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sparky-is-spiders · 1 month

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So by the time they even meet Amaldyne will 1) have preconceived judgements (despises him) and 2) be in so deep with Eityr that neither of them have room for close relationships of any sort in their lives, but I think there’s an alternate universe where Leoshgon and Amaldyne date. It would HAVE to happen after her family dies and while Leo has the sword (aka when Amaldyne is enough of a control freak and Leo is at his most useful). But like. It definitely COULD.

I imagine it would be much like the Overseer’s relationship with Leo in terms of the dynamic, but the internal forces driving it would be different. The Overseer enjoys control and possession for its own sake. He likes that one of the most powerful forces currently at play belongs to him. Leoshgon is a tool and a possession, and a trophy, but the love goes beyond that. He’s a person who isn’t magically bound but chose to stay anyway, and the Overseer loves THAT most of all (I imagine some of that love fades after Leo loses the sword, which I think Leo would interpret as the Overseer seeing him as a tool, but is more the Overseer wanting a partner who chooses him). I think Amaldyne would lean less “posession” and mor “objectification.” Leoshgon would be, to her, an extension of herself and her values. Leo is in her corner. Leo is fighting her battles. For her cause. For HER. She loves that Leo never disagrees with her (or at least that he always sides with her in the end), that he’ll do anything for affection and validation. And even if parts of Leo want to be his own person (want to be a person) he loves having somewhere to belong and someone to love him, even if it means being a doormat for someone who’s love is very much conditional.

And I think that’s why, if Leo was in a relationship with Amaldyne instead of the Overseer when he gave up the godslayer sword, she would kill him for the betrayal when the Overseer would keep him for coming back at all.

#lemme just be pretentious about my lizards #does this make sense?#idk so much Lizard Lore exists only in my brain and nowhere else #and i don’t know how much people know/remember from my posts/can intuit based on context clues etc.#anyway for the record these relationships are both different brands of awful #like leo is fucked either way #honestly the only difference is that amaldyne theoretically gives him a moral high ground #because he isn’t fighting to bring the world under the control of a murderous autocratic necromancers #However much like eityr he does enable amaldyne’s worst impulses and feed her ends justify the means mentality #like fully uncritical of her even as she gets more self-serving and violent and questionable and rigid #idk if he’d return to her after giving up the godslayer sword #i feel like he’s pretty good at reading people he just has very skewed ideas of how relationships should work #so much like with the Overseer he’d probably get to the point where he realizes that his partner wants him Fucking Dead and abandon ship #(for the overseer the murderous impulse is an extension of love. for amaldyne it is Not)#should i tag for some kind of warning or something? i feel like i should #tw abuse #abuse tw #idk if that’s the right tag but i feel like better safe than sorry #because yeah these would both be TERRIBLE for leoshgon #anyway sorting tags #the lizard crew #amaldyne #amaldyne rotwing #leoshgon #leoshgon varmillius #the overseer #leoshgon/the overseer #leoshgon/amaldyne #<- not officially canon but a fun concept i like to rotate #i am but a scientist putting two chemicals into a beaker and seeing how they react <3

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evilelitest2 · 4 years

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How did China become the way it is now? They went from dynasties to a communist dictatorship that targets Uighurs?

Well i will say, the Qing Dynasty (last dynasty of China) also did a lot of genocides against Nomadic non Han peoples on the frontier provinces (Despite being a non Han steppe dynasty themselves) , like China has a long history of that sort of thing. But to answer your main question, this is really complicated but i’ll try to reduce it down to a few steps

Step one: The Qing Dynasty, last Imperial Dynasty of China, is chilling out being the Imperial power when the British Empire, in their endless addiction TEA basically gets a ton of the nation addicted to opium to force China to Trade with them, cementing their role as history more aggressive drug dealer. When china is like “hey we don’t want to do discount heroin” Britain launches a series of “Opium wars” where they destroy the Qing army and force them to basically a accept these unequal treaties where Britain and the other European powers could basically run sections of most of the Chinese coastal cities, were immune to Chinese law, take Hong Kong for themselves (different story) and force China to enter unequal trade treaties.

Step 2: In part to response to this, an unorthodox Christian sect starts a massive Revolution/Civil war called the Taiping Rebellion, which has the “FUN” distinction of being one of the most bloody war in human history...ever. up to 30 million people die. Remember this is happening at the same time as the American Civil War, whose highest death count only gets up to 1 million. This does massive damage to Qing China, even though they win the war, and makes them super hostile to Christianity and western adaptations.

Step 3:Japan, who is going through their own period of Modernization, decides the best way to reject Western Imperialism is to Imperalize Korea. This leads to the First Sino Japanese War in 1895, who defeat China and start to take over chinese territory. They take even more when they win the Russo Japanese War in 1905.

