communism will prevail ☭

If I become someone else after this, believe me, it wasn’t by accident. And I don’t mean my soul will change, but the way I’m perceived will go through changes. - Apotheosis, by Kai Straw

This is not a memoir or a biography, but it is a manifesto in the same neo-tradition of how George M. Johnson made their work All Boys Aren’t Blue as a memoir-manifesto. It is a guide, in a way I hope the people who need it will understand. This is focused in part on individual growth, but do not see this as an individualist creed - change will not come by the power and ability of any single person, but by many individuals who have found their strength contributing one or two specialties to the collective. 

We live in a time where our power, autonomy, identities, our realities are being stripped for parts—for those most marginalized and those further crushed by the gears of the machinery of empire, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. You cannot keep sitting idle, stagnant, waiting for something to happen. You, reading this, have to be the one to make it happen. I’m sorry, but we cannot keep waiting on someone else to do the work of saving us, because someone must be the one to start moving. 

This is urgent yes, but at the same time we must not rush, for forcing us to rush unprepared into the work we must do is a tool of white supremacy to ensure nothing can successfully undo it. You have to find others like you and learn how to grow together. You can no longer give in to isolation and stagnancy because you aren’t sure any of what comes next will be safe. It will not be safe. Change, especially for the better, is never safe for people like us—at best we will see our efforts come to fruition, at worst, well, “You already dead, asshole. At least die a sacrifice for something worthwhile.”

We must choose the path of uncertainty, because I would rather my life mean that eventually they cannot lay hands on a single other Black, trans, disabled, woman’s body after mine. We all know that there is much more that we can and should be doing beyond watching and pretending there’s nothing we can do, that our circumstances hold us back from doing something. There is always Work to be done, that some are already doing and that some want to do but need someone to take the first step, and not all Work is physical, monetary, or constant. 

This is a tool to help you reach a place where you have the willpower and focus to take on that Work and step into a more collective role, whether you view this work solely in a spiritual or material sense, or as a combined concept. You must look at yourself and take that first step.

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??

My bestie told me people are calling him Palantir Parker right now on Twitter cuz of the movie.