#but nations & war are not inevitable

[creativesplat]

Happy birthday to Nintendo's unexpectedly nuanced princess!

[clfixationstation]

I suppose it's realistic that the Jaegerists survived, but good gracious did I want them eviscerated

Their ideology is absolutely repulsive. I wish the militarism had ceased, I wish Queen Historia had managed to dissolve them, I wish that if military was necessary, that it would be a brand new group with ideals that are not imperialistic nor nationalistic

One of the consequences of Eren being a fucking dumbass I guess

and by eviscerated I don't mean they'd all be executed - that would only incite resentment and more violence - I mean ostracized, ridiculed, and disanded by the gov't and/or people of Paradis

[wonder-worker]

how do you think the Lancasters stood the best chance at winning the war?

Imo, if they'd won at Mortimer's Cross or Towton, the Yorkists would be finished.

A lot of the WotR depended on military victories, tbh. We tend to get distracted by fancy discussions like "Who had the best claim?"* or Propaganda Roulette 101, but the fact remains that it was ultimately military victories that sealed the deal and got rid of opposition**. Everything else was pretty wrapping on top of the already-won or to-be-won prize.

*The most useless debate of all **The exception was Richard III's usurpation but that was a fairly unconventional and entirely unexpected usurpation, and in any case it was a military defeat that ended his reign.

[reasonsforhope]

The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.

That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...

More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.

There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024

[apas-95]

As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

[probablyasocialecologist]

From Hamas’s perspective, was Operation Al Aqsa Flood a successful operation? Hamas undoubtedly knew that Israeli retaliation would include the killing of many Palestinian civilians, even if the horrific scale of Israel’s assault was unforeseen. Was October 7, then, a collective martyrdom operation launched without the consent of 2.3 million Palestinians? And, for the many people who proclaim their support for the Palestinian cause but reflexively condemn the violence of the October 7 attacks, how can they realistically separate the two?  Drop Site conducted a series of interviews with senior Hamas officials alongside a comprehensive review of its statements and those of its leaders. I interviewed a variety of Hamas sources on background for this story and two—Basem Naim and Ghazi Hamad—agreed to speak on the record. I also spoke to a range of knowledgeable Palestinians, Israelis, and international sources in an effort to understand the tactical and political aims of the October 7 attacks. Some people will inevitably criticize the choice to interview and publish Hamas officials’ answers to these questions as propaganda. I believe it is essential that the public understand the perspectives of the individuals and groups who initiated the attack that spurred Israel’s genocidal war—an argument that is seldom permitted outside of simple soundbytes. Hamas leaders cast their operations on October 7 as a righteous rebellion against an occupation force that has waged a military, political, and economic war of collective punishment against the people of Gaza. “They have left us no choice other than to take the decision in our hands and to fight back,” said Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza. “October 7, for me, is an act of defense, maybe the last chance for Palestinians to defend themselves.”

[...]

Hamas has emphasized that its aim on October 7 was to shatter the status quo and compel the U.S. and other nations to address the plight of the Palestinians. On this front, informed analysts say, they succeeded. “On October 6, Palestine had disappeared from the regional agenda, from the international agenda. Israel was dealing unilaterally with the Palestinians without generating any attention or any criticism,” said Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official who worked as a special advisor on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group. “The attacks of Hamas on October 7 and their aftermath played a crucial role, but I think just as much credit, if you will, goes to Israel, if not more so,” he added. “If Israel had responded in the way that it did in [previous assaults on Gaza] in 2008, 2014, 2021, it would have been a story for a number of weeks, there would have been a lot of hand wringing, and that would have been the end of it.” “It's not only the actions of the colonized, but also the reaction of the colonizer that has created the current political reality, the current political moment,” Rabbani said.

