#so much for a communist state lol

[ennobaka]

One of my distant aunts (who just divorced my distant uncle so technically she's not my aunt anymore. Technically. She's cool tho) visited my SIL today and when I came down, the first thing she said to me was asking me when I would get married. And then after some talking she said not to marry unless I was 1000% sure that they would be good for me. Like, girl

[48787]

So, as it turns out, my capacity for tyranny is actually fuckin huge and I'm really fucking good at it

I have so many more things to put in my book now

Peace Through Tyranny will be real circa 2048 and it'll still be sued by fucking Hasbro

[comradecowplant]

i've still been feeling bad about things not working out with the sad neighbor lady with the busted leg, even though SHE was the one who 180ed and pushed me away, but then i start thinking about all the shitty little -isms (mostly race) she said, some of which i confronted in the moment & some that i picked my battles over given the circumstances, and then i feel less bad :)

[metamatar]

If right wing is licking Modi's dick. How did it feel like licking Dhruv's dick? Batao?

I have actually never really managed to watch a Dhruv Rathee video in full in my life, he's very much a politics for dummies kind of guy. I don't know how to say this without sounding arrogant but I am read widely enough that he is not really valuable for offering me any new insight. I use alt news to see the state of misinformation in the media so his debunking videos aren't useful either. But I pay attention to what he's making videos on because he is very very popular, his videos seem to really reach people. I'm also too cool to take a full time influencer seriously. I'd rather open the EPW and read an academic present their work.

I'm also a hindu hating communist, while his whole appeal is he is a hindu liberal. He is very weak on caste. He couches his criticisms with his love for "our culture." His economic policies are just neoliberalism with just less corruption. Interestingly, he was pro Modi in 2014 while I opposed Modi on the grounds Rathee is now opposing the guy, so maybe we can radicalise him lol. Apparently he's come out in favour of one state which is palestine while living in germany. We are still, however ideological opponents, allied only because the violence of fascism forecloses any political possibilities till its defeated. I do respect his integrity and energy in an ecosystem entirely full of right wing personalities funded by the govt.

[odinsblog]

Gosh, im so captivated by the russian election. like, who will win?

what happens if anti-putin voters stage protests at polling places? or what if reporters write negative unflattering news stories about putin, like they are totally allowed to do, since russia is such a free country, right? its not like the political opposition and putins detractors will be punished or jailed or defenestrated or disappeared or anything, right? im just soo curious about who will win the russian election tomorrow. who will the next president of russia possibly be? so much suspense. its really a nail biter.

im kinda new at this, so maybe a tankie could help me understand how the (lol) fair, free and democratic (definitely not authoritarian nor dictatorial) state of russia works.

but in all seriousness, i am genuinely and deeply saddened for any of the russian people who may actually want to vote against putin, and who are against the “special operation” in ukraine, but cannot voice even the slightest dissent for fear of reprisals by the state. that is not freedom. that is not the better world that is possible.

i will pay very close attention to how tankies, putin apologists and republicans try to spin this though. how they try to explain away the fact that russia is such a “great” “communist” country, and its just a big coincidence that their beloved thug, putin the war criminal ☭ will have somehow managed to stay in absolute power for almost three decades.

oh well, ides of march 🗡️🗡️🗡️

[blueberryforestelf]

Russian Influence in Moral Orel:

Okay so a while ago I just finished watching Moral Orel and I noticed that there were some connections between it and Russian culture. I also noticed that the show had just become popular in Russia and there are dubbed episodes available on VK. Even though Moral Orel is an American TV show and the creator of the show is of Greek descent, here are some connections on the show that linked to Russian culture and social cues:

The heavy alcoholism on the show: Clay and most of the people in Moralton are straight-up alcoholics, and even Bloberta was an alcoholic before she met Clay. Of course, alcohol is a significant part of Russian culture and the country has the highest consumption of alcohol in the world. Not only are alcoholic beverages are consumed in high amounts, but is also very much socially accepted and encouraged. Even underaged children are encouraged to drink. In the episode Maturity, Orel thought drinking would make him “wise and mature” like his father and in Help young Bloberta stated that drinking alcohol “makes us better people”.

There’s a city in Russia called Orel.

Orel means “Eagle” in Russian (and other Slavic languages). So in the Russian dub Orel’s name is Eagle.

Ms. Censordoll loves pickled eggs and keeps a jar full of them in her library. Russian cuisine consists of a lot of pickled foods, including pickled eggs, cabbage, potatoes, fish, watermelon, etc.

If you notice in the Puppington household, you’ll see an oriental carpet on the living room floor. Oriented carpets are very common in Russian households and are often on floors or hung on walls.

Clay’s reckless driving and Russia is famous for its many reckless drivers and very frequent traffic accidents (I just had to add this to the list lol)

Clay’s car looks like a Lada (a Russian brand of cars).

The “depressing”, conservative, perfectionistic, and collective culture of Moralton is quite similar to that of Russian culture. The entire town is centered around a church which literally controls everything in the town and how it operates. The people are fed Christian propaganda and are not allowed to think differently or do things differently than what is socially acceptable, otherwise they would be outcasted and have to face harsh consequences. This pretty much relates to Russia’s Soviet/Communist Era of when housing, stores, businesses, etc. were all controlled by the government and not the people. People were not allowed to solely own their own property or businesses, and if they were to speak up about problems and issues facing their economy or speak out against propaganda or the government, they would would face the harsh and legal consequences (i.e. prison camp or deportation). Moralton is quite similar to that, except it’s in the United States where people have more freedom to do want they want and express themselves.

Many people in Moralton tend to be “cold”, reserved, strict, and cynical, which is a common stereotype among Russians.

