Latest Posts by jjgaut - Page 3

shoutout to the lord of the rings lighting directors. bold move to let the audience see what's going on in nighttime scenes. i miss that.

A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.

just ran across this perfect 2000-year-old portrait of a pet who knows what he did.

"Dog Mosaic," Ptolemaic period, 2nd century BCE, floor of a house in Alexandria, Egypt. 3.25x3.25m. (Pitcher is probably gold.)

Kinda of random but what do you think of Alan's Moore comments about people liking comic book movies could lead into fascism? Seems like bitter old man territory but what do you think?

I think it's fair to say that fascism has been something of an obsession of Alan Moore's and a recurring although not omnipresent theme in many of his works.

While Miracleman is technically an expy of Captain Marvel, I would argue that the series is Moore's most extended commentary on Superman instead and especially the idea of the ubermensch. In Miracleman, our protagonist is initially thought to have been made into a superhero by a benevolent enlightened scientist, but eventually we learn that Miracleman is the product of an Operation Paperclip Nazi science project called the Zarathusa Project designed to create the literal Nietzschean Ubermensch, complete with a fixation on "blond gods" and a eugenicist breeding program. A superhero fight in the midle of London causes mass civilian casualties on the scale of an atomic bomb going off. Ultimately, Miracleman effectively overthrows Thatcher's government and rules as an enlightened despot before eventually leaving Earth for space.

Likewise, I think Watchmen is Moore's most extended commentary on masked vigilantism and thus on Batman. In Watchmen, the phenomenon of vigilantism is repeatedly associated with right-wing politics: Hooded Justice is a German circus strongman who has pro-Nazi politics; Captain Metropolis wanted his superhero teams to target "black unrest," "campus subversion," and "anti-war demos;" and the Comedian is a brutal nihilist who ultimately joins the U.S security state where he cheerfully follows orders to assassinate JFK and Woodward and Bernstein, commit atrocities in Vietnam, kill protesting hippies, etc. Finally, there's Rorschach, Moore's most famous mis-interpreted creation - Rorschach is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who's an anti-communist, anti-liberal, militant and militaristic nationalist, homophobe, misogynist, and avid follower of the John Birch Society-like New Frontiersman.

And then there's V for Vendetta, which I would argue is Moore's attempt to create a masked vigilante superhero with his own anarchist politics. In this story, the vigilante isn't a crimefighter but rather a revolutionary who seeks the overthrow of a fascist state and the creation of an anarchist utopia.

Moreover, his more recent comments about comic book movies being linked to fascism are arguably just part of his much longer-running commentary that superheroes as a concept are at the very least proto-fascist.

Having read a lot of Moore's work and interviews on the subject, I don't find his critique compelling. I think his definition of fascism is far too loose, I think his lens on the superhero genre is overly narrow, and I think his mode of analysis tends to neglect the vital area of historical context.

Definitions

So let's start with Moore's definition of fascism. I think Moore tends to really over-emphasize the whole idea of the Nietzschean ubermensch and the use of force to solve problems, and more recently he's been on this weird kick of saying that nostalgia and a childlike desire for easy solutions leads to fascism. I have several problems with this definition:

the first is that, as I've talked about in the past, fascism is a very complex historical phenomenon that can't be boiled down to a single idea, and in particular the idea of the ubermensch is a pretty small part of the German case (and even then how do you balance it against Nazism's more anti-individualistic aspects, like the mass party and the mass party organization).

the second is that the idea of a larger-than-life individual using physical prowess to solve problems is not unique to fascism. After all, during the 30s, you also had the Soviet Union promoting the heroic ideal of Stakhanovitism and the depiction of the heroic male factory worker in socialist realism. More importantly, the idea of a "larger-than-life individual using physical prowess to solve problems" is basically the same description for any number of literary figures from pulp cowboys to the Greek heroes of the Iliad and the Oddessy to the epic of Gilgamesh.

the third is that I think Moore's definition overlooks the actual drivers of the rise of contemporary fascism. Anti-semitism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny - all of these are real social and cultural forces that are actually motivating people to join the ranks of the alt-right, to commit massacres, to riot at the Capitol, and so forth. It is incredibly self-involved to think that superheroes and superhero movies are worth discussing in the same breath. At the end of the day, they're harmless entertainment compared to the real political issues that need to be tackled.

