Multi-fandom blog, with a lot of star wars (mostly new canon eu) and whatever my current hyperfixation is. There will also be politics/current events. I try to tag things, but I'm not great at it. Hornyposting at @land-of-constrasts Never worry about bothering me if you send me an ask or a message. White. Agender. Young Adult(18-25) They/them. Aroace. Generally leftist and generally anarchist. Avatar comission from @rebekahs-art and offical Spiritfarer art. art tag is #my art and ao3 is absolxguardian. I'm absolxguardian on most platforms
You recall Fluttershy getting more and more unhinged in "Best Night Ever", well now imagine her searching ever more frantically for an Actual Cybertronian Animal to nurture and instead she keeps running into sapient beastformers who respond to her cooing and cuddling with "wow so you want to lock me in a zoo and take away my right to VOTE, huh? BTW this is an HR violation" and Fluttershy becomes more and more crazed and when she does find actual Dumb Beasts they are a herd of metal Cybertronian horses and she freaks out because she never thought of equines as animals.
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I think people often misunderstand my position on the Habsburg incest thing as "no, don't make fun of the royals I like!"
When really it is "I find it unnerving how fast people make fun of physical disability and equate it to moral goodness when you make it slightly ok to do so in context."
You wouldn't believe how many history books sound like they want to say slurs when they talk about Ferdinand I having hydrocephalus and epilepsy. Conditions, I must stress, can be caused by other things. Conditions other people have.
Look, if you want to critique the politics of the Habsburgs and the idea of the empire and the whole structure of monarchy, go ham. I will help you in that endeavor if you want.
However, there's so much going on with that approach to it, so here are my thoughts in no particular order:
This idea presumes so much choice that just did not realistically exist for so many people. Archdukes and Archduchesses more often than not had no say in their marriage partner, because marriage wasn't about what they wanted. You, woman in this family, have to marry your cousin because it's what is best politically, and how you feel about the concept doesn't matter one way or another. This happens to men too, though less so, but off the top of my head you can look at Crown Prince Rudolph's marriage being more or less decided over his head. So, preference to marry a cousin you barely know really isn't factored in at all. You're lucky if your parent cares about you being happy in the marriage.
It's not about purity, it's about politics. The rule isn't that you had to marry a relative, it's that you had to marry a Catholic from a ruling dynasty. Add in the idea that this was chosen for you from a set of politically advantageous matches, because daughters and sons are assets to be used strategically, and you get a lot of marriages into the same set of families. As crass as it is, letting your children marry downward is wasting a bargaining tool. For the Habsburgs, the religious bar is also important and pretty constraining, especially when they aren't on good political terms with the other major Catholic powers (France and Spain) so you get Italian state and Bavarian marriages. If you keep reinforcing those alliances through marriage, that also means you're probably marrying a relative. Look at how quickly they leap at having new options when Belgium is established as a friendly Catholic state.
The above problem is complicated when someone in your family becomes Grandmother of Europe. Maria Theresa's extensive marriage politics means that a lot of the possible marriage candidates are almost certainly related. This is also, by the way, how we get Victoria's hemophilia being so widespread in the Courts her children married into, and everyone seemingly being cousins by World War I.
There is a lot of "might" going on with how disability works here. Ferdinand I's Wikipedia page ("citation needed" all over the place by the way) is littered with how his disabilities "might" be caused by heredity. But they could also be caused or compounded by many of the other things that caused birth complications or disability to be more common historically, like insufficient medical knowledge about prenatal care, insufficient maternal nutrition, or infections during pregnancy or after birth. Epilepsy certainly isn't constrained to just when your parents are related to each other.
Look me in the eyes and tell me that historians routinely acting like this man (who actually functioned pretty well in a world without anti-seizure medications) had no sentience because he had a disability from birth is schadenfreude.
Even if it was the product of their parents willfully having a preference to never marry the lower nobility or the bourgeoisie because they think they're gross commoners or something, do we really want to reinforce the idea that disability is a moral punishment?
It wasn't just Habsburgs who married cousins, people, until just a few generations ago, most of the human race lived in small villages and married within them about half the time.
Yes, things are different now, we know what lethal recessives are and also we get more opportunities to travel and meet people from different families. Just like we know more about hygiene and nutrition. But that doesn't mean people who knew less were bad, or didn't care about their children.