9 July 2024

[txttletale]

could you elaborate on the difference between liberalism and fascism? it often seems like the latter can evolve into the former, but the varying definitions of fascism sometimes make it unclear when the line is crossed - possibly due to fascism’s position both as a politics and a historic moment?

disclaimer: this is a very rough overview and by no means comprehensive

fascism is a political project by which capitalism reasserts itself in the face of the threat of socialist uprising -- fascism adopts some of the rhetoric of communism while offering no actual change to the ownership of the means of production (except further privatisation) and playacts at offering the masses power on a purely affective, expressive level (what walter benjamin calls 'the aestheticization of politics)

this siphons discontent and radicalism away from socialist politics and towards a movement that will violently suppress and attack socialists, offering a two-fold shield against any real threat to the bourgeoise's control of the means of production

when in power, fascists will shore up the power of the bourgeoise and allow an open mingling of private enterprise and the state (corporatism), and answer economic crisis by expanding the genocidal and ethnic supremacist policies of the colony to the nation itself in an act similar to what marx calls 'primitive accumulation'. because there's a finite amount of wealth to be seized by this method and because purely affective politics deliberately blinded to changing the ownership of the means of production, fascism inevitably turns to external war

[boreal-sea]

absolutely wild to me that people are genuinely saying “if Jews didn’t want antisemitism they shouldn’t have been Bad Jews” as if Israel represents all Jewish people or moreso that bigotry is ever justified. if someone can’t call out what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians without being antisemitic they’re just a bigot. plenty of people have been able to do so, antisemitism is not inevitable. all people like that seem to do is harm everyone involved, Jewish people and Palestinian people. you’re not helping any kind of liberation with that.

People really cannot handle separating the government of Israel from Jews in general. People also had a hard time disconnecting Al Qaeda and ISIS from Islam, so I mean, I'm not surprised they can't do it here, either.

I'm on the side of the citizens. ALL of them. Everyone living in this region, regardless of nationality or religion. I am on their side. I want the government of Israel AND Hamas to lay down arms. But after that, to be honest, a huge weight does lay on the government of Israel to begin undoing decades of harm it has caused.

Netanyahu and his administration are absolutely committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. They have spent years abusing Palestinians. They've just ordered all people in north Gaza to "evacuate" to south Gaza within 24 hours. That's over 1 million people. That's impossible. They've cut off power and water and travel. It's inhumane. It's a war crime. Hands-down.

Hamas, on the other side, is just as genocidal - they just don't have as much power to enact it. They are holocaust deniers, they are openly antisemitic, they want all Jews in Israel gone or dead. Just because they claim they're "fighting for Palestinians" doesn't make them morally right. They are rapists, murderers, and kidnappers. They enforce Sharia law. They have also committed war crimes by attacking civilians.

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

i literally spend at least 2 hours a week just looking at various pictures of the terracotta army. utterly entranced. look at the details in the hair. you'd never see ANY of this when they're lined up in formation, but they're there.  

theres about 8000 of these guys down there, no two faces are alike. they're works of art. they're the manifestation of a cruel despot's delusions of grandeur. a talisman against the terrible inevitability of death, both pathetic and strangely pitiful. like watching a child clinging to his blanket, begging you not to turn off the light. they were a bunch of insignificant clay statues from a side chamber that was so small and unremarkable, no one bothered to write down the location. they were modelled after real people. their only purpose was to serve qin shi huang in the afterlife, so he could reign in heaven as he did on earth. now the emperor is just a ghost and his pawns are immortal. my dad and i visited them in the dead of winter, on a weekday, just so we wouldn't have to deal with tourists like us. the place had easily 500 people--not including the ones below ground. we traveled to xian via the old "green skin" diesel train. there are faster means, like highspeed rail but dad insisted i try the authentic way, the same way he would have traveled when he was my age it was also like, a quarter of the price but im sure that had nothing to do with it! back in the 80s carriages would get so packed people had to have their luggage passed in via the windows. as we chugged along, i read my book and my dad made us cup noodles. car is just a shortened version of "carriage", the word is the same but the mechanism is different. it's the same in chinese. i think if i told someone from the warring states period i could travel from the Kingdom of Qi to Qin in just four hours with my metal carriage, i'd be laughed out of town--or accused of being a spy and sentenced to 'death by carriage.' we hopped off the train at 4am and took a different "carriage." the taxi driver joked; "basically every dynasty put their capital in xian, stick a shovel anywhere and you'll turn up some national treasure or another." i wonder what it would have felt like to be a farmer digging a well and then out pops a remarkably realistic human head. statistical analysis show the soldier's faces bear a strong similarity to people living in the region today. the taxi stopped in front of a jewellery-hawking tourist trap and refused budge an inch until we went inside. did you know the terracotta soldiers were originally multi-coloured and painfully gaudy, just like the greek marbles? they were made assembly-line style. the arms and legs were made from the same workshops that made clay plumbing pipes and roof tiles. for quality control, the artisans were required to stamp their names. the workers who built these tombs were executed shortly afterwards, because only dead men can be trusted with secrets. qin shi huang's mausoleum is unlikely to be excavated in my father's lifetime, or mine, not unless i'm willing to take a BIG ONE for the team... instead of the tomb, they built some kind of qin shi huang-themed theme park next to it. not only was it tacky as hell the entrance fee was like $50. we went to the museum and i looked at bronze tools and pottery shards for three hours. look why can't we just crack the thing open i can't be the only one here whos dying from curiosity what if we all just took turns digging

