#some of these are very basic predictions so i hate to act like its revolutionary. but still

[hollyberrygarden]

things that I, a Wildberry fan, hope to see in the Awakened Hollyberry/Eternal Sugar update next month:

his presence. deadass. I just want him there. none of this list could happen but if he's there, I'm content

new sprite(s), either really happy or really sad/hurt. we've seen the other beasts hit where it hurts with the other ancients, not above targeting/hurting the ones they care about and love (and definitely not above direct violence), so there is a lot of potential for new sprites for him (and also for Hollyberry ofc). he already has a good amount, but the more the merrier I say

more dialogue abt him being raised by Hollyberry/him being her adoptive son. I think about her significance in his life constantly, and I really want a canon story touching on their feelings about that in more detail, especially from Hollyberry. it's genuinely so interesting and the only thing we know about it is Wildberry's brief explanation of it in Cookie Odyssey. PLEASE

combining these last two points - Wildberry getting severely injured/kidnapped by Eternal Sugar or some equivalent. it would be a direct hit to Hollyberry herself given his status as her bodyguard AND as someone she has raised since he was a kid. directly taking/hurting someone so important to her, someone who has always protected her when she once did the same for him and she can't do anything about it. and it's one of the things spurring her to not only keep fighting, to keep living, but also reach her Awakened form. please devsis PLEASE

banter with Pitaya Dragon. I really hope they also go to Beast Yeast (considering their presence in that one cutscene at the end of the Crispia storyline + their new alliance with Hollyberry, I think it's very possible), and I want them and Wildberry to argue constantly!!! it always made me laugh in the Dragon City update. give me a part 2 of that

more dialogue about him being raised by Hollyberry < / 3

[saintambrose]

haha it’s US politics hours

listen, this tumblr has always been a fandom place since its inception and I’ve not really designated it as a space for political discussion because 1) I have several other avenues for that arena of discussion and 2) escapism was the theme here; but I’ve finally watched The Comey Rule and I have some THOUGHTS 

and I’m not really sure how active anyone is here anymore anyway, because I’ve not really been around as regularly as I was before the nsfw-ban shitstorm, so. Diving right in.

Probably my favorite thing was how it painted the American right wing as this faux-centrist bastion of impartiality at first, the whole circus with HiLLaRy’S EmAiLs being about how they legitimately believed they could play the angle that the emails were a threat to national security all while they knew damn well it was a huge big nothingburger (with a side of hatred of women) while doing that thing that right wingers have done since the Reagan administration where they malign anything left of fascism as communism (including basic human rights) and then, predictably, you have all these very furrowed-browed old white men sitting around a conference table being VERY CONCERNED that precisely the thing they wanted to happen came true and they are completely unprepared to do damage control on the mess they engineered because WHITE MEN ARE INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS. 🤣😂🤣😂

In all seriousness. I wasn’t crazy about Hillary either. I don’t like dynasties of any kind, royal or political. I don’t like establishment dems who are really just center-right in the real world while masquerading as left in backwards-ass bizarro-world USA. But I’m an old motherfucker now, I’m well into my 30s, I’m boring and watch CSPAN for leisure and shit. I read the reports coming out of the DOJ. One of my degrees is in political science, though admittedly, that’s the least thing that matters, in the scope of everything else these days. But it’s safe to say Hillary was unfairly maligned while republicans committing atrocities exponentially worse have been treated with kid gloves for decades. A very distinct double standard has been applied here for....longer than I’ve been alive, that even the most educated people on the left have refused to acknowledge for far too long. I watched that entire BeNgHaZi hearing (which is easily accessible on youtube, so there’s literally no excuse not to know the facts on this), and everyone knew -- everyone knew it was a bullshit smear campaign. 

So, this post isn’t so much a review of the miniseries more than it’s an indictment of the corruption of American politics. The most damning aspect being that, on principle, US politics has always had a problem with embracing progressive policy, and basic civil rights in general. That’s not news; people have known this for some time. But the thing that this miniseries really illustrated in a very cartoonish, yet succinct, way is that there are experienced professionals who hold the highest, most powerful seats of authority in this country who won’t bat an eye at dedicating their entire careers to denigrating common decency, basic human rights, and even constitutional law, while being absolutely incapable of conceiving the long-term consequences of these actions, who will then turn around and concern troll over the ashes of the empire they enthusiastically helped to burn down. It’s nauseating. It’s infuriating. It shows a pathological disregard for personal responsibility.