The townspeople’s love for classical arts, music, and theatre, like in the School Pageant episode. Also Bloberta comes from a family of choir singers/musicians and her singing voice is similar to that of an opera singer. Russians are known for their love for classical and opera music as it is a very significant part of their culture. I’ve met many Russians who come from a family of musicians, are talented musicians outside of their occupation, or happen to own a musical instrument in their homes.

Moral Orel is a satire that explores the hypocrisy of religious and social institutions with a touch of dark humor and irony, which is similar to the works of Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky, who used similar techniques to critique religious and social mores.

Moral Orel is a stop-motion animated series and Russians are very fond of stop-motion animation as it has a rich history in Russian media and cinema. Famous Russian animators such as Roman Kachanov, Ladislas Starevich and Ivan Ivanov-Vano were pioneers of stop-motion media during the Soviet Era. Many beloved animated films and shows made during the Soviet Era were stop-motion animated. Also a lot of stop-motion animated media known today (such as Coraline, Corpse Bride, Isle of Dogs, etc.) are becoming very popular in Russia. Also, Orel loves making little stop-motion movies!

Thanks for reading! 😁

[communistkenobi]

Hi, you tend to have well-thought-out political opinions (I don't always agree with you, but your reading liveblog were the kick in the ass to make me read Orientalism, and you have managed to change my mind more than once), maybe might have a better answer here than me.

Is there an ideological reason that American (b/c it typically is, god help me) left-of-center types love electoralism so much online (and offline too, tbh. College continues to deal new and fun kinds of psychic damage), but only in the context of the general national elections? I so often receive various extensive breakdowns of reasons that I MUST vote for Biden in 2024, but less about the benefits of, like, getting really invested in my city council elections or the school board.

We have so many freaking elections for goddamn everything because the US/Canada are fuck-off huge that it's super easy to argue for the importance of participating in electoralism and instead I (especially recently) see so many people picking the worst hill to die on, that I really struggle to. Well. Understand why.

I’ll speak mostly to Canada since that’s where most of my formal knowledge comes from and also because I live here lol. Also a lot of what I’m talking about is coming from books I’ve read - Still Renovating by Greg Suttor for example is a pretty in depth history of social policy (primarily housing) in Canada, it’s very dry but is useful for this conversation. This is off the dome and not meant as a PSA or anything, it’s my own perspective, if people want sources for what I’m discussing I can go dig those up, but I’m just putting this disclaimer at the top in case this post leaves my circle.

To answer your question, my instinct is that it’s because north american democracy is increasingly necrotic and disconnected from the general public (with the usual list of caveats about how much liberal capitalist democracies have ever been “for the people”). Reading up on social policy in Canada directly post-WWII is pretty bleak when comparing it to today - social housing used to be a robust part of the housing market, people were paid far better and had far more economic security, our healthcare was freshly socialised and invigorated, the promises of the Keynesian welfare state were generally being met (for a predominantly white middle class electorate, of course), and so on. Even conservatives were basically on board with these things in the 60s, at least in Canada, although that obviously did not last long. And over the decades we have become entrenched in neoliberal cutbacks, the gutting of public institutions, the sale of public space and utilities, the downloading of responsibility for social welfare onto provincial and then municipal governments who have smaller budgets and more limited institutional power, the massive expansion in public-private partnerships, the militarisation of the police - these things really kicked off in the 80s/90s in Canada and have showed little signs of stopping or even really slowing down since (something that also obviously happened in the US). People make the joke that if libraries were suggested as a policy goal today it would be called a communist plot, but it’s true - all of the shit the government offered us forty years ago is unthinkable to even suggest now. Life in general has gotten more difficult as private wealth and deregulation has taken a progressively stronger hold on domestic affairs. This happened slowly over the course of decades, and as political horizons shrunk in terms of what you could expect/demand of your government, there was a real air of this being inevitable, not a result of conscious political decisions but just some organic outcome that no one had control over (“the invisible hand of the market”). Democratic civic responsibility demands we vote as citizens of our country, but for all the reasons outlined above plus a bunch of others I’m sure I’m forgetting, the liberal conception of democratic participation shrunk to the ballot box alone.

And while we all joke about everyone having the historical memory of a goldfish, I think the pandemic made this a deeply dissonant position to hold onto - we saw the government seemingly awake from a long slumber to exercise its might. It placed eviction bans on landlords, enforced mass quarantines and social distancing measures, provided economic relief to people who lost their jobs, stationed itself inside every building and public space to enforce mask mandates, rolled-out universal vaccination programs that were mandatory if you wanted to keep your job - we saw the government flex its power in labour, in housing, in healthcare, in civic life, and at the border in a way previously unheard of, particularly for people who were not alive to experience the welfare state of the 50s and 60s and even 70s. The state revealed itself as the life-structuring force it always had been before receding again, telling everyone to go back to normal as if nothing had happened, as if millions of people had not died in a global plague, as if it had not just demonstrated to everyone in the country that the state can at the drop of a hat order your landlord to stop evicting you and your boss to give you paid time off. This of course didn’t really happen in the US, or at least not nearly to this degree, which resulted in the deaths of over a million people.