[winterinhimring]

The real tragedy of Dune (which the movies did an excellent job of portraying) is that almost none of the characters we see have any real choice in what they do. The only choices they have are in how they do them.

Duke Leto must take House Atreides to Arrakis, or be declared a traitor to the Imperium and hunted down. He knows it's a trap and that the Emperor is, in the very best case scenario, setting him and his family up for a serious reversal of their fortunes (far more likely, he's outright scheming to get them killed). But he doesn't have a choice. He must go to Arrakis. He does go to Arrakis. He dies.

Paul and Jessica must flee into the desert or the Harkonnen soldiers will kill them both brutally. They must go to the Fremen for refuge or the desert will kill them. They go. They find that the Fremen have already begun to mythologise Paul. He's the Mahdi, the Lisan al-Gaib. There is no option for Paul to be a normal person here. He is either the messiah or he is a false prophet, and false prophets in a nation of true believers don't live for long.

So Paul fits himself into the mold of the myth. He becomes Muad'dib and leads the Fremen in war because they believe too much in him to let him be anything less. Is it manipulation? Yes. But because the Bene Gesserit have been manipulating the Fremen for centuries, Paul has no choice but to continue it if he wants to live.

He sees the holy war at the end of every timeline by glimpses and he fights to avoid it. To avoid it, he becomes the Kwizatz Haderach and gains the ability to fully see timelines, and thereby he makes himself that much more of the Fremen messiah and brings himself one step closer to the holy war. Every choice he makes is a choice for survival and an attempt to avoid that war, the war he cannot escape because every step he makes along the path to survival is one more step towards the war. He has no more choice in what he becomes than his father had in whether or not he went to Arrakis.

The only people who ever had a choice were the Emperor and Gaius Helen Mohiam. They made their choice, to exterminate House Atreides, and thereby they took everyone's choices away, including their own. Once they sent House Atreides to Arrakis, the entire plot was inevitable.

[headspace-hotel]

I've come across like 3 or 4 Centrist-Guy-Saying-Stuff books now that have a chapter trying to criticize how "the Left" flattens history down into a stereotype where everything Europeans did is UNIQUELY EVIL!!! and they all have the same points

The Ottomans and the Romans had slavery and African nations captured slaves from each other so it's hypocritical to focus on chattel slavery in the USA being particularly evil

Columbus is being "villainized" and the colonization of the Americas was inevitable to happen that way, that's just what happens when a stronger country meets a weaker one

Native Americans waged war on each other/did X gruesome or shocking thing so they're Not As Innocent As The Left Would Have You Believe

and it's like. Buddy. The point isn't to prove that Europeans have a uniquely evil culture or that X thing they did has never happened before in another culture. The reason European nations' actions are so focused on, is that they directly caused a ton of problems we are Currently Dealing With Right Now.

Like yeah, Roman slavery was fucking evil and dehumanizing and full of sexual and physical abuse, but it didn't give us the instructions for who should be dehumanized and demeaned that our society is STILL FOLLOWING

[storms-path]

Dawntrail and Conquerors

Dawntrail has given me thoughts. So many thoughts. This is only one of 'em, be prepared for more! But also, SPOILERS FOR BASICALLY ALL OF DAWNTRAIL AHEAD! Read on at your own risk!

