I don't care about your, "journey." Don't show up and thirst trap at me, don't try to make bambi eyes with your sob story. I'm not interested in sending anybody money.
Just had an alleged person try and get in my DMs with banter that kept suggesting they were putting a bunch of money towards a kid with cancer of theirs, and they were whoring around/camewhoring for that "journey."
They immediately lost interest in this fake assed pleasantry conversation after I told them I'm not sending them money for any reason, or telling them any personal information.
sorry but once you notice how often ppl use a southern accent as shorthand for being unintelligent you can never unsee it. classism is baked so deeply and why are you acting like anyone who talks the way my grandfather talks is stupid.
It's not just 'classism.' This was actively helped along by progressives, yes, "antiracists." If not accidentally, then by people that absolutely knew what they were doing and did it on purpose.
I'm in my 40s. I know well the experience of the gay rights person that would be the nameless antagonist running around calling everybody slurs based on their sexual orientation and accusing straight people of being gay, "to make society's hatred of gay people backfire on itself. :^)"
And those same people, supposed anti-classist, anti-racists, used vilification of the southern states and southern people to START conversations about "anti-racism." You saw it all over the place in progressive comedies in the 80s and 90s. Southern whites were okay to make fun of, call hopelessly inbred to the point of having gills and ugly faces and misplaced features. Southern inflections used to indicate backwoods retardation and refusal to civilize, "if it meant toleratin' the NEgro."
They used the south as a shorthand for how they now include all white people and American society as responsible for and beholden to the history of slavery and violence, pretending that is the ONLY legacy of not just the south, but the US as a whole. It was a practice to disavow The South as it'd been set up as a representation of open white supremacism in the US, part of the old culture that hadn't generationally replaced itself out of shame to something more modern, to talk about it like it was the one bad acting cousin making everybody else look bad.
It was shitty thinking, but because the South still harbored white supremacist elements, those that identified as white southerners were fair game to mock as partially responsible for their actions and expected to show deference and shame whenever, "one of their own," did something like kill a non-white minority. In the discourse of the day, razzing and quipping at the Old South made you on the right side of history, because it meant you disavowed everything they stood for, and that was enough to perform good-personness. That you weren't one of the bad white people conspiring to supremacy.
And then they expanded the umbrella of the definition of 'bad white person' to just mean, 'white and in the United States of America.' So being from a state that outlawed slavery or fought against the slaves states wouldn't help you anymore. The discourse moved away from antebellum south holdovers vs. modern egalitarianism, where guilt was based on the reverberations of black slavery and how that still serves to keep people disenfranchised and poor, based on region and assumed prejudices of those regional powers, to accusing all whites, everywhere, of this white supremacy.
There is no outrunning the shark. There is no region of the US they won't say is not guilty of white supremacism, because their accusations do not ultimately stem from concrete, economic and employment or civic based examples. The accusation of white supremacy is one of principle and demographics, and springs out of the idea whites are an inherently oppressive political group and this status is circular. That you cannot have whites without them being an oppressive, supremacist class, and you cannot have oppressive supremacists without whites.
So there's no reason to scapegoat a modern person from the south as the reason why racist violence, casual discrimination or oppression still exists. Their scope of what counts as racism and white supremacy takes nobody as innocent anymore, not even in omission. To be white in the US is to be considered just as culpable for the crimes of the slave states, as the ones that personally and privately profitted from the trans-atlantic slave trade. Being from the North won't save you the stigma.
saw your tags @did-sm1-say-catfish and yes, that link is broken! I looked into it, and it's because there are now multiple maps, including a map of India—
The reason they oppose communism is specifically because it doesn't work. It's an inherently corrupt system that rewards sycophants that will pretend everything is right either because of rose tinted lenses and idealism, or because they have something to gain by being in The Party.
Communism didn't fail because of "state capitalism." It didn't fail because Eastern Europeans are just incapable of implementing it. It fails because it eats everything, manages poorly, refuses to accept it's not a good fit and insists NATURE ITSELF must conform to its idealism, or else nature itself is out of line and needs correcting. It cannot function.