So now when politicians perform this same incapacity to do anything, when they trot out hyper-specific policies that might benefit a couple thousand people at most, when they make stupid non-promises and shrink away from even mild forms of social democracy (eg Sanders-style campaign promises), I don’t know how much people buy it. I’m not particularly optimistic about the pandemic radicalising large amounts of people, but I think even if it doesn’t, we saw what happened! And we’ve all seen a million fucking articles about how people don’t want to go to work anymore, about labour shortages, we’ve seen essentially every sector of labour go on some kind of strike in the past two or three years - there is popular organised political participation happening far away from the ballot box, and is only growing in power by the day. Socialism is now a word that exists in the national consciousness, something that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Currently right now we are seeing an international conversation about (and global popular support for) indigenous sovereignty, we are seeing a full-throated articulation of what a LandBack policy would look like, and this comes on the heels of the national Canadian conversation of residential schools and missing and murdered indigenous women. Decolonisation is now a household term. In the case of the US, we are seeing people make the very obvious point that America can conjure billions of dollars to bomb hospitals and civilians, but any social policy to help its own citizens is too expensive, pie in the sky fantasy nonsense.

And by the same token, there is organised right-wing and fascist violence happening in the streets, massive increases in hate crimes, insane political stunts and demonstrations like the Freedom Convoy and 1 Million March 4 Children (inspired by the Capitol Hill storming in the US), Qanon plots to kidnap and execute elected officials - things that right wing parties are actively encouraging, particularly the PPC and CPC. More and more we see that electoral politics is the domain of the far-right, whose culture war issues have the best chance of being realised through the sacred portal of the ballot box. Democrats can’t even offer people legalised abortion now!

I think this is why liberals are in a state of hysteria. A healthy liberal democracy does not require constant, unrelenting reminders to “vote your ass off.” Liberals are very much aware, even unconsciously, that voting does less and less of what they want every single day - you see this openly admitted to by American liberals, who are now doing Hitler % meter calculations about which fascist to vote for come the next federal election. Voting itself is what matters, even as they openly, frantically admit it will do nothing but slightly delay the inevitable.

So to like directly answer your question: I think it has less to do with federal elections as a specific political strategy and more just an expression of anxiety about the fact that voting does not do what you want it to do, or what it once did - perhaps encouraging larger questions if voting does anything at all. If national federal elections don’t do anything, if you voting for the most powerful position on the planet doesn’t really change very much regardless of who’s in power, what is the point of voting at all? So I don’t think they are articulating an actual political strategy or way of doing politics, because by their own admission it’s not going to do much of anything (while at the same time being an existential crisis). I’m in a similar boat to you, I vote in smaller elections where I feel they will do some measure of good (in part because municipalities are responsible for so much more of civic life than they were a few decades ago), I have engaged with the Ontario NDP for several years (although that has come to an end now because of their position on Palestine). Electoralism is a compromise, it is an avenue for potential good, but not always, or even most of the time.

Thankfully there are other avenues for politics - labour organising, protesting, mutual aid support networks, getting involved with community work, even something like local neighbourhood councils. Those are places of political potential, and a single person’s presence in them can make a legitimate noticeable difference (speaking from several years of heavy involvement in community orgs). I have never really felt like I was making a change while voting, but I have felt that way helping community members not get evicted, or offering them free daycare a few times a week, or running programs from lgbtq kids who don’t want to go home after school. Those things legit save peoples’ lives, a lot of them are low stakes relative to their benefit, and they help stave off the alienation and loneliness I know everyone feels. Obviously you run into the same structural problems you would everywhere else, it’s not a paradise by any stretch of the imagination, but they are so many avenues outside of voting that do actually help people around you.

And I think if liberals admit that these actions are more powerful, more effective than voting, they are admitting to themselves that their core beliefs are wrong, that the communists and anarchists are correct and have been correct long before their dumbass was born. They can no longer point to any institution that gives a fuck about them as a defense against left-wing critiques of liberal electoralism. I think that is part of what animates their hysteria, their temper tantrums, their screaming about the only thing to do is do nothing at all. It is a full-throated defense of self-defeat. They are wailing as everything they believe in dies. I’d be pretty upset too if that were me! Luckily I grew out of that when I was like 19

[transmutationisms]

a friend suggested hermeneutics to me as a field of study and a decent number of authors in the field r reliant on psychoanalysis and that was so very confusing for me 😭 i understand tht interfacing with "wrong" schools of thought is important but it's such a wild 180 turn from like..completely disregarding psychiatry in my daily life lmao

well it's more that psychoanalysis is one particular hermeneutical method, right? like there are other very different schools of thought on meaning-making. so you can study hermeneutics or practice exegesis and never touch analysis, is my understanding.

anyway though when i say psychoanalysis is wrong or subjective or whatever i'm generally talking about 1) specific schools of analysis that impute their particular theories / forms / archetypes to a transhistorical, a-social, mythologised human psyche, and 2) the tendency among liberal and other non-materialist commenters to causally impute changes in the world-political context to psychological conditions, rather than the other way around. this is where someone like wilhelm reich becomes really vital imo, although even freud was aware of these issues to some extent (though like not really interested enough to try to theorise outside them lol).

i think plenty of psychoanalytic concepts have applicability in particular contexts, like for example maybe you take a 'complex' that is formulated in observation of, say, bourgeois viennese white women in the early 20th century, and there are often real insights you can generate by interrogating how that complex forms in those people, and why, and again all of the interior analysis here should be subordinated to the analysis of the material conditions: labour relations, the role of the household in capitalist political economy, the production of the roles and positionalities of bourgeois genders, and so forth. all of these things are what produce the 'complex'; not the other way round. psychoanalysis at its best has a capacity to interrogate the dialectics of psychological interiority in context and i actually think this is very much worth doing and would like to see more communists commit to it. it's not a deference to a pre-determined set of rules laid out by freud or anybody else; it's a mode of investigation that i think can be entirely materially oriented, and is more conducive to understanding psychological complexity than most of what passes for 'social sciences' today lmao.

in history you see examples of this happening if you think about the difference between 'psychohistory'---a mode of historical writing that claims to analyse material events as influenced by some individual's or group's decontextualised psychological states---and something like a cultural history that attempts to explain something about an age's psychology as a function of its material conditions and relations of production. think, like, what walter benjamin had going on. and then compare to eg desmond and moore's deeply unserious darwin biography. so i wouldn't say "engaging with psychoanalysis" has any singular degree of rightness or value or whatever---it's a question of how you're engaging, and with what political commitments, and how you see the psyche in relation to its material conditions. all of this is also what i would say about any school of psychology or psychiatry, though there are some that are just hostile to materialist analysis by nature, eg bioessentialisms of all stripes.