Moore's Model of Superheroes

Here's where I'm going to say something that's going to be a bit controversial - I don't think Alan Moore has read widely enough in the superhero genre to make an accurate assessment of its relationship to fascism. If we look at his comics work, and we look at his writings, and we look at his interviews, Moore's mental model of the superhero really only includes two figures, Superman as the representative of the superpowered ubermensch and Batman as the representative of the masked vigilante crimefighter. Notably, Moore hasn't really touched the last of the Big Three - Wonder Woman, a superhero with a strong legacy of radical left-wing politics. I do think we have to mention, given Moore's somewhat troubled history when it comes to issues of gender, that Moore's model of the superhero doesn't include any female superheroes (or for that matter, any superheroes of color or queer superheroes). (EDIT: I should clarify - Promethea is Moore's version of Wonder Woman, but she doesn't really come up in his discussions of fascism, and her thematic profile has more to do with Moore's interests in magic.)

And other than Captain Britain, Moore never worked with any Marvel character and basically ignores them.

To me, this is like having a career as a painter and never working with colors. Moore's model of the superhero leaves out the Fantastic Four and how their flawed psychologies revolutionized the industry and the whole idea of the superhero-as-explorer, it leaves out Spider-man and the idea of the superhero-as-everyman who's central struggle is about work-life balance and altruism, and most importantly it leaves out the X-Men and the idea of the mutant metaphor.

If as a critic you're going to make grand pronouncements about something as morally evil as fascism, I think it really is incumbent on you to have read and analyzed wildly rather than cherry-picking a couple of case studies. Especially if you have something of a tendency to mis-characterize those case studies by ignoring historical context.

Historical Context

So let's talk about Superman and Batman and their emergence in the 1930s. One vital bit of context is that the U.S experienced a significant crime wave in the 1920s and 1930s as Prohibition encouraged the rise of organized crime and then the Great Depression spurred the rise of kidnapping and bank robbery gangs. Moreover, municipal police forces tended to be wildly corrupt, accepting bribes from organized crime to let them operate with impunity, while not letting up in the slightest in their brutal oppression of workers and minorities.

In this context, I think the idea of vigilantism - while it has an undeniably racist legacy dating back to Reconstruction - is not purely a conservative phenomena. It's also an expression of a desire for help from somebody, anybody when the powers that be are of no help. And at the end of the day, unsanctioned use of force can equally be traced back to left-wing self-defense efforts from the Panthers back to the Communist Party's streetfighting corps to unions packing two-by-fours on the picket line - so I don't think we can simply equate punching a bad guy with racist lynch mobs and call it a day.

So let's talk about Superman and the ubermensch. I think Moore has a bad tendency to focus on his nightmare scenrio of a godlike being tyrannizing and destroying hapless humanity, while minimizing the actual ideas of Siegel and Schuster. He tends to take their use of the Nietzschean as a straighforward invocation instead of the clear subversion it was intended to be - rather than a blond god who imposed tyrannical rule with horrific violence, Siegel and Schuster made their Superman a dark-haired Moses allegory, who rather than solely fighting crime acted to stop wife-beaters, war profiteers, and save the life of death row inmates, and whose secret identity was of a crusading journalist who uncovered corrupt politicians.

To be fair, Alan Moore admits that Superman started out as "very much a New Deal American” - but because this kind of does near-fatal damage to his argument, he quickly minimizes that by saying that Superman got co-opted and thus it doesn't count. This is some No True Scotsman bullshit - Moore knows that his example just imploded so he tries to wriggle out of it by arguing that Superman sold out to the Man. If we go back to the actual historical evidence, we can see that at the outset of the Red Scare, the Superman radio show went on a crusade against the Klan, and throughout the conservative 1950s, Superman was used to propagandize liberal values of religious and racial equality:

So much for selling out.