And everywhere it goes, it runs people into the ground for generations, making everything worse, every generation, infecting neighbors and insisting, "if we just force MORE PEOPLE to interact with this system, if we all just tighten our belts more and more, it WILL work (probably!)" Just for people to die in droves so some proud commisar can brag falsely about their accomplishments and raise bogus assed museums and historical societies about the false achievements.
Cuba wasn't destroyed or checked by the US. It was an artificial society upheld solely through Russian and then other infusions of gasoline and diesel. And every time communism fails, they sniff, turn their noses up and say, "It didn't work, therefore, it wasn't real communism." Or blame the CIA for the failures, or say it wasn't given enough time to mature.
Socialism is a noxious and infectious disease that despoils healthy economies and trades the future for strutting and preening today, in ways worse than the most consumerist and flippant of capitalist ones. It's all of the toxic industrial excess with none of the functional government to reverse-course and deal with the corruption, because the state becomes the industry becomes the entrenched corporate interests with no checks or real interest in changing. A devil in a hell you cannot try and is beholden only to itself and its own best interests, not best practices.
And then they have the audacity to scream about red scare and red terror while inventing how all their opposition "must be" fascists.
I think something a lot of people don't get is that they think Zionism is Jewish supremacy, when in reality it's Jewish nationalism. And they don't get what nationalism is either. Right-wing, populist, ULTRAnationalist parties like the GOP, Reform UK, Vox or AfD have stolen the word and turned it into "xenophobia". All it means is that nations have the right to their own state that protects them.
If you think the US should exist, you're an American nationalist. If you think China should exist, you're a Chinese nationalist. If you think Germany should exist, you're a German nationalist. Anti-Zionism means you desire the destruction of the only Jewish state.
There are some people, so sheltered, they really believe that "nation states" shouldnt exist and if borders were dissolved the world would just go all kumbaya and sing-a-longs and ice cream parties
That's the rub. Anti-Nationalists. Which, often are just code for "we should all be unified by rules and groups that follow the same rules and make these decisions for the rest of people as institutions and authorities beyond their reproach or control."
They argue just being a nationalist, whatsoever, is right-wing bigotry and wrong. That's the secret sauce, chief. They don't believe there should be ANY countries or nations, and when it comes down to it, they only tolerate races and ethnic group communities as political entities, but are also chomping at the bit to have the authority and monopoly on violence to tell them, "Actually, your religion/ethnic identity/race isn't legitimate or valid, either, and from this point onwards we'll consider you raging right-wing Nazi-adjacent for being so."
They think all countries and nation states with majorities need to have those majorities marginalized and be diversified into that marginalization. That's the bar under which they measure level of diversity. That means, if you have a homeland, and it has any sort of ethnic, indigenous majority, they hate you, too. They just aren't voicing it out loud, yet. They're trying to find people domestically that agree with their point of view to collude, conspire, and eventually network to get people that feel their way into positions of power.
They're starting with the whites first, because it allows them the ablative shielding and inconspicuousness of just, "being against economic disparity." Hoping people in other countries, jealous and xenophobic themselves, may see it's just particular hatred of white people, go, "I am not white so that won't harm me any," and be disarmed.
No. They hate you, too. If you are part of a community defined by ethnicity and heritage, they hate you, because morally they are opposed to the idea of an ethnic community held together by genetic relations. Not just the white ones. Because of their beliefs in "oppressive majorities" and "oppressed minorities," to be a minority population anywhere is to be oppressed. For any community to exist among its own kind, they consider to be bigotry towards someone else. For any rules or society to exist that outsiders cannot move into and be part of, they see as invalid to the point of needing stamping out.
This is why they also have unavoidably been forced to comment on how much they hate Jews, while blaming, "the Zionism." They usually pretend to protect minorities, but the Jews will not be broken up and abandon the ethnic nation element of their religion. And so, they decided the Jew is their enemy.
