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The way this is framed it looks like Merry is talking about his plans to blow up the shire.
Mr Frodo a second breakfast has hit the Shire
Love the Marvelfication of fascism.
AI slop aesthetic
The administration is like “well ai steals from artists, so why not just steal the art and use it for propaganda anyway?”
I wished for a long time that the Tolkien estate would go after Palantir, Anduril, etc but they don’t seem interested. I don’t think they necessarily agree with these groups but I think they just like holding on to their massive wealth over paying for expensive lawyers.
Tolkien was by no means a comrade or even progressive really but there is no way even he’d be cool with this shit.
Tolkien wasnt a comrade, but he was extremely opposed to both the british and american empires. He’d hate what these companies have associated his lore with
I hate soy fascism
cottage core fascism actually or maybe ukrainian strain, who the fuck knows.
deleted by creator
Funnier bit: using these companies’ unwillingness to defend their copyrights as a grounds for vacating them.
This is real?😭
did you see the AI generated video that Trump posted of trump wearing a crown flying a jet and shitting on america as he flew?
Lol jesus christ, no I didn’t.
God damn this timeline is unserious.
So…what happened to The Shire when Sauruman took it over? Oh yeah, the industrial revolution!
A tragic but necessary stepping stone to the hobbit peasantry becoming conscious of their class interests and overthrowing their landlords
The Hobbits being the most industrialized guys in Middle Earth has always been kinds funny to me. Everyone else is living in ancient stone halls or thatched roof cottages and they’ve got mechanical clocks and shit like that. They’re like an enclave of Elizabethan ish England while everyone else is pre-battle of Hastings
That’s kinda like writing a fantasy setting where most of the races are living in an equivalent to the early modern period, like telescopes and printing presses are still cutting edge technology, but then there’s one race of chill dudes who live in a tiny village of Khrushchevkas and drives Trabant 601s to the local cinema, which is an awesome concept now that I think about it
It’s mostly cause The Hobbit was originally it’s own lil story and the only Tolkien could get his nerd shit published was as a sequel.
don’t let smooth talker from penthouse command your industrial policy ✍ concerning.
And when Frodo, Merry, Pippin and Sam came back from the war they rallied the kulaks and they lynched and expelled the immigrants based on their racial profile. Then they did a coup, declared fealty to foreign kingdom completely ignoring any local authority. And pushed back Shire from the road of progress into the kulak farmville, which effect was that hobbits “faded” and disappeared later.
They (Merry and Pippin, the sons of the aristocratic Tooks and Brandybucks) actually rallied the poor farmers (e.g. the Gamgees and the Cottons) and the middle farmers (e.g. the Maggots) against the kulaks (whatshisface from the southfarthing and the Sackville-Baginses) backed by an invading industrial power (Saruman)
Any “coup” was really the traditional authorities being restored to power by a lower and middle peasant uprising bc it is a fairy tale written by a medievalist who wishes capitalism and industrialism never came about. Principally bc tolkien hated the destruction both have wrought on the natural world and on humans. (And to his credit, he was consistent enough in his hatred for modernity to oppose the whole british imperial project, despise the spread of the english language, refer to british soldiers as orcs, and in The Hobbit imply modern europeans are goblins.)
Idk what you mean by lynching, the book is very explicit that the only deaths were in the battle (+Grima and Saruman), that all who surrendered were let go and that Frodo is constantly trying to get the hobbits to be LESS violent
The Hobbits faded bc hobbits dont exist in 1900s and Tolkien is writing a fairy tale that takes place in the past. Also the “progressive” rule of Saruman was literally an ecocidal human supremacist dictatorship where the only growth industries were policing and exports to the imperial core down south (which, quite explicitly, does not happen under Aragorns kingdom)
Also to reply to your other comment here, the Gamgees arent “slaves”, as Sam’s father recalls (literally the first conversation in the book!) it is a job he got via family connections. In the Shire, gardening is skilled labour. Hamfast is literally called “Master Hamfast” by Bilbo and respected by all for his knowledge of gardening.
Lastly wrt your point about the aristocratic families having power, the books are actually quite explicit that those families have no real coercive power (the only military the shire has is the entire shire raised, there is no coercive apparatus separate from the whole people). In all but aesthetics (which, bc of the hobbit, are locked into a weird mix of neolithic britain and 1870s england), the hobbits are a tribal society only shortly removed from primitive communism / kinship economy
They (Merry and Pippin, the sons of the aristocratic Tooks and Brandybucks) actually rallied the poor farmers (e.g. the Gamgees and the Cottons) and the middle farmers (e.g. the Maggots) against the kulaks (whatshisface from the southfarthing and the Sackville-Baginses)
They rallied their family clients against the class traitors.
