Reminds me of that time a royal navy nuclear submarine was repaired with superglue

Have they considered that this would be antizionist, and therefore antisemitic?

Aha, I may be stealing your land and massacring your children, but I have depicted you as an unreasonable violent thug and myself as a stuttering innocent smol bean, checkmate Palestine!

Audio from the Yemeni missile

American hogs are so mouth-frothingly angry all the time that it's easy to point them out, they wear their fascism right on their sleeve. But there's a certain type of central European EU-loving neoliberal who presents this soft and friendly facade, wearing sensible business attire and never raising their voice, who is so rabidly anticommunist and anti-immigrant it would give the ghost of Hitler pause - basically Democrats but intensified in every way.

They are the PMC spreadsheet holocaust technician, peloton fascist, health and wellness, mindfulness meditation, concentration camp builders who are so totally immersed into the 'European identity' that they're indistinguishable from Nazis. They'll explain why Ukraine needs unlimited weapons to deter Russian aggression, but immigrants need to be rounded up and deported or drowned in the Mediterranean, the same way you'd explain to a wayward child that you shouldn't touch the stove - or even with a tone of righteous indignation, 'speaking truth to power' as if they weren't 'the power' and as if they were telling the truth. And then they'll go for a bike ride along one of their many beautiful publicly-funded cycle paths.

They have completely internalized their existence as 'gardeners', the superior enlightened cultural pinnacle of the world (as opposed to the powerful but crude and tacky US), which they earned by just being better than the rest of the world in a way that gives them the right - no, the burden! - to lecture everyone else, especially the people they formerly colonized; after all, Europeans are basically trustworthy and righteous, in a way that no one else can be, because they overthrew Hitler! It's their duty to warn the naive simpletons in Africa and South America against the predations of the kind of dangerous authoritarians that the Europeans defeated, and so have been immunized against - such as those in Asia, who are all sadly pathological due to their culture but with some tough love and Balkanization could maybe one day be guided into the light of liberal democracy.

All of which gives them a totally unassailable sense of moral superiority and inner peace. The garden is blooming, the jungle is walled out, the dictators are chastised and the 'children' are receiving our guidance - all is right with the world. They're like the Eloi, except they're the ones eating people.

Monopoly prices

My policies are too strong for you, traveler!

My strongest policies would kill the economy of a dragon, let alone a man!

Elon assassinated by Chechens please, god, please

Boss fight game over screen hints be like:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

Man, I'm sure I've read it before but I must have forgotten, he really does always cut it right down to the purest truth.

I agree with everything you've said, and having read through this other thread about astrology I think I was taking too soft of a position on it, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

I'd also like to link an essay, The Overthrow of Religious Authority and the Eradication of Superstition (1927) which I think is relevant.

You're absolutely right, it's no real help whatsoever. But there's also no other actual guide beyond just having to learn the hard way to discern people's true intentions, which is difficult and exhausting while astrology appears so simple and easy. This is not in any way a justification, just my explanation of why it's so pervasive and attractive, and why the state of the world cultivates pseudoscientific beliefs in general - of which astrology is merely among the most socially acceptable to display, and therefore has the largest reach.

I definitely think its use in making life decisions is actively harmful, but it's hard to pull people away from what may be their strongest social connections. In this way it's just like any other real religion, which as Marxists we obviously oppose, but we also have to understand that these beliefs, and the psychological need for these beliefs, arise from social conditions of alienation. So until we're in a position to change social conditions, just attacking the belief system and the people who believe in it won't achieve results and will just push people away. Especially when so often, the people holding these beliefs will come from among the more marginalized intersections - probably not a coincidence, as if you're a member of a group who has much more control over their life why would you need to look for guidance in the stars?

When the time comes, I'm sure there will have to be some kind of cultural revolution to sweep out every kind of pseudoscience, from astrology to crystal healing to reiki to everything else, but until then all we can do is tolerate these beliefs in our allies, push against them in our actual comrades and make sure they're never used to make the really important organizational decisions.

Select all images with people who won the Winter War

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Having been close friends with someone who's way into astrology, I think there's a number of factors here.

Firstly, in a world that is clearly 'going wrong', with ever increasing economic precarity, political polarization, and visible worsening of climate change, the idea of a system than can give you any level of prediction for your personal future is a huge comfort. Marxism, despite being a scientific discipline that makes very accurate long-term predictions of social development, has no (or very little) power on the individual level, so some people may cling to this other system that gives them a sense of preparedness for their personal life. And while I agree that truly understanding and internalizing a dialectical-materialist perspective means both an end to being able to believe in things like astrology, and a kind of inner peace in the face of the inevitable dialectical unfolding of the material world, most people (who are still valuable allies) never actually reach that level of understanding.

Secondly, as people are increasingly alienated and atomized, it provides access to a large social space of overwhelmingly non-straight-white-cis-male people, immediately gives you a tribe with specific traits and icons to identify with, has (at the very least, the aesthetic of) a deep history going back to antiquity and has a lot of specific in-jokes that can quickly bring someone into the fold. My friend is constantly posting memes about the supposed characteristics of various different star signs, sub-categories of those star signs, interactions between different star signs, etc. etc. It's an endless source of, for want of a better word, content, which you can enjoy both as part of the space as a whole and from within your specific niche. You can see something and say "Yes, I am like that! They know me so well!", or "Ah, you got me! I do that too!", or "Oh, those [star sign]! That's exactly how they are!", all of which binds you into a social fabric and identity that rarely exists elsewhere.

And thirdly, through the supposed 'compatibility' of different star signs, it gives people a guide to who they should try to form a relationship with. Statistically, by far the number one danger to women is their male romantic partners, both in terms of physical violence but also in terms of the possibility of psychic distress. Will he dump me? Will he cheat on me? Will he leave me to do all the house work? He seems like a good guy now, but is he just tricking me until he thinks I'm stuck with him? Does he secretly listen to Andrew Tate? Will he start doing that a year into our relationship and suddenly completely change? There's no way to know these things, and under patriarchal capitalism men are under constant social pressure to gain these behaviors and traits. So a system that claims to give even the slightest insight into who you can trust to be a good partner offers a huge psychological comfort.

The only way to remove it is with an 'exile' effect

I would support the use of a nuclear weapon in space if it was used to evaporate that car

The true Enlightened Centrist

*NATO *10 years ago

He seemed really shaken by the assassination attempt, some staffer said he obsessed over it to the point of rewatching the video of it on loop, so if people keep popping off around him he might seriously break down.

Alberto Is-no-more-i