Step 4: The Qing rejection most attempts to reform the state (such as the Hundred Days reform) and instead attempt to fight all the Colonial powers...at once in the utterly disastrous 1908 Boxer Rebellion. The Qing are semi colonized as a result and financially ruined and have lost the respect of the people.

Step 5: Sun Yat Sen, the most prominent Republican (as in democracy) founds his resistance group to China based on the notions of China accepting westernization, modernization, a secular anti traditionalist goverment, nationalism, anti imperialism, and democracy. The idea that for China to have a good future is to embrace a western style of nation state building.

STep 6: In 1911, a carelessly discarded cigerrete leads to an explosion which leads to a popular rebellion against the Qing. Before anybody, including the rebel leaders themselves are ready, suddenly the Qing dynasty is gone leaving behind a massive Power Vacumm.

Step 7: Sun, taking control of the state, founds the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang or KMT. They attempt to create a modern Republican Chinese Nation State but erm...

Step 8: A previous Qing General named Yuan Shikai attempts to overthrow the Republic and create a new Imperial Dynasty. He fails and dies, but the civil war between him and the KMT leaves the KMT in control of only a few Chinese cities, and the rest of China breaks into a bunch of local petty fiefdoms with local military leaders just declaring themselves warlord and running China.

Step 9: Sun is like “ok the democracy thing isn’t working out” and enlists the general Chiang Kai-Shek to help the KMT unify china. Chiang starts to fight the other warlords, and when Sun dies in 1925, Chiang turns the KMT into a military positivist dictatorship with the long term goal of unifying/modernizing China and then maybe becoming a democracy.

Everybody Pauses for World War I

Step 10: Some Chinese intellectuals think that the new party should be founded on more left wing principles, and they found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They ally with the KMT because they also want to modernize/unify China, and accept from the Soviet Union as well as other anti colonal forces

Step 11: Chiang (with the help of the CCP) does a pretty good job at defeating the Warlords and unifying China. BUt Chiang then betrays the CCP and massacres most of them as well as left wing KMT members, and starts to adopt an anti Communist profile.

Step 12: The CCP, now much more radical, sets up their commune and fights against both the KMT and the warlords. But they lose and are forced to flee across the rural China as part of the “Long March”. Most of the communists die but those who survive to arrive to the last communist hold out in safety, is the new communist leader and totally not a psychopathic murderer, Mao Zedong.

Step 13: Chiang has mostly unified China, defeating or subduing most of the Warlords, and is slowly but surely destroying the last remnants of the Communist party, who have retreated to a few hold outs in the rural north. The new KMT state is relatively stable but still a military dictatorship surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile Japan is going through its fascist phase and is gobbling up bits and pieces of Manchuria, but Chiang doesn’t think he has the strength to fight Japan until he has finished fighting the Communists.

Step 14: Japans military on the Ground goes rogue and just sort of...invades Manchuria on their own. Meanwhile Chiang is literally kidnapped and forced at gun point to declare war on Japan in 1937. The KMT and the CCP make an alliance to fight against Japan jointly. The Second Sino Japanese War has begun

Step 15: Between 1937-1945, The KMT is almost entirely driven back to rural Western China by the Japanese, who spend their time committing horrific atrocities which the goverment still hasn’t apologized today (which is why the rest of East Asia hates Japan), including the absolute horrific Rape of Nanking (look it up). meanwhile the CCP fights a few token battles but then hides in the north and slowly trains up their forces and lets the KMT and Japan fight it out

Step 16: The US gets Japan to surrender and the CCP and KMT immediately go back to fighting each other. However the economically ruined KMT isn’t able to defeat the far more disciplined CCP and is defeated in 1949. The CCP declares itself a new country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Meanwhile the KMT under Chiang flees to the Island of Formosa (Taiwan) and says that they still are the Republic of China. The two Chinas then spend the the next 70 years pretending the other doesn’t exist

Step 17: Mao, now dictator of China, attempts to modernize the economy and centralize the state. The good news is that the economy does recover. The bad news is massive human rights violations and the massacre of a few million people. The PRC while an ally of the Soviet Union, really is an independent communist state that actually can hold its own. Mao gets involved in the Korea War against the US and while the PRC doesn’t win, they also don’t lose which establishes them as a world power.

Step 18: However Mao very quickly goes off the Deep End and launches the “Great Leap Forward” possibly the worse economic policy in human history which leads to the death of up to 40 million people....whoops

Step 18: The PRC leadership puts Mao in a corner so he can think about what he did and try to restore order, but then Mao is able to launch a revolution against his own government with the students called “The Cultural Revolution” which is...the weirdest revolution ever? Its like if a dictator lead a revolution against his own goverment...long story for another time. The Cultural Revolution destroys mountains of traditional chinese art and culture, kills, arrests and harrassings thousands to millions of people, and just breaks the state, finally ending with Mao’s death in 1976.