[pinkeoni]

do u realize that st is anti-communist lol

I bet you also think Animal Farm is an anti-communist novel.

Okay, maybe I am giving the show too much credit. This is the same show that just announced their new board game and has already been merchandised to hell and back already. The Duffers are no George Orwell.

But still, there is a difference between what is in the text of the show and how their network chooses to market it.

I can understand where an audience member may see ST as anti-communist, considering that the characters themselves, the heroes of the story that we are meant to root for, are anti-communist. Which makes sense! These are characters living in America during the Cold War with the Soviets. The entirety of the Scoops Troop and Jopper plotlines in season 3 are about bringing down the “evil commies” and Hopper spends most of his time in season 4 being tortured in a Russian prison.

But here’s the thing that most anons seem to be doing, which is conflating the Soviet Union with communism. Saying that Will Byers would be a communist =/= saying that Will Byers would support the Soviet Union. And okay, I may have made that edit of Will in an ushanka, which I did only because editing fictional characters in ushankas is funny. Here it is again:

Let's bring it back to what I mentioned in the very beginning, which is George Orwell's Animal Farm, but specifically the last scene of that novel. The farm animals have successfully led the revolt against the humans, and yet the state of the farm is as bad as it was before, and the pigs are sitting at the table indistinguishable from the humans that they rebelled against in the first place.

Because Orwell's novel isn't saying "communism bad," but rather, the political leaders of the Soviet Union had gone against the original principles they were fighting for.

So the show is definitely anti-soviet, which doesn't equate to anti-communist. To be fair, there isn't much in the show that is expressly pro-communist, but the show isn't really pro-capitalist either. In fact, the show isn't even really that pro-American.

I feel like the ideology of the Cold War was very us versus them, or you're either with us or your against. You are either a red blooded American who is a proud capitalist and uphold the beliefs of your country, or you are a soviet communist pig. But as Papa would say—

The best season to express this is season 3. Season 3 introduces Starcourt Mall— the pinnacle of American consumerism. We learn that the mall has actually been actively hurting the town, causing many local businesses to go belly-up because they just can't compete.

But we also learn that Larry Kline, the mayor of Hawkins, was actually colluding with the Russians the whole time and the mall was a big front for the Russians to conduct their experiments. The point that the show was trying to make is that the same patriotic "All American" man who held a Fourth of July celebration for the town is on the same side as the "Evil Communist Russians."

Let us not forget that this is the same show that said that American government agents were "bad men," and actively used the Reagan/Bush campaign as a symbol of danger. Maybe ST is not the flagship communist show, but it isn't the flagship pro-American capitalist show either.

tagging @aemiron-main since you expressed interest on my poll

Side bar! Did you know that during the Second Red Scare, queer people were labeled as communists and prosecuted, because their lifestyles were considered inherently anti-American, and a security risk to the country? True story!

[wackyrumble]

San Marino v.s. Roommate

San Marino - Real life

A European country. Founded when a guy accused of being a woman’s estranged husband fled to a mountain where he then created a church. Its head of government are two captains elected every six months. Was once almost been invaded by Napoleon, and twice by family of the Pope. Read more about San Marino below.

Roommate - Diary of a Tourney Kid

A clone of Adam Ruins Everything that came out wrong. He debunks things in the same way as his original, but completely incorrectly. Bill Cipher turned him into a hand puppet and fused him with a clone of another character. Fought Walter White and his evil shadow self, Walter Black. Read more about Roommate below.

Full description of San Marino:

“Okay look I know it’s a country and not a character but perhaps I can convince you that it’s a wacky guy… the wackiest ever in fact. First of all I believe nothing can top its batshit insane political system. The heads of state are called CAPTAINS and yes it’s plural there are 2 of them. And they are elected… every SIX MONTHS. I shit you not. And even better. They’re usually from OPPOSING PARTIES. How anything gets done is a mystery to me. Anyway moving on to history. It was almost invaded by Napoleon in 1797, but one of their regents prevented that. How? He became friends with Napoleon. Napoleon valued their friendship so much he even offered to extend San Marino’s territory… isn’t that crazy. Also. It was the first country ever to democratically elect a communist government, elected directly after their fascist government mind you. All this while being the fifth smallest country in the world. It happened TWICE that a family member of the pope tried to invade San Marino. There can only be one Italian microstate etc (jk I have no idea what their reasoning was). It’s the fact that the whole country only exists because some guy decided to fuck off to a mountain after a woman accused him of being her estranged husband. So he built a church and there you have it San Marino was created. And yeah it’s the oldest surviving republic in the world with the oldest constitution. That’s simply the San Marino way being so special so wacky so unique…”

Full description of Roommate:

"OK OK OK SO LIKE. HE'S FROM THIS MASHUP TOURNAMENT HOSTED ON SOUNDCLOUD & DISCORD CALLED "DIARY OF A TOURNEY KID, RIGHT? YES, IT IS BASED OFF OF DIARY OF A WIMPY KID IN NAME, THEMING, AND A BUNCH OF THE CHARACTERS IN IT. AND YES, THE ENTIRE PREMISE WAS STARTED BY GREG HEFFLEY TRAPPING A BUNCH OF PEOPLE IN THE DIARY. LOOK. OKAY. THAT ISN'T THE POINT HERE. (including a few real people but. roommate isn't one of those real people, LOL)

so Roommate is, like, a WEIRD case. he's a clone of a TV personality version of a real guy(adam conover specifically the whole thing he does in, like, adam ruins everything), but is SPECIFICALLY STATED TO BE A SEPERATE CHARACTER IN LORE. LIKE. HES A WHOLE OTHER GUY. HE DOESNT EVEN ACT LIKE HIM. HES LIKE. THE SCOOBY DOO VILLAIN EQUIVALENT OF A MAN. all he does is run around and "Debunk" shit but hes getting it all totally WRONG. It's like, if someone who never watched adam ruins everything before took one look at its name, the blonde, glasses wearing combover having guy on the cover, and went. "oh, this guy is gonna be HORRIBLE, isnt he". and in the shows case thatd be wrong but in roommate's case, he's...he's so pathetic. he's not even the same guy at this point. (and also literally isn't. but)

He never even manages to intimidate anyone even once. not even mr beast and ninja fortnite, (part of a team called Dubious Duo) who he just. VERY much annoyed via "ruining" twitch. He also got turned into a meaty handpuppet and fused to another clone of a different character by BILL CIPHER, of all characters but then immediately fell into a hole. He got his shit beaten out of him by a 19 year old punk catboy JUST before this, too. the punk catboys name is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart BUT HE IS IN NO WAY RELATED TO THE REAL GUY. HES LITERALLY JUST. SOME RANDOM TEENAGER.

Also, extra fun facts about him include: during an event that happened on the discord, he canonically went ":3". He made his own ytp and posted it on the soundcloud account, too. he put a bunch of goofy wacky cartoon sounds in it. (his mashups use these sounds a lot outside of the ytp, too.) (incase you REALLY wanted to hear the ytp, though. here it is:

P.S: extra information from a friend because they like to infodump this sort of thing & this isn't nescessary at all. but: He gets the fandom nickname of "Roommate" from his connection to Collegehumor & the Insane Clown Posse song In My Room, which he used in the tournament & is strongly associated with. He's so. He's so normal.

(P.S, P.S: THE IMAGE I SENT WITH THIS IS TECHNICALLY ART OF HIM FROM A CROSSOVER WITH ANOTHER SOUNDCLOUD TOURNAMENT THAT HAPPENED. BUT. its the best render i have that isnt done in like. ms paint LOL. IN SAID CROSSOVER (WITH A TOURNAMENT CALLED "THE PERFECT TOURNAMENT") HE ALSO FOUGHT WALTER WHITE AND HIS. EVIL SHADOW SELF, CALLED WALTER BLACK. WHO WAS LITERALLY HIS SHADOW.)

also: nobody in the fandom knows what his deal is, either. they literally just couldnt catch the real adam conover at first so they (In canon) just went "well! time to make a clone, i guess!" and then he came out WRONG."

[kapi-tanka]

what do you think about arcade gannons father? do you have any headcanons or just thoughts in general? i've seen your posts about his mother so yk just curious

sorry it took so long to answer! actually i had a similar conversation with my mutual not so long ago so i'll just copy my discord messages if it's okay with you lol... i don't know what else to add. at first i wanted to write a separate answer to your question but i guess there's no point in repeating myself in slightly different words also sorry to any marxists who get to read this. my understanding of politics is still far from confident but i try to educate myself as much as i can. TEXT VERSION UNDER THE CUT

omg i'm by no means an authority but i really appreciate it!! hmm but what are you interested in exactly? i think i've covered my headcanons on arcade's mom pretty well in one of my comics but his dad's still a bit mystical figure to me. but i have a couple of headcanons based on info from the ttrpg fallout game where arcade was josh sawyer's player character. like, i headcanon his name as mark because it was his name in the ttrpg (and i feel like some people do that too) and it seems that he knew some latin or at least a couple of latin phrases (and maybe mark even was the reason why arcade learned latin later, that and his medical education). and since cannibal johnson says that arcade reminds him of gannon sr. i feel like he was a pretty educated person too. and it may be a bit weird/hard to explain/very post-soviet of me and i'm not sure if it's even a thing in other countries/regions but i've always read gannons (or at least mrs gannon) as "intelligentsia" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia). basically, a social class of the "minds" of the state who were privileged enough to get good education and, therefore, important positions in the state, primarily in science/arts/education (it's not a separate class actually, they mostly were bourgeoisie/petite bourgeoisie or on the border with the working class). education was almost inherited in such families because "intelligents" gravitated towards each other and subconsciously taught their kids the same ideals/automatically gave them some of their cultural capital. so yeah, it was pretty elitist in its core but intelligentsia was generally very politically conscious (because they had opportunities to learn in-depth theoretical politics and not only the propaganda for the working class). i obviously oversimplify it and all of this was much much more nuanced and complex, but i hope it still makes some sense and we have very tragic associations with intelligentsia here because when the soviet regime started to shoot itself in the leg intelligentsia was the first to leave the country/be imprisoned/executed/repressed in many other ways. because, again, they were educated enough to critique the state in "dangerous" ways (and many intellectuals helped to shape the communist revolution in the beginning so their importance was originally in this ability to provide state criticism). i know that the enclave is nothing like the ussr in terms of their politics and roots but i feel like similar social classes form in other secluded states too (and something similar even happened to veronica in the brotherhood so. yeah). and i feel like the enclave went through the same process of staling within itself due to lack of contact with the outside world soooo its policies became more and more right-wing with time. and gannons were somewhat oppositional even before mark's death and mrs gannon's parting with the enclave. like, we know that cannibal johnson was openly anti-enclave and even sabotaged his missions. and also cannibal johnson says the nicest things about arcade's father so i think that they had to share political views at least in some way. but mark gannon has to be much more complex than this, not all sugar and candy of course. i feel like he went through a "going anti-state" arc and was much more right-wing in the beginning of his military career and before meeting his wife (also i headcanon her name as daniela because "daniel" was originally arcade's middle name) sorry for the wall of text!!! i can elaborate on anything (also lol. it reads as very anti-communist but i didn't intend it that way. i'm an anarcho-communist myself but i think it's important to talk about war crimes of any failed regime, especially the one you want to work properly in the future)

