apparently the USA has all the money in the world when it comes to funding genocide but not when it comes to healthcare and housing it’s own people. we can spend trillions on being an imperialist piece of shit country, but god forbid all levels of education is free and libraries are well funded and teachers are paid what they deserve. we can stick our hands in the politics of other nations but it’s just not in the budget to feed the American citizens. the us government would rather spend our money on being terrorists and killing Palestinians than do anything to help the working class in America

"Better a rapist than-"

"The Nazis were actually right to-"

"I can't feel too bad about the Atlanta spa shootings, Asians have it coming for making such disgusting art."

"We need to begin the reeducation of those Asian countries."

All real things said by morality cops about fictional stories and works of art. And they insist they're progressive and left-wing. And they'll just keep trying to derail and point the finger back at whoever points them out as the abuse and genocide apologist, fascist bootlickers they are. More and more are becoming weirdly comfortable rubbing shoulders with literal Nazis and fascists because "as long as they're not lolis or proshitters, right?" And that's terrifying and I sincerely leave a door open for anyone scared of the crowd they've ended up in. I've been in a similar place, becoming too lenient and friendly with alt-right types. I don't want to be part of chasing anyone into the arms of hate groups. Please, please, please be mindful. All the denial of complacency and collaboration does nothing against the very real and present threats happening in the US government (and others, but I'm American so this is what I'm most aware of.)

every time i learn more history i have a worse opinion of nation states, especially the one i live in

our government is terrible and does bad things for bad reasons every fucking day

we're not the worst

but that's a low bar

the only things we're really any good at are logistics and propaganda

which the world has learned, to its lasting sorrow, is all that's ever needed to bring misery, exploitation, and death to uncountable millions of people

(many of whom we called allies until they became inconvenient to continue to use as proxies)

for real for real the u.s. government does a world class job of lying to and indoctrinating its residents

and to the rest of the world

y'all complain about military funding in movies but holy shit the possibilities that come up with how deeply these movies penetrate societies the u.s. regards as hostile

god

i feel like a conspiracy theorist

i feel super crazy

whoo, okay, here's the thing

i know this isn't exactly a covert government project because, for one thing, our government is super bad at secret conspiracies

our covert actions mostly fail in their high concept objectives and fail to remain covert and often come back to bite us in the ass in ways that mildly inconvenience us

like

how we keep funding fascist dictatorships and death squads

for example! one mr saddam hussein, who we didn't sell weapons systems directly? but we did send over a shitload of chemical precursors for the gas weapons used in the iran-iraq war and iraq was able to buy astonishing quantities of french weapons

like the aérospaciale am-39 exocet air to surface missile, two of which were launched, by a modified commercial jet, procured from the same french corporation that supplied the iraq air force with mirage fighters, at uss stark, then on patrol as part of our economic blockade of iran

both missiles struck their target, killing thirty seven sailors and wounding twenty one more

iraq claimed to have executed the pilot who flew the mission and our government claimed to believe this, though it was not true

the one thing of note the reagan administration did was to relieve the captain, who apparently followed his standing orders and absolutely kept his badly damaged ship floating which is a really difficult and technically impressive thing to do! from command and ended his career

for not defending his ship

i'm amazed we continue to have a navy, really

anyway the u.s. government is a petty evil bitch so we weren't quite done yet

i'll cite wikipedia here for a reason: i am definitely mentally ill with a history of occasional delusion but this is not that

this is all available on wikipedia, it is in no way secret!

On 21 June 2011, an agreement was reached between the governments of the United States and Iraq regarding claims of United States citizens against the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government established a fund of $400 million to compensate prisoners of war and hostages in the Persian Gulf War, and those killed or injured in the 1987 attack on Stark. The United States Department of State was to establish a mechanism to process applications for compensation.

it's so evil i want to pull the skin from my face

just just just fuckin look at the user of language here, look at the dates, holy fucking shit

is wikipedia run by the cia? i doubt it

but if the article didn't use such carefully bloodless language to describe how the greatest nation on earth straight mugged the people of iraq using things done by the dictatorship we so loudly claimed to have liberated them from as moral and legal justification

fffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

if the article just said that it'd be flooded with edits from bootlickers

"an agreement was reached" my god*

amazing

and it doesn't take the government doing much more than funding media through partnerships with military and police

the incentives of capital do the rest

we aren't just telling the american people our armed forces, here and abroad, are good people, heroes even, we're telling everybody

and it's just capitalism as hegemonic paradigm! plus, you know, a ridiculously huge nuclear arsenal and a history as the only nation to use them against another nation state, that's always factored into the geopolitical calculus

you think china doesn't know what's up with our media? it's not great for their domestic political projects but the incentives and threats are enough that american movies play on chinese screens

such is the nature of capital and its most zealous manifestation, american empire

*specifically, the morrigan, for reasons i hope are obvious enough

Please stop discoursing and nitpicking over voting third party vs. voting democrat. Trump already has and will continue to erode lgbt rights, reproductive rights and lifelines to the poor while feeding people to the pandemic and the police with a big fat smile about it. He will literally make many more people die than anyone else is going to and that’s what you are voting on: Trump vs. Less Murder. The Democratic party is made up of spineless, infantile, tone deaf bootlickers who have shamelessly rigged it so your only “Less Murder” option is a vote for Biden. That’s just the way it is. I’m tired of people arguing that they have to vote by their moral principles or they feel bad. It’s that or more guaranteed death, I’m sorry that’s the way it is. Being spineless, Democrats at least try to look good and sometimes listen to the actual American people more than Republicans do, meaning that once they have the white house, you will have more influential power over the government and it will be easier to try and dismantle and reform a thing or two about how all that works. That should be the strategy; play their stupid game so you can break it. Otherwise, I sure hope anyone who’s withholding their vote or voting third party has some sort of plan to help fix things in other ways.

