Sweet Seals For You, Always
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Today's Document
noise dept.
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
occasionally subtle
Cosmic Funnies

Kiana Khansmith
Mike Driver
we're not kids anymore.

oozey mess
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
RMH
Monterey Bay Aquarium
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
NASA
Keni

Origami Around
d e v o n
todays bird

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seen from Brazil

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@antirevisionist-char
they call it radicalising but becoming a Marxist is more like deconverting. you're shedding the myths you've been indoctrinated into all your life and seeking a materialist understanding of politics instead
It is a measure of the Cuban ‘heresy’ that, while rejecting the reformist capitalism of ECLA, Cuba also resisted the easy formula of blanket copying from the existing socialist countries. In this, Guevara was instrumental.
Guevara’s ‘heresy’ reflected his profound perception of socialism as a transitional stage – the period between capitalism and communism – in which the qualitative tasks of preparing human consciousness and social relations for communist society were as important as the quantitative tasks of developing the forces of production. ‘We fight poverty but we also fight alienation’, he said: ‘Marx was concerned with both with economic facts and their reflection in the mind, which he called a “fact of consciousness.” If communism neglects facts of consciousness, it can serve as a method of distribution but it will no longer express revolutionary moral values.’ Through the revolutionary process, Cubans would transform themselves and this would in turn impact upon the institutions and relations they established within the Revolution.
-Yaffe (2009) Pgs. 9-10
This was heresy??? God. Old Soviet dogmatism’s a migraine.
This earlier section in the book has me very curious about the specifics of his critiques.
Guevara challenged the way in which Marxism had been interpreted and applied in the socialist bloc, condemned the dogmatism of the USSR and set up an alternative economic management system in Cuba. Through his systematic critique of Soviet political economy, by 1966 he was able to conclude that without a dramatic policy change, capitalism would return to the Soviet Union. [!!!]
Pg. 2
Very excited to read more.
hopefully you don't mind the addition. it seems relevant
Prior to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 there was a lack of community identification and empowerment in Cuba. The country’s Batista-run government was a dictatorship supportive of America’s off-shore business interests, and Cubans were not able to participate actively in decision-making in areas that most affected their community organizations and workplaces. An attempt to change people’s perspectives from the individual to the collective was led by Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, who believed that living under a capitalist economic system caused people to adopt traits characterized by individual greed, profit, and selfishness. His aim was to instill in the Cuban people new values that emphasized moral convictions of social justice and a collective rather than an individualist approach to life (Benjamin, 1997). According to Juan Antonio Blanco, Director of the Felix Varela Center, a Cuban non-governmental organization studying ethics and politics, one of the goals of the Cuban Revolution was to create those new perspectives and values in Cuban citizens. It sought to create Guevara’s vision of el hombre nuevo, the new man. The Cuban Revolution thus sought to be not only a vehicle for redistributing wealth in Cuba but also to release the Cuban people’s creativity and participation in society (Benjamin, 1997). One of the vehicles for bringing about that change in values was the introduction of structural changes and the creation of mass participatory organizations which were intended to restructure traditional attitudes and beliefs and to transform Cubans into selfless and cooperative members of the community (Salas, 1983).
MarkH. Kruger (2007) Community Based Crime Control in Cuba
i think the idea that art cannot affect the world as an absolutism is not really accurate, it is an exaggerated version of the much truer, "you cannot make a movie that's so good that you singlehandedly transform the culture". but the superstructure--in aggregate--does of course influence the base, and totally denying that is an undialectical overcorrection in response to idealism. it would be wrong to suggest that chernyshevsky novels caused the russian revolution but you can't ascribe complete meaninglessness to the fact that lenin named his pamphlet that
Transgender woman faces two felony charges after drawing a firearm during an altercation.
A Wyoming transgender woman is facing two felony charges after drawing a firearm during an altercation she says began with anti-LGBTQ+ and a
Ríhanna Kelver, a bartender and trans rights advocate in Laramie, has been charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent after a 13 September 2025 confrontation outside the Crowbar & Grill, whereshe worked. Kelver could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted on both charges.
Kelver says one man in a group of men across the street from her started shouting homophobic and transphobic insults at her before the man allegedly shoved her to the ground in a downtown crosswalk, as reported by The Laramie Reporter.
There's more, as it pertains to Black trans people's right to self-defence:
Despite Wyoming’s “Stand Your Ground” statute, which allows people to use reasonable force in moments of self defense, Kelver faces up to 15 years in prison for both charges, as well as up to $11,000 in fines, per Cowboy State Daily. Kelver faces an additional year and $1,000 fine for a charge of interference with a peace officer. [...]
As pointed out by Slate, self-defense laws are often put into question when people from marginalized communities, especially trans people, use them, including Cece McDonald, a Black trans woman who served time in a men’s prison for defending her friends during a racist and transphobic attack. Ky Peterson, a Black trans man from Georgia, was also arrested and imprisoned for killing his rapist in self-defense.