On the other hand, Batman is a tougher case, given that his whole deal is being a masked vigilante who wages an unending war on crime to avenge his murdered parents. So is Batman an inherently fascist figure, a wealthy sadist who spends his time brutally beating the poor and the mentally ill when he could be using his riches to tackle social issues? I would argue that this version of Batman is actually pretty recent - very much a legacy of the work of Frank Miller and then the post-9/11 writings of Christopher Nolan, Johnathan Nolan, and David Goyer - and that there have been many different Batmen with very different thematic foci.

For example, the early Batman was as much a figure of horror as he was of superheroics - he fought Frankensteins and Draculas, he killed with silver bullets, etc. Then in the 40s and 50s, you got the much more cartoony and light-hearted Batman who pretty much exclusively fought equally oddball supervillains in such a heightened world of riddles and giant pennies and mechanical T-Rexes that I don't think you can particularly describe it as "crime-fighting." Then in the 1960s, you have the titanic influence of the Batman TV show, where Adam West as Batman was officially licensed by the Gotham P.D (so much for vigilantism) and extolled the virtues of constitutional due process and the Equal Pay Act in PSAs and episodes alike. You can call the 1966 Batman a lot of things, but fascist isn't one of them.

Conclusion

I want to emphasize at the end of the day that I'm a huge Alan Moore fan; I've read most of his vast bibliography, I find him a fascinating if very odd thinker and critic, I've even tried to read his mammoth novel Jerusalem (which is not easy reading, let me tell you). At the same time, it's important not to treat creators, even the very titans of the medium, as incapable of error. And in this case, I think Alan Moore is simply wrong about fascism and superheroes and people should really stop asking him about it, because I don't think he has anything new to say about it.

cats be like

Pls reblog if u vote :)

Paizo, AI Art, and Copyright

So you may have seen that Paizo, the (unionized) tabletop roleplaying company behind Pathfinder, has decided to ban AI art and writing from both its own products and its community-created marketplaces. As you might expect, this has caused a certain amount of righteous indignation among pro-AI tech bro types. 

I think one thing that the tech bros who are screaming about Luddites and the inevitability of market forces and blah blah are completely ignoring is that we’re not talking about personal use of AI art and text - we’re talking about commercial uses of AI art and text. That means what really matters here is contracts and copyrights.

In case you haven’t heard, it is very well-settled law that art produced by non-humans cannot be copyrighted. More specifically, the U.S Copyright Office has repeatedly ruled that AI-generated pictures and comic book art cannot be copyrighted.

No matter how much you say that you “created” something by typing into a search bar and hit a button over and over again, if you don’t own the copyright to a piece of art, you can’t sell it because you don’t actually own it. Which means that Paizo isn’t going to buy it, because they can’t purchase the copyright to it as part of the contract, which means they can’t sell any products that use it.

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

I love how after “The Dancing Men” Holmes is constantly telling people to sit down whenever he interviews them.  Watson one time was like ‘hey that woman looks awful, ask her to sit down, Holmes’ and Holmes was like ‘Ah yes!  People like to sit down!  I will hold this as a primary fact of life for the rest of my existence.’

Could you maybe reblog this post if you think respecting trans peoples' names and identities is a basic right and not a political opinion?

No pressure. Just seeking some validation of my sentiment. Due to some. people

my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this

look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit

motherfucking australia

Consider the god of salmon.

There is a god of salmon, somewhere in the gravel and the pebbles of the spawning redd. All salmon are aware of it as soon as they are born, in their own, private, fishy ways, and remember their god of salmon when they leave the spawning grounds and journey into the saltwaters beyond.

Theirs is the god of journeys and returnings.

Eventually, every salmon is struck by the urge to return to the holy lands of its ancestors. They pray to the god of salmon, asking for protection against bears and other predators on the journey.

“Deliver us from eagles,” the salmon pray.

All animals get their own gods, and those animal gods get their own prayers. The gods of mice and rabbits and other small, squeaking, hunted things usually get prayers along the lines of, “Oh please, oh please, oh please…”

Unlike those fickle gods, parishioners of the god of salmon get results.

Salmon get miracles.

A salmon returns to freshwater and discovers that it can breathe.

A salmon swimming against the current watches its spine curl, its teeth lengthen, sees grey scales turn red.

A salmon comes to a waterfall and discovers that it can fly…

Eventually the salmon complete their pilgrimage, and return to the holy lands of their ancestors.