Everyone was so preoccupied with their massive turgid erection for hating the Clintons (and women) that no one saw they were enthusiastically living in a henhouse built by fucking foxes. No one saw the genuine threat. 

And, by extension, no one had the balls to acknowledge that age-old instinct of white men willing to engage in a scorched earth campaign simply to satisfy their worst impulses and entitlement complexes. 

Can you fit “Who cares if we’re screwing over several generations with corrupt court-packing and a flagrant disregard for checks-and-balances predicated entirely on the honor system; we just don’t feel like doing domestic labor or respecting women and minorities so we’ll continue expediting reprehensible policies that exploit the most vulnerable people in this country because we can’t compete in an authentic meritocracy" onto a campaign slogan banner? 

I sounded the alarms on this trend 20 years ago, meanwhile. My parents and I had just gotten US citizenship, luckily months before 9/11 and the patriot act; and as an outsider looking in, as someone who had risked their life escaping a dangerous regime at an incredibly young age, I saw the warning signs in the republican party even back then. Naturally, I was denigrated as an alarmist and a butthurt liberal. 

You know, I’ll acknowledge that as a white person, I’m not the average American’s image of what an “immigrant” looks like. My experiences here over the past couple of decades have thrown into sharp relief how “immigrant” is just a dogwhistle for racist bullshit, because people who concern troll about us don’t seem to have many problems with us white ones. But I came out of a communist country. I’m straight outta the eastern bloc. And I don’t think there are any words in any spoken language that can do justice to how insulting it is when americans try to americasplain communism to me. Bitch. Y’all don’t fucking know. You just don’t.

The point is, even back then, I could see the slippery slope republicans were tumbling down, and I can't say I derive any pleasure from being vindicated in such an extreme fashion. Like. I told y’all motherfuckers. TWO DECADES AGO.

People who aren’t familiar with US politics, and even long-term US citizens who for some reason feel like it’s a waste to pay attention to your own shit, seem to spend a lot of time trying to unpack what precisely went wrong. My observations came up with 1) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools glossing over, and even omitting, the most gruesome aspects of the revolutionary war, the holocaust, and the cold war (and oftentimes, the cold war is NEVER EVEN COVERED, which is especially insulting to me, for obvious reasons); 2) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools teaching kids that the Declaration of independence and the Constitution are unassailable doctrines of freedom and liberty, and, as such, after independence was won, no further activism to maintain democracy was needed so we can all just smoke a bowl and be complacent because all those authoritarian third world regimes we constantly ridicule and criticize can NeVeR HaPPeN hErE 😒; and 3) how limpdick both-sidesism replaced civil, comprehensive political discussion because the right spent so long abusing, denigrating, and bullying the left that it was just easier to play it safe and take the milquetoast ~centrist~ stance, which always, always, always capitulates to the lowest common denominator, which is always the oppressor. 

And generally just this age-old trend of holding the victims of systematic oppression to a higher moral and behavioral standard than the perpetrators of systematic oppression. 

Guys, I’m tired. I’m so tired. 

I’ve gotten a few questions over the years about why my writing is so angsty, why it always seems to follow the same themes; war crimes, PTSD, gore, torture. 

I already escaped one authoritarian regime. The USA promised us one thing, and then once we got here, it started emulating the very tyrants we worked so hard to get away from. A lot of people have no idea what that feels like. How much of a betrayal that is. Especially considering all the financial and legal landmines one has to navigate just to do it, and then we’re punished for that, too.

I write about PTSD because I fucking have it. I write about war crimes because I’ve experienced them firsthand - just as a victim and not the perpetrator. I so often write about soldiers committing them because I want to roleplay what it’s like to not be a victim for once. 

tbh writing a fucking Hamilton fanfiction is one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever done, but the extensive research I’ve had to do to be able to write this thing has been low-key traumatic. There’s a lot of historical material I’ve consumed that should have been covered at the most basic level of compulsory education, but conspicuously isn’t. And I know that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s by design. 