So in among us society do you think there's frequent doubles with the same name or do the main crew all just happen to have the simplest names and the color names get more niche the further you go out from them
I like the idea that you increase how specific your color is depending on the social context. Everyone is going by their general color names because there aren't any conflicts. If two people named Blue are in the same context they'll both have more specific names to change to, which since everyone is a different shade will hopefully be different
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Something that has bothered me for a while now in the discussion surrounding Spamton's trans coding (or rather, the denial of it) is the idea that the dress mannequin can't represent anything negative because it would sully the meaning of The Dress itself as a symbol of freedom and self-acceptance. However, I think this argument fails to consider the idea that the dress and the dress mannequin are two different objects that represent two different things.
When talking about the meaning of the dress in this instance it's important to recognize that the dress can't be separated from the mannequin, both contextually and literally.
They are a package deal. The dress is permanently attached to the mannequin and must be analyzed with this context in mind. The dress being unobtainable on its own and instead being affixed to the mannequin makes this item inherently different from the dress in Undertale.
In Undertale, the dress is wearable. It's free to be given or taken with nothing to get in the way of that. In Deltarune, the mannequin flips this aspect of freedom on its head. The dress is unable to be taken off the mannequin or given to anyone else. The choice is taken away and the object is rendered useless.
The mannequin represents a lack of choice in the ill-fitting roles imposed upon oneself by others, and I think chapter 5 bolsters this idea even more with Pink's comment about how it "doesn't fit" just like how Spamton won't fit into the mannequin in chapter 2. Conversely, Ralsei likes the dress, but would be unable to wear it because it is instead being forced onto someone who doesn't want it.
Perhaps the dress freed from the mannequin would not evoke these same negative reactions, but as it is right now, the dress mannequin is the opposite of the dress in Undertale and shows how forcing people into roles that don't fit is a detriment to everyone. And, in my opinion, this is extremely fitting for a game like Deltarune, where the statement we are challenging throughout the game is not "In this world, it's kill or be killed," but instead "No one can choose who they are in this world."
Does anyone have any links to MASH without the laugh track, the internet archive version is currently incomplete. I can torrent as well, I just know how hard it is to find the specific version of something on torrent sites.
Also if you have any top episodes you'd like to recommend, let me know. I'm putting together a best of watch order for my partners, and you can assume I'll include all the usual suspects, but I want to be thorough.
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The BEST part about shockop is that their love couldn't save them in the end. It briefly did, for a moment, at the end of Dark Cybertron, Shockwave got his love back and that mattered. But afterwards, there wasn't anything going against it, Shockwave was just set in his ways. The love either didn't matter or just made things worse.
I love the idea of Prowl developing a parasocial relationship with Scrapper because he never got to know him but he falls for the very idealized version of him from the gestal memories and he is kind of concerned because one day realized he is missing and mourning someone that he never met and never will.
Plus point if his interest started because he thought Scarpper would have been a good addition to his team from a tactical perspective and tried to learn more about him from memories just to make hypothetical strategies.
btw "you are allowed to hate your oppressor" is about Your Personal Feelings As An Individual. that you are allowed to have whatever feelings you have about your experience being oppressed, and the fact that rage and hatred can be a powerful motivator to break away from the status quo and engage in revolutionary action against oppression, does not mean that no one is allowed to criticize an approach to liberation that is centered on rage and hatred given the very well recorded downsides to such an approach.
like "well POC are allowed to hate white people so women are allowed to hate men!" yeah and also, Malcom X himself realized he was wrong to disregard allyship with white people because coalition building between working class people of different races was actually quite important to overthrowing racial capitalism. plenty of feminists activists (particularly women of color, bisexuals, trans people, sex workers) have criticized feminism for separatism and gender essentialism and reluctance to form necessary coalitions across gender to meaningfully resist racist capitalist patriarchy.
none of this means You The Individual are not allowed to feel the emotion of hate in response of oppression, or that that emotion needs to be suppressed or stigmatized or shouldn't help motivate your resistance. but it's just naive and shortsighted to stop your revolutionary thought there.
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[T]he extent to which a metanarrative is capable of transforming reality is the same extent to which its failure precludes future transformation. This is the great tragedy of any totalizing historical narrative, Marxism included. If the worker did indeed stand at the fulcrum of history, the slow death of the workers’ revolution necessarily means the death of any hope in future change. State communism’s ultimate failure has marginalized the proletariat as a meaningful political force. To read confident, latter-day predictions of incipient proletarian revolution in Western states is to read the predictions of a tiny doomsday cult proclaiming that the end is nigh.
