ComradeRat

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

; Aang's

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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

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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

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toph creates the police to crack down on crime after her boyfriend's firing of benders in favour of cheaper nonbenders (ty machines) caused a crime wave of unemployed benders. This is all treated as natural and normal

Korra is an amazing depiction of the inside of the liberal mind (even down to

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'balkanize china'

). Sadly this depiction is created by and for liberals, so all the liberalism is seen as good

If the sun destroys capitalism by frying all our technologies i will immediately convert to a sun cultist

As we get into summer remember that wasps' aggression is in large part because they are starving to death because all their food has been bulldozed to make room for buildings and roads. Plant some native plants. Wasps are pollinators, but their mouths physically cannot get into a lotta the favoured decorative/garden plants. Leave some rotting vegetation outside to attract bugs. Leave some rotten meat outside. It's their third choice after pollen and bugs, but the first two choices have been systemically exterminated by capital's expansion)

no u

Caroline Humphrey's Karl Marx Collective, Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm is very, very local but a really interesting look at day-to-day functioning of collective farming in the 80s. The more recent edition, sub-subtitled "Marx Went Away--But Karl Stayed Behind" (A reference to the fact that post 1991 the Karl Marx collectives renamed themseves to Karl collectives).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9098764

It's very, very dry reading (and the goodreads description is right when it calls it 'dispiriting'), but lets you get a closer look at people who don't get much attention (other than as vague "the farmers"), and who generally aren't able to write themselves (and those who do write don't tend to be representative of those who stay on the farms)

Also there's some interesting descriptions of how local religions interacted with socialism e.g.

To the best of my knowledge that isnt really accurate. For one, smallpox, the biggest recurring epidemic disease, is from rats. Bubonic plague is from fleas on rats drawn to cowfeed and other grains stored in large quantities. Chickenpox, cowpox etc also from livestock.

For another, the water in pre-1800s Europe was much more drinkable than is commonly assumed. You might get worms, but generally you dont see the massive outbreaks of dysentry until urban populations explode from the 1600s on. Generally pre1800s epidemics are a complex mixture of lack of nutrition and a disease transmitted from some animal, rather than just "people drank their own shit".

Animal cruelty? Causing disease? And general horrors? Another thing marx talked about (quote from Saito Karl Marx's Ecosocialism):

...Responding to...enthusiastic reports about the 'system of selection developed by English breeder Robert Bakewell, [in 1864] Marx wrote in his notebook: 'Characterized by precocity, in entirety sickliness, want of bones, a lot of development of fat and flesh etc. All these are artificial produces. Disgusting!'