humaniterations (dot) net/2014/10/13/an-anarchist-perspective-on-the-red-lotus/ this article from oct 2014 is very dense — truly, a lot to unpack here, but I feel like you would find this piece interesting. I would love it if you shared your thoughts on the points that stood out to you, whether you agree or disagree. you obv don’t have to respond to it tho, but I’m sending it as an ask jic you feel like penning (and sharing) a magnificent essay, as is your wont 💕

article

i know this took me forever 2 answer SORRY but i just checked off all the things on my to do list for the first time in days today so. Essay incoming ladies!

ok im SO glad u sent me this bc it’s so so good. it’s a genuinely thoughtful criticism of the politics in legend of korra (altho i think its sometimes a little mean to korra unnecessarily like there’s no reason to call her a “petulant brat” or say that she throws tantrums but i do understand their point about her being an immature and reactionary hero, which i’ll get back to) and i think the author has a good balance between acknowledging like Yeah the lok writers were american liberals and wrote their show accordingly and Also writing a thorough analysis of lok’s politics that felt relevant and interesting without throwing their hands up and saying this is all useless liberal bullshit (which i will admit that i tend to do).

this article essentially argues that the red lotus antagonists of s3 were right. And that’s not an uncommon opinion i think but this gives it serious weight. Like, everything that zaheer’s gang did was, in context, fully understandable. of course the red lotus would be invested in making sure that the physically and spiritually and politically most powerful person in the world ISNT raised by world leaders and a secret society of elites that’s completely unaccountable to the people! of course the red lotus wants to bring down tyrannical governments and allow communities to form and self govern organically! and the writers dismiss all of that out of hand by 1. consistently framing the red lotus as insane and murderous (korra never actually gives zaheer’s ideas a chance or truly considers integrating them into her own approach) 2. representing the death of the earth queen as not just something that’s not necessarily popular (what was with mako’s bootlicker grandma, i’d love to know) but as something that causes unbelievable violence and chaos in ba sing se (which, like, a lot of history and research will tell you that people in disasters tend towards prosocial behaviors). so the way the story frames each of these characters and ideologies is fascinating because like. if you wanted to write season 3 of legend of korra with zaheer as the protagonist and korra as the antagonist, you wouldn’t actually have to change the sequence of events at all, really. these writers in particular and liberal writers in general LOVE writing morally-gray-but-ultimately-sympathetic characters (like, almost EVERY SINGLE fire nation character in the first series, who were full on violent colonizers but all to a degree were rehabilitated in the eyes of the viewer) but instead of framing the red lotus as good people who are devoted to justice and freedom and sometimes behave cruelly to get where theyre trying to go, they frame them as psychopaths and murderers who have good intentions don’t really understand how to make the world a better place.

and the interesting thing about all this, about the fact that the red lotus acted in most cases exactly as it should have in context and the only reason its relegated to villain status is bc the show is written by liberals, is that the red lotus actually points out really glaring sociopolitical issues in universe! like, watching the show, u think well why the fuck HASN’T korra done anything about the earth queen oppressing her subjects? why DOESN’T korra do anything about the worse than useless republic president? why the hell are so many people living in poverty while our mains live cushy well fed lives? how come earth kingdom land only seems to belong to various monarchs and settler colonists, instead of the people who are actually indigenous to it? the show does not want to answer these questions, because american liberal capitalism literally survives on the reality of oppressive governments and worse than useless presidents and people living in poverty while the middle/upper class eats and indigenous land being stolen. if the show were to answer these questions honestly, the answer would be that the status quo in real life (and the one on the show that mirrors real life) Has To Change.

So they avoid answering these questions honestly in order for the thesis statement to be that the status quo is good. and the only way for the show to escape answering these questions is for them to individualize all these broad social problems down into Good people and Bad people. so while we have obvious bad ones like the earth queen we also have all these capitalists and monarchs and politicians who are actually very nice and lovely people who would never hurt anyone! which is just such an absurd take and it’s liberal propaganda at its best. holding a position of incredible political/economic power in an unjust society is inherently unethical and maintaining that position of power requires violence against the people you have power over. which is literally social justice 101. but there’s literally no normal, average, not-politically-powerful person on the show. so when leftist anarchism is presented and says that destroying systems that enforce extreme power differentials is the only way to bring peace and freedom to all, the show has already set us up to think, hey, fuck you, top cop lin beifong and ford motor ceo asami sato are good people and good people like them exist! and all we have to do to move forward and progress as a society is to make sure we have enough good individuals in enough powerful positions (like zuko as the fire lord ending the war, or wu as the earth king ending the monarchy)! which is of course complete fiction. liberal reform doesn’t work. but by pretending that it could work by saying that the SYSTEM isnt rotten it’s just that the people running it suck and we just need to replace those people, it automatically delegitimizes any radical movements that actually seek to change things.