There’s something of a running theme throughout FF14 that I think Dawntrail has really honed in on, and it’s something that resonated with me the more I thought about it. Time and time again we’re confronted with men who claim that they are worthy of rule through the strength they bring to bear, and time and time again they’re laid low by our own. We see it with Gaius, with the Heavensward, with the entirety of the Garlean empire (but in particular Yotsuyu and Emet-Selch), and now in Dawntrail with… Well, you know. The theme is clear: Conquerors do not keep their thrones.

So when we heard stories at the end of Endwalker about how the mighty Dawnservant united the people of Tural, a famously divided people by both land and people, my thought was this: We have another conqueror who we’ll inevitably have to topple. With the Garlean empire fresh in my mind, it was the obvious conclusion to reach towards. And Wuk Lamat was already shown to be sheltered and naive from her introduction, which made me wary of trusting her word on her own father’s supposed goodness.

Suffice to say I was pleasantly surprised that Gulool Ja Ja was not a conqueror, but a uniter instead. For all that he’s hyped up as an incredibly strong combatant, and a force to be reckoned with on and off the battlefield, all the stories we hear of Tural’s founding are of him… Making peace. Liberating through non-violence. Saving people from terrible beasts. Forcing a generations-old war to end through a cook off to end all cook-offs! He could have quite easily conquered the people of Tural, forced them together through violence, but he knew how short-sighted that would be. He was raised in warfare, called upon to be a saviour of his forsaken people and lead them out of the canopy… and he did, in a way. But he did so without casting down everyone around him.

Is he a perfect ruler? Oh, absolutely not. His people still have problems, especially the Mamool Ja who chose to remain. But he has succeeded in bringing together a prosperous, peaceful nation in a time of upheaval and crisis. And despite everything, he is successful in… well, being succeeded. His trials do exactly what they should, but teaching Wuk Lamat and Koana how to properly rule through respecting their people instead of using them for their own gain.

Which bring me neatly to Vergil Zarool Ja.

Zarool Ja is everything Gulool Ja Ja isn’t. Ruthless, cold, unable to see the people around him as anything but tools. He claims he wants to bring war for the sake of peace, but he simply wishes to escape his father’s shadow and truly surpass him. And he cares not a whit for his siblings or fellow competitors. At every turn he is given the choice to do better, and at every turn he chooses to walk further down the path of blood and violence. So it came as little surprise when he positioned himself as head of a conquering army, intent to overturn everything his father worked to build.

Zarool Ja is the clearest and finest-pointed reminder of FF14’s core lessons. He is the epitome of unearned strength, literally leaching it from the souls of his people. And it consumes him in the end, turning him into a pale mockery of his father, complete with a stump where his second head should be. Resolve without reason, hellbent on conquest at any cost. And so, of course, we put him down. Just another marker on our list of conquerors conquered.

And then Sphene fully unmasks.

Sphene is… very interesting. In a lot of ways, she entirely rejects the idea of conquest. She only wants to keep her people safe from harm forevermore. She actively joins us against Zarool Ja when he turns on them! But therein lies the problem. She can’t keep her people around without taking from others. And so, regretfully, with utmost sorrow… She enacts her plan to keep her hollow world alive. Invading other reflections and robbing them of their aether to keep her people forever sated and able to live beyond death. It doesn’t matter to her that they’re only shades. After all, she is one herself. If that’s what it will take to protect and safeguard her people, so be it. No sacrifice too great, no sin unforgivable. So she does what so many have done before her.

She attempts conquest. And we put her down.

Conquerors do not keep their thrones, after all.

[belit0]

ahh, i just found out tobirama was about 40 when he became hokage! which makes him even hotter🤭. can you do a hokage tobirama and his young pregnant shy wife meeting his family and like people around the village

I need to EXPLICTLYYYY know where you got that information from bc confirming that he was a daddy brings a different flavor to his character🫠❤️‍🩹

For clarification purposes: Madara is blind in this piece. Hashirama healed Izuna before he died, under Madara's acceptance of peace, and Aniki never took his younger brother's eyes, preferring to go blind rather than steal his sight.

