Dialectrician @dialectrician - Tumblr Blog

Posts

It's very interesting how anti-targs absolutely want them to be "colonizers", because they blatantly are not by any definition of the term. They don't exploit Westeros for the profit of a metropole, they aren't replacing the Westerosi population with Valyrian settlers, or keeping them in a subaltern position wrt a non-existent Valyrian caste, or anything like that. They haven't attacked Westerosi culture at all.

What they are, however, is *conquerors*. And if you really want the Targs to be evil, you can just say that? Wars of conquest are bad. You are allowed to say Aegon was evil for it.

But (mostly american) Social Justice/ Progressives types are obsessed with the concept of colonisation as the ultimate evil, so Targ can't just be conquerors. They are colonizers.

#a song of ice and fire

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

"Why would people make things if they weren't forced to labor–"

Because people want the things. It's not complicated.

sigmaleph

i like to imagine how people in the post-material-scarcity future would romanticise the current time period.

having a job gave people a sense of community and purpose lacking in our modern age where nobody is forcing you to get out of bed on threat of starvation. actually the average office worker in the early 21st century was so much wealthier than a UBI-having-modern if you forget to count paying rent and also make some very bad purchasing power conversions. if you look at contemporary records (sitcom where the main characters are only at work when it's plot relevant) it is obvious that employment was never really a major obstacle to having an active social life or pursuing your own passions.

nitpickspot

Honestly I have a lot of...concerns about how a post scarcity society would work in relation to the things that I love. But I hope having to give up things like tv and pop culture and toys makes them happier

sigmaleph

why would a post-scarcity society have to give up those things? what do you think post-scarcity means?

nitpickspot

I mean, cartoons are probably going to end up "reduced" to Glitch Productions type things, like 10 minutes of animation every 6 months. There's just no way to produce 20 minutes of quality animation on a weekly or even a monthly basis in a world where no one has an incentive to work on an idea that isn't theirs.

Why would anyone choose to do inbetweens on someone else's cartoon, when they have no financial or occupational obstacles to just working on their OWN cartoon? Animation takes dozens or hundreds of people to do to current quality and a lot of it is a really shit job to get stuck with.

The same goes for things like toys and collectables. Who is going to CHOOSE to make someone else's dolls all day when anyone with the skill or the talent is 100% fo the kind of person who would just be making their OWN dolls in miniscule batches.

Remove employment from the equation and I just don't see any reason why ANYONE would do large entertainment projects at current scale. And even if they did, most of them would crumble under the fact that the entire workforce can and will just leave at any possible moment, right?

This isn't a dig, or a gotcha, it's just the thought I constantly have when this concept comes up

sigmaleph

i think you're imagining 'nobody needs a job to survive' but 'post scarcity' is a stronger postulate than that, and implies something like e.g. if i have an idea for a doll or a tv show it can trivially be mass produced (generally under the assumption that we can automate almost all things that nowadays require human labour)

nitpickspot

We're uhh...kind of already starting to try and do that automation step.

and the results are not great.

sigmaleph

we've been doing the automation thing for centuries and I would describe the results as nothing short of amazing.

gpedia

nitpickspot might want to look into how cloth was made before the loom was invented, or the concept of the manual choke in cars, or how flour had to be milled before machinery — I've done that latter one, for fun, its not very.

dialectrician

It's almost like the concept of post-scarcity is stupid because most things already take a trivial amount of labor to make!

Somehow, Odysseus returned...

#the odyssey

While only seven "Harry Potter" books survived past the Crisis of the Fourth Millenium and burning of the AO3 library, we know that they were part of a much larger corpus known as "the M/M tag", though those works were typically considered inferior and were not attributed to Rowling.

#harry potter #this is about the epic cycle

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

dialectrician

It is good that they cut the "nobody" shit from the odyssey actually, because it's kind of dumb.

Why didn't Polyphemus tell the other cyclopes, "no you assholes, I was hurt by a guy called *nobody*"?

This is the kind of thing you can gloss over in a poem but not when you actually show it on film.

dialectrician

Also while it's one thing to be upset they cut "nobody" (I get it, it's iconic), why are people pretending to be mad they didn't mention the olive tree bed of all things? No one cares, and the movie is already too long. They were always going to cut some things.

#the odyssey

Lots of people are so keen on hating Nolan they're like "why didn't he make a movie about how rape and murder is good actually", but in a progressive way, I guess.

Making it a movie about how perfidy is dangerous to the fabric of society and self-destructive is good, especially considering the current wars.