and that’s the most interesting thing about this article to me is that it posits that the avatar...might actually be a negative presence in the world. the avatar is the exact same thing: it’s a position of immense political and physical power bestowed completely randomly, and depending on the moral character and various actions of who fills that position at any given time, millions of people will or won’t suffer. like kyoshi, who created the fascist dai li, like roku, who refused to remove a genocidal dictator from power, like aang, who facilitated the establishment of a settler colonial state on earth kingdom land. like korra! she’s an incredibly immature avatar and a generally reactionary lead. i’ve talked about this at length before but she never actually gets in touch with the needs of the people. she’s constantly running in elite circles, exposed only to the needs and squabbles of the upper class! how the hell is she supposed to understand the complexities of oppression and privilege when she was raised by a chess club with inordinate amounts of power and associates almost exclusively with politicians and billionaires?? from day 1 we see that she tends to see things in very black and white ways which is FINE if you’re a privileged 17 yr old girl seeing the world for the first time but NOT FINE if you’re the single most powerful person in the world! Yeah, korra thinks the world is probably mostly fine and just needs a little whipping into shape every couple years, because all she has ever known is a mostly fine world! in s1 when mako mentions that he as a homeless impoverished teenager worked for a gang (which is. Not weird. Impoverished people of every background are ALWAYS more likely to resort to socially unacceptable ways of making money) korra is like “you guys are criminals?????!!!!!” she was raised in perfect luxury by a conservative institution and just never developed beyond that. So sure, if the red lotus raised her anarchist, probably a lot would’ve been different/better, but....they didn’t. and korra ended up being a reactionary and conservative avatar who protected monarchs and colonialist politicians. The avatar as a position is completely subject to the whims of whoever is currently the avatar. and not only does that suck for everyone who is not the avatar, not only is it totally unfair to whatever kid who grows up knowing the fate of the world is squarely on their shoulders, but it as a concept is a highly individualist product of the authors’ own western liberal ideas of progress! the idea that one good leader can fix the world (or should even try) based on their own inherent superiority to everyone else is unbelievably flawed and ignores the fact that all real progress is brought about as a result of COMMUNITY work, as a result of normal people working for themselves and their neighbors!

the broader analysis of bending was really interesting to me too, but im honestly not sure i Totally agree with it. the article pretty much accepts the show’s assertion that bending is a privilege (and frankly backs it up much better than the original show did, but whatever), and i don’t think that’s NECESSARILY untrue since it is, like, a physical advantage (the author compares it to, for example, the fact that some people are born athletically gifted and others are born with extreme physical limitations), but i DO think that it discounts the in universe racialization of bending. in any sequel to atla that made sense, bending as a race making fact would have been explored ALONGSIDE the physical advantages it bestows on people. colonialism and its aftermath is generally ignored in this article which is its major weakness i think, especially in conjunction with bending. you can bring up the ideas the author did about individual vs community oriented progress in the avatar universe while safely ignoring the colonialism, but you can’t not bring up race and colonialism when you discuss bending. especially once you get to thinking about how water/earth/airbenders were imprisoned and killed specifically because bending was a physical advantage, and that physical advantage was something that would have given colonized populations a means of resistance and that the fire nation wanted to keep to itself.

i think that’s the best lens thru which to analyze bending tbh! like in the avatar universe bending is a tool that different ethnic groups tend to use in different ways. at its best, bending actually doesn’t represent social power differences (despite representing a physical power difference) because it’s used to represent/maintain community solidarity. like, take the water tribe. katara being the last waterbender, in some way, makes her the last of a part of swt CULTURE. the implication is that when there were a lot of waterbenders in the south, they dedicated their talents to building community and helping their neighbors, because this was something incredibly culturally important and important to the water tribe as a community. the swt as a COLLECTIVE values bending for what it can do for the entire tribe, which counts for basically every other talent a person can have (strength, creativity, etc). the fire nation, by contrast, distorts the community value of bending by racializing it: anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is inherently NOT fire nation (and therefore inherently inferior) and, because of the physical power that bending confers, anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is a threat to fire nation hegemony. and in THAT framework of bending, it’s something that intrinsically assigns worth and reifies race in a way that’s conveniently beneficial to the oppressor.

it IS worth talking about how using Element as a way to categorize people reifies nations, borders, and race in a way that is VERY characteristic of white american liberals. i tried to be conscious of that (and the way that elements/bending can act in DIFFERENT ways, depending on cultural context) but i think it’s pretty clear that the writers did intend for element to unequivocally signify nation (and, by extension, race), which is part of why they screwed up mixed families so bad in lok. when they’ve locked themselves into this idea that element=nation=race, they end up with sets of siblings like mako and bolin or kya tenzin and bumi, who all “take” after only one parent based on the element that they bend. which is just completely stupid but very indicative of how the writers actually INTENDED element/bending to be a race making process. and its both fucked up and interesting that the writers display the same framework of race analysis that the canonical antagonists of atla do.

anyway that’s a few thoughts! thank u again for sending the article i really loved it and i had a lot of fun writing this <3

ElaborTe

So if you like Nords or stan them or cherish them as much as I do the Snow Elves, you might wanna skip this one.

TW: White supremacy, Neo-Nazism, the trash blog going completely off their shits

From the early days of the Elder Scrolls, the Nords have always been.. Well, Norse-coded. As far as races and their lore-evolutions go, they’re the only ones who have held steady in their Nordy McNordness throughout the series. They’ve always been hardy, fair-haired men and women from frozen reaches of Skyrim. They’ve always had a foothold in that tundra, as early as the days of Labrynthian, first featured in Arena. They’ve always preferred axes and steel over magic and guile, and before anyone says anything about Project Tamriel or out-of-game lore or whatever Kirkbride said about robots and wasabi, I’m talking explicitly about canon here, as canon is what most gamers see in these games.

From their appearance to their armor and weapons to the draugr and ancient gods, the Nords are very much the Elder Scrolls’ answer to the Fantasy Viking, which in itself is based on the Vikings of yonder year.. Give or take a few embellishments. Their axes have harsh-but-intricate carvings, their armor is lined with fur and made from honest steel, they have names like Hulda and Sigrid, Roggvir and Thongvor, their voice actors hail from Sweden or can put on a Scandivan-esque accent. They look, sound, act, and dress Norse.