Step 19: With Mao’s death, the more moderate faction of the PRC takes over, purges the more radical members of the Party, ends the Cultural revolution and starts to semi liberalize the economy, leading to the weird communist/capitalist/mercantilism/Imperial hybrid China operates under today, including of course massive corruption. The dictatorship because less intense and relaly less communist and they start to drift away from the Soviet Union. Then in 1989 as the Soviet Union is collapsing, and their is a massive student protest against corruption and in favor of China becoming a more liberal democratic and socialist state. The goverment after a few months of dithering, opens fire on the protesters and you still aren’t allowed to talk about it in China today. Death toll varies but most non Government accounts put it at around 10,000.

Step 20: China becomes a global super power, only behind the US and EU in power and turns their government into a major economic hub, though they keep pissing off their western allies with unfair business practices. Recently however, the country has gone from an oligarchic autocracy to an...autocracy autocracy with the rise of their new leader, Xi Jinping, who has centralized authority and made the country a lot more oppressive and autocratic, while pushing aback against corrupt and dissident.

Step 21: Which finally brings us to the Uyghurs. Imperial China did this too, but the PRC really has a problem with the various non Han minority groups, doubly so for those who are Muslim and have separatist leanings. So the extermination of the Uyghurs really could be read as a continuation of how the PRC has treated the Tibetans, the Mongolians, and even Hong Kong over the last few decades. This is part of their vision of China as being a centralized, modernize, secular, unified Nation State, which doesn’t really leave room for regional ethnic religions minorities, doubly so against those with a non Chinese language.

That is the super simple version, Chinese history is super complicated.

#ask EvilElitest #Chinese History #PRC #CCP #KMT #Republic of China #People's Republic of China #chiang kai-shek #mao zedong #Qing Dynasty #Sino-Japanese War #Rape of Nanking #uyghur genocide #Imperial Japan #Xi Jinping #Chinese Communist Party #Imperialism

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evilelitest2 · 7 years

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Top Nine Reasons why Marxism Failed in Implementation

100 years ago (though not on this day) The Soviet Union overthrew the Tsarist goverment to usher in a new age of Utopian politics..and that didn’t go so well (and now a bunch of tankies are pissed at me). So why is it that Marxism tends to not work out so well in the implementation. Just forward note, I am mostly talking about the schools of Marxism that are descended from Leninism and actually attempted to control a nation, so when Marxists Orthodoxy folk come in and say “Hey Lenin skipped the Capitalist step” yes I know, I”m talking about the Marxist states that actually exist.

Number 1: Party Vanguardism

So while the popular image of Marxist revolutions is a giant crowd of people storming the palaces and killing all the nobles, Marxist organization principle was based around Party Vanguardism, basically a small elite group of ideologically pure Marxists will take over the country in a lightning coup, seize control of the goverment and implement the necessary social reforms for the sake of the people. The idea is that since the average people are far too ignorant/stupid/religious/superstitious/easily confused what have you appreciate the Marxist Utopian vision, they would basically forcibly implement the system upon them from above. Party Vanguardism came about in the French Revolution with the Conspiracy of Equals as a response to the sort of self destructive nature of French revolutionary mob politics. Problem is when you give a small elite total control of the country whose primary qualification is their ideological purity you wind up with a bunch of people living in a total fantasy world and people who aren’t actually qualified are put into positions of power. Small groups like that are also really suitableness to infiltration by opportunistic egotists (Stalin) but also are prone to corruption and autocracy by those within because those in the vangaurd are like “I seize power” and then they are like “I has power” but they never seem to get to the “giving up power” stage....hmmm

Number 2: No Balance of Power

So why is it that Marxists regimes always become dictatorships (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Tito, Castro, the Kim Family and much much more) If your nation is led by a single Party who can best implement the great wonderful Utopian vision, then there isn’t really any room for an opposition party. At first glance this sounds great, no stooges of the capitalist machine trying to gum up reform and plan military coups (that wasn’t sarcastic that happens a lot with right wing opposition parties), but here is the problem. If you’re regime has no built in mechanism to counter the leadership if they go wrong....then holy shit will they go wrong. And ambitious morally dubious men will quickly realize “Wait...if I seize control of this goverment, then I will live out the rest of my life as a communist god king cause there isn’t any check on my power”. And those men will fight to obtain as much power, and once they have it, it is basically too late for the Communist state, because once a dictator seizes power they can ruin the state so thoroughly it is impossible for it to right itself under communist principles, as we have seen in both the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Because while Marxists never intend to implement a horrible dictatorship, there is not safeguard to stop it, and that is why it always happens. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Not that I want to defend the US system too much because it is a mess, but Trump obviously wants to make himself into an autocrat...but he can’t, at least not yet. The system is so decentralized and opposition is so easy that he can’t even get his travel bans implemented. Power needs safeguards put into place to keep it in check, otherwise autocracy.