Any “coup” was really the traditional authorities being restored to power by a lower and middle peasant uprising bc it is a fairy tale written by a medievalist who wishes capitalism and industrialism never came about.
We were certainly told it was like that, coincidentally in PoV of the instigators. And by “coup” i mean declaring fealty to Reunited Kindgom which i imagine wouldn’t be very popular since hobbits were pretty xenophobic, again it’s the kulaks and their clients.
Idk what you mean by lynching, the book is very explicit that the only deaths were in the battle (+Grima and Saruman), that all who surrendered were let go and that Frodo is constantly trying to get the hobbits to be LESS violent
That’s a literal good tsar syndrome plus swerve, Frodo remains stellar exemplar, his henchmen less so, but the evil dudes are conveniently dying by their own hands or in legit battle.
The Hobbits faded bc hobbits dont exist in 1900s and Tolkien is writing a fairy tale that takes place in the past.
Yes yes just as orcs, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. This is the age of men! Even fucking Howard written this trope better.
Also the “progressive” rule of Saruman was literally an ecocidal human supremacist dictatorship
Swerve
Also to reply to your other comment here, the Gamgees arent “slaves”, as Sam’s father recalls (literally the first conversation in the book!) it is a job he got via family connections.
The family connections of being a serf lol
Lastly wrt your point about the aristocratic families having power, the books are actually quite explicit that those families have no real coercive power (the only military the shire has is the entire shire raised, there is no coercive apparatus separate from the whole people). In all but aesthetics (which, bc of the hobbit, are locked into a weird mix of neolithic britain and 1870s england), the hobbits are a tribal society only shortly removed from primitive communism / kinship economy
Yes because obviously the bucolic idyll portrayed in the book is completely divorced from any material reality.
I get that you take the book on the face value, but i would greatly appreciate that you start your wall of text from that.
I get that you take the book on the face value, but i would greatly appreciate that you start your wall of text from that.
And evidently the extent of your engagement with the book is “the opposite of what the book says must be true” and “the fantastic neolithic shire must fit into the square peg of the rural class structure of the 1920s USSR” which is the laziest possible critique. Like if you’re gonna say “the book is lies (except for what I think is true) and what I say is really what happened in it” just go write ur own fanfic lol
Or yknow, go study history before 1300 instead of mechanically shoving all societies into the same square bourgeois hole
They rallied their family clients against the class traitors.
The wealthy farmers supported by saruman are hardly class-traitors; they are supporting their wealthy class interests against the interests of the poorer farmers
We were certainly told it was like that, coincidentally in PoV of the instigators. And by “coup” i mean declaring fealty to Reunited Kindgom which i imagine wouldn’t be very popular since hobbits were pretty xenophobic, again it’s the kulaks and their clients.
The real coup was Lotho’s takeover and then Saruman’s takeover from him. Fealty to the reunited kingdom is one of the parts of the book i’m not fond of, but again that isn’t a coup, that is the results of a mass peasant uprising against a coup. And you’ve gone within these two sentences from “the book is unreliable we can’t trust it” to “the book says hobbits are xenophobic so this must be true.”
That’s a literal good tsar syndrome plus swerve, Frodo remains stellar exemplar, his henchmen less so, but the evil dudes are conveniently dying by their own hands or in legit battle.
Idk what ‘good tsar syndrome’ or ‘swerve’ mean. Frodo has no henchmen. Saruman dying by wormtongue’s hand is convenient, but then wormtongue is killed by all the hobbits nearby (against frodo’s will, so much for henchmen). Idk why you take issue with the idea that the enemy survivors of the battle were let go? That’s pretty common in battle, especially before the intensification of warfare that happens with the rise of the state and bourgeois society.
Yes yes just as orcs, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. This is the age of men! Even fucking Howard written this trope better.
Idk who Howard is or why you think he’s written it better. Tolkien, for his part, doesn’t portray this as an unambiguously good thing (see e.g. how quickly aragorns kingdom falls into typical feudalism in the appendix as an example), but again he is locked into this ending by his own premise of “the story takes place in the prehistoric past.”
Swerve
Still don’t know what swerve means, saruman still sucks and evidently is no more historically progressive than british rule in india; the hobbits native productive forces were destroyed and confiscated to maximise exports to the imperial core
The family connections of being a serf lol
No one had a more attentive audience than old Ham Gamgee, commonly known as the Gaffer. He held forth at The Ivy Bush, a small inn on the Bywater road; and he spoke with some authority, for he had tended the garden at Bag End for forty years, and had helped old Holman in the same job before that. Now that he was himself growing old and stiff in the joints, the job was mainly carried on by his youngest son, Sam Gamgee. … ‘I know nothing about jools. Mr. Bilbo is free with his money, and there seems no lack of it; but I know of no tunnel-making. I saw Mr. Bilbo when he came back, a matter of sixty years ago, when I was a lad. I’d not long come ***prentice ***to old Holman (him being my dad’s cousin), but he had me up at Bag End helping him to keep folks from trampling and trapessing all over the garden while the sale was on.
