#and i say this as an anarchist

[locrianking]

am yisrael fucking chai.

[mokeonn]

"oh I dont know a lot about other countries because the american school system was so bad haha." You know you can fix that, right? You can change that. With the device you are reading this post on. You know that, right?

[seoz-seoz]

here's all the finished drawings i did for my punk/antifa naruto au

✨️Konoha revolution my beloved ✨️

[simplepotatofarmer]

i'm going to say that doxxing is a serious thing involving private info being posted publicly online without permission and i really, really wish that the community had taken it seriously a year ago.

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

Somebody come and look at this

Hey Buddy are you outta your fucking mind? Crack? Is it crack that you’re smoking???? First one on the list and you already fumbling the mic??

bitch I-

[gingebreadbeetle]

I’ve been researching Cherri bomb to redesign her and all I’ve learned is she has a manipulative father and died in the 80’s.

Send help

[freemonker]

My current emotional support characters, maybe it says something about where I am in life currently, dunno

[statementlou]

So I see folks pointing out that Louis' circle A tattoo is more likely an aesthetic choice than an announcement of a political commitment to anarchism, and saying basically that that maybe makes him a bit of a poser and I mean- I GUESS. But I don't like to look at things that way and I don't think it's useful. As I see it the subversive sexiness of the symbols of resistance have ALWAYS been gateways for people who are drawn to the struggle in vague ways and that's GOOD. Aligning yourself with those values is good no matter the reason, in my book, especially given the wretched options available out there, but also the journey doesn't necessarily stop there. Gatekeeping queerness victimizes people who are just trying things out and starting to discover that it may run deeper than just trying on a new look who should instead be welcomed and helped along their path, and I fail to see how gatekeeping political affiliations is any different (plus how counterproductive to actual movement building is that?)

ANYWAY. What I really want to say about Louis is that while I KNOW that Louis is probably not secretly a theory reading anti-state communalist anarchist, I think that actually Louis' optimism and idealism (and his unwavering commitment to allying himself with the working class and embracing those roots) are a perfect fit for the philosophy and always have been. I know that anarchism is mostly understood as being about throwing molotov cocktails and fighting the state (and the allure of its symbols are that they signify this, a terrific aesthetic for him to choose to sign on with in my book), but that's honestly largely cartoonish stereotyping that comes directly from anti-anarchist state propaganda. That resistance is necessary in this hellscape of oppression we live in and is super important, but in its heart anarchism is only about the state in that the state and capitalism currently stands in the way of its goals. The whole point of anarchism is that it's NOT about the state! It's about being able to imagine something better than a state, it's about how we live and about how we SHOULD live, it's about HOPE and picturing something utopian and something free of the ways capitalism pits us against one another! What could be more Louis than that?

"I need you and you need me and I love that" is as beautiful a way of talking about the cornerstone of anarchism that is mutual aid as any long winded essay I've read (even if what he meant was contextually different), and I think when he talks again and again about how special the space fans have made around him is he is expressing an intuitive understanding of the importance of autonomous zones, places and moments outside of the shitty life imposed on us by the system (also a huge part of anarchist thought). Maybe I'm just being an optimist but I think that Louis DOES understand that caring for people and wanting self-determination and freedom for all and allying himself with the working class involves a certain amount of resistance to and positioning yourself in opposition to the state. Thinking the symbols of smashing that state are cool isn't meaningless; it's a CHOICE. There are other cool symbols out there and I just happen to think that feeling a resonance with certain ones is something in and of itself, even if at this moment he does not choose to start a fight with the media about it all.

[socialist-microwave-laser]

the "hamas actually treated their hostages really well" talking point is INSANE to me do you even hear yourselves? i don't care if these people were/are dining at the fucking ritz every night, do y'all know the amount of pain and turmoil these communities have been in for the past two months??? a friend of mine doesn't even know if her son is still ALIVE. a gilded cage is still a fucking cage, and it's still horrifying that these people are being held against their will. period, end of discussion

[toubledrouble]

You know what we should bring back?

Older christianity. I mean the anti government, anti military, community based christianity. The one that cared the most about peace, equality, mercy, kindness, and radical love. The one with shared property. The one that didn't conform to society but instead existed mostly outside of it. The one where noone considered one sin worse than another because in the end, we are all sinners trying our best to be better.

[stillflight]

To every de-assimilating and re-connecting ethnic Jew lurking in Jewish tags:

One day it will all just be part of your life, no second guesses. One day you won't feel so uncomfortable or guilty, even a little bit. One day you will be cleaning your house for Passover and realize it's all just so normal. One day you will be saying the Hanukkah blessings and realize you know them by heart. One day you will offhand mention you're Jewish and not feel that familiar pang of guilt and shame.

You are already "Jewish enough" because you are Jewish. This feeling of not quite belonging does not last forever. You will feel all right someday. I know I do now, even though for a while it felt like I never would.

Welcome home.

[nixiecat]

hey I normally try to keep this blog free of real life stuff but this person just followed me today and I just...