Democracy - and independence, freedom, liberty, justice, civil rights in general - isn’t just some final xbox achievement that you unlock and then just shelve the game and forget about it for the rest of your life. You have to keep grinding to maintain it, because there will always be selfish, malicious people out there who will dedicate their entire lives playing a long con to ensure you don’t get the same opportunities as them. For the love of god, stop playing the both-sidesism game. From someone coming out of the eastern bloc, I can tell you with great confidence that that was part of the propaganda campaign you were fed to keep you from engaging so they could install a dictatorship under your nose. Do some self-guided historical research, guys. It can be very illuminating.

Anyway. I’ve gone on long enough here, but damn, don’t screw this up again, guys. Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, and I’m going to do my duty. When I first came to this country, after experiencing the rigorous vetting process and labyrinthine legal requirements of US citizenship, I was led to believe that in exchange for that privilege, I was personally responsible for my own civic self-education. It’s so much more important than you've been led to believe. 

[englishchinesetranslations]

Reviewed by John Bell

Adolf Hitler emerged from World War I as a decorated but penniless army corporal, embittered by the lost war and the devastating Treaty of Versailles which he, like many Germans, attributed to treachery rather than failure of German arms. Yet in 1933 he stood as the undisputed leader of a resurgent Germany, revered by his own people as have been few leaders in history. The story of that ascent is important because the forces that shaped the world in which Hitler contended for power are the same ones that shape our world today --- the shadowy, seemingly disconnected worlds of Bolshevism and international finance.

James and Suzanne Pool's Who Financed Hitler paints a picture that will disappoint conspiracy buffs but which may surprise those who have seen Hitler solely as a demonic megalomaniac because the left has portrayed him that way for the last 60 years. The bottom line is that Hitler rose to power legally via the ballot box. And he did it in large measure --- though by no means exclusively --- on the strength of small contributions from lower and middle class Germans who were most harmed by the war, by the Treaty of Versailles and the runaway inflation that it brought on and by the malevolent, pervasive threat of communist revolution.

Among conspiracy believers it has long been an article of faith that Hitler was secretly funded by Bolshevism, by Wall Street or by international Jewish bankers. Indeed, World War II did make the world safe for Bolshevism, delivering half of Europe into communist hands. It also devastated the White nations of the world, killing millions of the flower of European manhood in the process. However, Who Financed Hitler presents little evidence to support the conspiracy thesis. Most of the money Hitler received from the wealthy class came from nationalist German, British, and American individuals acting alone, an example being car maker Henry Ford. If communism did provide money, it constituted only a small fraction of Hitler's backing.

The truth is that Hitler was the most popular politician in Germany in the late '20s and early '30s. He did not seize power by overthrowing a legitimate regime. He garnered the votes of millions of ordinary German workers, shop owners and artisans. He was opposed not only by communists -- with whom he waged, quite literally, a battle to the death -- but also by most of Germany's military, industrial and intellectual leadership. His "Brown Shirt" street army has been condemned, but in post-WWI Germany it was a necessary self-defense tactic adapted from the communists, who routinely used mob violence against opponents.

The Treaty of Versailles created economic conditions where Hitler's populist message could gain a hearing. The Allies forced a prostrate Germany, threatened by communist revolution from within, to accept full blame for the war. Reparations included the loss of 25,000 square miles of territory together with 6 million inhabitants. Germany lost 65 percent of her iron ore reserves, 45 percent of her coal, 72 percent of her zinc and 10 percent of her industrial capacity. A 26 percent tax was placed on all German imports. It was calculated that, with interest, the cash reparation burden would have taken 50 years to pay off.  [Image: Hitler's anti-Versailles poster design -- a chained Germania beneath the slogan "Only National Socialism will free Germany from the lie of sole guilt!"]