In media studies, this is called coding, a relatively new term in academia and so far still largely used in queer studies. Unlike allegory, which is an intentional one-to-one comparison of something vis a vis Lion Witch and the Wardrobe or Ender’s Game, coding is by and large unintentional, or at least unclaimed and not explicitly stated. It is a byproduct of beliefs, biases, and bumbletyfucks the writer possessed as they created a work, and left unchecked it can lead to problematic elements.

This isn’t to say that coding is terrible, or Bad, or Problematic (though it often is at least one, and sometimes all three), but rather, it is a limitation of being human. Most writers are human as are most of the audiences the media reaches out to, and as such are bound by their worldview and preconceived notions and biases. Just because it can be problematic doesn’t necessarily mean it always is going to be problematic. A skilled writer can recognize this and work around it, or even play with the preconceived notions the audience has. I’ve seen very few white writers accomplish this, even fewer that were cisgendered men, but it’s doable.

However, if these notions are left unchecked, unchallenged, and uncritically accepted, you end up with uh, things. Things like, oh, the Khajiit who steal and deal drugs and travel in “caravans” (oof), the Bosmer who are the only brown Elves in the game and are also cannibals (yikes), the Reachfolk are dressed in untanned animal skins and wear antlers and do guerilla warfare and fucking yikes Bethesda what were you thinking???

You also end up with the Nords, who really took a nosedive from Fantasy Vikings into Gleeful Killers with Magic Shouting come Morrowind, where the Snow Elves had a proper introduction if only to show that the Nords of old were mass murderers, but, y’know, felt kinda bad about it after a child soldier killed their leader. It makes for a sad story, but it’s a cheap, Ender's Game-esque out so the viewer doesn’t have to feel bad about rooting for them. “They felt bad, guys! It’s okay!”

These deeply problematic aspects of Nords-as-homicidal-maniacs only became more apparent with the arrival of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

Here’s where that white supremacy warning I gave earlier comes into play. You still got some time to check out and enjoy your day.

Still here? Alright.

It was a perfect storm. As I said in a previous rant, Skyrim came about in a time of unprecedented White Anxiety. I cannot stress enough how much white people lost their damn minds when Obama was elected president. There were threats on the then-President’s life, on his wife and daughters, on a daily basis. Gun sales reached record highs out of fear that the boogeyman Democrat would take their guns away. Libertarianism soon became a shorthand for a white supremascist who likes to smoke weed. The so called Tea Party screamed about “freedom of religion” while openly applauding anti-Islamic hate crimes and calling the President by his middle name/dogwhistle “Hussien”, white supremacist hate sites saw an influx of traffic; Stormfront, the oldest of the bunch, saw a jump from 23,000 users in 2004 to over 100,000 in 2008, and this was before bot users were a thing admins had to weed out, this was before a certain foreign power took a keen interest in installing a useful idiot.

This was home-brewed vitriol.

All the while, right wing media went batshit. Fox News had their Mustardgate “scandal”, a dogwhistle to their populist audience that their leaders weren’t like “the average American”. Conspiracy theories sprung up right and left (pun intended) about the Obama administration and “the shadow government”, of which those neo-Nazi sites, with their surge in fresh-faced users,  were a wellspring for. Being the Internet, their memes and “facts Big Media doesn’t want you to hear” spread like a cancer to the greater Internet-- Reddit and its subsidiary Imgur, Tumblr, Twitter, 9Gag, countless other pockets of blogospheres and forums and media platforms. It was, and still is, fucking inescapable.

And of course, Nazis love them that Norse aesthetic. They love the cold where only real men could survive, unlike those weak-willed patsies and *checks notes* dijon-mustard lovers. They love the pale skin and light hair of the people as that’s their idea of genetic purity. They love the runes, the affectations, how the Norse folk of old just invaded and pillaged and were so strong, they did Blood Eagles and were so masculine.

And therein lies why I hate the Nords. I hate how they went from Generic Viking to Murder Men, I hate the direction Morrowind and onward took with them, I hate how no one had the foresight to either tone down these aspects or put a spin on them like they seemed to do with other races. I hate how quickly actual racists took to this fake ass race, I hate how they tried to pull a “both sides are the same” in that stupid Civil War questline when one side is an actual ethno-nationalist paramilitary cult. 

I hate how the writers of Skyrim were cowards, and I hate that they apparently looked at Ur-Fascism and saw a checklist. I hate that they gave the Nords, and by extension you, the player, a moral justification for rallying against a “high-brow”, “elitist”, “globalist” “oppressive”, distinctly non-Nordic and non-Mannish group of people because they “threaten the Nord way of life”. But let’s make the Elves the Nazi allegory so there’s no qualms whatsoever about siding with the Fantasy Republicans. I hate that every other stereotype of non-Nord races can be found in that game, from the skooma dealing Dunmer to the thieving Khajiit to the bootlicker Imperial to the fucking High Elves. I hate that they only expanded on the morally-justified genocide of the Snow Elves with Songs of the Return, and then further reinforce how “good” that was by having you meet the guy who slaughtered children. I hate how, barring one easily missable side quest that still uses bothsidesism there is no challenge to this bullshit way of thinking. I hate that a sizable chunk of Stormcloakblr are also very clearly racist. I hate that my Ysgramor/Pelinal shitpost started to gain traction after someone with a rage face icon reblogged it with a “Kill All Elves” tag. I’ve deleted it since. The meaning is lost on those wastes of breath, and was 100% the cause for this rant.

