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The Quuuuuill
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2,073
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2 yr. ago

  • You ever read a comic book with characters with big blocky fists and feet? You ever notice how the comic book villains in those stories were completely incompetent and SUPER weird? Yeah that's because Jack Kirby, a Jewish man from NYC was a forward scout during WWII and saw the nazis for who they were first hand. He spent a career trying to communicate to the world the horrors of what he saw: these weird dumbasses were somehow able to kill 6M of his brothers and sisters simply by doing it.

    He also portrayed his Jewish-coded characters such as The Thing as being deeply emotionally connected to the people around them and invested in social causes because

    1. That was his own personal understanding of his Jewish faith
    2. Something very disturbing happened after WWII. A particular set of violent weirdos like the ones he'd seen in France and Germany came to define what Judaism was to the world at large (I'm talking about Zionists right now). He hoped to reach young boys reading his comics and instill in them that this was not the way, and that the way was for them to find allies and coalitions with similar ideals to them without establishing a hierarchy of racial classes

    None of the way silver and bronze age comics depict violent weirdos is an accident. Comic Books as an art form has its roots in a mix of street art and war-time propaganda. The weird part (or perhaps the beautiful part) is that across the globe this is true. Spanish Comics have their own look and feel influenced by that Iberian street art has its own look and feel. Same with Japanese comics, Latin American comics, comic books from people outside of NYC. I could go on. But there's this... Incredible force of... Human nature where when we gather together we tell stories and spread messages to each other. Comic Books are a low art, and they're often seen as being for kids, but their creators don't see being low art as being lesser art. A lot of them have high art training and have seen what the high art world values and have rejected that.

    And like... There are some comic books out there that have TRULY incredible things to say about the world, history, and humanity. My very favorite, One Piece, is super accessible, too, written and conceived to communicate to 10 year olds that resistance to fascism is rooted in the following: environmental protections, comedy, and giving nazis a good old fashioned punching. Maus is a biographical examination of the experience of a holocaust survival. Monster is about the traumas of the cold-war era for people "protected" by the mass control mechanisms established by the Soviet Union and United States. Footnotes in Gaza is an expose of the long running genocide in Gaza that is currently intensifying into total elimination. V for Vendetta explores what it means to resist fascism. Saga is... Jesus what do I even say about Saga. Saga is... An exploration of... Everything. It takes a deep close up look at what it feels like to try to survive in a total system of torture while maintaining a normal relationship (hint hint: it's messy). Too often we think of war as being a top level thing between groups when those groups are made up of individuals experiencing daily personal tragedies. Saga addresses that. Which means there's a mass scale war and interpersonal drama and neither draws focus from the other, but instead places both into stark relief about what's going on.

    New paragraph because I'm not done saying there's comics out there that y'all should check out. Obviously there's Watchmen, the examination of American fascism and its downsides. Actually I guess that's the last one. But like... I hope this makes an impression on someone. Comic Book artists aren't just trying to make a buck drawing doodles. A lot of them could make more money selling their work to high art assholes, but they choose to share their work with you and inspire you into being a better more complete person. And the accessibility and relationship between Comic Books and Street art is also an invitation. If you have a message to promote to the world, there's a place for you in the arts, even if your art isn't refined enough for the high art assholes. Still you can make something that connects with someone.

    If you really pay attention, too, to the street art in your community, you can start to notice that street artists are having an asynchronous conversation with eachother. One will tag something and include a message with a tag, and then another street artist will tag something nearby with a message that's related or in response. And when you see street art covering up other street art? That's a dire message. The second artist is telling the first "I don't just disagree with you. I think you should shut the fuck up and stay out of the streets"

    And comic books are always having this conversation back with the streets, too. That's part of what's so incredible about the Spider-Verse films. They're the first super hero films that engage with that the intersection of activism, art, and fantasy is where superheros come from. Every Spider-Man in those films is an artist of some variety and Spider-Punk (Hobie) is an EXPLICIT demonstration of exactly how far this can go. His activism and art aren't an undercurrent or a side hustle for his spider-man. They're an explicit aspect of his "heroism" (he's not a hero because calling yourself a hero makes you a self mythologizing autocrat (by the way Luffy in One Piece says the exact same thing))

  • Basically he's 47 little bitch boy for any job he doesn't care about enough to install one of his white supremacist stooges. Marco is his little dancing monkey, sent to do the jobs he doesn't think are important.