#the odyssey

It is good that they cut the "nobody" shit from the odyssey actually, because it's kind of dumb.

Why didn't Polyphemus tell the other cyclopes, "no you assholes, I was hurt by a guy called *nobody*"?

This is the kind of thing you can gloss over in a poem but not when you actually show it on film.

#the odyssey

lucifer

i enjoyed the odyssey film for what it was but the people in the tags on this site are such nerds, fully crashing out because a myth wast told the exact same way it was told when it was originally written

Israel literally did a genocide and people are still pearl-clutching about "On the Jewish Question".

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

The sets in the Odyssey were good but the costumes (specifically the armors) were terrible. I don't understand why. Best as I can describe it everyone looks like a Greek themed marvel superhero.

#the odyssey

pontmercii

I really dgaf about hotd, haven't even watched the second season, but it will forever be hilarious how all the asoiaf tumblr scholars/BNF continue to suck its dick sooo much while performatively trashing GoT

pontmercii

this is getting notes in the year of 2026 and seriously I've never been happier watching the asoiaf scholars twisting their balls in a knot trying to paint the show as deep and woke when it's just a poorer more boring more sexualized version of GoT

dialectrician

In what universe is it more sexualized? I think you just don't remember how trashy GoT was. It was the most 14 year old boy-core show ever made.

#a game of thrones #house of the dragon

wrath-of-achilleus

Someone needs to make a full list of all that cowardly, namby-pamby language ASOIAF bitches use to describe Mirri Maz Duur’s specific form of death, “executing,” “disposing of,” “sacrificing,” etc so they can avoid ruining their carefully maintained facade of false progressivism by saying “I believe that sometimes it is morally acceptable for gang rape survivors to be publicly burned to death by a white girl” with their whole chests.

someone needs to make a full list of the ways in which dumbasses in this fandom use racial language as an excuse to celebrate the forced stillbirth of a 14 year old bridal slave so that they can thinly veil their misogyny by saying "I believe that it is morally acceptable for a rape victim to be forcefully sterilised for the crime of carrying her master's baby" with their whole chest.

The way we talk about "patriarchy" has made people forget there were (and still are) actual, literal patriarchal society and those are actually very different from what we have in developed capitalist countries...

gazeldhazel

(spent too long on Tumblr voice) actually the status quo is okay! It's okay to be the status quo! you don't have to be anything besides the status quo! #statusquoaffirmation #statusquosafe

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

edwad

Would you consider yourself a reformist? Or do you have a sort of "reforms as a road to revolution" kinda thinking

i think the beauty of reforms is that they either secure a better quality of life for people and a victory to build from or they expose that capitalism can't really sustain that, at which point the political point is in our favor. if you organize around capitalism's alleged "absolute limits" then you are practically demonstrating the adequacy (or otherwise) of your account of the system and what it is or isn't capable of providing. i don't think you can just reform away capitalist social institutions entirely, but i think reforms can be a way to push political messaging and clarify what capitalism can meaningfully offer. but absent a political movement pushing for those reforms, it's all just hypothetical and you're trying to convince people you're right with no obvious stakes. if you can develop a movement that has lower-level goals and winnable reforms, you can scale that up and also capitalize on social frustrations where they arise to push that toward a non-reformist politics that centers around a layer of society that has built itself up and learned how to fight for itself

dialectrician

All that stuff already happened. There used to be social democracies in Europe and they're all withering away because those are bad policies which impede capitalist accumulation on which they depend.

mackalena

What do we think of social democracy (kinda) in the global south? Qaddafi, Perón, Nasser etc. What should be the Marxist stance on critical support and stuff ?

dialectrician

I feel like those are sufficiently different kinds of guys that you can't make a blanket judgements on them under the umbrella "social democrats".

Qaddafi: very bad man in hindsight.

Peron and Nasser did okay developmentalism and the latter was an actual anti-Imperialist who did actual, literal war against the British and French Empires and Israel, so that's good. But ultimately those are the leaders of capitalist states who did repress workers so.

mackalena

What would you say was very bad about Qaddafi?

dialectrician

Just you know, the standard stuff, being a dictator, banning political organizations, being corrupt, firing on protesters. That's what liberals and democrats are criticizing him for too but it's not *wrong*. He also wanted to abolish primary schools for some reason?

Plus toward the end he was liberalizing the economy and trying to cozy up to the west so he doesn't even really get that anti-imperialist cred.

Problems with guys like Qaddafi is they hang out to long, way past the point where the bad has caught up to the good.

Trending Blogs

Last Seen Blogs

Dialectrician