On one hand, I do find agenda chasing to be silly, and powerscaling outright irritating, but I do understand why there is so much memeing and slander around Dracule Mihawk specifically.
Because, when you come down to it, Mihawk really isn't much of a character is he?
And I'm not talking about his sort of flat, low information antagonist he represents. We have other villains like that who work very well. Look at who he's been partnered up with, Crocodile. The man's about as complex as a $5 california screwcap, and he's still unconditionally beloved. He's a power-hungry, megalomaniacal sociopath who will do anything in order to get what he wants, even if it means killing literally millions of people, and that's pretty much all we've known about him for 25 years. But that doesn't matter, because we know from one of the best arcs in the series of him being maybe the most proactive, intimidating villain we've ever had from Oda, and another arc of him having a world-historic crash out that what really matters about Crocodile is what he's going to do next.
It's not like that with Mihawk. The closest Mihawk has ever come to actually being involved with the story is a smattering of pannels at Marineford, where he still doesn't really do anything. All we know about this guy is that he's bored and grumpy, and apparently he is the greatest/strongest swordsman in the world, who we have never once seen genuinely demonstrate that fact. We know nothing about where he came from; we know nothing about what he wants or where he wants to go. He is essentially a mcguffin for Zoro, who only exists to gatekeep him from achieving his dream.
You can look at him on the page, and maybe you can even detect that maybe, eventually he just might amount to something, but Mihawk simply is not there.
The year is 2008. America is in the midst of an economic recession, its reactionary leadership is deeply unpopular and faces annihilation in the forthcoming elections. Lady Gaga has released a new album. Homestuck is relevant.
The year is 2025. America is in the midst of an economic recession, its reactionary leadership is deeply unpopular and faces annihilation in the forthcoming elections. Lady Gaga has released a new album. Homestuck is relevant.
Listening to Hotel California on the store radio and they muted the word "kill" when he says "but they just can't kill the beast" like what are we doing here has humanity not suffered enough
What we are seeing in the waning days of this war is a sort of revival of imperial power politics. A receding of the age of the nation state, and a return to spheres of influence. The world will be divied up amonst the Anglosphere, Russia, the European Union, China, India, and maybe Brazil.
And eventually we will see these powers, no longer willing or able to stand one another's company or competition, descend into the exact kind of apocalyptic, multipolar war that felled the empires of old. The lot of us all gone on to the same unhappy grave as the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary; the Tzar and the Kaiser.
Only now with the addition of nuclear weaponry. The War to End All Wars, truthfully this time.
It's very fascinating to me the way that Trump and the MAGA movement as a whole both are and are not fascists.
This is gonna be a long one, so I'm going to drop a handy-dandy "read more" here
Like, if you look at MAGA on paper, all the trappings of a fascist movement are there. The whole "we used to be great, but we have been robbed of our greatness by minorities and civil rights" narrative, the strongman personality cult, the rampant indulgence of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, pirmarily derives it support from a base in the middle class, it's all there. If you were to stop there, the only difference between Trump and Hitler is the mustache.
But then you get down to Trump on an acting policy level, and you begin to see all these ways that MAGA is radically different from like the Nazis or the Italian Fascists. For one, it is much more openly elitist. Trump has actively made the homeless one of his scapegoat groups, and that's not something you would see traditional fascist groups do. You can even see this within MAGA, as, for example, the Big Beautiful Bill's practical elimination of medicare has been deeply opposed by the likes of Josh Hawley. The homeless and unemployed don't make for a good outgroup for fascists, because fascism is all about inherit absolutes like race or gender, while poverty is something literally anyone can fall into. Fascists usually recognized issues like homelessness as something they could use to gain public ground. Job programs were very popular with Hitler and Mussolini. They were not good job programs, of course. They very much resembled slavery for those "enrolled" in them, and failure to perform usually resulted in being shot. But the message was always, "we will eliminate homelessness and unemployment by siezing the levers of the economy and bringing them into the body of the almighty state" not "the poor are disgusting and I hate them and we should break their skulls and shut them away somewhere I can't see them anymore."
Fascism, traditionally at least, has often existed in this realm of a sort of Nega Social Democracy. A lot of these guys were socialists and marxists before their class interests took them in a more reactionary direction. They got along with the idea of redistributing the spoils of imperialism more evenly among their own workforce, but saw social democrats talking about starting towards less racial discrimination and more open attitudes about sex and gender, and said
And decided to start their own club where they reoriented the entire project around nationalism and genocide.