They hate all shades of European and Hispanic, as well. But they won't be forthright about the Hispanic subject until they can either convince Latin American compatriots to abandon concepts of ethnicity, or don't need them anymore.
An odd tic of a certain Type of Guy online is being convinced that art is a socially revolutionary force and every piece of genre fiction schlock has a moral obligation to be Making A Statement about some pressing issue of the day but also that actually portraying any of society's ills with anything like realistic detail is some kind of reactionary act in its own right.
like 'we want feminist horror stories but also you're not allowed to depict any women being harmed' leaves you with a pretty limited scope to work with, no?
The feminism is seldom to never about bettering or advancing the lives or state of woman, so much as it is adhering to an ideological movement and whatever institutions tenure it. And they reserve the right to snap their fingers and demand creative works conform to their supposedly pure and noble expectations, no matter how contradictory or self-defeating the criteria can be.
The academic feminist culture will demean and degrade anything that attempts to forward the movement as inherently problematic, as feminism is an ideology of a pure future, and the steps required to get there means what this morning is bloody and revolutionary, will by the evening be passe, old, and, "so status quo now it's practically regressive. We must look beyond this, now." And then criticize the work as being ineffectual or insufficient for feminism's needs. Not being radical enough, always.
Like for example, Steven Universe. Rebecca Sugar is a damned intersectional feminist and socialist. Even her work, which was Pinko Incarnate, was considered "Fascist apologist," because it didn't feature the immortal space queens getting shattered or sufficiently punished. It was praised for carrying water for feminism in theory, and "antiracism," but then it was chided for not going "far enough." It was penalized for invisible criteria that did not exist when it was being created or current and then considered a failed attempt by the sorts of people that try to judge the feminism in everything.
The penalty for not carrying that water to their satisfaction (and they can never truly be satisfied unless it's radical) is the Mean Girls decide your work is trash, and you must be trying to hurt feminism with it. J.K. Rowling used to be a feminist darling, before she ran afoul of transwomen. Then academic feminism decided the most famous female author in a generation was not feminist at all, never was, and in fact, a detrimental throwback to their movement and interests. Not just that, but the social campaign by feminists to pressure and harangue others to disavow Rowling or themselves be disavowed and considered fascists and transphobes was very real, and in living memory. These are not things one can deny as conspiracy theory or strawmanning, these are objectively things anyone familiar with Harry Potter and Steven Universe would remember. Joss Whedon getting a lifetime of at least being tolerated for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, undone in one year and his feminism an open thing to mock, as another example.
Many of the expectations that feminism as a group will just work on, won't even be said out loud, they'll be impressed and implied, vaguely hinted at, left strewn on the floor and the responsibility is yours if you piece them together and put it together yourself. And they'll expect you to infer them to take it the extra mile on your own accord, without them having to take the onus of responsibility of communicating to you their desires, contradictory or self-indulgent as they are, and expect you to somehow create a work of art that advances their ideological cause while cowtowing to every paradoxical demand. You have to set yourself up to fail and be disavowed if you do, while feminism gets to enjoy the exposure as an idea and ideological viewpoint.
The main character must be a woman, but she can't have any negative qualities or else you'll get raked over the coals for "perpetuating historical misogyny." She can't be one dimensional and optimally idealistically perfect, but if she's not, you just hate women and are drifting dangerously close to "centrism" and "fascist apologia." The villain must be a woman, but she cannot be villainous just because she's female. Her motivations must be her own, but she cannot ultimately be at fault for her actions because all bad female behavior is the result of patriarchy- but, she must have the agency of doing bad things, it's just not her fault morally.
Mean Girls are in charge of whipping up whatever subjective complaints and nitpicks and excuses to decide whatever author or artist or creator is on the shit list and needs to have a Come to Feminist Jesus moment, or wind up like Rowling- reputation guts strewn out all over the floor and their work rejected by the very ideological framework the creator sought to portray and impress.
