#reactionary vision

[alwaysbewoke]

x

[brw]

I know like, I'm the only person who thinks about Eric Williams at all but it is so frustrating reading the stuff he's been in for the past 20 years and there's zero rhyme or reason to any of it. His motivations and opinions change with no explanation or closure, and while I won't pretend he's ever been reasonable, or particularly coherent, he used to have a considered approach and have actual goals that were consistent. Now he ping pongs between anything on any given day. When we last saw Eric in Uncanny Avengers, he seems to consider both him and Simon fake men, mockeries unable to die but needing to for the world to be right. Before that, he considered Vision his true sibling, because of the ways in which Vision killed more of the Avengers, and is more violent and self-assured in their violence than Simon is. But in The Vision 2015 it's all "I'M REAL! SIMON'S REAL! YOU'RE FAKE!" like I know he's unstable but can we fucking commit to anything past 4 issues anymore or is it just have fun and be yourself.

[fahclove]

Got too stoned and now I’m bothered by people hating Sean Baker on Twitter. Bc I’ve seen the Florida Project and it is so beautiful and Tangerine and Red Rocket are so amazing and he takes such a specific and clear focus to his movies and he often highlights lower class people which is a lens we NEVER see and people choosing to hate him bc he was wrong about intimacy coordinators is so frustrating bc it’s clear they’ve never seen any of his other movies and probably never will

[upsidedownsmore]

I won't lie I nearly fell into disliking this quest after seeing so much reactionary negative feedback immediately afterwards, but posts like these have helped me appreciate the quest better and calm down from that initial spike in discourse. I know that's still me building my opinions off of the opinions of others, and I really do need to examine my own susceptibility to being easily convinced, but actual constructive discussions and breakdowns over the last few days have helped assure me that no the quest is not some problematic mess actually, as some made it out to be.

I do still believe the somewhat vague writing that Warframe usually has may not do it favors when paired with what can be seen as a harmful trope in other media when viewed from a glance, and the game progression structure/narrative of gathering warframe blueprints and parts to pilot copies of them can be seen as rubbing against the nature of Jade's story in a potentially disturbing way. I think those things could have been handled better with more time to handle those nuances. But in the end, while I feel the empty spaces in the story can be interpreted badly if twisted enough, what the story does say tells a clear message of love and respect in the strangest of circumstances and tragedies, even if it doesn't line up with some of our ideal scenarios or comforts.

I'm glad that, at least personally, my view has stabilized, and it seems that the view of the community here in general has begun to stabilize as well. I'm happy to take in the designs these artists have made with a clearer head, and I hope they have not experienced too much turmoil following the release of their hard work. I'm sure there will still be people unhappy with the quest for a variety of reasons, but I hope people have begun to understand this quest as not some misogynistic fever dream cooked up by the same writers and creative directors and studio that has brought us the rest of Warframe prior.

possible spoilers for Warframe: Jade Shadows ahead

i wish people would stop, take a breath, and actually think about jade shadows from an analytical place before they leave their reviews rather than just going "i think it's icky" because like. obviously it isn't perfect, i don't think anyone's arguing that, but it isn't gross or wrong- it's art, it's evocative, and it's going to resonate differently with everyone. i want to pick apart some common criticisms i've seen here from the perspective of someone who's played a lot of warframe and thought about some of the heavier themes present in the quest quite a lot.

It's weird that Jade is pregnant because I'm afraid of it/it's gross/it's fetishistic

Personal feelings of revulsion are not a reason to judge something on an objective level. It's perfectly valid to come out of Jade Shadows feeling weird about it- I do think that's kind of the point. The quest has a content warning before you begin it, because the subject matter is something that is really uncomfortable for a lot of people- that doesn't mean that the game shouldn't be allowed to explore it. Also, even if it was wrong to include something like this as fetish content, this argument would imply the game has already gone to weirder places. Looking at you, Grendel.