I hate how the writers could have done better, but didn’t.

Idk if you’ve talked about this before (I’m new to your blog) and feel free to ignore if you’re not comfortable responding or even if you just don’t feel like it, but what is your perspective on cultural appropriation in K-HipHop? I am Black, and I have been following KHH for almost 7 years now but the longer I’ve been listening, the more it seems inexcusable? Like I understand appreciating culture, but rappers like Queen Wassabi and (it sucks to say) Sik-K who make Black culture their whole aesthetic really get under my skin, and it sucks to see Korean Americans say nothing, or even appropriate themselves. A lot of artists I would actually love if they weren’t taking from Black culture, but it’s so weird to me, especially after seeing the almost complete scilence during all of the BLM protests last year. I know H1gher and some other artist said stuff, but even then it’s like if you can grasp that you should be able to grasp CA. Like you have your own beautiful ass culture. And if you don’t care about Black people’s opinions then get out of our genre?? How do you feel about it?

I abosulutley love your blog btw ❤️❤️❤️ sorry for the long ask lol

I’ve discussed CA quite extensively. But honestly, I’m quite burnt out on it so I don’t really discuss it anymore cause I’ve really said all I can really say. The braids are a mess, the du-rags are a mess, the appropriation of (mostly) Black American gang culture is a mess too and so on.

I wouldn’t really say Sik-K makes Black culture his whole aesthetic even though AOMG/H1gher LOVE a damn du-rag. I’m not a Sik-K fan so maybe I’m missing something but I don’t really see it that much. I’d say he dresses kinda normal outside of when he wears du-rags. My problem with Wasabii was that she said the n word.

I disagree that it was almost complete silence. Almost everyone I followed at the time said something about BLM or made a post about the protest or just hashtagged it.

I feel like CA is a much more subtle and complicated issue than police violence. Cause almost everybody with a brain thinks police violence is wrong just off the strength that it’s violence. Even if some people follow the “well follow the rules and you won’t get hurt” line of thinking. Everybody knows to a certain extent that non-violent people probably should not be murdered. Even the most racist person would probably agree even if they don’t necessarily care that Black people and other POC get killed a lot and would never be moved to advocate against that. Almost everybody regardless of location is indoctrinated pretty early on that violence, especially when one party hasn’t done anything (physically) violent, is wrong. Even the biggest police or government bootlickers likely understand on some level that the violence is wrong even if the police worship doesn’t allow them to truly admit that it’s a systematic problem with the police (and that’s where the “not all cops” thing comes in when there’s a case where they can’t “just follow orders” their way out of it because it’s just too blatant, excessive, and unwarranted in that case).

On the CA end, not everybody agrees that CA is a problem. Many believe that all CA is just appreciation and inspiration. It’s a academic (and in some cases legal) subject. It’s pretty complex. If it wasn’t for social media, most of the people who know about CA wouldn’t really know about it like that. In fact, SOOO many people who learned about CA from social media don’t even truly understand it like that. Even people from the culture are split (kinda like the n-word, you’d be hard pressed to get everybody to agree on who and if anybody should even allowed to be saying it). Also, there’s the location issue (”People from Japan don’t care if I do *insert CA instance here*) cause the history of two ethnically similar people could be COMPLETELY different especially if they are born and raised in two different countries and even if they are born in the same one but in two different neighborhoods or socioeconomic statuses and/or educations.

This is not to defend against CA cause I’m firmly in the camp that, in general, CA causes harm. Just to give perspective on how complex CA really is. Police brutality has complex causes as well but I feel like the basic understanding is much easier to understand since it’s [violence = bad] already ingrained in most people. 

Now where the hell was I going with this cause I done typed a whole damn essay...

Oh yeah, basically CA is wrong. I’m just burnt out of calling it out tbh but I side eye people and definitely take note of who does what so if things keep piling up THEN I can talk about that.

Hello! I really want someone to talk over our best hit men and I love your approach in EBYT! So, with little screen time and as a result, less material to work with, how do you analyse their personality? For me, every details contributed to their cold/cruel yet passionate nature. If anyone says they are heartless robotic killers, I would beg to differ. They don't hesitate to kill targets or even casualty, have no remorse and are even proud or enjoy it. It's sick but they have passion in it...

Cont: Prosciutto's speech is a big point you can't miss. He carries his job with pride, mentioning it as 'glory' He's as passionate and determined as he is ruthless. He calmly spoke that the world can move on with just one train clash. He isn't afraid to use nasty ugliest method to get to the goal.

and Formaggio? He seems like one of the 'friendliest' He jokes, he goofs, he chills. However, you notice how morbid his jokes are. Laughing his ass off over cutting corpse? yikes. His first scene is him playing with a cat. Cute. He did seem like it. Then, he friggn shove the poor thing in the bottle, like how sick and twisted is that? It gives us impressions that he is a casual psycho. I interpret that this guy somehow wanna have fun but don't know how to do it right.

Srsly, I genuinely wanna know their backstories. What kind of upbringing they had to have such morals, way of thinking and mannerism? They intrigue me beyond just a bunch of handsome strong antagonists. Given bucci's gang's past, I think theirs wouldn't be less shady/sad. Sorry for too long ask, I have lots of random thoughts in my mind.

Don’t apologize for the length, I love analysis! And I love whoever gives me an excuse to analyze characters.

Now, I want to start this consideration about la Squadra’s members with an observation. I don’t know if you’re American or any other nationality other than Italian, anon, but I think a big chunk of the JJBA fandom lacks the prospective of how Italian mafia works and how it affects some of its members.

