![axont [she/her, comrade/them]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/2289d3c4-69f9-40ed-a21d-cf84b32ccd85.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Schools in France send dozens of Muslim girls home for wearing abayas
The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of "what if cops mainly profiled poor white people." That's because the premise is that there's been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.
The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That's the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a "good cop" who is routing out the "bad cops" in order to repair the structure. It's the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show's attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.
Although another way of reading it is that it's a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That's a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I'm stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.
I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.
The worst aspect is Zack Snyder seems to think Rorschach is a cool dude with cool ideas. They made him talk normally in the movie, maybe that was so he could be more easily understood, but it didn't feel right. He's supposed to seem deranged. In the comic he talks in squiggly text boxes and in an odd kind of halting, broken English. He's not bad at speaking English, he's become so unstable and antisocial his social skills have atrophied. Jackie Earle Haley came across as too earnest or too confident. Like that scene with the therapist reading the ink blots, Rorschach in the comic comes across as pathetic. He's done, doesn't care, doesn't want to live. He says he sees flowers and trees because he just wants to leave the therapy session. In the movie he comes across as like this snickering badass ready to cause trouble. He's like "heh, you can't handle my twisted mind, doc." I hate it. Synder completely misread the scene.
At least the TV show had the guts to show Rorschach would eventually inspire a white supremacist movement
I appreciate Postal 2 because the premise is kinda funny. It's deliberately designed so you can beat it without doing any violence at all. You're given tasks like get milk, pick up your paycheck, etc. And it involves standing in lines or people berating you. You're stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower. I think standing in line to get Gary Coleman's autograph takes 90 minutes if you do it normally.
Otherwise it's very silly early 2000s edgy white guy dudebro humor
My favorite part is where Zizek, in good faith, asked Peterson to name a few of the Marxist professors. (Peterson at this point of the debate had been saying academia had been seized by Marxist malefactors). Peterson couldn't name any.
Zizek offered the name David Harvey, a highly influential British Marxist professor known for his commentary on Capital. Peterson had never heard of him.
I like how every year he somehow gets worse. I didn't think he could descend further from professor so annoying he refuses to call students by their preferred names. After the Zizek debate where he had no clue what he was talking about, he's become like a Charles Dickens character. He's like a crazy uncle kept in the attic because he's lost his mind from laudanum.
The two adaptations of Watchmen have both missed the point. The Zack Snyder movie treats the characters like gods rather than deeply flawed losers and weirdos.
The HBO series is better, and does get very close, but collapses from a meandering plot and glorifying cops
The original cut of the 2007 ended with Will Smith's character realizing he had been abducting and murdering conscious, aware creatures. The ending has the vampires doing a rescue mission, visibly terrified of Smith, and then he allows the one he abducted to rejoin her society.
Test audiences apparently didn't like it or didn't understand it
i'm only mildly exaggerating
Hell I realized myself the other day that there were two leaders between Deng and Xi who I couldn't name and know basically nothing about.
Oh well that's easy, before Xi Jinping there was Hu Jintao, who was a kind of moderate technocratic kind of guy. Always about plans and numbers. And before Jintao there was a magic toad wizard who wore George Romero glasses and would yell at journalists when they asked him stupid shit
there's a cool website called myspace where you can chill with friends
Possibly because of the way he's found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.
My favorite part about the book is that there's an alt-alt-history novel the characters will sometimes read, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy where instead the Allies win the alt-history version of WW2. In the alt-alt-history, after the Allies win they basically do a positive imperialism where they conquer Africa and China, somehow eliminate poverty, spread the New Deal worldwide, then the US and UK get into a cold war that the UK wins.
I took it to mean that PKD thought even in a liberal's wildest imagination, even when under the direct threat of fascism, they'd write a book about how they almost win and then lose.
Personally I don't believe the term authoritarianism is a useful description of anything. It's too vague. I've seen one definition that's like "a system that rejects the involvement of certain groups or interests from the political process." Well that would be all socialist nations by default, since socialist countries by definition have denied political representation for the capitalist class in some way.