It's weird that they make the operator give birth via transference

This argument has a little more ground, but also kind of misunderstands how transference works. Yes, it is a hand-wavy "linking of the minds," but we do see clearly in quests like The Sacrifice that when linking with the more sentient frames like Umbra for the first time, the Operator is not fully controlling the frame. I think Umbra is the most appropriate comparison- when linking with Umbra properly for the first time, you don't immediately control Umbra- it's a more spiritual "linking souls helping him find peace" thing. I'd also say that even in the case the Operator was fully in control, I don't think what happened was remotely equatable to literally giving birth. Like. She breathed for 20 seconds and then dissolved into light and died, then there was a baby there. I don't know if you've ever seen a birth, but that isn't how it works. I feel like after all the shit our Operator has been through, "giving birth" through transference is kind of a drop in the bucket.

It's misogynistic to have Jade die in childbirth

????????

Ok. So let's pick apart the possible reasons that this would be misogynistic. Maybe fridging the woman? But. Not really, because she isn't really gone- the game even acknowledges that she will live on through you and through the motes in Hunhow's message. You can literally craft her and then boom, she's back. She may not have a gigantic speaking role, but no warframe does- hell, even the Stalker barely grunts out single words.

Another one I see a lot is the argument that her sole role in the quest is the whole "her whole personality is motherhood" situation- and that is fair, her role IS that- but that is the point of the quest. They hid this in the teasers because they wanted the reveal to be significant, not to intentionally obfuscate their misogynistic writing- while I certainly do agree that it is all too common for female characters to be pushed aside and relegated purely to motherhood, particularly in fandom spaces but that's an entirely different discussion. I think Warframe handled the motherhood issue well- a person used as a tool of unjust death for years (remember the Jade Light?) giving her own life to finally bring life into the world rather than taking it away- it clearly had purpose and thought behind it, and Warframe has already spent years providing female characters that don't revolve entirely around motherhood- though they aren't pushed into your face and provided immediately without any exploration, so it makes sense that some people on Tumblr would miss them. Warframes don't generally have fully fleshed-out personality- the more sentient frames like Dante and Umbra are an exception. Jade was on the verge of death, it's not shocking that we didn't see much of her personality. I don't doubt that we'll get some codex entries explaining more of her actual personality and story- the quest was just not the place and time.

At the end of the day, Warframe is a game about love, family, and sacrifice. Jade Shadows ticks all 3 of those boxes, probably in the most on-the-nose way we've seen yet. I'd love to make a post soon lauding the things I liked about it, the real narrative depth it presented, the meaning behind and the significance of the discomfort rooted in its themes, and its connections to Warframe's broader themes, but I've seen more negativity than positivity thus far which is... genuinely shocking. When I played it I had nothing but praise. Warframe's writing is usually a bit clunky, so I hadn't noticed anything particularly out of the ordinary, but a lot of people seem genuinely convinced that this expansion was somehow the worst we've ever seen when that is far from being the case. Operation Belly of the Beast has been a ton of fun, and the seeming finite nature of what's left adds a real gravitas to farming for Jade. I'm not shocked the quest itself felt a bit half-baked, I'm surprised they released this at all with 1999 coming up- I'm just happy to get some new content and a new frame whose concept I really enjoy.

[txttletale]

Hi! So I have been seeing your posts talking about AI art and tbh it has made me reconsider my stance that was admittedly very reactionary and I was wondering if you could clarify something you said "the sooner people give up on luddite dead end pursuits of turning back the clock to more indivualized production the sooner they can put their energy into productive working class organizing. " Does this mean as in artists genuinely starting to recognize themselves as part of the working class and forming "collectives" and working as such? Or is it in the sense that art as a career will always inherently be part of the petite bourgeoisie? I hope I worded this correctly I am genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts as it has helped me rethink my stances thank u!! :)

the former! there's nothing about being an artist that automatically makes you petit bourgeoise (even if that is a common aspirational vision, most working artists are straightforwardly proletarian & doing work-for-hire projects, animating trolls 7: return of the trolls or desigining ui elements for FIFA 27--when i say 'productive working class organizing', i mean in their capacity as working artists, i'm not doing some kind of 'get a real job' routine.

for an exmaple of what effective working class organizing can look like for artists, look at the recent SAG-AFTRA agreements. instead of hoping that yelling at people on the computer would make the technology magically go away forever, they levered their industrial action to extract concessions about its use, including requiring the consent of actors to recreate their likeness digitally and requiring actors to be paid for the appearances of that likeness.