I wrote a short explanatory piece on how gun control (in the USA, specifically) has always been a tool of oppressors against marginalized folks. You can find it on Tumblr here. Kelver needs assistance with her legal fees fighting these charges. Her crowdfunding sites keep being removed so here's her Venmo:
Please help her.
When Scott Durham pushed Ríhanna Kelver to the ground, she drew a gun in response. Kelver, a trans woman now facing two felony charges, said
Hope you don't mind me adding to this, i live in laramie and ive known ríhanna personally for several years and this incident has been so difficult for her, and additionally the attack exacerbated health issues for her.
a local reporter posted this article this morning that delves into her attacker's affiliation with the fascist patriot front org and the fact that since he moved to laramie in 2023 there has been a significant uptick in hateful activity and propaganda being spread throughout the town. this man was prevented from walking at his high school graduation by his own admission due to his racist, queerphobic, and antisemetic behavior.
one of the things that has been infuriating to me is that her attacker is not the one pressing charges. not the literal man she pulled a gun on, it is the police who are threatening her with 15 years in prison.
please help ríhanna if you can, she doesn't deserve this and it is depicting the increasing danger for trans women and other queer people in this city and state as a whole.
Stuff that is circulating on Twitter says that Iranian damage to US bases and Israeli assets was much, much higher than it was released in censored version, including hitting US radar systems that cost billions(!) and the HQ of Mossad(!!!!)
I wouldn't be suprised if we have an admission that the US carriers were hit too.
Also, virtually all of Iran's missile infrastructure survived, and the airforce that the US and Israel claimed it was "completely destroyed" still had planes, some even made air attacks in US bases
If there's anything you can take from this whole thing is that you cannot defeat a country of 92 million people with a highly advanced technical industry and a determined population by just bombing it from the air.
With the way both Trump and the Iranians are talking, I think this is it, they are going for a permanent (or semi-permanent) peace deal and Iran got most of what it wanted: lifting of sanctions, control over Hormuz, a red line on Lebanon (I think the Israelis will still try but they have lost US support), and while they got very harmed by the war, they got out with their missile and war capabilities mostly intact, while the position of the US in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere is much weakened. Israel is now under permanent notice by Iran, plus its decline on world support.
I think that Netanyahu and the Israelis finally managed to piss off Trump so much that he decided to deal with Iran instead. But this isn't just because Trump got distracted, Iran won a strategic victory fair and square. I think this will shift geopolitics for the rest of the decade if not longer.
It's of course terrible that the price of this was the death and ruination of countless innocent lives for the stupidest imperialist war possible.
Transgender woman faces two felony charges after drawing a firearm during an altercation.
A Wyoming transgender woman is facing two felony charges after drawing a firearm during an altercation she says began with anti-LGBTQ+ and a
Ríhanna Kelver, a bartender and trans rights advocate in Laramie, has been charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent after a 13 September 2025 confrontation outside the Crowbar & Grill, whereshe worked. Kelver could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted on both charges.
Kelver says one man in a group of men across the street from her started shouting homophobic and transphobic insults at her before the man allegedly shoved her to the ground in a downtown crosswalk, as reported by The Laramie Reporter.
There's more, as it pertains to Black trans people's right to self-defence:
Despite Wyoming’s “Stand Your Ground” statute, which allows people to use reasonable force in moments of self defense, Kelver faces up to 15 years in prison for both charges, as well as up to $11,000 in fines, per Cowboy State Daily. Kelver faces an additional year and $1,000 fine for a charge of interference with a peace officer. [...]
As pointed out by Slate, self-defense laws are often put into question when people from marginalized communities, especially trans people, use them, including Cece McDonald, a Black trans woman who served time in a men’s prison for defending her friends during a racist and transphobic attack. Ky Peterson, a Black trans man from Georgia, was also arrested and imprisoned for killing his rapist in self-defense.
Kelver's attacker has also been identified as a member of Patriot Front.
Kelver corroborated a report identifying the attacker as Scott Wayne Durham, a Patriot Front member from Aurora, CO. First unmasked as Patryck “Scott” Durham, he has posted fascist, white supremacist, and Patriot Front propaganda since high school, operating under the online handles “Kevin – CO,” “Fedposter,” “WallaceCarden,” and numerous others. Durham was barred from his high school graduation after being unmasked in 2022, and in 2023 left enrollment at the University of Colorado Boulder after a flyering campaign alerted students to his history. On June 10, 2025 he changed his name (p. 26) to Scott Wayne Durham and is now listed as an honor roll student at the University of Wyoming, located in Laramie.
So whether they know it or not, the prosecutors are helping a Neo-Nazi who tried to commit a hate crime.
(She's also been having her crowdfunding campaigns nuked. If you want to donate to her defense find her here.)
As a reminder if you're wondering why Gundam has so many weird names for people and things, this is why.
THIS is why Tomino was able to get away with putting in so much critique of the 1970s textbook controversy (and in general, history of Japan in the early 20th century) in his works despite the genre being called, pejoratively, "toy commercials." Yes, we all know about how he had to recolor the titular robot (it was supposed to be closer to Zakus' color scheme) anecdoctally, but he was given a far longer leash for the script and the writing, not just names.