No one dares to look him in the eye, let alone question the possessive hand that won't let go of (Y/N)'s hips. Her belly is too prominent to deny the situation, but no one is used to seeing the current Hokage with his wife.

Senju Tobirama devoted himself to hiding the woman he promised as a bride, unable to tolerate stares at her and unfortunate comments. Both men and women would send lust and desire toward her, and he would have no way to stop them all. What better remedy than to shelter (Y/N) until his ownership is undeniable?

Tobirama can be quite capricious.

The man even went as far as not allowing his own older brother to meet her, Hashirama himself excluded from the equation. To think that the former Hokage could betray his younger brother like that was ridiculous to everyone, but it wasn't about lust with him. No.

Tobirama hid (Y/N) because he refused to lose the one ray of light in his life (after Anija's solar shower, of course). His past is made up of death and disappointment, built as an unfeeling weapon of war by his father, robbed of the ability to empathize with anyone until the creation of Konoha.

His wife brought a peace he didn't know he needed into his life, a breath of fresh air even as nations struggled to not cooperate with peace, freedom among so much horror and suffering. (Y/N) showed him that life could be spent out of survival mode, that he could relax for sleep and accept another person into his bed without danger.

Having found what he always sought without knowing it, Tobirama could not afford to lose it.

Keeping her away from everything and everyone (beyond his possible jealousy) was also composed by the need to protect her, to remove her from the spotlight that inevitably comes with being the Hokage's future wife, to prevent her from being used against him. The albino's attitudes were based on affection, but now that (Y/N) is round with his creation, full of him, he can't help but proudly display her.

He strolls through the market streets with his head held high and his wife tightly in his grip, shooting hostile glances at anyone who looks at them for more than five minutes at a time. Of course he expects people to be surprised, but he doesn't want her to end up with the evil eye either.

"Hokage-Sama! Here, here!" shouts a little old lady from his favorite food stall. He can't ignore people from his village, those who trust him, and comes up to her stall to give her a smile unbecoming of Tobirama. "You look very happy, Hokage-Sama!"

"Ah... how could a man not be, having such a beautiful woman by his side?" And (Y/N) blushes, waving slightly at the little old lady and trying to hide the redness of her cheeks behind the sleeve of her yukata.

The elderly woman smiles, and hands them both a small package of food without accepting anything in return, "here, here, take this, enjoy life!" She practically pushes them out of her stall, and they resume walking to the point they agreed on with Hashirama.

People stare and stare at them, some even dare to congratulate the Hokage, give him blessings, ask if he could feel how many children are there. Some inquiries make him uncomfortable, and with just a blunt look he gets rid of those prying eyes.

They receive more gifts along the way, offerings of love and respect, food and decorations, townspeople declaring their eagerness to meet the Hokage's offspring. Tobirama would not expect to have interacted with so many people in such a short distance, and his social battery is noticeably drained, squeezing (Y/N) more and more protectively against his body.

By the time they reach Hashirama's house, the Hokage no longer wants anything to do with anyone.

"Ayoooooo! Tobi! You made it!" his older brother waits for them sitting at the door, like a little kid waiting for his dad to come home from work. The problem is, Hashirama is not a child, and not little one either. He pounces on the two, wrapping his arms around them and pressing their faces to his chest, invasive and effusive as always but enhanced by (Y/N)'s presence.

"Aaaa! (Y/N)! Finally released from your confinement! It's so beautiful to finally meet you!" Anija lets go of him, only to squeeze her separately, give her kisses on the crown of her head and clench her cheeks like a grandmother. Yes, Hashirama could be compared to a grandmother. "Have you looked... I mean, in there? See what's in there? We could ask Izuna to-"

"No."

"But-"

"No. It's a surprise." Tobirama pulls (Y/N) out of his arms, and hugging her enters the house he knows by heart. He heads straight for the courtyard, where he knows Hashirama (who comes behind him with his head down and feigning sadness) enjoys afternoons of tea.

Of course, he does not expect the surprise his brother has prepared for him there.

The whole clan, the whole damn family is gathered around a huge table, different from the one Anija prefers for his solitary lunches. Sitting in the two main seats, the Uchiha brothers, who have no business in a Senju house, full of Senju men and women.