  • Not random. This is a pretty common standard for most style guides that if you split a ternary operator across lines you align the option colon to the ternary itself. Your alt text formatting is way different from the pic by the way

  • And the algorithms are tuned to do it. Russia wants to run a disinformation campaign on Meta platforms and twitter? Well the owners of meta and twitter are both in favor of that type of disinformation being disseminated because it benefits them personally

  • Yes Marco. Yeees. Dance for daddy 47. Daddy 47 won't deport you to CECOT if you do what he says. Normalize fascism globally Marco for daddy 47 and grandaddy KGB potato. It won't get you specifically killed. Not so long as you dance the dance and sing the song, Marco. Never mind that most of the people in CECOT danced the dance and sang the song. Their only crime was looking like you in daddy 47's eyes. But you're different Marco. You're daddy 47's favorite. Sure he's backstabbed everyone who's ever helped him almost immediately. He's gone back on every deal he's ever made. But you Marco. You'll survive. Sure there's no evidence to demonstrate you'll be okay given the totality of everything.

  • "Got my mineral deal, fuck you guys, I'm going home"

  • well if they did that who would make the school lunch burritos in compton that feeds our nations white kids?

  • the entire stock market is a made up imaginary scam that all of our companies have forced us to care about by eliminating pension funds as a retirement avenue. i mean. the entire monetary system, but the stock market especially

  • the frustrating thing is this is well known if you know who to listen to. abolitionists, union organizers, civil rights activists, hippies, punks, hip-hop artists, academics. they all been saying it

  • they are losing their minds. granted not enough energy is being put toward doing anything. but that's what libs do. they hand wring and ask politely because that's what you do in a framework of rules and norms. we need to convert some libs to that their strategy doesn't work into actual resistance

  • big box store managers don't know that the full saying is "the customer is always right in matters of taste"

    they legitimately think that "the customer is always right" is the full extent of making good business decisions. the average manager at one of these chains (and i'm switching terms here, because what i'm about to say applies to applebee's, target, payless shoes, any chain at all, really) is a member of the karen class. they are entitled. they are dumb. they are petty. they are mean.

    and these are the red hats in your community. the people who have inserted themselves into positions of power by being presentable enough for the people really running the business, the owner class, to think they can put someone that cruel in charge of their location and run a little fascist dictatorship for cheap. and none of this is new. this is the same Big Whites, Small Whites, and Workers setup that was present in early colonial north america. because that's the system the owner class inherited their wealth from. they know it works for them because it's been working for them. meanwhile the small whites are a mixture of thinking someday they'll be the big whites if they resent and oppress the workers enough and people who know they have no upward mobility in the system but still perform the role of violent oppressor because they don't want to risk sliding down the ladder into violently oppressed.

    the plantation system in america has never really changed, fundamentally. it has just changed shapes. walmart, target, dollar general, none are so different from the mining companies' company stores when you get down to it. klarna and afterpay are the new company scrip. i'm sure these things go back further into the plantation system, but my ancestors came here after the civil war. the coal wars was when they figured out how fucked america is. i've just pieced some of the puzzle back together with how the big whites, small whites, and workers relate to eachother. if you want to know more you'll probably have to go outside and ask a black person how food was distributed in the plantation system. the only thing i do know for sure is that the modern thing, where white poverty and black poverty are different because black people are kept away from prepared foods, and white people are kept not affording the time to make meals and learning to cook is SUPER old. that's been happening the entire time. whiteness has always been culturally dependent on someone else to make the food.

  • for decades the value proposition of target was "walmart for people who don't want to deal with walmart"

    then target got it in their heads they could leave their prices where they were and engage in the exact same evil as walmart. obviously we all didn't play along.

  • because that being the reason for the existence of the electoral college is a propaganda myth. the real reason is that virginia wanted to play king maker and was the early united states' california. the reason virginia wanted to play kingmaker is that their economic power was built through slavery. the thing where the electoral college skews elections by giving more electoral power to states with more wide open land? yeah. that's not an accident. that was just the system that was most favorable to slave holding southerners. alexander hamilton just pitched to northerners that "well this is fine actually, see, we can use this system to prevent someone truly incompetent from taking office" and people ever since have misinterpretted that as being the point. it would be nice if we could propagandize it into the truth, but the last chance to do that has come and past, and it's time to confront that the electoral college was never going to save us because it was never meant to save us.

  • i think people don't get that that the union army wasn't uncomplicated good guys. the emancipation proclamation wasn't declared for moral reasons but for strategic ones. the goal of the union wasn't to free the slaves but to preserve the union.

  • that being the case, why was he appointed from the start, and given that this is the type of person 47 wants when there's no oversight, why did the dems vote to confirm any of his cabinet picks.