The man in your pfp used the power of violence to crush fascism and try to fold the sucdems into actual socialists. Didn’t work, sadly.

Carrying on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping

tbf to tolkien, his orcs are very blatantly EuropeanEmpire-coded, sam and tom bombadil are brown skinned, rangers other than aragorn are dark skinned, every evil group other than Sauron/Saruman & loyal minions is said and/or implied to be tricked or forced into the service of sauron with promises that sauron won’t keep–they aren’t portrayed as evil for this, imperialism is explicitly and literally condemned even if for technological advancement / profit (“were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired”), there’s (problematic, but super-progressive for the 50s where even many socialists were telling indigenous peoples they should just assimilate into Canada) ideas of landback for groups dispossessed by the “heroic” nations like Rohan and from very early on we have e.g. Gandalf saying we should feel bad for even his slave-soldiers (still have to fight them tho; can’t kill imperialism with love sadly)

Orcs and Urukhai are the soldiers of the industrial-evil (Sauron) and industrial-market (Saruman) Empires and are portrayed as ontologically evil because they are loyal and relatively willing soldiers of an empire bent on slavery and/or extermination and gleefully carry out this extermination. Their mannerisms in this (“just following orders” “give me your number and i’ll report this”) and mode of laying out their camps (grid based, square buildings) also accord more with a modern euro style military than the “ontologically evil savages” most other fantasy portrays them as.

Orcs and Urukhai are not the conscripts such as e.g. goblins who are explicitly described as wanting to desert and flee back to their holes following the breaking of sauron’s empire. A lot of text implies that the ontologically evil “races” in lotr are the result of the evil empires corrupting regular peoples who may be good or bad (e.g. Treebeard muses that Saruman might have combined Orc and Men somehow–the chapter before Ugluk says Saruman feeds them human flesh so this seems likely, ents are noted to look similar to trolls, and when trees wake up they can explicitly turn out bad rather than good). So rly imo we should look at Orcs/Urukhai in lotr less as “an independent society” and more as “commissioned officers of the british army”, and goblins/trolls more as “conscripted troops in the british army who want to go home but will nonetheless commit attrocities bc of the racist society they’ve been brought up in”

I’m sorry to hear that comrade. I’m in the same boat in my classes (and more depressingly in my communist party group). My mother’s the only masker at her work too. Very shitty feeling

kind of them to send manure to help out the south’s agriculture

mod that makes Isabella white

mod that gives Isabella trousers

What’re you talking about? FMA’03 1. resolves all its plot threads and 2. is anime original, not “overshot the ending” filler. The mangaka herself asked the anime staff to make its own plot; that is why from very early on fma’03 diverges and starts setting up its own plots and themes. The show is better put together in terms of pacing, plot, characters and themes than the manga imo because of the simple advantage it gained by not being written as a serialization

Also fma’03 goes way harder against Amestry’s fascism than brotherhood does so it wins by default edit: like tbh brotherhood

Caroline Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective, Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm is very, very local but a really interesting look at day-to-day functioning of collective farming in the 80s. The more recent edition, sub-subtitled “Marx Went Away–But Karl Stayed Behind” (A reference to the fact that post 1991 the Karl Marx collectives renamed themseves to Karl collectives).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9098764

It’s very, very dry reading (and the goodreads description is right when it calls it ‘dispiriting’), but lets you get a closer look at people who don’t get much attention (other than as vague “the farmers”), and who generally aren’t able to write themselves (and those who do write don’t tend to be representative of those who stay on the farms)

Also there’s some interesting descriptions of how local religions interacted with socialism e.g.

stll masking here

Sorta. It’s very materialist. It treats economics as the foundation of historical development. Interest groups attract people based primarily on material concerns. Classes hence struggle against each other (afaik without scripting) and create alliances with other classes and do revolutions. What its really missing imo is the environmental aspect to be truly ‘marxist’ tho (the 19th century is when concerns about “what happens when we run out of fertiliser/trees/fish/etc” started really growing as a result of unprecedented extractivism, and these are recurring concerns in Capital)

I wonder if it is because with the game becoming less popular again

A lotta the reason people keep talking about marxism in vicky3 is because the devs of vicky3 outright said they uesed some of Marx’s economic theories because it makes for good game design.

Also something something reality has a marxist bias.

Khrushchev? What good has Khrushchev ever done?

-Deng, 1980

tv madoka portrays social democracy and is cringe

movie madoka portrays stalinism and is based

sadly you gotta watch the tv madoka for the film madoka

The most logical extension of this is ofc “If your dick causes you to stumble, chop it off”

43 If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. 45 And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. 47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,

genuinely baffling to me that people professing to believe in something can say and do things so entirely opposite. Like, why even bother with the professed belief at this point its just weird

I hope not

I remember playing Civ IV when I was like 13. I had a nice socialist state set up, everyone was happy and healthy. And then the UN voted for global capitalism and all my cities started starving. I think that played a part in my radicalisation.