sought to naturalize a system that kept some kinds of labor and some kinds of people firmly pressed beneath the surface. Coral’s biography, she notes, was “inseparable from colonial violence at almost every turn” (p. 7). Yet coral was also part of the material history of the Black Atlantic [...].

Thus, a children’s Christmas story, “The Story of a Coral Bracelet” (1861), written by a West Indian writer, Sophy Moody, described the coral trade in the structure of a slave narrative. [...] In addition, coral’s protean shapes and ambiguity - rock, plant, or animal? - gave Americans a model for the difficulty of defining essential qualities from surface appearance, a message that troubled biological essentialists [...]. Navakas thus repeatedly brings into view the racialized and gendered meanings of coral [...].

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Some readers from the blue humanities will want more attention, for example, to [...] different oceans [...]: Navakas’s gaze is clearly eastward to the Atlantic and Mediterranean and (to a degree) to the Caribbean [...], even though much of the natural historical explorations, not to mention the missionary interest in coral islands, turns decidedly to the Pacific. [...] First, under my hat as a historian of science, I note [...] [that] [q]uestions about the structure of coral islands among naturalists for the rest of the century pitted supporters of Darwinian evolutionary theory against his opponents [...]. These disputes surely sustained the liveliness of coral - its teleology and its ambiguities - in popular American literature. [...]

My second desire, from the standpoint of Victorian studies, is for a more specific account of religious traditions and coral. While Navakas identifies many writers of coral poetry and fables, both British and American, as “evangelical,” she avoids detailed analysis of the theological context that would be relevant, such as the millennial fascination with chaos and reconstruction and the intense Anglo-American missionary interest in the Pacific. [...] [However] reasons for this move are quickly apparent. First, her focus on coral as an icon that enabled explicit discussion of labor and community means that she takes the more familiar arguments connecting natural history and Christianity in this period as a given. [...] Coral, she argues, is most significant as an object of/in translation, mediating across the Black Atlantic and between many particular cultures. These critical strategies are easy to understand and accept, and yet the word - the script, in her terms - that I kept waiting for her to take up was “monuments”: a favorite nineteenth-century description of coral.

Navakas does often refer to the awareness of coral “temporalities” - how coral served as metaphor for the bridges between past, present, and future. Yet the way that a coral reef was understood as a literal graveyard, in an age that made death practices and new forms of cemeteries so vital a part of social and civic bonds, seems to deserve a place in this study. These are a greedy reader’s questions, wanting more. As Navakas notes [...], the method [...] is to understand our present circumstances as framed by legacies from the past, legacies that are never smooth but point us to friction and complexity.

---

All text above by: Katharine Anderson. "Review of Navakas, Michele Currie, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America." H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. December 2023. Published at: [networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20017692/anderson-navakas-coral-lives-literature-labor-and-making-america] [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[germiyahu]

Similarly to the "Jesus was Palestinian!" crowd, I find this phrasing (and I've seen it in so many fandoms and other contexts about portraying Bibical characters I'm not just picking on the thing that it's popular to critique right now):

Kind of annoying? Like "Middle Eastern Jewish" is baffling to me. Is it because the average person thinks Jews are white Americans and they need to specify Middle Eastern = Brown which isn't even always the case, especially when we decenter American conceptualizations of race. But it also very cleanly lops of Middle Eastern-ness, and therefore this implicit Person of Color-ness from Jews as a class?

Some Jews can be Middle Eastern, and therefore brown/indigenous/poc/valid/worthy of protection, but it's not automatic and it's certainly not universal, so any time a Jew is granted this special status it must be verbalized so as not to confuse people. They might think the Jew you're talking about is a colonizer otherwise!

Or is it a way to imply (if not outright say) that there has never been a Jewish state in the region? Any Jews from Jesus' time were just denizens of the Middle East broadly? They had no country of their own, they just existed nebulously scattered throughout among other tribes and tongues and nations? Like if the Hasmonean Dynasty ruled over a polity called Israel I would see how the average Tumblerino would obviously want to avoid alluding to that when talking about New Testament characters/historical figures. But it was called Judea, well Iudaea in Latin. Some Israelis refer to the Hebron region as Judea now but this is not something that most anti-Israel people on Tumblr know about. So it has to be an aversion to admitting that there was a Jewish state in the Levant no matter what it's name was?