It’s clearly referred to as a job with an apprenticeship and there’s no indication of serfdom or slavery. Again, you are transplanting economic categories from one time and place to another instead of engaging with the text. There are issues with the shire (it is in the beginning stages of forming class society), but there’s no indication that slavery or serfdom is one of them (until, yknow, saruman comes around lol)
Yes because obviously the bucolic idyll portrayed in the book is completely divorced from any material reality.
Not really. The 1870s stuff (umbrellas, rsvp letters, post offices, money) is where it’s divorced from material reality, but the social system (aristocracy without coercive powers), agrarian focus, familial landownership, lack of industry, etc are all fairly decent representations of agrarian tribal societies as they start to differentiate from primitive communism (as you can see in, yknow, Engels or more recent anthropological or historical investigations)
saruman reads like “brought railroads to uncivilized people”, so he is spiritually british, enslaving local peasant society. (although economics of hobbiton doesn’t make goddamn sense anyway, samwise is hereditary gardener/butler)
Saruman is 100% spiritually british and imo we should applaud tolkien for rejecting (both in lotr and in his letters) the propaganda of britain/imperial powers having the right to rule the colonies to spread civilisation
Samwise isnt a hereditary gardener (see my reply to polandisastateofmind), but hereditary professions are actually pretty common historically
although economics of hobbiton doesn’t make goddamn sense anyway, samwise is hereditary gardener/butler
We weren’t shown really much, but it does make sense, Bilbo and Frodo are local gentry kulaks that did not worked a day in their lives, but we weren’t show people who labour for them, except Sam who is literally a house slave. Merry and Pippin were failsons of the kulak clans who each fatten up on a good portion of Shire. Between the names of Baggins, Took and Brandybuck they had so much power in Shire that they did whatever they wanted there.
but kulaks imply they produce something with local impoverished peasantry, they don’t even do that? they sit pretty in their home and buy food on local market (presumably, garden seems decorative), don’t collect rent, don’t do import export business on local psychoactive substances so ??
We don’t see them doing so in books, but to live like that someone must have laboured for them. Also kulaks were diverse groups, there were small time tyrants making life miserable for few agri labourers and there were landlords who did nothing except buying land and collecting rent (and all between). Not to mention books, especially adventure ones do seem to skim on mundane everyday lives of characters.
The shire is a confusing place where the logic makes no sense bc most of its lore was established before tolkien knew his satire of modern rural english polite society would be going into his fairy tale.
In lotr he tries to salvage it a bit with the chapters showing the shire outside of hobbiton, and the whole very clearly premodern social systems, but that just makes the rural victorian aesthetics (rsvp letters! umbrellas!) stand out more and beg for explanation.
Wow I can’t imagine why reactionaries keep latching onto this fantasy series about the Men of the West uniting under a rightful monarch to wage justified war against a corrupt and evil race, written by a man who supported Francisco Franco
No I really cant imagine how the series about short brown farmers (read the description of hobbits in ch1 of the hobbit!) help create a multispecies coalition to destroy the armies of industrial europe before they do more ecocide and genocide gets latched onto by reactionaries
Like ffs in the hobbit its suggested that modern society is goblin society! This is right before the down to goblin town song everyone knows!!! In lotr, orcs do the whole modern european army thing with numbers, reports, orders, etc, and everyone just latches onto the whip song from the movie and the (reactionary) descriptions and depictions of their appearance.
Also afaik the support for franco thing ammounts to one letter where he is upset about anticlericalism. Reactionary yes, but if we’re basing his views on his letters he spends far more time complaining about the british and american empires than any other (and suggests the soviets to be better than either),
Peter Jackson did a lot of the damage here. That and the extended mythology being spread across the silmarillion and like 12 other super long books of drafts and notes and letters etc. However, the first and second age both show that these Men Of the West kinda fucking suck. Even prior to Sauron getting involved the Numenoreans were brutal colonists, displacing people and then absolutely devastating the area via resource extraction, mostly to build more ships to do more colonizing. The people they fucked over were even technically on the same level as them in their own invented race hierarchy. A decent amount of the elves also fucking suck and based on the very sparse physical descriptions they dont look nearly as aryan as the movies and generally dont view themselves as our superiors with a few notable exceptions. Orcs are corrupted but not inherently evil, they’re basically slaves to whatever dark lord is going on at the time and are killed on site by most other people, Tolkien struggled with this himself but for the first age youre more or less under the literal control of an evil god and then for the next 30 000 years or so every non orc has been out to kill you, it makes prettt good sense to me the feeling would be mutual by now. My dude Ghan-Bury-Ghan in Return of the King talks about how the people of Rohan hunt his people. The dwarves generally come off okay, but the elves were mostly assholes until the 2nd age where there bullshit had almost destroyed the earth and they decided to chill a little, the Numenoreans were pricks and the Dunedain inherited their colonies. Supporting Franco is still fucking bad but like any other comment Tolkien ever made on contemporary issues, he’s an incoherent dumbass. Dude was an anarcho monarchist.