Is this what peace looks like? Graphically represented? Tobirama wants to vomit.

"TOBIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!" He is greeted by his entire family as a whole, and the elders soon hover over both of them. Females kidnap (Y/N) to shower her with questions and love, all a carbon copy of how Hashirama behaves but boosted to the tenth.

The albino is also abducted, but by the young men and his older brother, who seems to have regained his cheerfulness. They sit him down in front of the Uchiha brothers, and it's like sending a cow to the slaughter.

"Tobi Tobes... I didn't know your family called you like that, neither that your wife was SO pregnant... He hides too many things from us, right Aniki?" Izuna starts, as usual, not missing a chance to poke him with whatever comes in front of him.

"Hm."

"How many children do you have there? 3? She's... prominent!"

"Get my wife out of your mouth before I make you remember why the war existed in the first place." It's a blunt threat, and the young men around him tense up. Peace is old at this point, but the habits of a life that no longer exists are hard to forget.

"He's joking! Yes, yes, he's kidding! No tobi?" Hashirama tries to disperse the waters, and it works, at least with those who don't know them inside out. Madara knows what's coming, and so does he somehow.

"You want me to see how many are there? With the Sharingan, I mean... it's not like I actually want to get inside-"

"Izuna. Enough." Aniki tries, and succeeds until the albino glares at his little brother.

"Madara... you're blind, but if only could you see the size of that woman's belly..."

"IZUNA!" This time it's Hashirama, who gets indignant every time the Uchiha speaks so lightly about his brother's eye condition. Maybe it's the way they both have of cooperating with the situation, but it's still terrible in his ears.

The Uchiha leader chuckles under his breath, and it's all the validation Izuna needs to go on.

"So, what do you say, Tobi Tobes, want to check it out?" and before he can activate his Dōjutsu, two huge branches stop them both. Tobirama, who was in the process of pulling out a kunai and jumping to his throat, is imprisoned in his seat. Izuna, about to reveal the mystery the couple wanted to keep, has a huge trunk wrapped around his head in the eye area.

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you too."

"Fuck all of you guys." And everyone turns around in surprise, because this time it's (Y/N) doing the talking. She puts a hand on her husband's shoulder, dodging the wood on him, and gives a pleasant smile to the Uchiha brothers. "We'll find out how many children are here at the time of delivery, for the time being, I appreciate your efforts, Lord Izuna."

[supremechancellorrex]

Avatar in my head and I was thinking about Maiko and Mai.

Now, Mai's character arc in Avatar, from my interpretation, is rediscovering herself and her wants and personhood that has been stripped from her as a noblewoman part of a family that submitted to the Fire Nation Imperialist structure and Ozai. We see in Book 2 set up for this. Mai in early Book 2 does not resist Azula's will aside from brief sparks of rebellion where she isn't present. "Of course not, Princess Azula" she notes formally and apathetically when Azula asks if she "minds", knowing she has no choice as Azula 'just' ponders if Mai's hostage brother is worth an Earth King like Bumi. Mai is always aware that Azula, as Princess in an authoritarian nation where the Fire Lord is God, can have her executed and her family punished. The unequal power dynamic is surprisingly consistent in the show.

Mai can't even insult Azula back in Zuko Alone as a child. She just lets Azula put an apple on her head (as Ty Lee loyally sniggers along), set it on fire, and when Zuko pushes her into the fountain to put it out, Mai, drenched, glares and says "You two are such… ugh". We know Mai can have an acid tongue, yet her fear of Azula prevents her from using it. Her most rebellious act in Book 2 is when she says "She can shoot all the lightning she wants at me. I am not getting in that wall sludge juice". Mai actually has self-respect, but she can't express it in the presence of greater threats, meanwhile Ty Lee merely says "Come on! Azula said we have to follow them", because Ty Lee follows Azula's will even when she isn't there.

Even when Mai gets with Zuko, she falls into a subservient role. When Azula interrupts Maiko's smooching, lazily dismissing Mai with "Oh Mai, Ty Lee needs help untangling her braid" Mai responds quickly "Sounds pretty serious" with only a touch of dryness and leaves, only able to muster throwing Azula a dirty look a split second after passing her. However, this little ember of rebellion will grow.