One wrong move and as a creator, your name will have shade thrown at it in a note on TVTropes. And it is this bizarre thought economy of reputation and the shreiking of harpies that makes sure doing anything feminist is a losing proposition.
btw, if you want to know the originator of the idea, it was this guy
"oh, he was an influential figure, that makes sense why you hear it so often these days" well brother have i got news for you about the Raisin De-Etree for that
I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American Communists, he kept on collaborating with them, particularly in view of their apparent approval or indifference to what was happening in the Soviet Union.[…] Brecht shrugged his shoulders and kept on making invidious remarks about the American Communist Party and asserted that only the Soviet Union and its Communist Party mattered. […] But I argued…it was the Kremlin and above all Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the opposition and their dependents. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him. 'What are you saying?' I asked. He calmly repeated himself, 'The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' […] I was stunned by his words. 'Why? Why?' I exclaimed. All he did was smile at me in a nervous sort of way. I waited, but he said nothing after I repeated my question. I got up, went into the next room, and fetched his hat and coat. When I returned, he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose, and with a sickly smile took his hat and coat and left. Neither of us said a word. I never saw him again.
- Sidney Hook, https://yquotes.com/sidney-hook/69234/
I no longer take "all art is political" to be a neutral descriptor of artists and their output, but as a concrete rallying cry of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and its would-be commissariat
New semiconductor building blocks make power converters smaller, more affordable
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory incorporated gallium nitride semiconductors to create a high-efficiency power converter that is more compact, affordable, and efficient.
A power converter is a type of device that manages semiconductor switching and transforms current or voltage, so electricity flows smoothly and safely among equipment, power sources, and users.
Silicon semiconductors are the fundamental building blocks of conventional converters. Manufacturer ROHM Semiconductor provided the ORNL research team with gallium nitride semiconductors that enable switching 10 to 20 times faster than silicon while losing less energy in the process.
Discourse during the late 80s and 90s was different. When we discussed if someone was racist or not, it was not considered set in stone that white was synonymous with racism. Not exactly. It was more common to approach the conversation from an American exclusive perspective, because we were anglophones living in North America. Not a lot of thought was put into terminology and words in a global or species context, because before the internet, there was no point. Different cultures may as well have been different worlds.
And at the time, the population disparity of whites in North America was greater. So while nobody would ever officially say, "ONLY whites can be racist," it was considered a grey-ish area in conversations about hateful discrimination and bigotry towards others on the basis of race, if a group other than the most populous and thus most dangerous, could even be racist in the context of society.
Like, yes, technically, Ralph the black green grocer could discriminate against whites and that would technically be racism, but for the sake of brevity, racism for the sake of the conversation was, "is a large population at risk of destroying the different, smaller one out of prejudice and hate?" Words meant less than their convenience for the sake of conversation.
And it was this gray area of the conversation with wishy-washy meanings, where placeholdert that only meant definition of convenience met definitions and concepts that demanded to be considered rigid, permament and official. Those dedicated, zealous anti-racists demanded the criteria that if it was discrimination that involved race at all, it was no longer tolerable in any context. But, the trick was, they would use these universal seeming declarations, and try to imply, without specifying it aloud, racism only applied to non-whites. To go from words only being shelves with meanings for the convenience of a conversation, to being hard pegs to try and force the other person to accept certain things as unbending facts and truths and dogmas of meaning.
This naturally ran aground of things when it was probed enough and we saw the supposed anti-racists, in their supposedly "universal anti-racism," only really seem to care about discrimination from whites, not against them. That was questioned. The supposed anti-racists tried to hurry passed these conversations, but if they were so eager to engage in discourse, the DEAFENING silence and omission kind of begged more address. Eventually, yes, they had to come out and proactively stand on their dogma and let out it was a principle; Only whites could be racist.
This was thoroughly rejected not just by conservatives, but liberals, who swallowed the line of anti-racism without pretension and wanted universal anti-racism. Having dressed it up in falsely universal language with MAJOR asterisks only visible if you were part of the Progressive in-group, those asterisks became spelled out in further discourse. But those did not live up to universal anti-racism, so liberals took a bat to that right quick, and it became consensus that prejudice levied at anybody on the basis of their race was wrong.