When Germany's economy collapsed in hyperinflation in the early 1920s, Versailles was to blame. Americans who remember the double digit inflation under Jimmy Carter that led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 cannot conceive of Germany's situation. At the end of World War I, Germany's mark exchanged at the rate of 9 marks per dollar. By January of 1922, the rate had increased to 192 marks per dollar. By November of 1923, it took over 4 trillion marks to buy one dollar! People took wheelbarrows full of money to the store to buy a loaf of bread. The wheelbarrow was worth more than the money in it. Millions of German families saw their life savings destroyed.

In this political witch's brew, Hitler's nationalism gave hope to the common man. Had not Germany's elite prevailed on German President Paul von Hindenburg to withhold power from him, he would have become Chancellor in 1932, by which time the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) was the largest party in Germany, with almost twice as many deputies in the Reichstag as its nearest competitor, the fading Social Democrats. Significantly, the Communist Party was the third largest party.

Hitler created the modern election campaign single-handedly, using airplanes to make as many as four or five speeches a day across Germany. Everywhere he was greeted as a savior by ordinary Germans fed up with grinding poverty and communist agitation. Yet the ruling class still opposed him. Only by holding the specter of communism before the Prussian aristocracy, the old-line Junkers landowner class, the military leadership and German industrialists was Hitler able to secure the behind-the-scenes power base needed to gain the Chancellorship.

In the early years, Hitler received only modest support from wealthy German industrialists. Most supported several political parties, some with mildly socialist views. They were anxious to void the Treaty of Versailles but were not eager to risk another war. Furthermore, they were deathly afraid of the influence of communism. German industry sometimes made surprising wage concessions to German workers even during the height of the post-war depression, in order to prevent communists from gaining a foothold. However they were not willing to support Hitler in the early years, perhaps because they perceived in Hitler's message a willingness to take genuine risks.

There were notable exceptions, patriotic individuals whose passion for restoration of a strong nationalist Germany, free of the hated Treaty of Versailles, outweighed their caution and led them to support Hitler out of conviction. Early on, he received help from the secretive Thule Society, a group of aristocrats dedicated to reconstructing a strong Germany. Later, two wealthy German industrialists became key backers.

One was Emil Kirdorf, who began contributing to Hitler in 1927. Kirdorf, whose fortune was made in the German coal mining industry, was so anti-socialist that before the war he considered the Kaiser himself to be a pawn of the middle-of-the-road Social Democrats. The authors point out that "[h]is feud with the Kaiser was carried so far that he refused to appear at any social function where the monarch was present." To such a man, Hitler's brand of nationalism appealed on principle.

By 1929, Hitler had the backing of Fritz Thyssen, heir to the vast steel holdings of his father, August Thyssen. In 1926 the father died and Fritz became chairman of the board of United Steel Works, the largest steel trust in Germany. Thyssen gave more money to Hitler than any other individual. He hated communism with a passion, perhaps because during the abortive German communist revolution of 1918 both he and his father were arrested by a communist revolutionary group and very nearly executed by firing squad. They were freed four days later when even these communist zealots could find no credible charges under which to execute them.

Despite his popularity among the German rank and file, Hitler knew he needed support from Germany's establishment. To this end he cultivated his few industrial supporters carefully in the hope that he might make a breakthrough. In 1929, Emil Kirdorf summoned Hitler for reassurance that Hitler's Brown Shirts would leave Germany's industries alone. Hitler replied that he needed only three things to fully enforce his authority on the party: "I want a little time, a lot of money, and the ban against my political activities in Prussia lifted."

"And what if I give you all of these?" Kirdorf asked.

"You and the other industrialists could dictate the party line insofar as it affected you and the properties you own." As James and Suzanne Pool point out, "From that day forth Hitler basically lived up to this agreement." Hitler gave similar assurances to the Army in 1930 as his NSDAP gained in popular support, admitting that the Brown Shirts "were set up exclusively for the purpose of protecting the Party in its propaganda activities ...." In a Germany racked by communist mobs and street violence, this protection, as foreign as it may seem to today's sheltered Americans, was a necessity for survival.

In January 1932 Hitler appealed to Germany's industrial leadership in a speech to the Industry Club of Dusseldorf. While he gained a few new converts, he presented a tightly reasoned defense of German nationalism that appears to have defused much of his organized opposition among the industrial leadership. The Pools write: "The audience feared Communism more than anything else. Realizing this, Hitler made the danger of Marxism the central theme of his speech. He discussed the topic with rational logic and made some startlingly accurate predictions about its future development."

