thefunkycomitatus

Yes. There is not going to be some cathartic cleansing of the US by outside forces. We have to do it ourselves.

Posting this because I think it's very relevant. I don't read it entirely literally because the article is about Western socialists who criticize AES, the people we would call ultras or leftcoms. I think if you take the article's principles to heart you can see a certain martyrdom and lack of rigor even among "tankies." Hexbear has been fairly good today while left reddit seems to be having some struggles.

Sentiments like:

• World governments should destroy the US and me along with it
• World governments should legally punish the US and remove my capitalist overlords from power for me
• I would rather go die or be arrested doing adventurism this weekend than spend the rest of my life building socialism
• I am going to go huff tear gas and fight cops this weekend as self-flagellation for the crimes of the US
• I am going to hook by brain up all social media feeds and self-harm via a stream of war evangelism and horror images. This makes me brave for facing the truth and keeps me informed.
• Doom doom doom because this just proves that empire is stronger than ever and only compromised socialism can exist as any real movement will be quickly snuffed out of existence.

Many people say blood is thicker than water...I don't know. I don't think so. Not mine. Not during my presidency. Once I'm done they will be saying that water is thicker than blood. Water will be like sludge slowly moving through, it'll be so slow folks. My bood will be fast, faster than anything anyone has seen. Faster than water. They won't even know how to measure it. The blood cuff won't cut it. They will squeeze the little ball and nothing happens because my blood is so thin. Pressure is impossible. I put a lot of pressure on my people, my beautiful people and I am very used to pressure. But not my blood. There is no more pressure and my heart beats very quietly because my blood is so thin. Very very quietly. The doctors can't hear it anymore and they say that they have never seen a heart beat so quietly folks. It's the first time in history.

One of my favorite threads of the AI saga is how it's just doing things that were already happening, but packaged as task agnostic live saas. ChatGPT always existed in the minds of capitalists.

The desire for mass produced slop was there all along. People were doing it. Now computers are doing it. It's not a revolution -- it's business as usual. Frankly? That's a fascinating insight!

Reading City of Quartz for an art/game project I'm doing. It's fucking heart breaking reading about all the failed communes and communist groups who were pushed out of the area. I mean say what you want about American socialism, or vague "leftism" (though there were plenty of Mexican socialists in the mix), but people were trying to build a different world. They almost did it too.

I feel like if I could just go there and stare at the empty industry buildings and urban decay long enough, I could figure out why it all went so wrong. It's like LA was the future of US capitalism and it simply collapsed into a black hole of neoliberalism and anti-communism. The essays in the book were written in the 90s so I can't imagine all the shit that's happened since.

Pineapples are cool though.

I came out of the Bush years as a liberal atheist skeptic teen and voted for Obama in 2008. Obama disappointed by 2012 and the libertarian stuff seemed kind of appealing. After all I was a very rational, logical person and didn't understand why people in charge didn't want to do the rational, logical thing. By 2014 I realized the libertarian thing was another dead-end and went back towards something more liberal. Gamergate was not appealing at all. I hated all that shit being spammed on 4chan and reddit. It always came off as sexist and manufactured. I did struggle with the ideas about privilege but not enough to join that clown show. By 2015 I was with Bernie. By 2016 I was jaded. My material conditions degraded enough to make me very angry. Luckily it was also around the time there was plenty of socialist rhetoric in the right places. I simply got lucky in the internet social media paremovedo machine. I bounced off the right pegs to place me in a position where I wanted change and socialism could provide it.

Then I kept finding footholds on bits of theory and history, slowly learning more and more. Podcasts helped out with some of that. Thanks to Trump enough shit kept happening to provide ample examples of why capitalism and liberalism is failing. Then COVID broke everything and that was it.

I think watching the internet be taken over by social media companies and then this engagement through outrage machine being built is kind of like watching industrialization take over the world. One minute you're an artisan in 2003, in IRC, in AIM, on a php forum. The next you're on the street outside of the "this totally real issue that's really important and everyone should pay attention to because it's why your life sucks, not us" factory. In retrospect it's so obvious what all of it was for, even going back to 2008 and Ron Paul's meme machine. The game was rigged from the beginning.

in the context of ww2 it was irrelevant that it was an inter-imperial conflict.

Why would that be irrelevant to WW2 in particular? Genuinely confused by this statement.

all i care about is that there was a historically progressive side that had to be critically supported on the one hand and fucking fascists on the other

Baffling.