Mai has continued difficulty understanding Zuko's anger and reactiveness, or how to even function in a relationship. She initially tries to joke in a dismissive fashion, as if saying 'ugh, feelings are lame, right?', but that would only work with Azula logically. The Beach episode is a key Mai episode. She continues to be emotionally repressed, to the point Zuko, Ty Lee and Azula comment on it. However, Zuko's insecurity at her talking to Ruon-Jian to the point he physically removes him from her presence, and his accusative comments like "You like him, don't you?", also makes Mai feel a little boxed in, controlled, and that does irritated her given her history. However, at the Beach's emotional narrative climax, Mai is able to finally express herself at the rest of the group (Azula included) for the first time, telling them to "Leave her alone" and that she's "still mad". After Zuko explosively reveals the extent of his pain and confusion, we see a 'smoothing' effect on her attitude. She realises her and Zuko are dealing with pain in different ways and his way is understandable.

Mai says softly, "I know one thing I care about, I care about you". This is the one thing Mai can grasp in the confusion. This is where Mai betraying Azula becomes inevitable. We see Mai continue to be more supportive with Zuko, more actively trying to cheer him up in Nightmares and Daydreams with big smiles and jokes while Zuko remains shut down over the War meeting and is acting irritated and repressed due to his family trauma. When Zuko later leaves and joins the Avatar, Mai is hurt and angry, which shows in the Boiling Rock, saying "All I get is a letter? You could have at least looked me in the eye when you ripped out my heart". They have a tense conversation, but it's their most honest one. I actually think Mai already made up her mind in this scene to support Zuko over Azula, and she doesn't quite realise it. "Save it? You're betraying your country" she accuses, to which Zuko replies, resolute, "That's not how I see it", and in response Mai just folds her arms and turns her head away in an almost defeat.

I find it very telling she doesn't respond. It's because she realises Zuko is more passionate and resolute about his mission than she is hers. It's because she knows the Fire Nation under its current authority is not exactly great. Sometimes in life we fall into a box and we need someone to give us that little push so we can realise we can climb out of it, that the toxic space we're in isn't normal, and we don't have to tolerate it. I like to think Mai was thinking in that moment where Zuko locked her in the cell and he and she gazed into each others' eyes, what she was really thinking about was what life she actually wanted to live. She was thinking of Azula and being under her thumb, and she was thinking of all those moments with Zuko, like when they were lounging on the sofa together, smiling and joking in Nightmares & Daydreams, and she realised how ridiculous it was to be afraid of Azula killing her when the real fear should be being Azula's servant until her dying days, decades of repression and misery.

After all, what does Mai have left to fight for? Fear of Azula? Hah, what a joke. She remembers "I know one thing I care about. I care about you" and when she sees Zuko about to die she has to intervene.

"I guess you just don't know people as well as you think you do. You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you" Mai says to an increasingly-enraged Azula's speak of 'consequences', because Mai did fear Azula, but now in her love for Zuko she has found a purpose she has been lacking, her feelings and wants over Azula's will. Zuko being true to himself is contagious. Iroh's love for Zuko puts him on the right path, and in turn the love Mai has for Zuko saves her. As a consequence Ty Lee chooses Mai and their friendship over Azula's toxic, fear-based one and even later bonds with former enemies like the Kyoshi Warriors. Like Zuko says to Ozai, "an era of peace and kindness" will replace an "era of fear". In the face of fear, love and empathy win.

[apas-95]

Couldnt it be argued that the US is still a slave republic? Domestically, there is slave labor through the prison system, human and labor trafficking, and only a few decades ago, if at that, systems such as convict leasing, share cropping, and debt peonage. Internationally, there is also the fact that for conflict minerals, coffee, chocolate, and other commodities, a portion if not the majority of it is sourced from slave labor.

The use of slavery in and of itself doesn't constitute the slave-society stage of production. Slavery continues to exist under feudalism and capitalism, but not as the driving force of society as in the ancient slave republics. Politically, in the modern USA, it is the bourgeoisie that are in power; and economically, it is the exploitation of waged labour (much of it overseas) that is the basis of production.

