Canadian anarchists side with capitalists to silence talk of peace
But it just might be hypocritical for someone to type "you commies criticize capitalism, yet you live in it, lol" on a smartphone made in China. (Buy Americ*n, you losers).
a lot of people own a house by default. at some point all the houses where people live were somehow given to them.
From what I understand, this is also the way things work in Cuba.
Didn't that century old insult actually originate with Trotskyites (whom Wisconcom, as a self-proclaimed Hoxhaist, should expecially hate?)
So I saw some pictures of the NAFO summit in Vilnius, and -- boy, was it eye-opening. I try to avoid making fun of people based on their appearance, but these people honestly couldn't embody the "needs to touch grass" stereotyple any harder.
They'll be back in log cabins while China is building the world land bridge, and they'll still be putting up town broadsides about how China is about to collapse.
Long, possibly controversial reply above
That was actually my first impression when I started watching TOS and TNG. But the more episodes I saw, something about the show started to rub me the wrong way, almost like under the utopianism, something more sinister was being smuggled in. Maybe I'm just a hypersensitive Zhdanovite, but here was how I ended up formulating my unease with the Star Trek universe:
- Most explicit philosophy in the show tended to have an individualist slant. Picard, in one of the very first episodes, wonders if humanity has a right to hunt the crystalline entity, because humanity's imperative to survive does not neccesarily outweigh the entity's need to find food; I can see Kim Il-Sung wanting to beat Picard over the head for this. In another episode, Picard tells Data that "you are a culture of one, no less valued than a culture of a billion." In context, this makes sense, because Data is an android and the only one of his kind; but you do wonder how something like this is going to be interpreted, and why it was put on American TV. But worst is the episode where a couple of Americans from the 20th century are brought back to life after being found in cryogenic stasis. For a long time, everything is entertaining enough, contrasting their selfish ways with the more utopian life aboard the Enterprise, but then there's this deeply uncomfortable scene (or at least I found it so). One of the group, a former billionaire, learns that money has been abolished, and that nobody strives after wealth anymore. "Where's the challenge?" he asks. "What do you live for?" Then Picard drops the bombshell: "The challenge," he says "is to improve yourself -- be the best you can be." Had there been something about "serving the people" "expending yourself in their service," etc., the scene might have embodied the spirit of Lei Feng. Instead, the federation seems to be more about the Jeffersonian "pursuit of happiness."
- This might just be the constraints of a 40 minute episode, but all the major problems facing humanity seeemed to be solved, not by collective action, but by the brilliance of a few technocrats (Geordie LaForge -- actually my single favorite character -- comes up with a new way to configure the phasers, or Counsellor Troy has prophetic dreams). Wesley Crusher, I think, made the theme too obvious, which was one reason he was so roundly hated.
- Women on the show: in TOS, the female members of the crew were uneccesarily sexualized, with that goofy miniskirt uniform which seemed explicitly designed to not be practical on any kind of planetary environment. There was also a whole lot of "leering" from Kirk, Bones, and the other male members of the crew, and attitudes like this were never really challenged. TNG fixed this somewhat, but there was still "bone every female in the galaxy" Riker, and he seemed conceived as the character a male audience would most indentify with. Then we have the movies, with things like an alien supercomputer indentifying a female member of the crew as a "mass of conflicting impulses," etc.
- Most seriously, the whole thing seemed set during and after a kind of Space Cold War, with the "Soviets" (Klingons) as the definite Bad Guys. In TOS, they were portrayed as "Asiatic barbarians:" quarellsome, uncivilized, and generally inferior to the federation technologically (though able to make up for this with superior numbers). Rather obnoxiously, they are equated with both the USSR and the Nazis, but this is a trick US liberals love to pull. In TNG, the Klingons have transitioned to being heroes, but only after the events in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where the Klingons experience a Chernobyl-like disaster that wrecks their entire economic system, causing them to seek help from the federation. The mighty Klingon Empire, in short, becomes Yeltsin's Russia, complete with Yanks to the Rescue. I seem also to remember an episode in TOS where the federation and the Klingons are both arming different sides in a planetary civil war; Kirk concludes that matching whatever armaments the Klingons supply is not violating the prime directive, which in the context of 1960s American can only be a metaphor for increased US presence in Vietnam.
Maybe I'm seeing this all through an American lens (though it is an American show), and in any case it's been years since I watched any Star Trek. But there you have it.
I dunno, Star Trek always struck me as a bit of a liberal fantasy, Next Generation especially. (Though I will say that giving the Klingons a flag deliberately reminiscent of Nazi Germany and then making them allies of the Federation was actually pretty prescient, given current events).
Important point. I would say that every profession artist in any system would create things for people to see (or hear etc.) and take under consideration what they want to see. Unpopular artists were sidetracked and fired even in socialist states.
Exactly, the artist must serve the people. To quote Sergei Prokofiev: "Can the true artist stand aloof from life and confine his art within the narrow bounds of subjective emotion? Or should he not rather be where he is needed most, where his words, his music, and his chisel can help people live a better, finer life?"
The face of a guy who would be celibate the rest of his life if his government (1) cracked down on prostitution and (2) started rigorously enforcing age-of-consent laws.
political power grows out of the microphone of a comedian
Alternate universe liberal Mao
Reject fake liberal modernity, embrace genuine socialist modernity
For being stoic, civilized Aryan supermen, these ukronazi types sure don't have a whole lot of dignity
Here's an idea, then: build your own damn weapons and take it.
So the "white" thing is interesting. White supremacists like to talk about "white culture" and "white identity," but in practice being "white" means having no culture and having no identity; whatever culture you originally possessed has been assimilated to the general American anti-culture of mass consumerism and social climbing. You have become the atomized individual, without family or communal ties, which is required by the capitalist machine. This evident in the way European immigrant to the US have historically not been considered "white" until their original culture is entirely lost; even the Germans, who are about European as European can be, were for a long time somewhat stigmatized as "Dutchmen."
In other words: people who are proud to be "white" are fighting for a cipher, something which, as you said doesn't really exist. Maybe in remote parts of Appalachia, say, there is something approaching a "white culture;" but even that is more a regional Southern thing than it is a "white" thing. White persons in (say) Washington or Seattle have little in common with it, and it seems to them quite foreign and "exotic."
capitalists will allow anti-capitalist ideology to exist, to a certain degree
You see this with fascism, which is in many ways pretends to genuine anti-capitalism, and so ends up capturing a lot of well-meaning people whenever it takes power.
Okay, but seriously, someone needs to do something about Prigozhin. The guy has been out of control pretty much since February -- anyone remember that disrespectful stunt with the bodies of dead servicemen?
Possibly, but if so it's a really stupid psyop -- kind of not what you would expect from a government whose top levels are supposedly stacked with former KGB and even Stasi officers.
I wonder if, when the dust settles, this Prigozhin mutiny will end up spooking world militaries on the use of mercs.
CHAZov battalion strikes again