seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Italy
seen from Iraq
seen from Russia
seen from South Korea
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from Italy
seen from South Korea
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
are any of the people bandwagoning warriormale actually taking it upon themselves to train and fight, as would be extremely useful and appropriate at the current political juncture, or have we just turned the closest thing the internet has to actual Kamina into another meaningless positivity gimmickÂ
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.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
methed-up-samurai is gonna become the next Shaman King
...there was something else going on here: a radical enchantment of the mundane.  As the creators of the superheroes pitched their nets ever wider in search of fresh and original gimmicks, they touched more and more of the everyday world with childlike wonder dust.  Bees could be special, just as they were in medieval illuminated texts and mysteries.  Boring gym equipment could become the lethal arsenal of the criminal known as Sportsmaster.  A discarded railroad lantern could be a mystic artifact capable of bestowing immense power.  In the world of superheroes.... any person, thing or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil - remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero.  Even a little bee named Michael - named after God's own avenging angel - could pitch in to win the battle against wickedness.
Grant Morrison, Supergods
Understanding was never a matter of just memorizing facts to increase one's knowledge. Â It was something that came from doing, from bashing oneself, until it finally soaked into the bones. Â What neither Artosh nor Azril had ever been able to grasp was the "unknown". Â What it was - was "possibility", surely: the ability to make the impossible possible. Â Something that, as the strong, as ones who never failed, the ones who never lost - was beyond their ability to conceptualize. Â And yet -Â "Living in the guise of the defeated already made me imperfect... I was just... scared."
No Game No Life, vol. 5 (Yuu Kamiya, trans. Daniel Komen) When I distinguish materialism in a Marxist context from fedora tipping, this is what I am distinguishing, btw. No Game No Life in general, and this quote in particular, also directly describe the problematic facing the left right now - understood in its broadest possible sense (i.e., left of fascism). The (far) right is “winning” due to the double advantage of considerable material advantages and a consciousness that totally denies them, dwelling exclusively in its imperfections and losses.  This consciousness, contra Feuerbach, is no less material than simple determinations and its paramount importance in achieving victory in moments of overdetermination is evident in the form of its victories.  Every alt right meme consists of waving this in your face and laughing at your inability to see it.  Â
The left, which also has considerable strengths, is putting up a good fight, but will keep pulling defeat from the jaws of victory (another form) if it continues down its current ideological path towards a spurious “materialism” that represents its victories, and their conditions, as simply determined. Blanket endorsements of political violence, as a principle of necessity rather than an autonomous ethical action, presuppose that reduced to a bare subtraction of quantities of force, the difference will go to the left.  Assuming that military confrontation even in its most brutely mathematical form involves not only addition and subtraction but multiplication (heavy weaponry) and division (organizational disruption, in which urban planners are miles ahead of antifa), this is simply not likely. The left has been decimated materially and organizationally, which is why the right now cheerfully echoes its brash demands for a final rending of all veils and an end to the mediation of social violence. In fact, we have far greater power in those very disadvantages, in the potential for the more complex, mediated and unpredictable strategies that are the prerogative of the slave in Hegelian and Nietzschean dialectics. But that’s a scary power to harness.  It demands the radical immanence of what revolution in fact is - a total leap into the unknown.  Which is always scarier for the side with something to lose, not necessarily the materially immiserated workers as Marx implied - it’s no accident that the most successful practitioners of meme magic right now are 4chan nihilists with nobody to protect.  For those with real lives on the line and no hedge of capital or technology, it will demand the true courage that will make victory - materially - inevitable.