Zionists fuck off and don't follow me what the fuck

[seoz-gets-artsy]

Behold the bestest boy of all time

[palin-tropos]

remembering that the reason I kinda fell hard for nilsen was the revelation that the impossible architecture was designed to collapse if the revolutionary society failed its people and they lost faith in it. buildings and monuments that would self-destruct in the face of alienation and suffering. it’s not meant to last forever without collective consent, it’s deliberately fragile. a state that loses the faith of its people doesn’t deserve to exist. cities built to crumble. that this is coming from a war criminal who regrets the direction the country he founded took. do you subconsciously want to give the people the ability to pass judgement on you mister war criminal. do you want your heart weighed on a precarious scale

[nateconnolly]

Strong contender for world's funniest anarchist

[Image ID: A picture of writing. The first four sentences are an epigraph in the form of a letter. It says, "Gentlemen, I am not in possession of my registration card or of a classification card. I burned them years ago. Please send me duplicates. Thank you. Thomas C Cornell." The rest of the writing is a single paragraph. It says, "When Tom Cornell informed his draft board that he lacked a draft card, he did so not out of a sense of civic duty or because he desired to follow the letter of the law. Cornell wrote draft officials for new documents because he found himself in a dilemma in October 1965. A leader in the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a fledgling protest organization with roots in the Catholic Worker Movement, Cornell spent the Fall of 1965 organizing fellow American Catholic activists to burn their draft cards at an upcoming public rally. All of a sudden, though, he faced the embarrassing scenario of showing up at the rally without any documents to burn. So Cornell wrote his draft board in hopes that they might kindly send him "duplicates," and in the process enable him to destroy them in a ceremony he believed would convey his religious and civic objections to the draft and the war in Vietnam.]

[comradekatara]

this is more of a ramble then an ask but I was wondering how u felt about how it’s set up in atla that the world is intristically all connected together and that the ideas of bending aren’t political in nature and they’re taught by the animals in the world but even tho the show talks about how they’re all the same and stuff it never seems to really expand on his ideas and the perfect world seems to just be the four nations living together in harmony without really questioning the systems of having specific elements to nations?

this is a really good question because i've discussed how much i appreciate the way atla illustrates how nationalism is heightened and borders are reified during wartime (perhaps almost paradoxically, considering how colonialism reshapes and removes previous borders) and how resisting that ideology through uniting the nations and dispelling the myth that they are ontologically discrete is crucial to ending the war.... but then lok kind of drops the ball on exploring how that would restructure a postwar world.

i will say that i like how the novels, which explore the world of avatars past, explore geopolitics in a way that challenges the claim that "long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony." we see that in yangchen's time, there is more cross cultural exchange in terms of (im)migration, but there are also sanctions placed on the water tribes and fire nation by the earth king as punishment for supporting an ultimately failed coup. we later see in kyoshi's time how despite there being an alliance across the four nations, there is political unrest within each nation, further problematizing the notion that if the four dominant cultures are internationally allied, intranational peace must also follow.

with lok, they had the chance to imagine a world in which the dominant imperialist power is successfully dismantled, and what that kind of world would look like 70 years after the fact, but the liberal imagination is, by definition, extremely limited, so we ended up with. well. you know. intermingling families without exploring the ramifications of how various politicized traits (in this world, bending even more so than physical appearance) would affect different members (firebending being celebrated as a tool for imperialist supremacy vs earthbending being stigmatized, for example)... a city built on colonial violence, expected to be a melting pot but its oppressive origins are only ever addressed by the fascist villain... even the red lotus, an anarchist terrorist organization, dress according to the international color code.

and don't get me started on the red lotus lmao. they basically have the same ideology as atla's heroes except we're expected to believe that they're unhinged and irrational because they randomly decided that it was in their best interest to kill a teenage girl and held the fragile remnants of a genocided people hostage to do so. zaheer's philosophy is an extremely warped and reductive view of anarchism, but it's also the closest viewpoint anyone holds to the central ideological conceit of atla, which is actually crazy if you think about it.

atla establishes that despite ostensibly insurmountable cultural differences, the world is fundamentally interconnected, and understanding that relationality across humanity as well as the nonhuman world is crucial to achieving balance. lok explores what a world without borders and unjust hierarchies would mean, but comes to some flawed and downright bizarre conclusions. national borders are rearranged but nonetheless affirmed, however the border between the spirit and material realms is dissolved. but also lok declares that actually the best way to fix an unjust hierarchy is just to put "good people" at the top of them and hope that they continue to be nice even once they're given absolute power.

i do personally think that if lok had better explored the conflict between the red lotus (anarchy) and the white lotus (liberalism) as the central ideological clash across the entire show, instead of merely presenting an extremely problematic and illogical liberal value system as, somehow, the only viable method, despite its myriad noticeable flaws from the very first episode, with the smug yet blatantly fallacious assumption that any other framework is inherently inferior, the setting being a neocolonial neoliberal "melting pot" would have made much more sense and worked far better overall. i would still have issues with how they handled the water tribes, the air nomads, the (lack of) fire nation, the characterization, etc etc. but it would have made for a far stronger central plot, instead of what ultimately appears to be a set of scattered, unthorough explorations of various status-quo-challenging ideologies that korra must fight with her liberal arsenal of cops and capitalists. (but i'm realizing now that a scathing critique of the ideological underpinnings of lok may not actually have been what you were looking for in my response. so i'll stop, for now.)

ultimately, i think it's impossible to truly critique atla's approach to this philosophical quandary as a standalone work, since the show ends with the war, and thus the postwar decolonial imagination cannot be truly explored. that is why i am obligated to turn to lok if i want to criticize this idea, but i also feel like critiquing lok is pretty futile at this point, considering i've done so so many times on this blog by this point that i don't think i have anything more to add on to my already expansive laundry list of complaints. but one day i'll write a thorough outline for my vision of a postwar atla. at which point i will explore the secretly radical ideas presented in atla with far more care and nuance than those spineless libs ever could.