Hitler argued that liberal democracy and the idea of human equality would inevitably lead to communism. "You maintain, gentlemen, that German business life must be constructed on a basis of private property. Now such a conception as that of private property can only be defended if in some way or another it appears to have a logical foundation. This conception must deduce its ethical justification from an insight into the necessity which Nature dictates ... I am bound to say that private property can be morally and ethically justified only if I admit that men's achievements are different."

"And once this is admitted it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. . . In periods of national decline, we always find that in place of the value of personality there is substituted a leveling idea of the supremacy of mere numbers -- democracy ... [But now] the concept of human equality itself has been developed into a political and economic 'system' and this system ... is Communism."

Hitler's thesis is historically sound. Karl Marx favored democracy, stating in his 1848 "Communist Manifesto" that "The first step in the revolution of the working class ... is to win the battle for democracy." America's Founders detested democracy. John Randolph spoke derisively of "King Numbers." James Madison said that democracies inevitably degenerated into mob rule.

No study of Hitler is complete without coverage of Hitler's relationship to the Jews. Indeed it is this aspect that forms the heart and soul of the left's vilification of Hitler -- and, by extension, of all nationalism. Who Founded Hitler is no exception. It contains a number of obligatory rebukes for "anti-Semitism" and "racism." However, a curious alternate view also emerges, largely based on facts that receive only muted criticism. These little-known facts explain much of the negative attitude of Hitler and Europeans of his time to Jews.

The discussion centers around support by Henry Ford for Hitler's opposition to Bolshevism. In the early 1920s, Ford published a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, largely devoted to exposing the Jewish roots of Bolshevism and the complicity between communists in the Soviet Union and Jewish bankers on Wall Street. His articles, including his analysis of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, were collected in book form, a four-volume study called The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem.

The Pools write: "Both Ford and Hitler believed that Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists were partners aiming to gain control over the nations of the world. Their views differed somewhat, but this was mainly a result of their contrasting positions and nationalities .... Communism was a completely Jewish creation. Not only was its founder, Karl Marx, the grandson of a rabbi, but more importantly Jews held leading positions, as well as a high percentage of the membership, in the Communist parties throughout the world."

The authors claim this fact was of little import. But they let stand some damning fact. "[T]his charge against the Jews was believed by many middle class Germans because it did seem to conform to the facts ...  [W]hile there were only 7 million Jews among the total Russian population of 136 million, their share in the membership of the revolutionary parties was about 50 percent ...  However, most Jews were not in the rank and file, but rather in the upper echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy." Lenin, himself part Jewish, said that, "Jews provided a particularly high percentage of the leaders of the revolutionary movement."

These facts were well known throughout Europe in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Red Terror that followed, during which literally tens of millions of white Russian middle class citizens were slaughtered. The likely reason for their butchery was genocide, i.e., elimination of the genes of those who possessed sufficient intellect and resolve to provide opposition to the Bolsheviks. Americans should consider carefully the implications of these suppressed historical events. Contrary to current perception, communism is not dead. If it ever gains the upper hand here, we will have our own Red Terror.

No man in history has been more vilified than Adolf Hitler. Whatever one believes about Hitler's alleged "genocide" -- and there is a growing body of scholarship that impeaches many of the more extravagant claims -- everyone concedes that the mass murders committed by Stalin and Mao are far higher than anything Hitler has ever been accused of. Figures for these murderers range as high as 65 million each, carnage which defies imagination. Yet only Hitler bears the continuing wrath of the left. By now, it should have occurred to at least a few Americans to ask why.

The answer is that Hitler called for European nationalism as a response to communism, liberalism and internationalism. Both Stalin and Mao were communists, committed to communist world domination -- as Henry Ford explained so long ago. Communist egalitarianism is a sham, intended to divide the loyalties of ethnically related peoples. Hitler is still demonized today because if the left is to achieve its dream of world conquest it cannot permit the rise of nationalism -- or the validation of nationalist aspirations from the past.