was feeling tempted by left-wing authoritarianism for a hot second while eating a shitty salad and thinking about the situation in the States, and thinking how much even in a liberal context could be accomplished if a left-leaning government was willing to go even Trump-tier authoritarian and the only reason it never happens, however authoritarian the discourse in the public gets, is Capital’s genuinely scared of that in a way it’s not of many things
and then remembered how unlikely it would be to last - in a liberal context or one of full scale regime change.  I mean tankies always sell “actually existing socialism” as the ~realistic~ thing that’s ~demonstrably had an effect~ but it’s demonstrably only ever had an effect that’s been reversed.  of course, once you put all the power of the people in the hands of a single person or a few people or an institution, even if they genuinely and selflessly use it on behalf of the people, it’s trivially easy just to take out that person/institution and then nobody else has any defenses again.  even if they were installed by a popular revolutionary energy, that’s already been diffused or even suppressed by the authoritarian program.  and I know that historically I have no ground to stand on because there is no actually existing socialism any more and there’s never been a libertarian/democratic/horizontal leftist society or achievement that hasn’t been co-opted or suppressed any more than there are left-authoritarians who haven’t been co-opted or subverted or assassinated, but speaking from writer’s intuition it feels like structurally, narratively, there’s a reason the story of Julius Caesar is perennially a tragedy
in fact - I can’t help but wonder if the form of tragedy is necessarily political in a way that speaks to this?  not the “tragic worldview” sense endorsed by conservatives now and in ancient Greece, where tragedy represents the futility of the Best men’s attempts to challenge Gnon as the highest possible hope of human achievement.  that model is disproven aesthetically imo by the mere existence of internally consistent and aesthetically successful genres, not to mention human experience, in which Gnon is challenged successfully - trickster myths, fairy tales, shonen manga.  even in high school I remember noticing how many scenarios I encountered in Shonen Jump were like these classic tragic setups where you insert a comic hero who treats it as a comedy and sabotages the carefully calibrated narrative clockwork.  the genres I listed are always, especially relative to tragedy, the aristocratic genre par excellence, regarded as popular/folk/lower genres. the tragic thesis - that a good king is always laid low by fate or hamartia (though the appetites of a folk hero always eclipse those tiny temptations that inexplicably shatter the fragile plot armor of the tragic king), ending his just rule and plunging his people into the miserable Iron Age in which the play is presented - is solemnly delivered by the representatives of the polis to the assembled citizenry as a demonstration of the power of Gnon even over kings - justifying their failures at the same time as satisfying ressentiment through a nihilistic hypostasis of equality: “Gnon is the great leveller”.  its affective power to sway the audience towards this message derives from a subversive grain of truth revealed by the narrative form: that the king cannot rule justly in the name of the people while being a king - his downfall is made inevitable by the contractual power Gnon holds over kings specifically.  the rules of tragedy acknowledge as much: tragedy can only be written about kings or aristocrats (which democratic Athens still had), and movement conservatism’s Death of a Salesman attempts to retcon it into a mythology of surplus labour inevitably ring hollow. then I realized I was poasting about Fate/Stay Night again.  the Fate route modulates Arthurian tragedy into Ayn Rand into this (with Agamben twisted through everything).  the Randian case for socialism is that egalitarian mutual support - “friendship, effort, victory” - is the only way you avoid the most productive members of your society wasting their energy clawing resentful defectors off their coat-tails forever.  Rand’s entire case for the virtue of selfishness is already predicated on a culturally conditioned appeal to selflessness: good Christian souls, think of the poor rich!  the Nietzschean slave-moralist, conditioned by the selfishness of his masters, thinks of them burning in hell, and laughs.  Shirou’s an obnoxious dick but he’s not wrong about Saber’s self-defeating self-reliance, or about the paradoxical-tautological moral form of the alternative.  Japan, of course, knows what going Galt actually looks like: going NEET.  and then, true, producing the disproportionate bulk of a dynamic generational culture - and sharing it communistically on the internet, or at least in economies radically less hierarchical than the zaibatsu (Comiket).