similarly, the WAG strike resulted in an agreement under which studios can't edit already written scripts with AI or produce scripts with AI and demand that an uncredited human edit them. these are actual, practical concessions extracted from employers that preserve working conditions and livelihoods. these are good political aims worth fighting for! but as you quote me saying, they are achieved through organized industrial action and not through shouting at twitter users innit

[autonomystic]

Adorno against "nothing ever happens":

Criticism of tendencies in modern society is automatically countered, before it is fully uttered, by the argument that things have always been like this. Excitement - so promptly resisted - merely shows want of insight into the invariability of history, an unreasonableness proudly diagnosed by all as hysteria.

The accuser is further informed that the motive of his attack is self-aggrandizement, a desire for special privileges, whereas the grounds for his indignation are common knowledge, trivial, so that no-one can be expected to waste his interest on them. The obviousness of disaster becomes an asset to its apologists - what everyone knows no-one need say - and under cover of silence is allowed to proceed unopposed.

Assent is given to what has been drummed into people's heads by philosophy of every hue: that whatever has the persistent momentum of existence on its side is thereby proved right. One need only be discontented to be at once suspect as a world reformer. Connivance makes use of the trick of attributing to its opponent a reactionary and untenable theory of decline - for is not horror indeed perennial? - in order by the alleged error in his thinking to discredit his concrete insight into the negative, and to blacken him who remonstrates against darkness as an obfuscator.

But even if things have always been so, although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India** systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms. Any other would be innocuous and would give way to conciliatory phrases, abandoning the qualitative leap. He who registers the death-camps as a technical mishap in civilization's triumphal procession, the martyrdom of the Jews as world-historically irrelevant, not only falls short of the dialectical vision but reverses the meaning of his own politics: to hold ultimate calamity in check. […]

Horror consists in its always remaining the same - the persistence of 'pre-history' - but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces. The same duality defines violence as Marx demonstrated in material production: 'There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common; and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general pre-conditions of all production are nothing more than … abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.'

In other words, to abstract out historically unchanged elements is not to observe neutral scientific objectivity, but to spread, even when correct, a smoke-screen behind which whatever is tangible and therefore assailable is lost to sight. Precisely this the apologists will not admit. On one hand they rave about the derniere nouveautés [latest news] and on the other they deny the infernal machine that is history. Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquillity of mind. Certainly, the unprecedented torture and humiliation of those abducted in cattle-trucks does shed a deathly-livid light on the most distant past, in whose mindless, planless violence the scientifically confected was already teleologically latent. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what, not having yet come to pass, denounces what has. The statement that things are always the same is false in its immediateness, and true only when introduced into the dynamics of totality. He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end.

**I think Adorno's remark about India here is diminishing of the gravity of colonialism and creates an unjustified distance between Auschwitz and EIC/British rule over India, which was likewise marked by horrific butchery and the deaths of millions, and thus he bends the stick too far in the opposite direction of his criticism - but I don't think this really diminishes the claim overall.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Did you heard Kim jung-un speech to the military?

All blame for the tensions in Korea lies entirely on the shoulders of the ROK and the US. Yoon has taken a hard-line anti-DPRK stance and has continued the submission of the ROK to US imperialist interests while firmly refusing to break from the reactionary trend in the ROK whose vision for the reunification of Korea mirrors the reunification of Germany: a bourgeois-led imposition of neoliberal economic reform, the auctioning off of state property to the highest bidder, and the subsequent impoverishment and imperial domination of the northern half of the country.

The DPRK has only responded in kind to the attitudes expressed by the ROK and the US. As Kim mentions in his speech, the DPRK is preparing for war on its own soil. That is not to say it is unwilling or incapable of fighting the war elsewhere, but rather that if open war comes once again to the Korean peninsula, it will come because the imperialist forces bring it upon the DPRK, and not the other way around. The DPRK is not preparing to invade, they are preparing to be invaded. Why shouldn't they be, seeing how averse to diplomacy and negotiation the ROK and the US have been in the whole affair?