Many raucous orgies are held.

Hallelujah.

And then, exhausted, the salmon die. The land flourishes as residual nutrients run through creeks and estuaries.

And the god of salmon continues, buoyed on the souls and prayers of millions of martyrs.

Oh shit I just realized I can post the “Gaussian Blur Wizard That Gaussian Blurs You” here

After shoving Hansel in the oven, the witch turns to Gretel - who is currently fending the witch off with a gingerbread chair - and says:

“I can’t believe you thought a trail of breadcrumbs would save you. I mean, honestly, this is a forest! It’s full of animals. Honestly, the very idea that a dumb shit like you thought you could get the better of me is absurd.”

Gretel hits her in the face with said chair. To be fair to the witch, she takes the chairshot like a champ.

“Ow!”

“Did you know,” says Gretel, “that crows are capable of facial recognition?”

“Eh?” Says the witch, clambering to her feet and pulling a candy cane sledgehammer off the wall. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Not only that,” Gretel continues, “but they can remember both friends and enemies. And they’ll often follow people they remember as friends.”

The two fence with their sugared weapons for a moment, before the witch knocks the chair out of Gretel’s hands.

“Enough with the bird facts! Honestly, this whole attempted escape has been utter clownshoes. Get in the fucking oven!”

She seizes Gretel by the collar. Gretel immediately sandbags, letting her whole body go limp. This eminently practical defense forces the witch to try and deadlift her. Which is hard, as the witch often skips leg day.

“For example,” Gretel says, as the witch struggles and grunts, “if you feed crows a lot of breadcrumbs, they’ll probably start to see you as a friend and follow you in the hope of more food.”

The witch stops. Outside, she hears the thunder of wings.

“They’ll even bring you shiny things they find as presents!” Says Gretel, as a corner of the gingerbread ceiling is suddenly cut away by a large crow with a knife in its mouth.

“Oh shitballs.” Says the witch, as the crows descend. “I hope you know this is a great unkindness.”

“Technically,” Says Gretel, “It’s a murder.”

Each new thing I see I get closer and closer to making a Sweded version of Goncharov

When Katya said “Of course we’re in love. That’s why i tried to shoot you.” And Goncharov said “If we really were in love you wouldn’t have missed.” 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Goncharov's main theme - one of the most beautiful movie themes from the 70s!

all this talk about goncharov but i dont see anybody posting the soundtrack??? like how are you gonna talk about this movie without the music

Can we talk about Goncharov's sound for a moment please?

I know this is tumblr so we've mostly gotta do extended examination of the themes and fanfic about the gay subtext that's absolutely there between Goncharov and Andrey and the subtext we all wishing was actually there between Katya and Sophia (as I'm sure has been point out, in the original script, it was "You could have been my *son*", not *sun*, which is a whole different mess of subtext, and the other reading only came about because of the lousy closed captioning on the one VHS release). But so much of what makes the film so involving and powerful is the *sound*.

And I know, too, that it's incredibly hard to find a version that sounds good -- I was so lucky to see a 16mm print at a now-closed arthouse theater years ago, and the sound was an absolute revelation over the aged VHS tapes we normally see. But if you can find a version with proper sound somehow, absolutely do, and listen with the best sound system you can. I also saw a version pop up on a local cable channel in Denver of all places once that had pretty decent sound, so I know that version is out there somewhere!

The way each clock and watch ticks different ways that relate to the mood and character. Listen especially to how Goncharov's has a barely-perceptible stutter - it's such an old watch, one he has cherished, but he doesn't have time to repair it. And the way the seconds ticking on it slow just a little each time he looks at it. (My mom's old VHS of it was so worn I couldn't even hear it on her copy when she showed it to me as a kid!)

Or the gunshots! I miss the expressionistic way 70s and 80s movies had handguns sound like cannons to get across how loud and powerful guns are in general, but this was one of the first to really push that idea, and the way you *feel* the impact has been replicated so rarely.

And it's all the more impressive because Walter Murch only had a few weeks to work on this between American Graffiti and The Conversation! It's partly why I believe the rumors that George Lucas actually did a lot of the sound mixing uncredited - not because Murch wasn't good enough to do this, but because there's just no way he had enough... well, enough time.