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.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
just watched Season 2 of American Crime (a middlebrow show that might be a parody of middlebrow shows: it spends so much time commenting specifically on the forms of the thinkpiece, the school assembly, the official statement, and other mass-produced simulacra of feeling or profundity that it’s really weird to watch it reproduce them and elevate its events to Tragedy by the intervention of a literal Greek chorus); was struck by the way it treats the dysfunction of high-status male Sportsball Culture (particularly in the character of the basketball coach, one of the most memorable I’ve ever seen on TV including fucking anime) not as brawn-over-brains animalism (i.e. a failure in the project of white patrician Civilization to be remedied by le Beta Uprising, redpill or nu-male edition), like it’s usually handled in even nonfiction media, but as a particular sentimentalized amorality and figure of the authentic social existing in a weird tsundere relationship with bureaucracy, presented with the same rhetorical and affective register you usually see in media presenting "team spirit” in a positive light, to the point that my parents were saying the coach was a sympathetic character right up to the last couple episodes where the show made really clear that he’s not and it’s only solidified my ideological suspicion towards sports shonen: do all the “sports shonen is the thinking man’s shonen” people ever think about how “Friendship, Effort, Victory” is, in the athletic context, not commenting on/negating anything at a more general level of the social incompatible with that motto, or abstracting itself in some way to address something unrepresentable, but restating without commentary a specific and located set of beliefs that uh enables a lot of rapists tbh I’m hoping this will be the basis of the next big Anime Genre Deconstruction now that Re:Zero has gotten isekai out of the way.  somebody should take the sports shonen tropes and feed them directly though something like American Crime Season 2, not *vindictively* but just to see what happens, what the tropes say about the situation and themselves.  like something where the super earnest lonely misfit main character finds friendship and meaning through sports, and then discovers the rest of the team have been bullying the one friend he had before joining the sports team and covering it up
I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.
Albert Camus was thinking about this quote because I was at a rap show at a punk venue (turns out my language skills are still not good enough to follow posse rap in French) and the DJ was spinning a bunch of Savage Fam between sets, and now I’m kind of torn about whether it’s justifiable to (even non-violently) resist or critique arbitrary retaliatory violence against members of oppressive, esp. colonizing groups (who may or may not be precious to me) again but anyway felt like noting that this quote, as a justification of Camus’ actual position (as I understand it), of support for a moderate solution in which full civil rights for Arab Algerians would be granted by the French colonial state, doesn’t actually work.  it doesn’t lead to his position, and reading it that way confuses the issue to no end the Algerian “terrorists” were actually operating on the exact principles of this quote: defending their mothers and children, their rights and economic prospects, against the “justice” that told them they could only defend them by non-violent, democratic means, by negotiating with nothing at the table with people who didn’t care about them which doesn’t change the contradiction Camus finds himself in w/r/t his mother whose safety disappears in a revolutionary context where any violence is permitted to end the systemic violence of the colonial state!  in fact that contradiction is displaced from the colonized Arab onto Camus in which case if there’s anything to what Camus is saying that can be taken as a paradoxically universal injuncture that we’d feel obligated to take seriously in our own revolutionary considerations (as he seemed to mean it), rather than a sheerly Randian “fuck other people lol” or a stupid analytical “values” compartmentalization, the conclusion should be obvious: if Camus wants to defend his mother before justice, he can’t do so and call it justice, using the institutions of formalized “Justice” no less
like if you’re living in a revolutionary context, congratulations!  you’re living the radical immanentization of this quote!  “if there is someone precious to you, protect them with your life”: that means yours, not a cop’s and not an innocent second-class citizen’s.  you’re responsible for keeping her out of the line of fire, even if you can’t characterize that as justice.  like people without access to “Justice” have always had to do.  idk git gud
A Nevada gym teacher who risked her own life to stop a 14-year-old student who allegedly was shooting his classmates is being called a hero, but Jencie Fagan says any mother would have done the same thing. "I think anybody else would have done it," Fagan told "Good Morning America." "I look at the...
serious arguments are made every single day from every single viewpoint predicated on the belief that this couldn’t happen not even the ones you’re thinking of probably a lot of pacifists wouldn’t admit this could happen; people who dismiss violent revolution regularly also dismiss that this could happen “belief” is not necessarily even the most accurate word
