muddi

Europe and European colonies have been in wars constantly since the fall of the Roman empire. The first and second Hundred Years, the Napoleonic Wars, the first and second World Wars, the Cold War, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars....

Not to mention capitalism has brought itself to its knees pretty consistently every decade or so in recessions and depressions

They really think they're unique from the rest of the world but can't admit that the USSR and China are the real exceptional ones in history

He's a capitalist, he should know buying out competition would be preferable to destroying them and letting the capital go to waste

But the fascists themselves at least claimed to be a third way beyond liberalism and socialism which they saw as ineffective right? Even before the petit bourgeois started backing them

Isn't that how fascism got its start? The sentiment that socialists were ineffective and indecisive, and taking advantage of the vacuum left by conflicts between socialists and liberals...also that is as much on liberals refusing to compromise leftwards as the contrapositive

Liberals think he got run over right? Also they know China is communist, has been for a while, and will be for the foreseeable future...

So this image is saying communists are on the winning side of history and liberals on the losing side by a wide margin?

Yeah I get it but that's what disappoints me. Like what I mentioned about Dune and Warhammer. Tolkien achieved something and kick-started a genre, but that genre turned out mostly to be about fantasy races fighting genocidal wars...not celebrating the wonder of mythology and fairy tales, at least in my opinion. At the very least, they could be more meaningful by being symbolic of something. But Tolkien already saw to that from the start

I like when authors are intentional about their stories like this.

People bring up Tolkien's "applicability not allegory" or death of the author, or just defend their treats against being apparently politicized. But people politicize, interpret, and re-mythologize things anyways. Tolkien's stories have been coopted by European nationalists to fight the "orcs" of the "East."

A similar thing with Dune, people fixate on the environment aspect or exaggerated brutality and oppression by imperialists hence Star Wars, Warhammer, etc. I guess. I find it weird. The point was or should be the struggle for liberation and the power of ideology.

Might as well be on the nose about things as an author IMO, seems annoying to deal with

Also: was Dune about Palestine? I thought it was inspired by Lawrence of Arabia, so the Arab Revolt. Maybe the Great Game

I'm glad India owns the islands. Not that India is some champion of indigenous peoples, in fact they are an imperial power in their own right. But it would have been worse if some Western nation owned it (like they still do other islands in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans, wtf)

The Sentinelese make obvious that lustful chauvinistic gaze of the West that I haven't seen in other countries, except maybe imperial Japan, which was copying the West anyhow. The whole idea that the world is there is be "studied" and that places like the Sentinel islands are some final frontier is fucked up.

I understand the linguistic and anthropological curiosity a little, though I think researchers should be more humble. Most are humble actually, it's the general public that still has chauvinism.

The missionaries bother me the most. Christianization has killed off many local cultures, claiming to liberate them but not saying the quiet part about control and whatever prophecy about the end days where everyone needs to be Christian I think. In India, the lower castes and pariahs mostly are Christian, with the promise of equality, but in reality they still have the caste system within their communities and are just pariahs in different ways at large now. So not much has changed. I am also brown and live in the US, so I have felt the lustful gaze of missionaries throughout my life here. I get missionaries banging on my door every week now. It's kinda scary, considering the KKK were around only a while ago here.

Also interesting fact, the Andaman and Nicobar island were home to British jails for political prisoners. Indian rebels and revolutionaries met in jail there and even founded parties for independence and socialism. In a way, the islands are a birthplace of Indian revolutionary spirit

lol sorry by fantasy I didn't mean the genre or setting, but like Mary Sue type writing where communism wins just because the writer wants it to, bad choice of words there.

I'm trying to write some communist fantasy myself! I think leftist writers put in a lot of effort to understand the history and be realistic about it. I've never seen anyone just champion communism because it sounds nifty

What "book" are they talking about lol, what modern communist writes utopian apologia or fantasy?

(not the genre of fantasy, I meant like, fantasizing about communism as a dream rather than a real historical struggle)

Autobiographies like Guevara's are based on actual historical realities

The Dispossessed comes to mind, and the subtitle is An Ambiguous Utopia

They're definitely not talking about the magic system in Das Kapital right??

This is what dates and hanging out with a friend turns into anyways. Go to a show/dinner/game then awkwardly walk around town because neither wants to go back home and do something less fun

I think there must be or have been. Corporate policies always have strict measures to make sure fired employees don't take out their anger before they leave

Other thing I can think of is that not many people would be willing to throw away their lives or their loved ones' by doing something that can hurt them even more than losing their job (the brutal reprisal of capital). I can really only think of very desperate or disturbed people like the Unabomber

or people joining hands through unionization and striking where they can have more confidence and hope. Sometimes that erupts into real violence, like the Battle of Blair Mountain