The closer example I can kinda associate with it are gangs in the worst neighbors in American’s cities or big cartels around the world. It’s a systemic phenomena that takes hold of realities that “need” it because there is a lack of help from the govern or the authorities. Mafia has often been defined a State withing a State here, because it’s like a net people fall in when their govern can’t provide for them. I’m no expert in its history, but it’s deeply rooted in poverty and need, just like most crimes on large scale that predate on poor people.

Also, you have to understand how powerful the group thinking is with the mafia. You pledge, you are literally deemed dead if you desert, and people who regretted that life and got out often had to live with the knowledge they will eventually die. Mobsters have this pride in being mobsters because they either believe they’re doing the right thing, they were raised with this mentality and/or they felt like they had no other choice.

(Also, I mean this with as little offense as possible, but I’m genuinely tired of Americans seeing things through their society’s lenses and forgetting there is nuance to cultures and a country’s history. I despise the bootlicker Abbacchio jokes for this reason, because police forces aren’t always the same as the American one, believe it or not.)

Ok, digression ended. To analyze la Squadra, I use a combination of elements from canon. I look at their Stands, I look at their speech patterns and I look at their general feel they give me as a character. I can try to put together what I mean, but it would be way too long right now. 

Also, another thing I want to point out and that I keep in mind while I write these characters is that they aren’t serial killers or single-time murderers, they’re assassins. Which means it’s their job, and it’s an easy step for the human brain to simply justify someone’s actions when you can say “well, it’s just my job” or “I was ordered to do that”. I believe they’re all bad people, but that they probably see themselves rather neutrally because they separate their private and professional lives.

Plus, yeah, I totally believe they had shit childhoods. You don’t simply join the mafia if you don’t have a general disregard for other people and even low emphatic people can feel compassion, if raised correctly.

And, in general, I think Stand Users are simply more violent than average people. Even someone like Tonio, who has the most benevolent Stand we’ve seen until now, throws a knife at Josuke simply because he got in his kitchen with dirty hands. 

Hi I have been a fan of your work for a very long time and so I sneak into your tumblr from time to time.I counldnt help but notice that you post a lot of political/sjw stuff and I know it is none of my business but since I am probably absolutely opposite in my political views I can't help myself and ask: I understand that you are Asian, but you don't seem to be interested in real or imagined injustices in your country/continent and are mainly interested in USA, why is that?

Hi, anon!

First of all, I am not Asian and I’m very sorry if I ever did or said anything to mislead people into thinking that I was. It was unconsciously done. I have no intention of offending anyone or appropriating an identity that isn’t mine, so if I did something of that sort, please let me know and I’ll do my best to correct myself. I often reblog stuff about China because I think it’s an amazing country, I’m learning Mandarin (not making much progress, though), love their culture, nature, architecture and am a big fan of their historical/fantasy dramas. Also, the two fandoms I was the most active in (coincidentally) happen to be a Japanese anime and a Japanese video game, so I have a lot of love for their art and aesthetics.

I’m actually very surprised that you would ‘notice’ that I post a lot of ‘political/sjw stuff’, considering that I mostly use Tumblr to repost Merlin gifs, cast/crew news and fanworks. There is maybe one reblog on just about anything else for every fifty (perhaps even more) Merlin posts, so I really have to wonder which of the RL issues I posted about bothered you so much that you would describe them as ‘a lot’.

I may be misinterpreting the tone of your ask, so forgive me if I misread your intentions and am responding too harshly, but in my experience, ‘SJW’ is a term that is used to be dismissive when people are talking about real social issues, plus I found your wording of ‘imagined injustices’ very… interesting.

Also, I find it odd that somebody would unironically ask me why I’m ‘mainly’ interested in the USA.

First of all, the global market is oversaturated with American media, American products, American news, American movies, TV series, music, you name it. It’s everywhere. Of course I’m going to know more about it than, say, Lichtenstein. The exposure of American public figures is insane and it just happens that the stuff that appears on my dash is most often related to the USA because that is what the people I follow also follow (and for the record, on Tumblr, I mainly follow the Merlin fandom and to a somewhat lesser degree, various artists, baby animals, Chinese traditional outfits, Buzzfeed and NASA news). I absolutely do reblog pure evil, injustices, hypocrisy and intentionally inflicted misery in other countries too when I see them, but I don’t actively go looking for them on Tumblr, just like I don’t actively look for the USA posts either. The USA posts are simply there, without much active input from me, while other countries are not. An important point, of course, since we are having this weird discussion about why a random person outside of the USA is consuming so much American media, is that English is the only foreign language I am fluent in, so when it comes to foreign content, I am primarily going to read and interact with posts in English. And which country creates the most content in English? Yup, you guessed it!  

On a similar note, everything that happens in the USA affects other countries too. Nothing that goes on there takes place in a vacuum and the USA has made damn sure that it has its fingers in each and every single pie all over the world. Everything, the good and the bad, spills over and trust me, we feel the effects acutely in my unstable, politically fraught little country. The economic and cultural implications are enormous, so you can bet American issues are very personal for me, even if I don’t live there. My country’s government consists of puppets in the hands of various world leaders playing tug of war with actual human lives. My literal paycheck depends on the stability of the dollar. The survival of the entire human species hangs on how we deal with climate change right now and that ignorant, illiterate orange shitstain Americans voted into power is now standing on a global platform, spouting nonsense that is barely one step removed from Creationist bullshit and Flat-earther conspiracies. And you seriously ask me why I’m interested in the USA? 