Number 3: Militancy

This isn’t unique to Communism, and it isn’t always the communists fault, but the violent militant methods embraced by the Leninists descended communist (Yes yes i know not all Communists are Leninists many are peaceful I’m talking about the historical states that have existed). I know that violent revolution gets romanticized but you know why it so many times turns from “overthrow the fate elites” to “Lets murder everybody” is because it starts as it means to go on. Once violence becomes an acceptable form of political expression, then violence is just going to happen more, and it becomes just easier to murder you’re political opponents than deal with them in other ways. And when you have an external enemy who the state has to be focused on battling on the first thing to go is individual rights, which is why the French Revolution really went to crazy land once they went to war with Austria and we have seen how the American political system deteriorated once we went to a 16 year long war. Wars make autocracy more likely, and Marxists states often emerge in a state of war. This is to say nothing of the fact that when you seize power with weapons, the person with the weapons is always going to be thinking to themselves “I can do this again.”

Number 4: Winner Take All Politics

One of the greatest advantage of democracies is that political losers can still exist within society (one of the greatest failings is that there isn’t any room for economic loser). Because when making an incorrect political move could result in death, people get a lot more scary. In a democracy, even a horribly mismanaged one, if you lose an election and can go home to move on with your life, the state as a whole is more stable. If losing a political battle results in death, then people are going to use any means possible to win, and this is why communist auto-cannibalism comes so quickly, because pretty much everybody has their back to then they will gladly destroy the state in order to come out on top or avoid being killed. Or like what we saw happen with the Great Leap Forward, people knew that if they didn’t meet production quotas they would be shot, so they lied and said they did, which caused those on top to make terrible estimations about how powerful the state actually was and oh shit famine.

Number 5: Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism basically means that the state has no independent groups, they have a totality of political power. I have railed long and hard about how states rights are awful and racist and how much I think the states power needs to be curtailed in favor of the federal goverment, but there is a very good reason why I want state governments to exist. And I”m not talking about balance of power, by having the implementation of policies go to local governments rather than the central goverment, you can adjust policies to address local concerns. There are a lot of problems with this like Pork Barrel politics, but one thing you avoid is the constant communist problem of “Lets implement a single policy that doesn’t vary across the entire giant country” which worked out so well with the Great Leap Forward....oh wait. And since there is no recourse...whoops.

Number 6: Religion

I’m am not trying to get into a religion vs. atheism debate here because I find those debates extremely stupid, just from a practical level targeting people’s religion leads to much more violent reprisals because the common people will ignore their own best interest in order to defend their religion. The French Revolution really lost its international appeal when they targeted the Catholic Church, same with the Russian and Chinese revolutions, just leave the Church alone and your state will just live longer, no matter how corrupt and conservative they tend to be.

Number 7: Poor Incentive Systems

One of the biggest issues with communist states is that it kinda wants people to run on ideologies and so either doesn’t design incentive systems to encourage people to do the work they want, or they only rely on “Do the work or I will shoot you” motivation which just causes this mess of ironically enough, labor problems. it also makes corruption and needlessly complicated bureaucracy inevitable, which compounds with reason 5 and 1

Number 8: Doesn’t play well with others

Again this isn’t entirely their fault, but communist systems don’t really work co-existing with other countries which means that you don’t usually get a good trade relationship going and the benefits of a debt based economy never really come in, which is why they tend to stagnate economically...along with all the other reasons

Number 9: Its Utopian.

The problem with Utopian political ideology is that it basically makes any middle ground impossible. After all, if you are going to bring about a glorious Utopia, then pretty much any crime to achieve that end becomes justified. And if the goal is utopia, why bother with the boring regulatory details like a constitution or specific system. While the American constitution is a giant mess of contradictions and bullshit and it desperately needs reform, but one thing I really like about it is that it assumes everybody is a selfish asshole who is trying to take as much power as possible. So its designed to try to prevent that, and worked well when it was designed...we haven’t updated it for decades but that is a new problem. You need to design systems to assume the worse, because the consequences of people taking absolute power are disastrous. And that is always my issue when I talk to Marxists is that they love theory, but kinda lose when you get to details, which is why marxism is always better as a form of critical theory than an actual implemented policy.

Ironically bemuse this is a long post, the only people who are going to read it...are Marxists. Evidently I wasn’t having enough fun getting into fights with Neoreactionaries.

#Historical Fact #Neglected Historical Fact #Communism #Marxism

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