The US only wants one thing: the dismantling of the DPRK and the dissolution of the Worker's Party of Korea. The ROK is in full agreement with this position. They share the firm belief that communism should not be allowed to exist and that it should be stamped out wherever possible. This is the position of all bourgeois nations, but it especially pointed with regards to the DPRK, which has been horribly maligned ever since it managed to hold its own against the terroristic carpet bombing of the United States, and further isolated as it has managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and major hardships that resulted from it without ever once budging on its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist position. The only comparable country in that regard is Cuba, and they don't have half their nation occupied by a belligerent puppet government.

If the US wants to make any attempt at even feigning interest in preserving peace in Korea, they must put forward at the outset and without conditions the promise of military withdrawal from South Korea. So long as the US maintains its occupation of the South, there is no reason for the DPRK to have any interest whatsoever in diplomatic negotiations. So long as the US continues to demand full compliance from the DPRK without any concessions of its own, there is no reason for the DPRK to comply.

[d8tl55c]

hey wait a minute

so it's the start of AvA part 7 and Chosen and Dark are talking, right? and the former has this vision of terrible things happening if they don't stop the latter, right here and now.

they see the ViraBots descending on the last remnants of stick kind with Dark as their leader (or Lord if you will. ha ha) and i, trusting viewer, took their assessment as reliable*. we JUST saw Dark getting uncomfortably violent in earlier scenes after all

but

however

notwithstanding

unless Chosen has demonstrable prophetic powers (like how Orange has** in the past seen things currently happening (horizontally-prophetic let's call it: seeing faraway in the current time) (there's probably a better word for this but let's move on)), how did they know this was definitely what Dark was leading up to?

** ⬆ examples of Orange horizontally-prophesizing in AvM episode 11, SkyBlock (unconfirmed but referenced as, "uh? well maybe??? maybe i didn't think about it yet-" (abridged quote from AvG react video)) (op will die /j /extremely pos if this is used again in AvA 11 (HAH they'd both be episode 11 (op just giggled maniacally)))

Dark doesn't even have his control bracelets on.

because Chosen didn't know about them yet.

because this is not a prophetic vision.

Chosen is just that... reactive. what was it. @compressedrage (hi o/ ) had a good wording let me find it. yeah i guess it was reactionary

the ONLY time we've seen them stop to think things through is actually just a terrified anxiety breakdown while they stand there, frozen, imagining the worst, until they snap out of it JUST in time to impact their reality.

but with no time left for debate. reasoning. they assumed Dark was beyond reasoning from the moment he showed off what his device could do............. because they were beyond reasoning out of fear.

<community post version>

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The FTC has Big Pharma’s number

On November 27, I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

The most consistent bright spot in the dark swirl of US politics is the competence of the Biden Administration's progressive enforcers: people like Rohit Chopra, Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan, who keep demonstrating just how far a good administrator can go. Anyone can have a vision, but knowing how to execute is the difference between hot air and real change:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

Take a minute to contrast Biden's administrators with Trump's: Trump's administrators had an ideological vision just as surely as Biden's do, and Trump himself had a much more pronounced and explicit ideology than Biden, whose governance style is much more about balancing the Democratic Party's blocs than bringing about a specific set of policies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

But whatever clarity of vision the Trump administration brought to DC was completely undermined by its incompetence (thankfully!). Apart from one gigantic tax break, Trump couldn't get stuff done. He couldn't deliver, because he'd lose his temper or speak out of turn:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/14/when-youve-lost-the-fedsoc/#anti-buster-buster

And his administrators followed his lead. Scott Pruitt was appointed to run the EPA after a career spent suing the agency. It could have been the realization of his life's dream to dismantle environmental law in America and open the floodgates for unlimited, wildly profitable corporate pollution and pillaging. But the dream died because he kept getting embroiled in absurd scandals – like the time he sent his staffers out to drive around all night looking for a good deal on a used mattress:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/epa-s-pruitt-told-aide-obtain-old-mattress-trump-hotel-n879836