Anyway, hope at some point this gets a restored release so we can properly appreciate some of the craftsmanship that's been all-but-lost in what few versions are out there.

Heck, there's a very good chance Littlefinger has an appointment made with Illyn Payne's sword. After all, it probably won't take long for Ned and Tyrion to put the pieces together in a conversation (one could say interrogation, but this is Tyrion we're talking about).

Hypothetically speaking, what would have happened if Tyrion managed to escape the Inn at the Crossroads before Catelyn captured him? Or better yet, if they hadn't crossed paths at all?

Catelyn makes it back to the North and starts preparing for war (which definitely makes her the protagonist of any Northern subplot), Tyrion ambles on down to King's Landing. When he gets there, it might be Ned laying charges (though his investigations may go differently, who knows when he's listening to Littlefinger). That means the entire matter is brought before Robert straight away and the Starks don't look great because the evidence against Tyrion isn't very strong and the people who were actually present for the bet about the knife know that.

So what we've got instead of rapid escalation to war is instead more of a slower-burning armed feud. Maybe Tywin retaliates with some border raids on the Riverlands (oops! were those your peasants?), but it's less likely he'd just walk in and start trying to burn the whole Riverlands down.

From there, we're back to a race as to whether Ned figures out the incest first or Robert dies...but Ned's got the time to gear up for war in this scenario, and he's probably not listening to Littlefinger anymore either.

as a member of the lgbt community, it really hurts to hear people say that my "lifestyle" isn't "family friendly". i care a lot about being family friendly. it's very important to me. that's why this month i'm partnering with your mom -

Okay so I'm just going to put this out there: y'all really need to learn what a President can and cannot do.

A President is NOT a dictator. They cannot do just whatever they want, whenever they want. This is a good thing.

A President can only codify a law IF IT IS PASSED BY CONGRESS FIRST.

Biden literally cannot do anything other than urge people do the right thing until a resolution passes Congress.

Since partway through Clinton's term Congress has been doing less and less every year because of shitty political maneuvering.

Please get mad at the right people. Yell at your Congress person. Vote in midterms to solidify a Democratic house and help turn the Senate (don't at me about the Senate right now--two "Democratic" senators are really Republicans and we all know it).

Don't even try to tell me voting doesn't work. How do you think we got a 6-3 majority in the SC? Because Republicans have been systematically showing up to every local and state election for over 30 years and now they have majority control of 26 states. They have control in the majority of state judicial branches. They showed up to the boring, uncool elections. They control city councils. They control state governments. And Democrats/third party could, too...if people show up to vote. But voting numbers don't lie. And we don't.

Get involved in grassroot organizations to increase voting registration and access. Stacy Abrams helped GA vote blue in the last Presidential election because she and her organizers got people to the polls. AL a while back got a Democratic senator for 2 years because we got people to vote. Republican politicians openly discuss the fact they only have the support of 30% of the country. But only that 30% consistently turns out to the polls. They have also openly said that they spread the word voting doesn't work so they can keep winning. When you say voting doesn't work you are spreading Republican propaganda.

I'm 34 but feel like this

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

Communist anon here - Yes to all of them?

@eyeofnewtblog​ said:  I personally would be very interested in hearing an educated opinion on theories and practice

This is going to be a long answer so under a cut it goes. The short answer is no, I do not like either Marxism or communism, to the point where I consider myself anti-communist. The long answer goes under the cut.

First, it’s important to remember where I am coming from, what I am, and what I am not. I’m neither educated in philosophy nor history. I study both, and I have had classes in both, but that doesn’t mean that I’m an expert in either, and my experiences with Marxism have largely been academic, instructors attempting to tell me what Marxism is (fun fact: I once made a lot of these theoretical arguments to a Marxist professor on an exam - I was given an F). So if you’re looking for an educated opinion, depending on what that means, I don’t have one, after all, I got an F on it. Similarly, while I do study some philosophy, it is by no means something I’ve been trained it or seriously articulated; my observations primarily come from observing human nature and studying history and political movements. In that sense, I’m far closer to Eric Hoffer than I am to Hannah Arendt (though both as philosophical scholars far exceed me in every sense that to be compared to them would not be an honor to me but an insult to them). I’m a believer in liberalism and democracy, and a radical individualist, which to me means that people have an inherent dignity, and should be free to determine who they are, what they want to do, and what they value. It’s not a fully-fleshed out philosophy with rules, I’ve already said I’m no philosopher. I just do the best I can and handle situations as they come up.

