How much time do you have?

Our position hasn’t shifted that much from the pod’s position.

The pod has a semi-ironic veneration of China, per the Wolf Warrior episode. It hates the entire US establishment. It wants Iran to get a nuke. Much of its stance is based on opposing what the most awful people in Amerikkka support.

That’s not to say we follow the pod’s marching orders. Rather, we get to the same place for much the same reasons.

The Ukrainian issue is probably the best example of this. No one here’s super pro Putin or his brand of Russian nationalism. When the war started, we were deep into ‘lol there’s not gonna be a war’. We had to eat humble pie, hard.

You know what changed?

Ukrainian flag emojis.

The worst people in the world, with the absolute worst takes, went hard on the Ukraine side.

Was the war a bad idea? Quite possibly. It’ll likely settle into a frozen conflict again, much like it was before, with similar territory, at the cost of a lot of lives.

But seeing people go around, pretending there wasn’t Ukrainian shelling of the Donbas? Pretending Putin hadn’t been pushing for Minsk II to be implemented as agreed? Saying that Putin wants to wage a genocide against Ukraine? Seeing everyone bend over backwards to apologise for literal neo-Nazis?

Fuck that.

Look we just want high wages, strong regulation, and redistribution of wealth, but without any of the levers of power necessary to achieve it. Is that so much to ask?

Yeah, the weirdest part about 90s/00s culture is the idea that a stable desk job in an air conditioned office is the worst thing ever.

9 to 5? Sounds heavenly.

It’s the best type of bourgeois spectacle. It’s like bum fights, but instead of two unhoused people, it’s two rich assholes. Whoever loses, we win.

If you like legal drama, load up the whole-day episodes from Law and Crime on YouTube, and enjoy. I know I did.

Here’s a take I saw on Folau that made me pause for a bit.

Missing from the public discourse is the background of how evangelical Christianity swept the Pacific Islands. This the story of colonialism and Christian missionaries and Captain Cook; of the destruction of local religions and languages.

It is the story of how all over the world, cultures that didn’t have laws or customs against homosexuality or gender fluidity could become so puritanical that they turned against their own LGBTIQ brethren in favour of the gospel as preached by their colonisers; only for the colonisers to then finally soften their own stances against homosexuality and decide that homophobia was yet another moral failing of the colonised. *

I still don’t like him, but there’s a grain of truth in it.

Graeber has you covered.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. These “heroes” are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their role as heroes: as Clark Kent, Superman may be constantly trying, and failing, to get into Lois Lane’s pants, but as Superman, he is purely reactive. In fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination: like Bruce Wayne, who with all the money in the world can’t seem to think of anything to do with it other than to indulge in the occasional act of charity; it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily carve free magic cities out of mountains.

Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the superego clubbing the errant Id back into submission.

V for Vendetta.

A government uses a false flag pandemic to consolidate power through provision of a vaccine. A single person in a Guy Fawkes mask wins the populace over with atrociously verbose wordplay and domestic terrorism. He also wins the girl over to his ideology by kidnapping and torturing her.

It’s less lib and more outright reactionary, but whatever.

I’m digging the encryption clues.

Leftists don’t have opinions on fucking kids challenge

I have two skills -it’s non-monogamy and speaking publicly, okay? Do some fucking research!

This is a pretty slick line