Little wonder many post-Marxist thinkers legitimately feel the “saddest legacy that the twentieth century leaves us is disillusionment, loss of hope”; that we must freely admit there is no new, emergent, revolutionary subject capable of remaking the world; and that our post-Marxist politics has all too often regressed into localism, horizontalism, and melancholic resignation.
And yet even after the failure of Marxist state socialism, we continue picking through the dustbin of socialist history for scraps of hope, seeking reasons to keep on organizing toward our “horizontalist horizon.” In this grim but necessary task, there’s no better guide than political philosopher Ernst Bloch. Born in Germany in 1885 and working throughout the establishment, global spread, and authoritarian betrayal of actually existing communism, this unorthodox visionary developed a unique mystic-Marxist hermeneutics expressed via an idiosyncratic range of philosophical and theological references.
Ecstatically preaching communism as the “faith without lies,” Bloch both captures the mystical potency Marx granted his proletarian followers and expresses the self-deluding willpower needed to maintain a belief in the Marxist proposal. Bloch’s eccentricity and mysticism have been the subject of reasonable criticism by other, more reasonable thinkers, but they’re precisely what we need if we are continue working for socialist revolution in a post-socialist, postrevolutionary age. Bloch’s unique understanding of Marx models a productive relationship with the tragic, inevitable current of history. It therefore suggests ways we can reckon with the tragedies of the twentieth century as we tentatively imagine our own latter-day metanarratives.
from Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment by Matt Broomfield
More on Bloch's mystical, existentialist view of Marxism under the cut:
In Bloch’s terminology, Marxism is possessed of both “warm” and “cold” streams. Marx instigated the cold science of historical materialism and thus demonstrated communism’s logical inevitability. But he also urged Marxists to uncover a hidden current of utopian hope surging through history, a “warm stream” that closely resembles the Kurdish movement’s “second river.”
Marx’s task is the “unmasking of ideologies and disenchantment of metaphysical illusion” on the one hand, and yet the unleashing of a “liberating intention and… strong appeal to the debased, enslaved, abandoned, belittled, human being” on the other. Through his critique of metaphysical illusion, Marx instigates what might, paradoxically, be defined as the new metaphysical ideology par excellence. The warm river flows into the cold and vice versa, cool dialectics instigating the white heat of revolution.
This paradoxical relationship equips Bloch for his curious magnum opus,The Principle of Hope. Writing after his exile from Nazi Germany, the Jewish intellectual surveyed history, culture, geography, and cosmology for proofs of the inherent dynamism and mutability of the universe. He quotes an extraordinary range of evidence, from the flight of a swallow to the Babel myth to pulp pirate novels, as supposedly containing or encoding this inherently revolutionary quality. Ultimately, he finds a meta-level utopianism in humankind’s inherent desire for meaning in a meaningless universe. Humans see faces in rock formations, angels in marble blocks, freedom in everything.
To Bloch, this inherent dynamism is proof of what he calls a “not-yet-conscious,” located in the future and set against the regressive past unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. Just as our brains work to suppress drives with their origins in the personal, sexual, and evolutionary past, so too (Bloch argues) do they suppress a drive toward an as-yet unachieved utopian socialist future. Why should analysis focus on the repressed past and present dreams, when our daydreams and fantasies in fact equally reflect the clash between our reality and repressed hopes for the future?
“More than one daydream before now has … remodeled reality,” Bloch observes, recalling Marx’s famous comparison between the unthinking labor of a beehive and the qualitatively distinct achievements of human craftspeople, who must necessarily imagine what they then go on to create. In this sense, humankind is precisely distinguished from other beings by our ability to labor toward an as-yet unrealized Babel.
One of Bloch’s favorite phrases is “thinking means venturing beyond,” always and in every-thing. For example, he reads a sense of transformative potential even into Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. The philosopher isn’t blind to that foolhardy, predatory venture’s genocidal ramifications. But he believes we have a revolutionary duty to identify the revolutionary values it simultaneously entails: an unjustified, absurd, and therefore emancipatory willingness to venture into the unknown. Bloch’s work is marked by just such a revolutionary willingness, a meta-level pursuit of the revolutionary in any and all circumstances.
