Untitled

Toph: I’ve been banned from every major city’s transportation system except Omashu

Bumi: Well, well, well. It seems I have finally met the troublemaker who has been causing such chaos with my rail systems.

Toph:…

Bumi: I must say, I am thoroughly impressed with your earthbending abilities. You remind me of myself when I was a lad.

Toph: Get to the point.

Bumi: I see great potential in you, Toph Beifong. I want you inherit my title once I am no longer fit to rule.

1. Implying Bumi was fit to rule at any point

1.1 except maybe in the sense that he was completely shredded

2. That he has no plans to die, (nor would death necessarily make him unfit to rule), but that he apparently intends to like. Tuck his arms and legs into himself and just roll off into the sunset.

Fortunately the clerks served under King Bumi the First and are well aquatinted with explaining chaos to the confused citizenry of Omashu. Without missing a beat they print the posters in 2 parts.

The first (read this aloud) part is a fairly standard Wanted poster explaining that King Bumi II Toph the Blind Melon Bandit Lord is Banned from the Omashu Transport system for crimes etc….

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

Which is why in the context of US politics I am basically a reformist. I think maybe on a fifty year timescale, a real labor movement can be built around ideologically committed, democratic labor unions and something like the Meidner plan can be pulled off. Probably this has to be backed by some level of labor militancy because, per crisis bargaining theory, even peacetime negotiations resolve to outcomes that reflect the balance of military power. But I think if there comes a US transition to socialism it can probably only happen by system-internal means. Of course I could be totally wrong I'm not uh, I'm not the Oracle of Delphi.

yeah, i mean, i don't think most revolutionary marxists seriously believe that socialist revolution will be achieved through armed mass revolution in an otherwise peaceful and prosperous developed capitalist economy. that doesn't mean writing off the concept however--what you might call the 'orthodox marxist' position on this is that the existing political and economic system is unsustainable long-term, and conditions will inevitably deterioriate to a point where that rational calculation changes, and the chief purpose of revolutionary socialist organizing before that inflection point is to build a party that is embedded in the mass movement, in labour struggles, etc. that can at that point provide a critical driving and directing force.

cba to find the papers now that i no lnoger have university access, but essentially; many sports fans who sing homophobic chants, when asked "well, would you chant that if there was a gay person in the seat next to you?" say "no, of course not, that would be very hurtful."

Is it the obligation of marxists to not make work in genres with reactionary origins or make works based on reactionary assumptions (e.g. a cyberpunk book or action movie ttrpg)?

If not, how do you deal with it?

i mean, i think marxists have a lot of obligations and frankly none of them have to do with what kind of art you make. i don't think that matters more or less at all. and, like, respectfully, with no malice--i think you have been on tumblr a lot and held onto a lot of ideas about, like. 'irredeemable media', this looks like an ask from the midst of the steven universe discourse wars with the word 'problematic' turned to 'reactionary'.