And less than 2 centuries later the land was renamed Palestine anyway. They don't even call Biblical characters "Palestinian Jews," at best some people used to call Jesus a Palestinian Jew, but I don't even see that anymore really. He's just "Palestinian" now. So you can be ahistorical when it's Jesus but not for anyone else in these books? Why? What's the point? What's the story what's the vision?

I'm definitely reading too much into this specific post, the worms in my brain sing so sweetly to me, but when these spaces are filled with so much casual disregard and disinterest in Jewish people, their culture, their history, their rights, their dignity, their lives... well maybe it's time to stop just slapping on "JOOISH!" to get sjw points while you're canceling the thing that is cringe.

[a-personiftranslator]

things doing personifs will help you solve:

wanting to join a fandom but not knowing how to contribute (nobody ever hates personif fanart)

lack of ideas (personifs are prewritten characters)

fear of revealing yourself to the world through your fiction (the goal with a personif is to find the story and personality that is already there)

boredom in history class (self-explanatory)

irrational feelings of intense alienation around the communities you’re in (the joy in a good personif design is universal)

lack of hobbies

difficulty understanding the behavior of past polities

difficulty appreciating the foundation of history that everything we have today is built on

difficulty comprehending the complexity of the systems that keep our world (somewhat) functioning

critical thinking (automatically turning everything into personifs means summarizing and interpreting and deciding what it means to you)

need to believe in higher beings (personifs are basically gods)

lack of perceived intelligence (you will do a Lot of research in the process of characterizing them)

lack of perceived silliness (these fandoms don’t have very good reputations)

[karrakincavalrycollege]

What are YOUR favorite classes here at the Karrakin Cavalry College?

Our roster of courses includes;

The Tactical Syllabus: With exciting classes such as Tactical Doctrine, Standard Adversary Chassis, Nonstandard Adversary Chassis, Combined Arms Approaches, Zero G Combat, Combat Gunnery, High Density Environments, Adverse Conditions, Loadout Analysis and Pushing the Envelope!

The Technical Syllabus: With intellectually stimulating pursuits such as Running Hot, Custom System Integration, Field Servicing In Practice, Distributed Systems. Electronic Warfare, Threat Systems, Intelligence Analysis, Failure Modes, Paracausal Analysis, and Copilot Systems!

The Noble Arts Syllabus with refined courses of study such as From Dynasticlade to Federation: a history of Calendula’s political reforms, High Passacaglian architecture and the Neo-Laurentian Movement, Corporate statecraft and diplomacy with non-traditional polities, Ontologies of Personhood: the philosophical implications of non-human intelligences, The Great Seven Formal Dances and their variant. First Contact: Union influences on New Federation-era literature, Ornamental flower hybridization and selecting characteristics through transgenic modification, Passions Across Worlds: cross-Concern comparative analysis of bond readings and divination ceremonies, Modern developmental psychology and its influence on rapidfax and traditional facsimile cloning program, and Words of Heritage: the influence of Apollonian languages on modern Karrakin

[realunderlake]

Fantasy Ideology Part 1: Magic

I don't know if this is anything, but sometimes I like to think about the ideological and social impacts about elements of fantasy worldbuilding.

Like, take magic for example. There are generally different ways it's presented in fantasy fiction. Sometimes, it requires an innate aspect of being to use (a la the force in Star Wars, or however the heck harry potter magic works.) Sometimes this innate aspect is heritable, and sometimes it is completely random. Other times, magic is something that requires rigorous study. And yet, we seem to have one broad conception of magic in most fantasy media: Wizards sitting off in their tower, doing spells and stuff. Most settings don't think about how magic would impact the world that much, and instead make the world a bland, medieval Europe pastiche.