The USA loves to dub itself as ‘the leader of the free world’ and ‘a global superpower’, and has managed to stick its nose into everybody’s business everywhere (usually with no good intentions), but somehow you question why the rest of us are now going to be interested in what is going on there, not to mention critical when the US government spouts absolute rubbish not just on a domestic, but also global scale? So, yes, I am personally invested in what is going down next in the USA and am sitting here, half the world across, cheering Americans on as they fight to have that shame they elected removed from power and, hopefully, incarcerated, along with all his corrupt cronies, advisors and family members. I’m going to be genuinely celebrating here when he finally goes down!

Secondly, I come from one of those countries that the USA and its allies have destroyed for their own gain and where they have ruined countless lives over multiple generations. I have every reason to notice, take a personal interest in and comment on the hypocrisy, the grandstanding and the false moral high ground that is assumed by the USA (and any of its bootlickers) when I see it.

For any of my USA followers here, I would just like to note that I am perfectly capable of distinguishing between ordinary people and disgusting government policies enacted by corrupt or incompetent politicians. I realise this post sounds angry, but I wish only good things for you all, people are people everywhere and the stuff I’m talking about is way above the average person’s paygrade. I also realise that the USA has screwed over so many of its own citizens; including its war veterans, PoC, minorities, the poor, the weak and the disabled. My heart goes out to you all, truly, and I love you all!

(BTW, I intentionally have not said which country I’m from because I’ve stopped publically stating my location online, simply because it makes it too easy for malicious people to identify me IRL that way. I don’t necessarily hide my RL identity if I have a valid reason to reveal my true name and location, but please forgive me for not stating it outright here, on a public platform, to satisfy the curiosity of an anon ask. My country is misogynistic, homophobic and hostile to all who are non-conforming and my job prospects are hard enough without my online pseudonyms being generally known in my RL circles. I used to be much less secretive about it, but have since learned the error of my ways and am now taking the most basic of precautions.)

With that said, yes, my country has issues! And, fyi, I have ranted and raged and cried about them before online, IRL and in private. I have posted about my country’s political problems everywhere, including here, when I was just too angry to hold it in because I’m absolute shit at being careful even when I make a conscious effort to be. Most recently, I raged about our elections which were a punch to the gut. If I was to start typing about the corruption, injustices and absolute evil going on around me, I would never stop, but I’m not going to do that because that’s not what I come to Tumblr for. This is primarily a fandom space, mostly for fandom stuff, where I come to look at other people’s things and almost never create content of my own. Just about anything political has been reblogged from someone else because it showed up on my dash and touched a nerve. Very little of that is stuff from my own country because nobody creates and reblogs posts about it in the fandom circle I mostly interact with.

I’m now trying to think back to what ‘SJW’ issues (as you put it) I reblog the most often and how any of them are ‘imaginary injustices’. Off the top of my head, the ones that usually touch a nerve are about the oppression and discrimination of women, patriarchy, sexism, various kinds of abuse, sexual assault, overworking, capitalist brainwashing, mental health issues, LGBTQ issues, freedom of speech, resurgence of Nazism, the gap between the rich and the poor, climate change and criminal religious institutions regaining power in society. I can assure you that none of these is ‘imaginary’ and the negative ways in which they affect me and the people around me are very, very real. Also, none of them is unique to the USA, which is what you seem to be the most concerned about, and even if the post is from or about the USA, these problems definitely overlap with things that I, and countless people around the world, are personally experiencing and have a lot of feelings about. The only social issues ‘unique’ to the USA that I often reblog are the ones related to the particular US brand of racism and the appalling, still-ongoing genocide committed against the indigenous people there, and how can you not empathise with that when it’s so egregious? I will reblog them every time they cross my dash to spread awareness since the US government is actively trying to stifle it and rewrite history and idc who is uncomfortable.

With all that said, I’m open to corrections and have no problem admitting to being wrong once I realise I’ve made a mistake. So, this goes for all the people following my blog: if any of the posts I shared are about ‘imaginary’ issues (just… wow at the use of this word) or contain false information, please feel free to let me know and I will take it under advisement. I’m always willing to learn.

How the Republicans became the party of Putin

Would somebody please help me out here: I’m confused,” read the email to me from a conservative Republican activist and donor. “The Russians are alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by hacking into Dem party servers that were inadequately protected, some being kept in Hillary’s basement and finding emails that were actually written by members of the Clinton campaign and releasing those emails so that they could be read by the American people who what, didn’t have the right to read these emails? And this is bad? Shouldn’t we be thanking the Russians for making the election more transparent?”

Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clinton’s controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trump’s explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of today’s Republican Party. In any other era, our political leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and borderline treasonous instincts on display.

Instead, we get this from the president of the United States, explaining away his son’s encounter with Russian operatives who were advertised as working on behalf of the Kremlin: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” And from elected Republicans, we get mostly silence—or embarrassing excuses.

Never mind that Trump Jr. initially said the meeting was about adoption, not a Russian offer of “ultra sensitive” dirt on Hillary Clinton. We’ve gone from the Trump team saying they never even met with Russians to the president himself now essentially saying: So what if we did?

What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My message for today’s GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back.

***

I should not have been surprised. I’ve been following Russia’s cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (“Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting “godless communism.”

Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin – a career KGB officer who hates America – have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.

