Carrying on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping

comparing the v-man to kaustsky is an insult to kautsky

Mr. Satan did something much cooler; he saved the Earth from cell!!!

tangentially related but i've been watching dragonball from the start with some friends and its shockingly good (in spite of the horny old man trope)

Christian brainworms i think

tbf to tolkien, his orcs are very blatantly EuropeanEmpire-coded, sam and tom bombadil are brown skinned, rangers other than aragorn are dark skinned, every evil group other than Sauron/Saruman & loyal minions is said and/or implied to be tricked or forced into the service of sauron with promises that sauron won't keep--they aren't portrayed as evil for this, imperialism is explicitly and literally condemned even if for technological advancement / profit ("were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired"), there's (problematic, but super-progressive for the 50s where even many socialists were telling indigenous peoples they should just assimilate into Canada) ideas of landback for groups dispossessed by the "heroic" nations like Rohan and from very early on we have e.g. Gandalf saying we should feel bad for even his slave-soldiers (still have to fight them tho; can't kill imperialism with love sadly)

Orcs and Urukhai are the soldiers of the industrial-evil (Sauron) and industrial-market (Saruman) Empires and are portrayed as ontologically evil because they are loyal and relatively willing soldiers of an empire bent on slavery and/or extermination and gleefully carry out this extermination. Their mannerisms in this ("just following orders" "give me your number and i'll report this") and mode of laying out their camps (grid based, square buildings) also accord more with a modern euro style military than the "ontologically evil savages" most other fantasy portrays them as.

Orcs and Urukhai are not the conscripts such as e.g. goblins who are explicitly described as wanting to desert and flee back to their holes following the breaking of sauron's empire. A lot of text implies that the ontologically evil "races" in lotr are the result of the evil empires corrupting regular peoples who may be good or bad (e.g. Treebeard muses that Saruman might have combined Orc and Men somehow--the chapter before Ugluk says Saruman feeds them human flesh so this seems likely, ents are noted to look similar to trolls, and when trees wake up they can explicitly turn out bad rather than good). So rly imo we should look at Orcs/Urukhai in lotr less as "an independent society" and more as "commissioned officers of the british army", and goblins/trolls more as "conscripted troops in the british army who want to go home but will nonetheless commit attrocities bc of the racist society they've been brought up in"

every single fucking time a friend of mine gets a romantic partner they suddenly never want to spend any time with me anymore. cos it's totally normalized in society that you should prioritize romantic partners so heavily

Stay safe comrade, sucks out there sometimes

Sorry if this is invalidating, idk how to phrase my feelings or put together my thoughts in a encompassing way here. I want it to be comforting but as an allo person I’m also being kind-of defensive here and honestly I’m worried about that being a toxic behavior from me

No worries comrade.

Your Catan comparison is spot on tbh. I'd only add that that allonormativity also says "it is more important to play catan with someone you are sexing with than a regular friend"

internalized assumptions about whether or not someone actually values you

Less assumption, more observation that sometimes some of my friends will disappear for indeterminate amounts of time because they've found partners then reappear when relationship ends

angry at a lot of other people about it. I'd encourage you to consider that these larger cultural dynamics are a lot like capitalism and other systems

I'd encourage you to consider that I'm angry at those larger systems and my post was about those larger systems. Just as when e.g. my grandmother says something racist I have anger both at her and the larger system.

as individuals we are near powerless to change them, and we'll die tired and angry if we spend our energies raging against them

I...don't? I made two hexbear comments when prompted by mention of kink at pride discourse.

If we want to see change in the larger social world, we need to join with organizations to do so

I...have? Was at a party meeting just last night

So for your own sanity, spend your efforts and energy on the things that are close to you that you can change, friends and family. Build your supportive circles so you can have some more enjoyment in your own personal life.

I...am? Again I made two hexbear comments complaining about the systemic normalisation of allosexual/romantic values, I'm not sure why you seem (sorry for assuming) to think this is consuming me constantly

ah, sorry for misreading comrade

What do you want from the queer community? Friendship? This is one of those situations where having more community outside of bars and nightclubs would help a lot.

I would like solidarity and for other queer people to not make me feel less queer because I'm not into sex or romance. I dont go to nightclubs, so Im afraid that advice is not very relevant.

Queer culture is always going to revolve around sex and romance, for better or for worse.

Indeed, and that makes me sad and depressed. I dont imagine/think/want it to change, but I feel like i should be at least allowed to complqin about how alienating it is

Real

I'm sorry to have reminded you of people IRL making queer spaces unsafe for you and your friends.

I have no idea where/why the accusation of bad faith (or especially queer and kinkphobia) is coming from, and wish you'd explain more rather than telling me that my (probably too genuine) depressed 2AM rant based on my experiences with other queer people is bad faith stuff meant to hide some real message.