yes same!! honestly i don't think arcade remembers him well. because everything arcade says sounds more like something other people told arcade?? and in my headcanon he internalized his mother's and other remnants' sentiments and opinions to a point of having fake memories about his dad (but i think it was mostly the remnants who formed this conflict, i see his mother as a silent and a bit avoidant type because she never told him what happened to mr gannon). i still can't figure out my own timeline for arcade's childhood but i thiiiink they left navarro when he was around 5-6 years old cuz arcade says in one of his quotes that he had to hide his association with the enclave for 30 years. plus i believe that he said something about moreno living half of his life on the wastelands already but still grieving the enclave

i think mark was mostly busy with missions to spend any time with arcade. but i don't see him as a particularly bad father, just a busy kind

like, maybe they've had so little time together that arcade remembered some moments very vividly but overthinked them? sometimes memories become foggy because you spin them in your head for too long. for some reason i feel like this happened to almost every arcade's memory of mark

[mesetacadre]

hello! asking this as a communist interested in family abolition (so i promise it's in good faith and out of curiosity lol): how might we look at abolishing family since it's such an ancient concept? of course it exists today to reinforce the rot of capitalism, so how should we approach abolishing it completely? would it be reworked/restructured from the ground up? abandoned completely?

i read your post this morning and it got me thinking literally all day - i see this concept talked through a lot in anarchist spaces, as you said, but much less in ML spaces. it's okay if you can't/don't want to answer these questions, and even moreso, i don't even know if it's worth asking at this point. but it's such a fascinating topic and i would love to hear more of your thoughts on it, if you've got any ^^ or any reading you recommend! (sorry if this ask is worded poorly lmao i'm like half falling asleep)

helloo, this is a very theoretical question and as such there really isn't a good basis to go on, so I'm more speculating here than anything else.

I really think family abolition will have to happen at the stage of communism, when other ancient structures like economic classes, money, and the state also begin to be dismantled. I think the functions of the family (child rearing and an economic unit of consumption/work) would be replaced by communalized child rearing, thus allowing the biological parents of the child to not be so occupied with raising the child and allowing the child to be educated by a lot more people, also curbing potential abuse that comes from exclusively being raised by one or two people. As for the economic aspect of the family, the colectivization of the means of production and the decentralization that would have to come with the stage of communism would make the family obsolete in this regard. Again, this is more speculative than anything.

To read more about what this would maybe look like, I'd suggest reading on the transition from primitive communism to slavery because that's when the family as a structure came into being and became intertwined with private property. Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* describes this, as well as this political economy textbook from the USSR, in the first few chapters

[tempesttz]

unnecessary rant about an

unnecessary (but very odd) debate

i know this is not my usual post but tumblr just suggested me another account (as it does), so i went to check them out. openly endogenic, wonderful. inclusive, check. "if i block you, you're probably not inclusive enough." sure? then i scrolled down a bit more, and... tw: mentions of discourse, nazis, the holocaust, and ai art. i'm also just not very nice, so tw for that too.

".....ai art is still art and arguing otherwise is spreading nazi bullshit regardless of if you personally like it or not...." ....what? at this point i'm thinking okay, op has no clue what a nazi is or something. right? right??? there was a link, so i, an unwitting fool looking for more elaboration on this take, clicked it.

"blocked a long time follower because they were being reactionary. here is your reminder that regardless of your stance on copyright, as soon as you start regurgitating that ai art isn't art, you are spreding the rhetoric authoritarianism. you are being reactionary and conservative. in fact, you are literally spreading nazi shit. read up if you have the spoons for it: link here. the focus should be on mitigating harm to those more directly impacted, not on trying to erase the art now exist.s not on ai arts legitimacy as art." i'm not going to just sit here and say "oh wow weird take, point and laugh guys." that would be weird and frankly no better than places like r/fdc and r/systemscringe. so instead, we're gonna break this down: first off: what is degenerate art? well, let's check their wikipedia link.

"Degenerate art (German: Entartete Kunst) was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art." okay, so op is claiming that dislike of ai art is comparable to the suppressing and banning of large amounts of art in nazi germany. which is a wild take. but why is it wild? 1. ai generators clearly do not experience much suppression or banning in places considering that they are an active threat to artists. 2. the main issue with ai image generation is that it is stealing from actual artists to create their images and putting people who have trained for years to hone their skills at risk of losing their jobs. this diminishes the amount of artists who will actually pursue a career in that field, thereby reducing the amount of actual artists and directly harming the art community. 3. a lot of people will lie about being ai "artists," attempting to claim the work as actual art. 4. the concept of comparing something like this to the holocaust in general is just... wildly insensitive, frankly. this should be common sense, but there seems to be a distinct lack of it here anyways. 5. people are allowed to have opinions? you can think ai art is a valid form of art. i'll think you're weird, but that's a valid opinion. some people don't think certain genres of music are art. some people don't think certain kinds of art should be considered art. for example, those pendulum paintings that were everywhere, and might still be everywhere. i saw a lot of discourse about those. some people did not consider them to be art, or at least not on par with things like large, dedicated paintings. does that make the people who have that opinion nazis? .....no????? there isn't a moral to this post. it probably shouldn't exist. i just saw this and needed to rant, and decided to make you all my unwitting victims, lol. if you agree with op, then... i don't know, have a nice day? maybe stop conflating something like ai art (which is basically inconsequential unless you are in a community it effects or witnessing a downgrade of media quality due to its usage in production) to the holocaust (one of if not the worst historical event to this day in history)? okay wait, i have a moral! you can dislike things or have an opinion without it having to be taken to the total extreme. for anyone who read through this entire thing, thank you for sticking around! have a cookie. 🍪