A better question is: How is a socialist country supposed to defend itself? It may not be possible for a country to achieve what Marx called upper-phase communism. It may not be possible for money, states, and all property to be abolished. That's a question for the future. But when a country tries to curtail the power of capitalists, even attempts to create what's known as true communism, they find themselves on the receiving end of an entire world against them. Sanctions, invasions, sabotage, spying. The shape that a socialist country will take is the result of its conditions. We're living in a world dominated by capital and socialist countries represent a resistance against capital. If socialist movements are threatened, they either defend themselves or collapse.
You're right that countries are dancing to the imperialists, because the imperialists hold the most power right now. That's why an anti-imperialist movement is important, why a multi-polar world is important. Once the threat of imperialism subsides or is defeated, then I'm going to guess socialist countries will begin to express their policies differently.
I don't think I'm comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don't have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Is there any society that isn't this? A central authority deciding how to distribute rights is a governing body.
Socialism is a movement about denying the right of property to capitalists. That's the entire purpose of the movement, to elevate working class people to the point of dominating society and to restrain or abolish the capitalist class. Landlords and capitalists shouldn't be able to exercise the same rights they have in a liberal capitalist nation. Fascists, racists, transphobes, imperialists, etc shouldn't have any civil liberties and should be subject to arrest, reeducation, or worse.
I've read through your earlier post and it doesn't really strike me as frightening or anything. It seems like standard kind of national mythology stuff that gets taught to kids no matter where they're from. What's the alternative? Is there a country on Earth that has an education curriculum amounting to "We suck and everything sucks. The government should be overthrown"?
Honestly what you described makes me kinda envious. It sounds cool, and it seems to have better outcomes. Kids in China outperform kids from my country in every metric from what I know, including stuff like understanding of civics, history, etc. Whereas when I was growing up I was told national mythology that makes excuses for genocide, like that pilgrims were friends with native americans, and that there were "kind" slave owners. I was continuously told the American Civil War was over a complex disagreement over civics, not slavery, and in fact the northern states started the war over jealously of the south's freedoms. The south which was a slave economy. I was told my state of Texas was justified in its war against Mexico for vague semblances of freedom and justice, even though the Texans were fighting to keep their slaves.
I know China's not the solution, but rather the answer is movement within America that could learn from Chinese Marxists and apply their methodology within an American context. International collaboration is the answer, ending American imperialism is the answer, and a fully class conscious American working class willing to shed its nationalist chauvinism is the answer
Dude, this may be breaching opsec, but my comrades have had DEA and FBI knock on their doors because of affiliation with anarchist organizations and connection to BLM leadership. Please don't tell me what cops here do or what I have the freedom to do. I live here and I've seen people get arrested. Just last month an elderly guy was shot and killed in an FBI raid over a tweet.
We're free to criticize as long as we keep quiet about it and don't actually try anything. The place I live absolutely will kill people if need be. I'm definitely not free to be open and critical wherever I go. My boss will fire my ass if he knew my politics. I've been fired for unionizing attempts at previous jobs. Is that freedom? Freedom of speech without the freedom to do shit about it? I don't subscribe to this liberal horseshit of raising awareness or raising voices, or that my ability to say certain things is my greatest freedom. Fuck that, I would take a free house, comfortable existence, a better job, and healthcare if it meant never opening my mouth again. You understand me? I want to do shit now, actual physical things and topple this whole capitalist framework.
Yeah we're still in a position where American fascism doesn't even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn't realize it's a movement that needs coherent aims. It's still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.
Not sure how Cuban party dues work, but I do know there's an application process and not everyone gets membership. Not sure how it works in regards to income level either
point at the theory that says I shouldn't try to work with every possible leftist in my area. I live in Texas. There aren't enough of us to go around already and we don't need to start splitting ourselves over irrelevant shit like the Spanish Civil War.
I don't think you could define this as strictly not racist, since "race" constitutes arbitrary characteristics decided upon largely by white hegemony. It's how Africans became a singular black race despite being different cultures and language groups. It's why Jews are sometimes white, sometimes not.
It's absolutely why most Americans consider a native Spanish speaker a different race, no matter how white they are. We're in a moment where being Muslim is a racial marker excluding a person from whiteness.
Here's a trick I do. Go show an uniformed white American a picture of Bashar al-Assad. Every time I've done this, they'll say he's a white guy. Then tell them he's the president of Syria and a Muslim. They instantly flip.