Or his insistence on installing a CIA-style "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility" (SCIF) so he could play super-spy while reading memos:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/26/politics/epa-administrator-scott-pruitt-sound-proof-booth-scif/index.html

Or the time he sent his security detail to the Ritz-Carlton to demand that they supply him lots of little bottles of his favorite hand-cream:

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/7/17439044/scott-pruitt-ritz-carlton-moisturizing-lotion

There were other examples in the Trump administration, but Priutt is such a good case-study. He's like a guy who spent his whole life training to compete in the Olympics, and finally got a shot, only to be disqualified for ordering too much room-service in the Olympic Village. Priutt was wildly ambitious, but he was profoundly undisciplined – and wildly incompetent.

Compare that with Biden's progressive enforcers and agency heads, who showed up on the first day of work with an encyclopedic knowledge of their administrative powers, and detailed plans for using them to transform the lives of the American people for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

The Biden administration's competence translates into action, getting stuff done. Maybe that shouldn't surprise us, given the difference between the stories that reactionaries and progressives tell about where change comes from.

In reactionary science fiction, we enter the realm of the "Competent Man" story. Think of a Heinlein hero, who is "able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

In Competent Man stories, a unitary hero steps into the breach and solves the problem – if not single-handedly, then as the leader of others, whose lesser competence is a base metal that the Competent Man hammers into a tempered blade:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/RobertAHeinlein

Contrast this with a progressive tale, like, say, Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry For the Future, where the Competent Man is replaced by the Competent Administration, in which people of goodwill and technical competence figure out how to join forces to create population-scale architectures of participation that allow every person to contribute their skills and perspective:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr

The right's whole ideology insists that the world can only be saved by Competent Men. As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind, the unifying factor that binds together conservative factions from monarchists to racists to Christian Dominionists is the belief that a few of us are born to rule, and the rest to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/mafia-logic/#mafia-logic

The Reaganite insistence that governments are, by their very nature, incompetent and malign ("The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I’m from the government, and I’m here to help'"), means that conservatives deny the possibility of a Competent Administration.

When conservatives take office and proceed to bungle the most basic elements of administration, they're fulfilling their own campaign narrative, which starts with "We must dismantle the government because it is bad at everything." Conservatives who govern badly prove their own point, which explains a lot about the UK Tory Party's long run of governmental failure and electoral success:

https://apnews.com/article/uk-suella-braverman-fired-cabinet-shuffle-7ea6c89306a427cc70fba75bc386be79

There's a small mercy in the fact that so many of the most ideologically odious and extreme conservative governments are so technically incompetent in governing, and thus accomplish so little of their agendas.

But the inverse – the incredible competence of the best progressive administrators – is nothing short of a delight to witness. Here's the latest example to cross my path: the FTC has intervened in a lawsuit over generic insulin pricing, on an issue that is incredibly technically specific and also fantastically important:

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/ftc-blasts-pharmas-abuse-fda-patent-system-sanofi-mylans-insulin-monopoly-lawsuit

The underlying case is before the FDA, and it concerns the dirty tricks that pharma giant Sanofi used to keep Mylan from making a generic version of Mylan's Lantus insulin after its patent expired.

There's an explicit bargain in patents: inventors can enlist the government to punish their rivals for copying their ideas, but in exchange, the government demands that the inventor has to describe how the invention works in a detailed patent filing, and when the patent expires, 20 years later, rivals can use the patent application as instructions for freely copying and selling the invention. In other words: you get 20 years of exclusive rights in return for facilitating your competitors' copying and selling your invention when the 20 years are up.

Pharma doesn't like this, naturally: not content with 20 years of exclusivity, they want the government to step in and punish their competitors forever. In service to that end, pharma companies have perfected a process called evergreening, where they dribble out ancillary patents after their initial filing, covering minor reformulations, delivery systems, or new uses.