It would be a mistake to attribute this shift solely to Trump and his odd solicitousness toward Moscow. Russia has been targeting the American right since at least 2013, the year Putin enacted a law targeting pro-gay rights organizing and delivered a state-of-the-nation address extolling Russia’s “traditional values” and assailing the West’s “genderless and infertile” liberalism. That same year, a Kremlin-connected think tank released a report entitled, “Putin: World Conservativism’s New Leader.” In 2015, Russia hosted a delegation from the National Rifle Association, one of America’s most influential conservative lobby groups, which included David Keene, then-president of the NRA and now editor of the Washington Times editorial page, which regularly features voices calling for a friendlier relationship with Moscow. (It should be noted here that Russia, a country run by its security services where the leader recently created a 400,000-strong praetorian guard, doesn’t exactly embrace the individual right to bear arms.) A recent investigation by Politico Magazine, meanwhile, revealed how Russian intelligence services have been using the internet and social networks to target another redoubt of American conservativism: the military community.

Today, it’s hard to judge this Russian effort as anything other than a smashing success. Turn on Fox News and you will come across the network’s most popular star, Sean Hannity, citing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a reliable source of information or retailing Russian disinformation such as the conspiracy theory that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich—who police say was killed during a robbery attempt—was the source of last summer’s leaks, not Russian hackers. Fox’s rising star Tucker Carlson regularly uses his time slot to ridicule the entire Russian meddling scandal and portray Putin critics as bloodthirsty warmongers. On Monday night, he went so far as to give a platform to fringe leftist Max Blumenthal — author of a book comparing Israel to the Third Reich and a vocal supporter of the Assad regime in Syria — to assail the “bootlicking press” for reporting on Trump’s Russia ties. (When Blumenthal alleged that the entire Russia scandal was really just a militarist pretext for NATO enlargement, Carlson flippantly raised the prospect of his son having to fight a war against Russia, as he did in a contentious exchange earlier this year with Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. At the time, I asked Carlson if his son serves in the military. He didn’t respond).

Meanwhile the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most influential conservative think tanks and a former bastion of Cold War hawkishness, has enlisted itself in the campaign against George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose work promoting democracy and good governance in the former Soviet space has made him one of the Kremlin’s main whipping boys.

And it’s not just conservative political operatives and media hacks who have come around on Russia. Pro-Putin feelings are now being elucidated by some conservative intellectuals as well. Echoing Kremlin complaints that Russia is a country which has been “frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled” – a self-pitying justification for Russian aggression throughout history – Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell extolls Putin as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”

How did the party of Ronald Reagan’s moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trump’s moral vacuity? Russia’s intelligence operatives are among the world’s best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the “evil empire.” What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments. If a political officer at the Russian Embassy in Washington visited the zoo that is the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, they’d see a “movement” that embraces a ludicrous performance artist like Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of intellectual heavyweight. When conservative bloggers are willing to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from Malaysia’s authoritarian government to launch a smear campaign against a democratic opposition leader they know nothing about, how much of a jump is it to line up and defend what at the very least was attempted collusion on the part of a brain-dead dauphin like Donald Trump Jr.?

Surveying this lamentable scene, why wouldn't Russia try to “turn” the American right, whose ethical rot necessarily precedes its rank unscrupulousness? It is this ethical rot that allows Dennis Prager, one of the right’s more unctuous professional moralists, to opine with a straight face that “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.” Why wouldn’t a “religious right” that embraced a boastfully immoral charlatan like Donald Trump not turn a blind eye toward—or, in the case of Franklin Graham, embrace—an oppressive regime like that ruling Russia? American conservatism is no better encapsulated today than by the self-satisfied, smirking mug of Carlson, the living embodiment of what Lionel Trilling meant when he wrote that the “conservative impulse” is defined by “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

***

The entire Trump-Russia saga strikes at a deeper issue which most Republicans have shown little care in examining: What is it about Donald Trump that attracted the Kremlin so?

Such an effort would be like staging an intervention for a drunk and abusive family member: painful but necessary. One would have thought a U.S. intelligence community assessment concluding that the Russians preferred their party’s nominee over Hillary Clinton would have introduced a bit of introspection on the right. Moments for such soul-searching had arrived much earlier, however, like when Trump hired a former advisor to the corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine as his campaign manager last summer. Or when he praised Putin on “Morning Joe” in December of 2015. Republicans ought to have considered how an “America First” foreign policy, despite its promises to build up the military and “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, might actually be more attractive to Moscow than the warts-and-all liberal internationalism of the Democratic nominee, who, whatever her faults, has never called into question the very existence of institutions like the European Union and NATO, pillars of the transatlantic democratic alliance. Now that he’s president, Trump’s fitful behavior, alienating close allies like Britain and Germany, ought give Republicans pause about how closely the president’s actions accord with Russian objectives.

But alas there has been no such reckoning within the party of Reagan. Instead, the Russia scandal has incurred a wrathful defensiveness among conservatives, who are reaching for anything – paranoid attacks on the so-called American “deep state,” allegations of conspiracy among Obama administration holdovers – to distract attention from the very grave reality of Russian active measures. To be sure, the Republican Congress, at least on paper, remains hawkish on the Kremlin, as evidenced by the recent 98-2 Senate vote to increase sanctions against Russia for its election meddling and other offenses. But in no way can they be said anymore to represent the GOP party base, which has been led to believe by the president and his allies in the pro-Trump media that “the Russia story” is a giant hoax. It wasn’t long ago that the GOP used to mock Democratic presidential candidates for supposedly winning “endorsements” from foreign adversaries, like when a Hamas official said he “liked” Barack Obama in 2008. Today, most Republicans evince no shame in the fact that their candidate was the clearly expressed preference of a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin.

If Republicans put country before party, they would want to know what the Russians did, why they did it and how to prevent it from happening again. But that, of course, would raise questions implicating Donald Trump and all those who have enabled him, questions that most Republicans prefer to remain unanswered.

Politico