So when Marxist-Leftists came out in the 2010s insisting that, "only whites could be racist, only "minorities" (black people, asian people, hispanic people) could be victims of racism", that racism wasn't "just" discrimination and prejudice, but a proverbial entire system supposedly set up to empower white people over "the ethnic groups," we'd seen it all before. They tried to mix it into the formula when they got militantly anti-racist in the early 90s and hit too much resistance, universally, among actual anti-racist liberals to continue.
So they vanished. They didn't die off and that school of racism didn't die, it just hid in the ivory tower and academia and quietly infiltrated left spaces, conspiring.
And they reveal how much enmity they have for liberals whenever the liberals rebuff or buck their manipulations into liberal-left values. As much vitriol and swearing and cursing them as any Fox News watcher, when they won't just take the bad orders or march to their tune even when they file the serials off and sneak marxist-progressive values into the liberal modus operandi.
One of the big problems of The Mandalorian is them giving him literal unbreakable armor that makes him functionally indestructible. He can't even take battle damage the way that Robocop and Terminator can, which makes it all feel a bit pointless.
Most heroes are on their last legs by the time the climax rolls around, but Mando just looks the same as he always does. Subconsciously, you're going "well, what really happened? He hasn't taken one bit of damage or changed visually at all, so did he really go on any sort of journey?"
Here's James Bond at the end of a Bond movie. Doesn't he look like he's pushed himself to the absolute limit to accomplish his mission?
What an epic adventure Max and Furiosa went on! They barely survived!
Aaand here's the Mandalorian. He looks exactly the same as he always does. The story literally hasn't left a mark on him.
The fear some people have that someone, somewhere, at some point of some process may be taking a profit that is not immediately related to their (preferably manual) labor at a public enterprise is wholly isomorphic to the fear some people have that someone, somewhere may be receiving sexual pleasure during an act that is not performed in a committed official relationship for the purpose of procreation.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the country's navy intercepted a sanctioned crude oil tanker that departed from a Russian port.
June 1 (UPI) -- French President Emmanuel Macron said the country's navy intercepted a sanctioned crude oil tanker that departed from a Russian port.
Macron wrote on X that a ship called the Tagor was seized Sunday by the French navy "in international waters, with the support of several partners including the United Kingdom, in strict compliance with the law of the sea."
The Tagor, registered in Madagascar, departed from the Russian port of Umba and appeared on ship tracking sites in the North Atlantic last week, CNN reported.
The European Union, Britain and the United States have all sanctioned the Tagor.
"It is unacceptable for ships to circumvent international sanctions, violate the law of the sea, and fund the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine for more than four years," Macron wrote. "These vessels, which fail to adhere to the most basic rules of maritime navigation, also pose a threat to the environment and to everyone's safety."
The Tagor is the third ship to be seized on suspicion of being part of a Russian shadow fleet. An oil tanker was intercepted by France between the southern coast of Spain and the northern coast of Morocco in Morocco. Another was intercepted by Belgium with French assistance in March.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov released a statement that Sunday's seizure was "illegal, bordering on international piracy."
"We absolutely disagree that they are being carried out in full compliance with international law," Peskov said of the seizures.
The Russian embassy in Paris told Russian state-run news agency TASS that the captain of the Tagor is believed to be a Russian citizen, and the embassy has requested information from French officials about whether other Russian citizens were present on the vessel.
Four years of sharpening blades. Four years of delegation and debate. Four years of Russia threatening nuclear war every other day.
I hope Russia threatens war.
And I hope France accepts.
If you don't know, France has a use-first nuclear deterrence policy. They will literally pre-empt you as a warning shot. Russia knows this, and UNLIKE Russia, France has nukes that actually are still in good shape. And they don't blow up in their GOD. DAMNED. SILOS, WHEN THEY FIRE THEM, RUSSIA.
Corral all the Russian shadow fleet next. Fucking yes.