[familyabolisher]

hi id be really interested on hearing more of your thoughts about dros because i cannot fully wrap my head around what he signifies. hes so much. sorry this is a bit vague you just sound like you get him

idk if i could say much that @txttletale didn’t already say very coherently here; would recommend giving her post a read because she explains him far more clearly than i can. i should also say that i've only played disco elysium all the way through once so i'm just going off of memory and the wiki page lol.

i guess my most significant thought on dros is that he and harry act as foils of a sort. when we meet harry at the start of the game, the immediate invisible force behind the spiral of self-destructive behaviour that led to him losing his memory is, of course, his being unable to get over dora; however, his transmuting of dora into a figure equivalent to dolores dei + the dialogue we get from the limbic system at the very beginning suggests that we should understand this spiral and effective ‘death’ as one driven by a failure to survive under capitalism.

YOU: Tell me, what's waiting for me?

LIMBIC SYSTEM: There is a giant ball there. And evil apes. And the evil apes are dukin' it out on the ball. You're one of them. It's basically all just evil apes dukin' it out on a giant ball.

YOU: How big is the ball?

LIMBIC SYSTEM: You can't even make out that it's a ball, when you're dukin' it out. It's that large.

YOU: How small are the apes?

LIMBIC SYSTEM: Infinitesimally small.

YOU: And what is this "dukin' it out" I keep hearing about?

LIMBIC SYSTEM: Vying for resources? It's just a stupid expression you picked up somewhere. The part of the presentation you want to take home is this: you have to beat the other evil apes in the face or you lose.

YOU: That's sad.

LIMBIC SYSTEM: Yes it is. And you drowned in that sadness a long time ago.

YOU: What do mean, "drowned"?

LIMBIC SYSTEM: You lost.

what harry’s limbic system describes there is a cynical perspective on participation in a capitalist society that rests on the myth of meritocracy; that humans have to be ‘vying for resources,’ that we have to enact violence against one another for the sake of our own survival. ‘lost’ here has a double meaning—harry ‘lost’ in that he failed to successfully participate in the myth of capitalist meritocracy, and he ‘lost’ dora, and the double meaning is intended to frame these two ‘losses’ as one and the same. from the snatches we get of his and dora’s history, it seems that the class gulf between them and the poverty that they lived in while together contributed in part to her leaving him; focusing on this (rather than on the fact that harry’s joining the RCM affected his behaviour such that he got, euphemistically, ‘sad,’ and violent) allows harry to both absolve himself of personal blame for the failure of their relationship (at least in a capacity that goes beyond self-flagellation) and to interpolate dora into dolores dei, ‘mother of humanity’ and synecdoche of moralism (and imperialist war criminal). 

referring back to the linked post which explains dros as embodying a spirit of regressive communism unable to adapt to the demands of the post-commune world (in effect, the post-soviet world), we might consider harry’s relationship to capitalism/moralism prior to the start of the game as running parallel to dros’ relationship to communism, in that both are trapped by the ideological tetherings of the past and unable to imagine a new future. (this is tangential, but disco elysium is very fixated on asking harry and the player both to imagine new, seemingly impossible futures outside of what seem to be fixed continuums, especially if you play as a communist, and the distinction between harry and dros is integral to that discursive move.) both are affected by the insulindian phasmid, though in divergent ways—for dros, the phasmid’s pheromones help to keep him trapped in the past and eventually send him into a catatonic state, whereas for harry, the phasmid is a ‘miracle from the west’—the interruptor of apparent inevitability and the narrative’s insistence that miracles are possible. both have ‘love’ embedded into their characters and intertwined with their political fixations—for harry, of course, his love for dora maps itself onto dolores dei and his having ‘lost’ her becomes interchangeable with his having ‘lost’ at capitalism itself, and for dros, isolated from the mainland and devoid of any real currency within the present political climate of martinaise, ‘love’ becomes the means by which he feels himself able to participate in the world again, leading to him spying on klaasje and killing lely (a fascist). 

dros & harry are similar characters that ought to have been on similar trajectories, were it not for the fact that harry’s memory loss gave him a chance to briefly shed the past (though ofc, echoes of dora remain throughout the narrative and we know by the end that he cannot wholly escape her) and build a new sense of himself, including a new ideological sense. where fascist/‘traditionalist’ harry becomes fixated on the past, communist harry looks towards the future, and confronts the tension between the seeming inevitability of communism’s failure versus the possibility of success. 

