Bluegrass_Buddhist

No idea

Nah you gotta do what's best for you two, I'm just trying to get a read of where people are. I don't plan on ever owning a house, so my concern's more with getting my paycheck garnished.

When European, at first Christian and then secular colonial powers run rampant over your culture and people for 100+ years, and demonize your local majority religion as barbaric for almost as long, practicing that religion becomes an act of anti-colonial resistance in and of itself. A way of rejecting outsiders' attempts to define "correct" beliefs and morality on their own terms.

Then there's also the element of practicality. At least in Palestine and Lebanon, a lot of the secular leftist anti-colonial movements have been hollowed out, smothered and/or discredited over the past several decades, leaving more religious groups like Hamas and Hezb Allah as really the only resistance-capable game in town.

Also also, there's a social element to it. Class differences can sometimes feel abstract, and religion, like race or narionality, offers a way to cut through that abstraction. A clear way of differentiating colonized in-group from colonizer out-group.

Critical support to Tennessean used car salesmen with brains so fried by Qanon they're stumbling backwards into opposing Bill Gates geo-engineering bullshit

Suddenly flashing back to that one dialogue where a human woman is desperately trying to get her mixed human/asari daughter out of a warzone and the galactic beuracrat she's speaking to initially won't do anything until the woman gives an emotional Sorkin speech that changes the beuracrat's mind.

It is only western leftists, at least in my experience, who engage in this kind of moralistic peacocking over people who by now are all either dead or very old.

Like yeah the viet cong were justified in doing whatever they had to do to get the US out of their country, even if that meant shooting teenagers conscripted against their will. But it's only in the US and Europe that you see leftists kind of reveling in post-hoc revanchist violence.

I think its another symptom of there being no consructive, material political project for people to rally around, and a reaction to the fact that we live in easily the most jingoistic, propagandized society on thr planet.

If this is a case of "person realizes something everyone already knew" please let me know.

A 22 year old losing some money on a horse race is a youthful mistake, but a major media company using a 22 year old to push horse race stubs is deliberately fostering addiction.

The Civ series is basically Whig History: The Game.

The anarchist-to-ML pipeline is real, and as someone who went through it, I'll say that anti-structure Reaction is also real. A lot of anarchists (at least in my experience) are young and full of piss and vinegar and distrustful of any kind of hierarchy that could constrain their individual actions. It's a form of liberalism that many outgrow and many don't.

Then there's the fact that in the U.S. at least, anarchism is far more tolerated by the state than is any kind of organized ML movement. Other comments have already addressed this, but it bears repeating: when you spend your whole life immersed in anti-communist propaganada, it's easy to take at face value that ML governments / orgs are "just as bad" as the capitalists.

It is the ugliest, most batshit insane etymology I've ever seen

The frankenstein mandarin-english-german-farsi-latin-turkic place names hurt my eyes