Those values put me at odds with Marxism from the get-go. Marxism articulates the necessity of a dictatorship, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” where the government following the revolution seizes the means of production, nationalizing all industries and property, and transition to a communist society, preserving the power of the state to suppress any reactionary or counter-revolutionary activity. I’ve heard this line before; this sounds remarkably similar to authoritarian measures enacted in tinpot dictatorial states meant to preserve order and enforce the power of the government to suppress dissent. The “transitional state” sounds a lot like perpetual “state of emergency” laws enacted to keep the populations in line, a theoretical end-state where such measures are no longer necessary is always on the horizon, but just like the horizon, is never reachable. Call me crazy, but I don’t see how putting people under control of a dictatorship with such unlimited powers is liberating them, save in a metaphorical, dogmatic sense that rationalizes their subjugation as necessary. There’s a broad appeal there, violent mass movements definitely find a lot of support from individuals who see it as a means to finally lord power over those they hate; individuals who want those they despise cowering before them, begging them not to bring the axe down. Such motivations have been an incentive for aspiring foot soldiers to put on their jackboots, so that they eagerly stomp the faces in of the people they despise, and to rationalize it away.

Marxism depends on a lot of things that are untrue, like his assertion that the rate of profit tending to fall, or the labor theory of value which has few serious practitioners and has been widely debunked to the point where Shimshon Bichler was able to criticize the lack of statistical correlation and the degree by which abstract labor must be assumed to see the labor theory of value as purely circular reasoning, hardly compelling for a central tenet of the philosophy to depend on a set of assumptions that rely on others being produced. While I’m no philosopher and reality is impossible to condense into any one singular lens, the degree by which Marxism is riddled with intellectual and logical inconsistencies make it difficult for me as a thinker to take it as seriously as others do. Other matters, while not necessarily untrue, become difficult to function when brought from theory to reality. Take the standard line: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” How are ability and need for each person assessed? What happens if someone is incapable of producing something to the level of ability that is assessed? What happens if someone needs more than is assessed? What happens if need outpaces supply? What happens if ability cannot meet need? What happens if there’s a disaster and there is a temporary shortage? These extend outwards to questions of land use, industrial capacity, training, etc., these centralized economically planned models failed in the 20th century, and again, this turns me off to the model. This is not simply a matter of corrupt Communist Party officials degrading the functioning of the government for personal enrichment, this is a serious information problem that even the most powerful computers of today cannot model and manage, and the idea of a communist state becomes much diminished in appeal to me.

Other stuff in Marxism goes further into what I consider downright repugnant. The idea of “false consciousness” is particularly disgusting to me, where if someone is not motivated by that which the Marxist believes that they should be motivated, these conceptions are deluded and must be corrected. That is such a statement of such monumental arrogance I’m surprised it doesn’t have its own gravity well. It is to say to one person that whatever meaning they have discovered through their own experiences is less valid; it is to say that the Marxist may state that whatever said person values is not in their own benefit. The logical conclusion from this is that non-Marxists cannot be allowed their own judgment, that they must be shaped until they embody the Marxist conception of reality and only then are they truly full people, capable of making judgments of this fashion and assessing what is to their benefit and what is not. For a movement that espouses equality and liberation, sure as hell doesn’t seem very equal to me; only our practitioners are capable, rational beings? No.

Now, most Marxists I know don’t really believe this, but I think this is more of their own conception. Like most practitioners of religions or other philosophies, they pick and choose what tenets to follow.