Evergreening got a moment in the public eye earlier this year, with John Green's viral campaign to shame Johnson & Johnson out of using evergreening to restrict poor countries' access to TB medication:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

The story of pharma is that it commands gigantic profits, but it invests those profits into medicines that save our lives. The reality is that most of the key underlying pharma research is publicly funded (by Competent Administrators who apportion funding to promising scientific inquiry). Pharma companies' most inventive genius is devoted to inventing new evergreening tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

That's where the FTC comes in, in this Sanofi-Mylan case. To facilitate the production of generic, off-patent drugs, the FDA maintains a database called the "Orange Book," where pharma companies are asked to enumerate all the ancillary patents associated with a product whose patent is expiring. That way, generics manufacturers who make their own version of these public domain drugs and therapeutics don't accidentally stumble over one of those later patents – say, by replicating a delivery system or special coating that is still in patent.

This is where the endless, satanic inventiveness of the pharma sector comes in. You see, US law provides for triple damages for "willful patent infringement." If you are a generics manufacturer eyeing up a drug whose patent is about to expire and you are notified that some other patents might be implicated in your plans, you must ensure that you don't accidentally infringe one of those patents, or face business-destroying statutory damages.

So pharma companies stuff the Orange Book full of irrelevant patent claims they say may be implicated in a generic manufacture program. Each of these claims has to be carefully evaluated, both by a scientific team and a legal team, because patents are deliberately obfuscated in the hopes of tricking an inattentive patent examiner into granting patents for unpatentable "inventions":

https://blueironip.com/patents-that-hide-the-ball/

What's more, when a pharma giant notifies the FDA that it has ancillary patents that are relevant to the Orange Book, this triggers a 30-month delay before a generic can be marketed – adding 2.5 years to the 20 year patent term. That delay is sometimes enough to cause a manufacturer to abandon plans to market a generic drug – so the delay isn't 2.5 years, it's infinite.

This is a highly technical, highly consequential form of evergreening. It's obscure as hell, and requires a deep understanding of patent obfuscation, ancillary patent filings, generic pharma industry practice, and the FDA's administrative procedures.

Sanofi's Orange Book entry for Lantus insulin listed 50 related patent claims. Of these, 48 were invalidated through "inter partes" review (basically the Patent Office decided they shouldn't have allowed these claims to be included on a patent). Neither of the remaining two claims were found to be relevant to the manufacture of generic Lantus.

This is where the FTC's filing comes in: their amicus brief doesn't take a position whether Sanofi's Orange Book entries were fraudulent, but they do ask the FDA to intervene to prevent Orange Book stuffing because "improper listings can cause significant harm to competition and consumers."

This is the kind of boring, technical, important stuff that excellent administrators can do. The FTC's brief is notice to the FDA that it should amend its procedures to ban (and punish) Orange Book abuse. That will make it possible for you, a person who needs medicine, to get that medicine more cheaply and quickly. In America's pay-for-use privatized healthcare hellscape, this could be a life-or-death matter.

There's plenty of things the Biden administration is getting very, very badly wrong, but we shouldn't lose sight of how its progressive wing is making real, lasting change for the better. Competent Administrations are the true peoples' champions. They beat Competent Men every time.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

[max1461]

what is is about third worldists that align with your values specifically if i may ask

I think the most pressing political issue is global poverty and the exploitation of people in poor countries by international capital. I also find that third-worldists tend to be more pluralistic, more invested in a future vision of a global human brotherhood of many diverse people of equal standing in cooperation with one another, than other political factions, who seem more likely to be interested in promulgating a single vision of what human life/society should look like as widely as possible. At the same time, third-worldists, being largely Marxists or Marxist-influenced, typically endorse a view of truth as objective rather than culturally relative and are thus likely to be essentially pro-science and less taken in by non-Western forms of reactionary conservatism than a lot of less principled leftists are.

[critters-collection]

Hello

I'm trying to make a catalog of whatever not art school related work I have the time to do, and as I have a bit of a twst obsession this is probably gonna be mostly about this perfect wonderful game for the foreseeable future I'll post whatever I have on hand, messy and quick doodles -like this one- or actual illustrations and designs I put effort in (I'm partly doing this to force myself to look the stuff I'm not satisfied with in the eyes and resist the urge to throw it away) ANYWAY I originally made this thing because I wanted to best communicate my opinion in a "twst alcohol hc" poll post, but recycling's good for the worms so here it is See, my enlightened vision is that as much as Lilia can daintily swing a sparkling fairy wine flute, I headcanon him to chug down ginormous mugs of gnome mead bigger than his head Like, in my mind, during Malleus's post-hatching childhood he spent way too many nights hanging out in burrow pubs with the smaller/wilder kinds of nocturnal faes to gossip with bog hags, get shitfaced with or without a goblin party, or if tipsy enough to butt heads with grouchy reactionaries (I picture this gnome to not have politically correct views on the peace treaty)

I zoomed in on the pixies because. Because I like pixies.