Bloch’s brand of Marxism recalls Öcalan’s own mystic belief that freedom is the fundamental goal of the universe, inherent in the very relations of quantum physics. Like both Öcalan and Bookchin, Bloch projects a confident ability to read his political project into biology, chemistry, nature itself. There is certainly important academic work to be done in reassessing archaeology, history, and even the natural sciences in light of a radical political agenda. More generally, Bloch shows us how much of seemingly everyday culture and apolitical science is ideologically captured by capitalism, and he challenges us to imagine ways of reclaiming these fields as sites of valid ideological contest.
#reading this entire post (cut included) made me - for a split second#feel cognitive freedom#to us revolution means liberation#but the term revolution itself can simply describe a paradigm shift#and many of those shifts have involved manmade horrors beyond comprehension#ppl explain trauma as the result of “bad thing + no support” but its more like#the result of trying to live after the incomprehensible happens to you or people around you#its inevitable that the others will feel or express that incomprehensibility as well#and yet some continue to live#we still dream. we dream until we act.#we act and then survive.#we dream until reality reflects the dream.#is this anything
its everything!!
i should also add (& i will link this in the og too) that this book is totally free to read & download on The Anarchist Library ! its a really good exploration of existentialist / absurdist socialism and how such a paradigm can revitalize the Left as a whole. sometimes challenging (ideologically more than textually) but always in a productive way. if you've never checked out Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? i have also found that book perspective-shifting
Omg this is perfect thank you!! I've been wanting to get into socialist literature again, but haven't jived with some things about Marxism and Western Anarchism (my prior interests).
I feel like both are too constraining when it comes to the potential structure of our future society. I don't know how to describe it. It's like, I need a middle ground, and social democracy isn't it.
I want to live in a society where any power is granted through genuine trust and mutuality. Where everyone's knowledge and experience is an equal part of the whole. Where any titles or hierarchy don't mean someone is an authority to obey or someone to be commanded - but rather signify a value for knowledge and a willingness to help or learn.
I want to see what people can accomplish when they work together to make sure no one is left behind, and I'm not sure we can say what that would truly look like until we get there. We can still dream, though.
I didn't know existentialist and absurdist socialist literature existed and I am so glad to know it does. I don't know if it's similar to what I just said but I'm excited to learn!
You are very welcome! if that's what you are looking for i would definitely suggest reading more about Rojava, communalism, and democratic confederalism. I was in a very similar boat to you and discovering this paradigm really breathed new life into my political consciousness and my dedication to socialism. I have a lot of links (articles + a few videos) related to Öcalan's paradigm of "democratic modernity" & Rojava in my pinned that could be a good place to start :)
The two theorists mentioned in this quote besides Boch, Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan, have created political approaches which have been described as combining the best elements of both anarchism and Marxism. Bookchin was raised a Marxist, later became an anarchist, and later theorized communalism as a third path. Öcalan is a Kurdish political prisoner and political philosopher, who previously was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who wanted to establish a state for the indigenous Kurdish people, but, in part inspired by Bookchin's work, rejected that path to develop a non-state socialist approach for his people that placed direct democracy, ecology, women's liberation and pluralism at the center. There are a lot of similarities to the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas if you've heard of them (born out of indigenous resistance, anti-patriarchal, rejects state power but does not seek unnecessary violence, decentralized confederate model of democracy, revolutionary dedication persists despite profound oppression and complex practical issues).
On top of those two books mentioned above, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Women's Revolution, and Democratic Confederalism is a good intro to his work (his Manifesto proper is very long and dense). For Bookchin, I really like The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy. I also have made a few infographics to help introduce people to these concepts if you are interested! This artwork really beautifully depicts the "warm river" / Democratic Modernity River described in the above quote as well.
Hope this isn't too much lol, I'm just very excited to talk about this approach to politics with people. & i think ive seen some of your posts before on this desire and was like. hmm i think this person would get a lot from reading about communalism/demcon! But also I don't want to alienate people by making them feel like I'm pushing an ideology onto them and claiming it will 100% solve every one of their problems. Broomfield's book is a good intro because he is able to highlight valid and necessary criticisms of Rojava & Öcalan, while also highlighting the immense value of this kind of approach and how the concept of "tekmil" (self criticism) plays a crucial role in keeping the revolution alive by being clear-eyed about its flaws and failings and integrating critique.
For some reason my thought it that once he has a compelling reason to ignore the prejudice from Decepitcon ideology, he'll actually work really well with them. Like the opposite of a well-meaning autobot who keeps almost stepping on their human allies and saying awkward things. He just picks up how to navigate around them really easily and does stuff like install a raised platform for humans to stand on during briefings and make sure the base has a well stocked fridge without being asked.
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