But lets look at magic from a social perspective, taking the classic DnD approach of "A wizard can be taught magic, though it generally takes a long time, and they should start from adolescence." You know what Magic is then comparable to? Because it's not a university professor... It's a Knight. For much of human history, aristocrats were warriors, because learning to be a *good* warrior, who used the most high tech stuff (whether that be chariots, or the couched lance) took a lot of effort, and you had to start pretty young, similar to how magic works. Thus, the social consequences of magic should be obvious, magic should be something that is used by the upper classes of a society, as they are the ones that are able to invest the time and energy into mastering it.

Perhaps however, as technology advances, magic becomes more widespread. Rather than having to painstakingly craft your own equipment, you can get it mass produced. Rather than working on outdated theories of physics (Aristotelian perhaps) you can observe the effects and costs of magic in a much more scientific way, increasing the effectiveness, and perhaps lowering the barrier to entry. Magic would be less blacksmithing, and more welding.

But in an instance like that, the ruling classes would not simply give up this power that they have, unless they have a reason to do so. Perhaps a king supports an up and coming magical bourgeoise to counteract the power of the magic-wielding noble class, for example. A good example of this is in the webnovel Mother of Learning, where the social forces have driven magic to be more equally available, after a devastation of the magic using ruling class through a combination of calamitous war, and the magical equivalent of the black death. In this gap of experienced mages, most of the polities have begun to allow "middle class" non-mage families into magical academies to bolster their ability to fight in the next continent-spanning conflict. This in turn has led to a backlash by the magic-wielding aristocracy, who have engaged in power struggles with the central government of the kingdom in which the story takes place, with many of these "Nouveau Riche" mages taking the side of the monarchy which has formed an unsteady alliance with these more progressive voices.

In any setting that puts some thought into how magic works in it's society, magic should be, by necessity, controlled by the ruling class. Whether that be because the ruling class are the only ones with the means to produce mages due to the required investment, or because those with the power to warp reality itself have decided that they, quite reasonably, want to be in charge.

Most wizards are written as weirdos off in towers because of Lord of the Rings, and because of cultural assumptions from Europe. But crucially, Europe never actually had wizards, and Gandalf was an angel, not a mortal man.

Even in settings where magic is not something trained, but instead something innate, there would be some method by which mages interact with society on a systemized level. Having them be simply random hermits makes no sense. Ars Magica, the TTRPG, for example, has a situation where most mages have a magical "gift", but said gift also makes it impossible for them to be liked or trusted by normal people. Despite this handicap, the Order of Hermes in that setting controls a good amount of political clout, with powerful Covenants being able to ignore the rulings of kings, and the Tribunal of Transylvannia basically co-ruling much of the Kingdom of Hungary with it's actual king.

These interactions of magic with class dynamics has interesting implications for the developments of ideologies. Will access to magical education be seen as a proletarian struggle in the development of socialism? Will Aristocracy persist for longer periods due to the inherent bias of the elites literally having magic? Can liberalism exist in a society where some people can warp reality with a snap of their fingers? Will it do *even better*, due to the radical individualist message meshing with the individual power held by magic?

Interesting Questions.

[jeahreading]

Honestly my Poor Science friends, like today, had my constitution book with me(Since I had a pol Science exam today) and almost everyone was amazed and mildly terrified of me(since 3 out of 4 of the students in my opt we out doing some other work i was sitting in the psych class and i was reading the Mode of promulgation and learn the Preamble, the psych teacher thought i was reciting some sort of scriptures of mantra but in fact, i was just babbling the preamble lol). Almost everyone in Class asked to see my copy once and it was fun seeing them totally lost as to wtf was actually happening in my head.

A friend in science asked to see my book. She was like "How tf do you find this shit interesting" and I went on a rant about how some part of the consti are so fun to see like double jeopardy, emergency etc. She genuinely looked so lost and disinterested, i think about people who find fascination in physics and maths and i can never understand them, i always felt lost and afraid in that territory and they find fun in that, and i see them lost and afraid of social science, polity, consti etc and where i find a world of amazement and it's so fascinating to me.

For sure, my friends in science won't be able to sit still in a class where we're learning FPTP and PR with single transferrable vote, while i won't be able to sit still in a class which is teaching sets and trigo