(I'm not the only one to make this observation, btw. Ernst Thälmann did as well. Though I believe he took the opposite approach, labeling social democracy an outgrowth of fascism, rather than fascism an outgrowth of social democracy. I'm more convinced of the latter.)
You don't get that with Trump. You don't get it with his contemporaries either; Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Even other leaders like Putin or Orban. I have this feeling that we have entered a sort of Absolute Monarchy phase for the capitalist class. "L'etate c'est moi!" and all that. Billionaires running around playing at Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Romanovs.
In that way Trump much better resembles the reactionary courts of Louis XVI or Nicholas II than he does the Nazi Party. Spending lavishly in spite of the national debt, constantly dodging scandals of inpropriety, sending troops into the streets of the capitol when a noble is assaulted, welcoming crackpots into the royal circle, firing economic advisers who bring him bad news. He even has a gaudy foreign wife everybody hates.
But fascism is still frighteningly present on the table of possibilities, particularly as a reaction to the disparities and anger created by Trump. You have to remember, Hitler and Musollini didn't take the reigns of power from well meaning liberals who just couldn't hack it, they took power from arch conservatives like Hindenburg who didn't give a shit if people were starving in the streets. And what's worse, should such a fascist movement rise to prominence in the US, we do not have a socialist movement that is populous or advanced enough to rise to meet it. It is a threat to which we are entirely vulnerable, without a defense in the world to speak of.
TLDR: Trump isn't a fascist, just a deeply out of touch elitist reactionary, who very much does want to rule like a king. Though he likes the cut of their jib, and his flagrant disdain for the working class will likely create a scenario in which fascism will rise to power in the US. We should probably do something to stop that.
do you think the current rise of right-wing thought could have been because of political and economical factors in the world's hegemonic superpower or was it cartoons
sorry but it's so funny. "these cartoons ruined everything. I guess that the US president who started two wars, led the rebirth of right-wing thought in the United States and worldwide, and created ICE was also kind of bad though."
Why are so many internet leftists prone to this sort of fetishism of tv shows (where I'm using "fetishism" in the traditional sense of attributing mystic qualities to innocuous objects)? Like, "Oh, young men are turning fascist because of South Park" as if it has nothing to do with, you know, fascist political movements parlaying unfulfilled and sexually frustrated young men into being defenders of an ailing capitalist system, as happened several times throughout the 20th century, including quite prominently in Germany more than 60 years before South Park debuted. "Oh, the Democratic Party is like that because of The West Wing" you're sure it has nothing to do with the decline of organised labour as a political force beginning in the 1970s?
Aren't we supposed to be the ones who believe in materialist analysis?
It is kinda funny how backwards people like that get everything.
Like, did South Park and Family Guy rise to prominence because watching them magically turns you into a bigot, or is it because 12 years of plainly spoken racial hatred under Reagan and Bush Sr combined with the arrogance of the late 1990s to create conditions where that sort of "irreverant" programming was in vogue?
Did The West Wing become a cultural hallmark of well-to-do liberals because it was genuinely shaping Democratic policy, or was it because the show was conveniently timed propaganda for the changing face of the party, that then turned into weapons grade cope about an imaginary Gore Administration after Dubya pulled a fast one during the Florida recounts?
Very silly to assume it was the former in either scenario. South Park causes fascism the same way video games cause mass shootings.
Some names just sound so ridiculously fake that had they been fictional, people would’ve rolled their eyes in complete disbelief. Like seriously. Wdym there’s a mf called Galileo Galilei. Stfu. You just made that up
Fastest man on earth is a guy called Usain Bolt. Sure I guess. There’s a poker player whose real name is Chris Moneymaker. Whatever. Scott Speed is a racecar driver. Founder of Tito’s Vodka is some guy called Bert Beveridge. There’s a former CNN bureau chief called William Headline. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
My vampires CAN walk into the sunlight but doing so would reveal what they would look like if they aged normally
Younger vampires don’t have much to worry about but older vamps have reason to avoid sunlight as they age. They are still immortal, but their aged, sunlit selves are significantly weaker than their non-sunlit forms. Vamps over 100 years old run the risk of crumpling over, fully immobile, but still conscious
Do you remember when you used to call a store and someone just picked up the phone on the other line and you weren't forced to make your way through a labrynth of automated prompts?
We've not only taken away all of the physical spaces for our children to exist in, we're now taking away the electronic ones as well. I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences.