I have never supported removing kink at pride. Largely I dont go to pride events bc 1. Loud and 2. Lots of people and 3. Usually unmasked people. My issues with allosexuality and romance are pmuch the same issues a lotta my gay friends have with cis romance/sexuality (i.e. its omnipresent, shoved in face, held up as super important for maturity, universal, most important relationship etcetc). Kink doesnt make me uncomfortable, as generqlly the people into various kinks arent the hegemonic group in society constantly shouting "be like me or you are worth less as a human being".

real

its the constant, casual allosexuality and alloromanticism creeping into every crevice of human life that rly fucks with me

the constant reminders of 'your friends will never consider you important as someone they're smashing privates (or hoping to) with', 'society won't consider you an adult until you get a partner', and 'some [a lot ] of people are nice just for sex' stuff that gets to me

and how all this means that basically every media has romance and sex--if it doesn't the fans will turn every platonic interaction into a sexualromantic thing because "people just don't [hug/cuddle/be a decent human being] unless they want sex or romance"

And even if there is sex or romance, fans will turn all the platonic relationships sexual anyway because "they have better chemistry" or "it's obvious Sam really wants to sex/romance Frodo; there's no other reason he'd go so far for him"

just,

As one of the "sex repulsed ace" folks who gets shot at / tokenised / ignored / etc by all sides

Allosexuality deeply normalised and world is scream. Can't use goddamn pleading emotes anymore because the goddamn allosexuals stole the goddamn emote to mean "bottom" and have turned anxious behaviours, nervousness, etc, into sexualised "bottom behaviour" to contrast "top behaviour" (fucking hell my fellow queers have recreated masculine and feminine gender roles down to their association with sexual behaviour! Infuriating!).

Also its fucking creepy that "pickup line" "stutter/blush/etc" "kissing / etc" being taken as "consent" is BACK but now its fine bc its gay? Like god i don't want my anxieties taken as "i just secretly want the hornies??"

Oh and the jokes from other queers about turning everyone gay etcetc and i'm like "fuck you i don't wanna be gay i hate this whole sex and romance thing"

So yeah notta fun month here ! ! !

Is there any way to perfect the tech that ISNT something out of a dystopian scifi?

Nope. The entirety of academic science is predicated on the dystopian scifi of modernity. E.g. the species of mouse that has been selectively bred to remain genetically identical (so it can be used as a scientific unit for experimentation) for more than a century, has been copyrighted, and is used in basically all testing. It's been squished, starved (lab animals are generally kept in a state of hunger to make them more easily controlled), diseased, burnt, drowned, cut open (while alive), shocked, etcetc. Similar treatment of many other animals (and humans in the global south, and people of colour and disabled people and women etcetc in the global north).

Our (Capitalist-European) ways of knowing are based on this brute force torture-science where we tear stuff apart to find out "what it is" (and more importantly, can it be made profitable or is it useless?) as soon as possible, and then we declare the results of this torture-science universally applicable, e.g. we declared animals stupid because we ran tests on animals we've captured, starved to ensure food motivation and locked up in cages for ease of access and tested on things humans find relevant (e.g. testing facial recognition on apes using human faces instead of ape faces; shockingly gorillas are better at telling gorillas apart than telling humans apart).

Like, it rly has to be remembered the basis of Academic European Science is rich fucks doing experiments for fun, using "raw materials" (living or otherwise) available to them as a result of their immense privilege. As their wealth was already based on e.g. literal chattel slavery they had no qualms doing literal torture on subhumans for fun and "progress", no qualms tearing up ecosystems to "study plants and animals" (bc of this, Academic science is still basically baffled by a lotta how plants and animals actually work in nature). They therefore had less than no qualms doing any of this to "improve the human condition (i.e. to make more shit for companies to sell)".

Capital was willing to work 2 year olds to death in lace mills for pretty dresses; it has less than no qualms about torturing apes or mice to death to ensure quality hair products or slightly longer human lifespans (for the rich, in the global north). Socialism (as it exists after imperialism dies, not as it exists while competing with imperialism) will likely have to (be forced to by the poorest) reconsider a lotta the stuff we in the imperial core take as necessities of life.

Tbh I love it because it subverts AtLA's "happy" ending of

spoiler

the imperialist fire nation's monarch is replaced by another monarch and this somehow reshapes the entire socioeconomic structure of a century long imperialist-fascist power.

so that by Legend of Korra

spoiler

the Fire Nation's technology and socioeconomic systems have taken firm root in the southern water tribe, republic city and are worming their way into the earth kingdom

And I find this all 100% reasonable for the characters;

Zuko

spoiler

is a naive 14 year old whose anti-imperialist uncle retired to Ba-Sing-Se he would be eaten alive by the Fire Nation's aristocratic proto-bourgeois

; Sokka's

spoiler

fondness for technology and novelty could easily see him rapidly adopting fire nation technology without realising their social relations are built into their technologies

; Toph's

spoiler

hit first ask questions later mindset combined with isolation from poverty are fundamentals of policing

; Aang's

spoiler

inability to do what needed to be done wrt Ozai means there's fuck all he could do against any of his friends if they get co-opted.

No idea why the hell Katara

spoiler

stands by with all the pollution and shit when she helped blow up a fire nation factory to stop pollution, but ig everyone else thought it was a good idea so she went along with it

Sadly the writers think this is all inevitable, natural and good ('progress', 'development', 'modernization'), but if I were to write a sequel to AtLA i'd keep all the lore from korra but portray the society as bad

mod that makes Isabella white

mod that gives Isabella trousers

if atla ended with aang listening to yangchen it would be so much better