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house study

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"NO, NO, NO, I HAVE AN IMMUNE!"

дайте танк родные

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im a materialist. i love to have items

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I wish they were real, I want to feed them mashed sweet potatoes

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There's a lot of competition for funniest moments in Pathologic but a top five has to be in Artemy's route where Vlad the Younger can pay you 7k to go down a well to see wtf is going on and you meet the Rat Prophet, and upon going back to VtY and telling him it's fucked up down there he asks you, in the tone of a man who really doesn't want to be saying what he's saying, 'was there a... tiny.... rat man...' and when you're like wtf yeah what is it he's like idk. Here's another 7k to never speak of it again

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someone vague-posting me in the patho tag: I was going to be a pedant and say something in defense of my post but then I saw them accuse me of "anti-soviet" sentiment, and well. Surely they live in a world of their own that I'd be egotistical to think I can penetrate.

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not to be dogmatic but one of the funnier but also depressing things about postmodernism and the total abandonment of socialism and materialism is how sometimes you’ll read a new essay from some very seemingly radical scholar of decolonization or something who has so taken for granted that marxist theory is like eurocentric and marginal and hasn’t seriously studied it and then there’s a section where they’re just unknowingly trying to reverse engineer some very basic principle of marxism and can’t quite get there

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Wait, hold on, I want to talk about Marxism and the Kains. If you will bear with me. And if you will also let go of/forget the Omelas child because I don't think the Kains want that kind of utopia, either.

For the Kains, the town was made as a focus to capture a "mystical manifestation of a world inscrutable and inaccessible for men" because sometimes, that impossible, fantasy world collides with the mundane. Example: mundane materials from mundane flesh-and-blood people created the Polyhedron, which houses genuine "mystical manifestations" and is "inscrutable."

When Maria says that Utopia requires "dirt, blood, manure, devourment, skins, meat, and bone tools," she means that it's part of the creation, not the product. Literally what the Kains want is an eclipse-like event brought about by a miracle and then captured to be used as a Utopia. Here's the timeline:

create the mundane town -> create a society wherein there exists two conflicting groups, devourers and creators, that live together -> the sustained existence of this is a miracle -> the "mystical world" eclipse is here and needs to be captured -> build a structure to house the miracle -> they build the Cathedral but it's not good enough -> the Kains fail.

This is why people in the game refer to the Kains as a cult because, to them, the true metamorphosis of utopia isn't "the dream of mercantile prosperity, sensible social structure, or political fairness." It's not Thomas More's or anybody's draft of a well-structured world - there is no Omelas, there is no child - it's this tenth-dimension reality that already exists in our world but is so inconceivable to us that it's invisible. In the sense that antibiotics have always existed in our world, even before they were made - we just couldn't always conceptualize of them. True Utopia is this on an unimaginably macro level.

The Kains suddenly, surprisingly succeed in the creation of the Polyhedron. They capture a miracle and can finally interact with and view it. This is the start of their Final Utopia.

Where the human rights abuses kick in is not in the product but in the creation of a Final Utopia.

This is what Georgiy (or Simon) has to say about it in the Marble Nest:

"My heart aches for [the dead]. This is dreadfully cruel. But perhaps the thing we are trying to build can only be erected with the help of those who have passed it - the exam of death. Who has learned not to fight it, like you do; not to deny it, but rather ... Embed it into themselves. Use it. Humanity has learned to use the law of gravity, hasn't it? There is your proof, just look out of the window. There was a time when humans could not brave the sky. But that time has passed."

So the idea here is that progress (toward an existence so advanced it is impossible, unthinkable) requires suffering. It requires poverty so that it can learn from poverty, dying so that we can learn to stop it. Imagine that we are in Dankovsky's future, where everyone is immortal; we are dependent on the pre-existence of death. All forms of dying were integral to this future.

In the same way that communism requires capitalism so that it can learn from the suffering of capitalism (according to Marx).

What Georgiy has to say about "not fighting the exam" is Marx's approach to history.

"Achieving modern levels of civilization required ancient chattel slavery and/or similar systems of brutal exploitation, misery and subjugation to begin the process of material accumulation that led to further innovation and cultural advance. Thus the broad historical alternatives are either justice on the basis of atomized farming at the eternal mercy of nature, or slavery and similar systems of brutality with the ultimate result of reaching modern civilizations." - Jeffrey Vogel

This is also not in dismissal of suffering, either.

"No such justificatory reasons are available for those who are required to sacrifice themselves on behalf of human progress. ... It is implausible to expect self-respecting slaves to regard our benefit as a sufficient reason for the sacrifice of their one life on earth." - Jeffrey Vogel (again. i'd recommend reading this article)

The tragedy of history is that liberty needs to be prioritized over justice in order for the creation of true communism. Communism, or utopia, or whatever the Kains are making, needs to benefit off the pain of those who never get to see it. And nobody has to like it, or feel okay about it. As Georgiy says, "this is dreadfully cruel."

Here I am at the plate, and not to "go up to bat" for more deeply flawed Pathologic characters, but the reason why the Kains are left-leaning is because they are Marxist, but the ugly kind of Marxist that isn't only about overthrowing capitalism and ignoring what came before it; how communism, in many ways, should thank capitalism - not like it, but thank it.

tl;dr, we all want utopia or an ideal state of living and the kains are people who don't ignore that ideal living stems from miserable injustices (I do also think that the Kains take missteps in their own Marxist philosophy because of interpersonal reasons - ie sometimes those injustices happen to them, too, and they don't like it - nobody does! they struggle on their strings)

tl;dr dankovsky goes home and kills himself not because the utopian future is ruled by conservative futurists but because he cannot morally justify the process it took to get there within himself. if utopia requires death than he'd prefer to join the dead. this is not the world for him.

tl;dr russian game is russian

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There were some young kids playing at the park today. One of them said “Liar liar pants on fire!” The other one replied “I don’t even care about that. I don’t even believe in that.”

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"you should watch this show!!" "what is it about?" "oh it's gay!"

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another year…

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kind of emblematic of the limits of "progressive" liberalism and "progressive" zionism when the woman who was sued by holocaust denier david irving is now defending the fact that people are being deported for opposing israels genocide in palestine

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🕊️

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i thought if i cleaned up sketches rather than line them it might be quicker but hm.... took longer im pretty sure

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Just one moment. One more moment with her.

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more posters/signs. Google translated so inaccuracies possible. Seems to be references to the Bachelor/digs at his curiosity and time travel ability