I also like this guy, he's probably stationed as a guard but he'd have made a good foot soldier

[sam-keeper]

of course social media trends reactionary, how am I to compress and summarize all the theory I've read and all the life I've lived into a *post* that can compellingly present a novel vision of humanity's future? whereas reminding people what they already lazily believe is very character-efficient.

[katyspersonal]

Perhaps Marika's situation is less about 'perpetuating the cycle' and more about reactionary paranoia?

I was thinking a bit more about the reveal what the Hornsent once did with Marika's folks and why (this ( x ) post by drenched-in-sunlight for context) some more!

Like, think about what kind of folks she has been oppressing in her reign past the point of simply taking revenge on the Hornsent! Misbegotten, for one, were also considered sacred due to odds of their contact with Crucible, so were the Crucible Knights fashioning themselves after it. With Fire Giants it was more plainly stated that there was a fear that they might burn the Erdtree once. And who knows if they would? Their fire had it's worshippers and was a godly thing too, and perhaps Fell God was called Fell for a reason? Albinaurics were creation by Nox, people who once angered the Greater Will itself, in their pursuit to have the 'Lord of the Night' and pretty much counter Marika's rule..

The thing I am seeing is not "becoming the very thing she sworn to destroy", but "if some folks believe their kind is blessed in any way this is an instant 🚩"! Because that's the shared link between the species she put under oppression - considering themselves and/or being considered divine. She didn't just take revenge or continued the cycle, she "learned" from her traumatic experience but she learned a bad thing, and now crippling some species believed to be "blessed" before they went "far" is her whole MO. She destroys them before they can even THINK of being purer and better than her! Because really, who is to tell they won't come after her and her family? After all.. the Hornsent did once believe they were divine, didn't they?

I know I compare her with Gwyn often, but whereas he was very cunning and smart in his fear, Marika was more outright oppressive. Marika is like if Gwyn personally obliterated Manus and all Pygmy but one and made humans live in constant humiliation and mistreatment 🤔 Because nothing and no one should be considered sacred besides those she personally blessed, or else it is 🚩🚩🚩. She didn't perpetuate the cycle but attempted to stop it, by solidifying herself and her vision as the one and only thing that can be "divine" or will EVER be divine. Better oppression by one power forever than the cycles of thriving and then being killed by multiple powers! It is the dilemma of being "preventive". You can't be nice about it, but how CAN you take any chances, after having seen what funny thoughts can lead to?

(On the brighter note this makes her/Radagon's alliance with Rennala much nicer because glintstone and moon sorceries were in the contrary with the Golden Order once but merged after marriage (according to Rogier's research, I trust that man lol). She didn't put Carians and other sorcerers under oppression at the end of the war. It means that love was the only thing stronger than paranoia, once ;-;)

[yallthemwitches]

Some James (and Potter family) Headcanon

Because I always seem to fixate on Lily hc and he needs some love:

---James didn't really chase after Lily because she was pretty, intelligent, and cheeky (though those helped) but rather because she was a challenge for him. Not in the sense that she said no for years and he loved the chase, but because Lily as a person really expanded his worldview. Due to his extremely coddled upbringing and lush life due to his blood status/ quidditch ability, James always gravitated to people that made his life more difficult in an enriching way: Sirius was the first person to ever "hit back" with his own antics and not shy away from taking the piss out of him, Remus had a troubled life completely foreign to James that provided lots of apparent troubles but also made James see bravery in a new light, and Peter made him a mentor figure who saw merit even in meekness. Lily came from a different background from him and despite having a temper was highly rational and never reactionary even when faced with discrimination. Despite growing up in one of the hardest times to be a muggleborn, she overcame it. She found meaning and joy in even the darkest places ( her friendship with Snape being the most difficult of examples to understand.) and made James better because she didn't resign to looking at the world like he did, but rather sharpened his vision of it.