Further, slaves in the US are owned either by the state, in state prisons, and leased to private companies; or owned by large companies directly in private prisons. The individual or smallholder ownership of slaves was done away with in the USA's previous civil war: carried out between the industrial haute-bourgeois of the developed north, and the agricultural petty gentry of the southern hinterland. Slaves in the US today are the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie, through their corporations or bourgeois state.

While large amounts of raw materials are sourced through slave labour, as are agricultural goods, slave labour in the broadest sense is not applicable to industrial production of the type required by modern capitalism - if for nothing else than reasons of profitability. The slave labourer is effectively themselves human capital, part of the machinery bought wholesale - while they still effectively carry out labour, they fundamentally do not produce surplus value in the same manner as a wage-worker; it is necessary for their food and other reproductive labour to be given to them without cost, in the same way one carries out maintenance on equipment - whereas a wage-worker is only purchased and employed as capital for the duration of the workday, and then is responsible for their own food, housing, and reproductive labour. The principal exception to the use of slave labour in industrial production (which already has an exceedingly high fixed-capital cost compared to agriculture) is in the historical case of fascism, where primitive accumulation and war industry led to conditions favourable to industrial slave labour, which was carried out en-masse by e.g. German industrial syndicates using concentration camp labourers.

While the earlier USA, as a settler nation, made heavy use of both slavery and primitive accumulation, this was necessarily a historically-contingent process, one carried out by the European empires precisely because the Americas had not been 'brought up to' the level of social contradiction they had. Slavery's profitability necessarily fell as the USA industrialised, and remains now only in certain key industries like agriculture and military production. Historically, again, the movement to make slavery a profitable general venture in the era of capitalism is the fascist movement, which attempts generally to replace the proletariat at large by mobilising the higher strata upwards, into petty-bourgeois smallholders (e.g. wehrbauern), converting the middle strata into slaves, and exterminating the lower strata - a movement that fundamentally requires both large swathes of cleared land as well as mass depopulation, due to the lower population density such an essentially backwards mode of production can support. Ultimately, it is a project doomed to failure, due to the impossibility of turning back history - but one the bourgeoisie are inevitably driven to attempt when capitalism starts nearing the end of its profitability.

In the USA, historically, the exploitation of indigenous nations and external colonies has provided a source of profit and primitive accumulation that has rendered a genuine fascist movement effectively unnecessary, despite the middle-class yearning for it, but these systems are themselves drying up, and the US, while not a slave republic, will soon start attempting to fashion itself into one by carving up its population.

I hope this has answered your question, thank you for writing in!

[probablyasocialecologist]

The real issue is that Israel has no right to self-defense against the territory and the people that it occupies. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, it has a duty and a responsibility to protect those people until the reversion to a status quo ante that preceded hostilities, meaning until sovereignty is returned to the Palestinians. Of course, Israel denies that this is applicable, because it denies that Palestinians are a people, and so they say there is no sovereign to whom to revert. Israel also claims that this territory belongs to them. They claim that they had the right to acquire it by force, which proceeds from their claim that the 1967 War was a war of self defense. Neither of those claims are true. Israel insists that the attack that launched the 1967 War—in which it destroyed Egypt’s entire air fleet while it was still on the ground—was a preemptive strike against an inevitable attack by Egypt. In reality, Egypt was cooperating with the United States as it worked toward a mediated agreement. This was not a defensive war—but even if it was, since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, there has been no principle in international law that permits the acquisition of territory under any circumstances. Israel has created and perpetuated legal fictions to deny the applicability of international law. For one, Israel says there is no occupation. It says the territory is “disputed” and applies occupation law on a de facto basis, which allows it to cherry-pick the provisions with which it complies. It has created a sui generis regime that has no analogy or precedent, and thus it neither recognizes Palestinians as part of its domestic order—which would characterize its confrontation with Palestinians as a civil war—nor acknowledges the existence of a regular war against a nascent sovereign fighting for national liberation. Instead, Israel has been creating new law to cover what it calls “armed conflict short of war.” This enables Israel to usurp Palestinians’ sovereignty, and associated policing power, while also using military force against them.