Talk about committing to the bit.

Maarva kidnapped an indigenous-coded kid, gave him new name, and assimilated him to her culture.

I do have to give them credit for consistency here. If you’re going to take issue (and I assume this person does) with Russia relocating orphans out of a war zone into safety (and even call it a “genocide”), then I suppose you should also condemn Maarva for taking Cassian out of a situation where he was going to be killed.

I suppose saving children instead of leaving them in front of moving steamrollers violates the NAP

E. coli take my energy

Indirectly? Yes. They’re responsible for creating and upholding a declining status quo while suppressing all left-wing alternatives and not only allowing the right to run wild but also legitimizing them through concessions and appeasement.

Directly? Also yes, because they literally promoted Trump thinking he’d be easier to beat and that they could more easily sell themselves as the “lesser evil” and coerce voters into coming out if they were up against him (which they’ve also done with other far-right candidates).

Literally any scale, any perspective you want to use, they deserve plenty of blame.

The US has always been run by vampires,^[1] and they moved into Russia in the 90’s.^[2] Vampires love their little power games, political intrigue, etc, but they rarely do direct confrontation.^[3] There’s only one thing that could provoke them into it: aliens. Ofc, they’ve had UFO technology for a long time,^[4] but they’ve never actually captured a live alien, and a lot of the stuff is too advanced or biocoded, so they can’t unlock the full potential.^[5] A UFO must have crashed in Ukraine and now both sides think (or at least suspect) that one of them survived the crash.

They probably haven’t captured them yet (if they actually even survived), but if either group of vampires gets ahold of them, it’s fucking game over. They’re gonna go straight for the Galactic Union of Planets and it’s gonna be full-on, Castlevania style demon armies from here to the fucking Pleiades.^[6]

And I know there’s some fucking crackpot accelerationists out there like, “Actually, it’d be good if the vampires got the alien because then the GUP would have to intervene.” Yeah, just like they “had to intervene” if the vampires got UFOs.^[7] Well, where the fuck are they? The Council is filled with these fucking, 90,000 year old vegetables hooked up to a bunch of tubes,^[8] they will not respond quickly enough and they have never taken the vampires seriously enough.^[9] Also, if they do interfere, then we’ll have failed the test and we’ll be eternally forbidden from interstellar travel.^[10]

Honestly, our best bet at this point is to launch the nukes. The Watcher will shoot them out of the sky, come down and tell us we failed, suck the extra CO2 from the atmosphere, and take control of the planet from the vampires.^[11] Like at this point we’re gonna fail either way, the only real danger is the vampires getting to the council, and that’s way more important than just our planet anyway. And we’d be much better off under the Watcher than under the fucking vampires, that’s for sure.^[12]

The assumption that we have to fight Russia because they’re the “bad guys” is grounded in this idea of “idealist interventionism,” that American foreign policy is motivated by benevolence and promoting freedom and democracy. There was a time when that was politically hegemonic in both parties but the complete failure of the War on Terror has broken that down and bred more skepticism of those assumptions. That skepticism goes in all sorts of directions, from leftists who correctly identify that US foreign policy is motivated by the material self-interest of the ruling class, to nationalists who think that it’s motivated by idealism but should be self-interested, to libertarians who see it all as “the government doing stuff.”

Trump’s approach to foreign policy is built on appealing to nationalists and libertarians. Any ideological differences between the two are easily papered over by the democrats screaming “Russian bot” at anyone who doesn’t want to kill a bunch of people halfway around the globe for the sake of “freedom,” and by parading around the Cheney’s, who are emblematic of that ideology (and it’s failures). When Trump persued an exploitative mineral deal with Ukraine, that’s red meat to the nationalists who are just as warmongering as the liberals but think the problem is the veneer of idealism, in reality, Trump is likely to keep the Ukrainian meat grinder running but he’s selling it to his base with, “We’re doing this for our own material benefit” because they respond better to that than, “We’re doing this to uphold international norms and promote democracy.”

Trump once bragged about sending “offensive weapons and tank killers” to Ukraine when Obama only sent, “pillows and blankets,” and that’s true. All that really matters is Trump being able to distinguish himself as an “outsider,” as an alternative to the status quo everyone’s fed up with. It’s kinda similar to how Trump promoted COVID vaccines while trying to take credit for them and his supporters booed him for it, because if the Democrats are saying one thing, his base wants and expects him to say the other.

https://tankie.tube/w/t99y1HbjaCHmUwUrfcKwPW

Also what’s with the title? “Crime and Punishment?” What was wrong with, “I Killed An Old Lady To Steal Her Money So My Cute Sister Wouldn’t Have To Marry A Rich Asshole But Now I’m Bedridden With Guilt And The Police Are After Me?”

Also the first one was waving around a blaster while the driver was acting friendly. And both happened in or on the Senate building, where she’d worked for years.

Both moments really made it sink in that what was happening was real, after years of planning and maneuvering and playing politics, and it only took a few minutes for her life to transform forever.

Again, they are not meant to be excuses, and I have said that repeatedly. I literally said, “I’m not saying it made sense or was in any way excusable.” The reason I’m concerned with understanding their motivation is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Yes, but the US didn’t represent the ideological strain they were trying to root out. Conciliation with the USSR would make one look like they agreed with the USSR’s path and wanted to do the same in China.

I’m not saying it made sense or was in any way excusable, but that paranoia was a factor in it.

China’s foreign policy was completely unhinged during this period.

The transition from leadership by a war hero guiding a fledgling country through difficult circumstances into a more “relaxed” leadership governing over a more stable and peaceful country is a conundrum that AES states struggle with. Mao attempted to prevent that transition by any means necessary, and splitting with the Soviets, training the Khmer Rouge, and normalizing with the US were driven by that fear, fear of a Chinese Khrushchev.

From a big picture, outside view, and with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easier to say the Khrushchev and Deng were the result of changing material conditions, and no matter how hard one tries to stop it, changing conditions lead to changing leadership.

However, if you’re the wartime leader it’s harder to see that, not only for self-interested reasons, but also just in terms of personal experience and personality. The person most capable of leading the revolution to victory is generally not a person who is easy to convince to stop seeing threats everywhere. I agree with what seems to be the prominent strain of thought on Hexbear that people like Stalin and Mao were necessary but also that modern China is socialist. Unfortunately, I don’t really know what the solution is to get from point A to point B other than waiting for the leadership to die.

Imo Mao really put the cart before the horse with his concept of “permanent revolution,” as if the end goal of leftism is to create ideologically pure revolutionaries. The goal is to create a more peaceful and equitable world where we don’t need revolutionaries.

In any case this is a definite black spot on the PRC and it’s worth noting that it’s history is pretty messy in general. Don’t think you can or should defend everything.

Pirating Andor bc Disney+ is on the BDS list. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen but I’d sooner drop it than violate the boycott, even if money was no object. As things stand, piracy is the only ethical way to watch it.

I wasn’t sure about all this God stuff, but then I went to an Italian church, and let me tell you, having a bit of oil to dip the communion wafer in really sold me.

I learned today that Chappell Roan has an uncle who’s a republican congressman in Missouri.

It’s simple, we, uh, kill the bourgeoisie.

There’s parts of the country that are so uniformally conservative that virtually the only way to encounter outside views is through the internet. Doubly so if you’re a kid growing up sheltered by conservative parents.

CP violation in weak interactions

Weak force, why don’t you have a seat over there