--Of all the many muggle movies Lily showed James, his absolute favorite was Harold and Maude ( Hal Ashby 1971). It was the first time he had ever seen a depiction of mortality really laid out in front of him and it was the first time Lily ever saw him cry.

--Nothing made James more angry than when Lily would be harassed for her blood status and the fact that she was dating him. This feeling was often left unresolved as Lily refused to let him retaliate, saying it was stooping to their level to fight back.

---While also having just natural unruly hair, James like keeping his hair unkept because it was an act of rebellion from his parents who acquired the family fortune on hair taming products. He felt like it brought a sense of irony to the household.

---I feel like this one MUST be canon: James hated Snape for a lot of reasons but I think the biggest was that he was so close to Lily for so long and James was never so lucky. Then, once Snape started to be into dark magic it was all the more reason to detest him.

--I know everyone loves Fleamont, but I am always partial to thinking about Euphemia Potter because there is so little known about her. I like to think she was a very eccentric and worldly person who gave her interest in muggle things to her son. I have this image of her listening to 1960s muggle zamrock around the house ( artists like WITCH and Amanaz---60s trippiness meets African traditional music). For a while I had this headcanon that she worked directly with the Statue of Secrecy Department ( hence why she met the Potters' in the first place due to Henry Potter's influence) so she was very up to date on the very thin line squibs and muggles would walk into either finding or revealing the wizarding world (like how hilarious would it be if someone like Alejandro Jodowosky or David Lynch was a squib and Euphemia was their case worker and had to call them up and be like "Cutie, you are giving away too much, take it down a notch" so they don't accidentally reveal wizard secrets.) For this reason her and Lily got along really well.

--James really loved to read! Everyone always makes James this jock, prankster bad boy but the kid was super smart ( I mean he became an animangus and made the marauders map--its literally canon). He had loads of books on Transfiguration and mostly read nonfiction, but Lily got him to read more fiction and muggle works once they got together. He was more practical about his reading though and was not very interested in the more existential topics that Sirius would often carry around.

--When he found out Lily was pregnant he quit the order on the spot. No questions asked. Lily was annoyed by this for a while. He pulled them out of missions before she had even finished her first trimester and even so she felt like he would have been much more helpful out on the field then playing house with her at home (especially when she wasn't even showing yet). Lily even wanted to keep doing missions until she was farther in her pregnancy, but James was beside himself about the idea of her continuing to be in danger while pregnant. It was one of the biggest fights they ever had and ended with James crying, which immediately broke Lily down.

(Art source @blvnk-art )

[stackslip]

ruining the notre dame reopening hype for most of my relatives by half bitching about how much of it is a grotesque nationalist farce that's not so subtly pushed and funded by reactionary "guardians of french christendom" and half bitching about how much they based the reconstruction on viollet le duc's work when the guy (fundational to restoration work as he was) was also completely fucking clueless at the time and pushed a 19th century nationalist romanticized vision of medieval gothic architecture that we know today is fundamentally wrong, and how restoring the interior of notre dame to all white is so fucking stupid and sanitized and a tragic waste. and also bitched some more about notre dame's stupid use as a nationalist symbol that people keep saying is good bc it helps fund heritage protection/restoration meanwhile the places i've been working on during summer get basically nothing bc they don't fit the nationalist framework nearly as much lol

[southernsolarpunk]

I am once again posting the solarpunk manifesto because I keep seeing people saying that solarpunk is just an aesthetic

Inspired by Solarpunk: A Reference Guide and Solarpunk: Notes Towards a Manifesto

A Solarpunk Manifesto

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.

We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.

At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.

The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.

Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.

Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.

Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.

Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.

Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.

Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.

Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:

1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)

Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)

Appropriate technology

Art Nouveau

Hayao Miyazaki

Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world

High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.

Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.

Solarpunk:

is diverse

has room for spirituality and science to coexist

is beautiful

can happen. Now

-The Solarpunk Community