I do want to add that Tolkien supported Franco and his depiction of the “eastern” people was basically just orientalist racism.
The regions of the east that helped out Sauron were Numenorean colonies. The ruler of one of em became a Nazgul. The writing itself, due to not doing much physical descriptions, also avoids a lot of orientalist tropes that the movies go head on into, which could be influencing your view.
“It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace - all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind” - Two Towes, Book 2, Chapter 4
The regions of the east that helped out Sauron were Numenorean colonies.
Umbar was, Khand was not but it was iirc ruled by nazgul, Easterlings and Haradrims actually had a very good reasons to ally with Sauron because every time Gondor had a good period, it invaded them. Also depictions of Haradrim iconography suggest it was just one faction out of that huge land.
feds resorting to ragebaiting for impressions is not a good look. facebook meme page-tier ass government ahahaha
when its our turn, we will not apologize for the dunking
Whats up with you people optimistically hoping for the profit seeking owners of your favorite media to stand up to the government. They wont do it stop looking for heroes in profit based enterprises.
tolkien estate is very funny grumpy one about their rights, dicking amazon on silmarillion rights. and is anchored in petit-bourgeois morality, if anything. + i think it would be funny.
(p.s. you should of course, pirate 80gb anniversary edition and learn how relaxed labor rights in new zealand are actually based compared to woke la, allowing 14h workdays)
p.p.s but now that i think about it, it’s probably movie rights, which has folded to warner? or amazon? so grumpy estate couldn’t even it wanted to :(
I don’t think you can really sue the government for copyright infringement can you? I’m pretty sure sovereign immunity means they’d have to consent to being sued.
So basically they can use all this stuff for promoting their little reactionary militia stuff all they want. In fact there was never anything stopping them from plastering Mickey Mouse over like government ads for how great social services and SNAP are (except the fact they’d never cross precious property rights for the sake of the poor workers).
So at most these companies could sue and then complain when the government declines to hear it which would get fash frothing mad and declare the brand/IP/universe “woke” but little else. That and probably get the government to try and investigate them for any badly filed paperwork.
hypothetically speaking
-they should do it only for precedent, because if the government wins it - the state can make drugs for free, disregarding ip as well. i don’t think usa government before had flagrantly disregarded ip laws, they usually do backroom dealios. (like brand damages are obvious, government necessity - very much less so)
-ice is not sovereign in itself, it’s a branch of government, they could sue individual posting it or chain of command
obviously it’s all implying there is good faith to be found anywhere and desire to do stuff to spite the righties, instead of a search for profits.
they should do it only for precedent,
The precedent exists. The federal government has sovereign immunity from most claims. Though I’m not a lawyer and it seems a little confusing it seems they’ve only waived immunity for patent suits (for example the government starts churning out iPhones, Apple could sue them but the remedies are limited to Apple being given damages equal to the lost revenue of those products and they must go through a special court).
ice is not sovereign in itself, it’s a branch of government, they could sue individual posting it or chain of command
No, not so far as I know. Government is not a magical entity kept locked up in the basement of the capital with writhing tentacles. Government is made of people. Those people are acting as part of the government not as individuals unless you can prove otherwise (in this case it’s an official government account, if they posted on their person account not for government business you might have an argument though they’d argue back they were using it for government business that time and likely get the benefit of the doubt, best you could hope for). While acting for the government they are not legally a human being named say J D Vance, they are the US government legally speaking as an entity under the law. You could try and challenge that but in this case you’d lose very quickly as this is obviously a government act. We can disagree the government should be doing anything in the realm of this type of thing but they are.
Sovereign immunity would be worthless if you could just go after whoever carried out things and terrorized them all into not doing a thing by directly hitting them with lawsuits and stress. In fact this goes as far as the government at the federal level extending immunity to contractors carrying out government contracts where the government under the law steps in the way of potential suits as concerning their government contracts and work done for that and you must sue them not the contractor, they get in the way.
They could probably try and abuse the DMCA take-down system, especially automated ones to try and knock these offline though the government might appeal and threaten them into getting it back online in this case and DMCA technically has a penalty for filing false claims, not something your average person could ever hope to use in retribution but the US government certainly could though one might argue they’d lose because the take-down was good faith, it was infringing.
Who made Q the shitposter of DHS?