I can't tell what the split on that arterial is. Is that a protected pedestrian/bike lane or dedicated public transit lane? It seems like the 6 lanes on the left are for cars. The right lane on the other side of the huge grass median is for what? There is that nice park/green space as a buffer between the commercial center and the arterial but the only pedestrian connectivity seems to be sidewalks? I wonder if there are any tunnels between the residence area and that green space. There don't seem to be any bridges. Though the residences seem to have some mixed use so maybe it's not all bad if you can still get to the amenities you need without crossing a 6 lane road. Crossing that 8 lane seems like a nightmare for abuela.

I wonder if they would ever encroach on that green space for a highway. That whole band seems like leaving room for future expansion. It would suck to grow up with that park and then lose it to a highway. Even at the intersection it looks like they left room for an interchange.

They're not insightful if used to avoid delving into the artistic content, or any other aspect of the specific content in question. What I'm saying is that surface-level political readings are used to elevate or hide otherwise bad or specious opinions. A motte & bailey, if you will. Retreat from a weak opinion on a piece of media into a safer political opinion that most would agree with. There are exceptions for works that are created with nothing but political content. Like low budget, terrible right-wing movies that exist just to complain bout a culture war issue. Those things technically have artistic content but it's so unremarkable that you can only focus on the political content.

I use two real examples. One is Pluribus. There was a sentiment shared several times over the past week that it's more interesting to discuss the show than watch it, or there is more to discussing the show than watching it just to see people's takes. I think this shows that discourse does overshadow content on this site. The other example is Avatar. While there are fewer discussions about it, I think it shows that people will defend questionable artistic content due to surface-level political readings being agreeable.

Also this ties into media literacy. The point of commentary isn't to accurately decipher intention or subtext, it's to provide content for social media. It's taking the conversation you and your friends would have after a movie 20 years ago and commodifying it. Mass producing it on an industrial scale. Stripping away the need for friends or going out to see the movie. You don't even need to watch the movie so much as be hyper-aware of what other people think about it. That happened before Hexbear but it's baked in to the idea of a content aggregator and curation platform. We do it but with our own Hexbearian character.

The hyperawareness of what others think comes from the affordance of other takes being shoveled into your face for consumption by the same forces that mass-produce opinion. The takes have boundaries that somewhat reflect society at large, in-groups and out-groups, cohorts and demographics. Competing interests turn into competing takes and a game of meta-commentary forms. People purposefully provide exaggerated or aloof commentary for kicks or spite. Again, we do this too.

Hexbears tend to have an added level of cringe because we start assuming our takes on media are politically meaningful, significant, and more astute. It's the difference between saying The Godfather is boring vs The Godfather is capitalist striver propaganda that glorifies anticommunist mobsters who did counter-revolutions in Italy. You may look at the latter and say that it's completely correct but it's also a way to launder shallow criticism. If you don't have anything particularly insightful to say about media (and you must post anyways because the internet demands you have a take), then just vaguely attach it to some political stuff that is agreeable.

Then there is the urge to be obnoxiously maximalist on a take. "This media is garbage and I low key don't respect anyone who engages with it" kind of stuff. Which goes beyond simple media criticism into drawing real lines between people and groups over media consumption. Online leftists have a long history of being overly concerned with media consumption. It does get to a point, at the most extreme, where people think you can't be a good leftist if you consume a piece of media.

They show what happened idk what you're talking about. She seized and fell down. The guy in the truck seized and ran off the road into another car. Some people stay standing up. Some people in the bar and hospital also fell down. The "virus" itself doesn't kill people. Helen even smiled before dying because she completed joining but the head trauma was too much.

People died during the joining because they had to rush it due to being discovered. Their strategy was to isolate people and have them in a safe place before initiating the joining. Something, we're not told exactly, went wrong and they had to speed it up. That's when they did the chemtrails and infected everyone at once. People were driving, operating heavy equipment, in the bathroom at home, etc so when it happened they seized and got hurt. Think of the guy you see on the hoist when Carol is walking in town.

It's the exact same stuff from every other season but done worse. More retconning. Just about ever episode is characters coming up with a plan, arguing with each other about the plan, doing stupid analogies, then only spending 5 mins executing the plan. That only leads to needing another plan. Too many characters. Now there are more people holding up their hands and screaming in slow motion. They ran out of music licensing money because they are fucking beating Running Up That Hill into the ground. Some of the actors are clearly phoning it in and tired of doing the show. A lot of nonsensical plot points and weird character moments.