& the end of disco elysium is bittersweet—dros, last notable remnant of the antecentennial revolution, is ‘defeated’ in a sense by moralintern forces, much the same as the revolution itself. harry, played as a communist, returns to the RCM, much like how the insurgency in revachol was absorbed into the RCM and thus became an extension of coalition authority. time in a sense resets itself—but if dros espouses absolute failure and the ending seems to regurgitate the trajectory of history that we’ve seen before, disco elysium’s broader discursive fabric all but begs you as the player to believe that something else is possible. i’ve talked about this a bunch of times before, but it really does boil down to moments like the inframaterialist tower being able to stand on its own, ‘something beautiful is going to happen,’ ‘be vigilant, i love you,’ ‘we refuse to accept that the world has to remain like this,’ etc., pitting the inevitability of communist failure against the necessity of revolutionary optimism. (i’m working on an essay rn on disco elysium and walter benjamin + historical materialism which should clarify this argument a little more??)

i don’t know if i’ve explained this as well as i’d like but i’ve had this ask sat in my inbox for like a week now fhskjnfn. anyway: dros as both foil to and mirror for harry, as representing the stagnation of a revolutionary ideology that fails to adapt to new conditions and recognise the new possibilities present even in the face of defeat, as key to establishing the tension between defeatism and optimism by which the game comes to insist on the necessity of the latter. 

[odinsblog]

Don’t fool yourselves, tankies, Putin and the Russian government are every bit as terrible as anything you hate about America. Homophobic, transphobic, pro-Trump, and racist af. And every bit as capitalistic. Putin and his cronies are all billionaires.

The video below shows Russian state tv (their nationalized Fox News) and how very much they are like conservatives and Republicans. It’s a little over three minutes long, but please watch it:

Pandering to theocracy and Christofascists, invoking a “holy war” against Ukraine, likening Putin to a Godlike figure (authoritarianism much?), the whole “traditional” “Christian” “family values” rhetoric, homophobia, demonizing and dehumanizing their enemies into subhuman things that aren’t worthy of life, denigrating Ukrainian culture and history, and sO much worse…

Look, I’m Black. I remember seeing those videos of how shitty those Ukrainian and Polish border guards were treating Black students who were fleeing war. That was wrong and inexcusable. Period. But you know where those Black students weren’t fleeing to? They were not fleeing to the “safety” of Russia. And they didn’t go to Russia to complete their studies in the first place. Why?? I mean, if Russia is so pure and if Putin is so good, why tf didn’t they go to Russia in the first place?? Why would they have gone to Ukraine if it was full of Nazis?? Why didn’t they run to Putin to (lol) “save” them from the Nazis???

And JFC don’t even get me started on what they’re doing to Brittney Griner, a Black, openly lesbian woman. For cannabis oil! Just like American conservatives & neoliberals would treat her here at home, if given half a chance.

And, when Putin invaded them, Crimea wasn’t in NATO, and Ukraine wasn’t in NATO. Putin started these wars. Not NATO and not Ukraine. If you believe that invading and going to war with another country is okay because you’re afraid of what they might do, then you’re every bit as imperialistic and jingoistic as Benjamin Netanyahu or any American President.

And, if you believe that ALL Ukrainians are Nazis, then congratulations—you’re stupid af and very easily manipulated. I’m going to need you to please explain to me how the allll of the Jewish residents currently being bombed in Odesa are Nazis.

Putin’s army is mass bombing innocent civilians, raping people, and committing horrific war crimes. Because what? Because Putin was allegedly “afraid” they were all Nazis? Or, because Putin didn’t like that sovereign nations were talking to countries he didn’t like?? It’s straight up imperialism. It’s naked colonialism.

Anyway, this was something that came up recently, and I just wanted to take a moment to say I’m old, and Russia hasn’t been a “communist” country since almost before I was born, and to tell tankies to fuck all the way off.

[communistkenobi]

the thought I am about to voice is going to be very messy and rough and probably overly generalised, but I’m coming to the point in my education (& I’m picking out Fanon, Said, Cesaire in particular here) where I feel like empiricism as a system of thinking is at a crisis point for me. rationalism and positivism and scientific discovery broadly as a way of systemising information and thinking about the world has been so deeply bound up in projects of capitalism and empire, legitimising the “civilising efforts” of colonial occupations of various “irrational” societies across the world, producing “The West” as a political entity that is seen as ultimately rational, and creating this body of secular authority (“scientific knowledge”) that is imbedded in the maintenance of “The West” and its component states, an authority that can only be understood and contributed to as an academic via the same capitalistic market logics that govern everything else - that to be “empirical” about the world, to present myself as someone whose beliefs are informed by provable discoverable “facts” about reality, feels very similar to an allegiance to capital-E Empire in general.

And Marxism has been very clarifying for me in this regard, to be able to use empiricism and make empirical claims that are fundamentally counter-hegemonic to capitalism, but it still comes out of this same European enlightenment tradition. But absent that I don’t know what else there is lol. Like empiricism feels like the only game in town but it’s a game with so much blood on its hands that I don’t know if it’s something you can export out of capitalism. To use an example, is eugenics a “misuse” of science? My answer to that question is both yes and no - yes in the sense that a belief in eugenics is not backed by evidence, that when you put the idea that some “gene pools” are “better” than others and that you need to get rid of “the bad ones” to scientific tests, this does not stand up to scientific scrutiny because the categorical bins you use to define good and bad gene pools are also not biological or scientific (eg race), as well as a bunch of other issues, so eugenics fails the empirical smell test. But eugenics is also effectively “true” because the belief in it has produced unquantifiable amounts of imperial violence. It’s “true” in the sense that it has become a rational logic by which empire justifies itself, and so imperial powers behave as if it is true. And because eugenics emerges out of enlightenment scientific thinking, a project itself that emerges from capitalism/colonialism, can it really be called a misuse if it’s accomplishing exactly what European imperial powers need it to?

Like I guess basically what I need clarified for me is, is it possible to believe in empiricism as an epistemic authority without it being ultimately used for imperial ends. If you believe that capital-T Truth is discoverable, and that the more that Truth is used to inform the organisation of society, the better off society will be (which, as a communist, I generally do believe), does that lead you to fundamentally imperialistic conclusions?