Communism is practice has been a disaster. Lenin really ran with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat with his vanguard model, making the centralizing dictatorship a core part of his leadership and in charge of everything, to the point where failure to provide the dictatorship with what they demanded was considered treason and grounds for termination, and later communist regimes really ran with this idea, as I’ve mentioned before, Marxism appeals to revolutionary dictatorships because it justifies the dictatorship beyond a naked power grab to better secure it. Similarly, Lenin rationalized ignoring his citizens by simply ignoring elections when he lost; the Leninist model was openly a sham democracy. In the Soviet Union, even Khrushchev, who gave the Secret Speech denouncing Stalin, still sent the tanks into Hungary and forcibly medicated any who disagreed with the principles of communism as mentally ill (my previous paragraph is not jumping to conclusions, this was a documented fact). Mao created the “mass line,” a means to consult the population while mandating interpreting their wishes through the ideology, thus dismissing anything that the dictator doesn’t want, a clever fig leaf. Of course, Mao’s already deeply unworthy with its massive loss of life - the Great Chinese Famine was the largest famine in history and enacted by the ideological dogmas of the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s Cultural Revolution was doubling down on his mistakes, murdering those who opposed him. The brutality though, has been the biggest failure; there’s a reason the European left jumped to the social democrat model with the rise of Keynesian economics in the aftermath of World War II, they felt it was a way to achieve their objectives without the brutality of the Soviet model. The totalitarian conception of power and identity left its mark on the movement, but I don’t see them as inventions by power-mad dictators, they were extensions of the philosophy that saw only its practitioners as fully human. 

Even discounting the brutality, the standard of living and industrial capacity of communist countries has been low comparatively. In 1927, the Soviet Union produced a scant 3 million tons of steel despite massive advantages in natural resources and manpower, compared to Germany’s 16 million tons, Britain’s 9 million, and France’s 8 million. Relatively speaking, more resources were wasted in steel production in the USSR, and this was similar across the board in communist countries. Communism lambasted capitalism for its wastefulness, but the numbers show that communism was the far more wasteful, inefficient method of economic organization. Some defenders of the Soviet Union point to the growth under leaders like Khrushchev, but I counter that the exceptional rate of growth was both temporary and comparatively small compared to non-communist states. Francis Spufford may have tried to sell it with the idea of Red Plenty as a fusion of history and fiction, but history has borne out that it was entirely fiction.

The more anarchist sects of the movement, the ones who reject the transitional state, similarly were failures in practice. In Spain, those who did not wish to join were often brutalized, which seems to me to be violating the principal of anarchism in that forced compliance in an anarchist society is an extension and use of state power. This is relatively common throughout history though, particularly when it comes to ideology. The Soviet Union decried “imperialism” but was incredibly imperialist, just as the United States decried the security state apparatus of the Soviet Union as violating the rights of their own citizens while pursuing COINTELPRO when it came to folks like Fred Hampton. In a more practical sense, the anarchists poor training and suboptimal deployment were unable to stop Franco despite having plenty of clear advantages in the Spanish Civil War. While they are by no means the only reason for the Republican failure, the inability for the anarchist faction to defend their people is a failure of their system of government. A lot of anarchist models run into this problem, it should not be thought of as a failure reserved solely for the anarcho-communist model, and anyone who says it doesn’t is ignoring history.

So to sum up, I consider Marxism to be a philosophy which espouses tenets that I find disgusting, and it’s articulation of government to be illiberal, anti-democratic, and founded on the violation of human rights and dignity.

Thanks for the question, Anons who were waiting.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

palpatine straight up told anakin he was a sith lord and anakin was like well. this is a lot to process so im going to go fetch my boss and we’ll come back in about half an hour and murder you so don’t go anywhere and palpatine didn’t you have to admire the man

A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.

Source

What should people from Eastern Europe do, should we prepare for war?

Is World war 3 coming now?

Taking these two questions together. I don't think it's the Third World War, though it's definitely a much more localized armageddon for Ukraine.

I'd improve cybersecurity and other methods to stop Russia's hybrid warfare doctrine, increase commitment to regular forces, improve dialogue and coordination with fellow allies to increase a deterrent effect. Help the Ukranian refugees how you can. Vote out the cowards and Putinites that are elected and shun the rest. Correct revisionist falsehoods that permeated Putin's speech from the Ukranian independent identity to Putin's excuses about NATO enlargement to the "denazification of Ukraine" pretext, flimsy even for an autocrat.

Thanks for the question, Anon and Eastern European Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King