Bluegrass_Buddhist

joined 4 years ago
 

Tomorrow not paying back student loans actually means something again. I don't wanna go back to paying again but I'm not sure the ratio of debt strikers to student debt collector mafias is in our favor

[–] Bluegrass_Buddhist@hexbear.net 29 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

When European, at first Christian and then secular colonial powers run rampant over your culture and people for 100+ years, and demonize your local majority religion as barbaric for almost as long, practicing that religion becomes an act of anti-colonial resistance in and of itself. A way of rejecting outsiders' attempts to define "correct" beliefs and morality on their own terms.

Then there's also the element of practicality. At least in Palestine and Lebanon, a lot of the secular leftist anti-colonial movements have been hollowed out, smothered and/or discredited over the past several decades, leaving more religious groups like Hamas and Hezb Allah as really the only resistance-capable game in town.

Also also, there's a social element to it. Class differences can sometimes feel abstract, and religion, like race or narionality, offers a way to cut through that abstraction. A clear way of differentiating colonized in-group from colonizer out-group.

[–] Bluegrass_Buddhist@hexbear.net 12 points 2 years ago

I'm back because liberal twitterati have been annoying me lately and I need to kvetch about it

Boss said I'm fired if I pop off on twitter again boowomp

Critical support to Tennessean used car salesmen with brains so fried by Qanon they're stumbling backwards into opposing Bill Gates geo-engineering bullshit

[–] Bluegrass_Buddhist@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Suddenly flashing back to that one dialogue where a human woman is desperately trying to get her mixed human/asari daughter out of a warzone and the galactic beuracrat she's speaking to initially won't do anything until the woman gives an emotional Sorkin speech that changes the beuracrat's mind.

 

where an impoverished young woman is trying to sell herself into slavery and the game presents the most ethical outcome as helping her negotiate a better contract for her indentured servitude?

Looking back those games were Fukuyama'd as shit, jfc

[–] Bluegrass_Buddhist@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Very interesting. Are there any works you'd recommend that talk more about this? Besides the one @Wertheimer recommended, that is.

[–] Bluegrass_Buddhist@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Didn't Hellenistic era Greeks have their own internal ethnic chauvanism going on though? Like Ionians didn't like Dorians who didn't like Magnetes or whatever?

 

I tend to rankle when people compare the colonialism of the last few centuries with the pre-capitalist expansion and settlement of ancient societies. It seems like there's a lot of daylight between the English founding Jamestown and ancient Ionians founding Massalia or w/e.

But what do Hexbear's historians think? Is it fundamentally the same social phenomenon across time or is capitalist settler-colonialism its own unique thing?

The problems of 2014, of 1992, of 1979, of 1968, of 1963, of 1955...

[–] Bluegrass_Buddhist@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago (2 children)

A good handful of mostly Black, leftist organizers have "mysteriously" died since Ferguson way back in 2014. Same as it ever was.

 

On the one hand, we're seeing the consent manufactury kick into overdrive and a lot of state department goblins seem to be absolutely itching for a fresh round of meddling. Cuba as a client state would open the door to all manner of renewed imperial nightmares in the carribean and South America.

On the other hand, it feels like most people's reception of the situation outside of dedicated chuds and Floridians (but I repeat myself) is muted, and I've already seen a few small anti-intervention protests pop up. After two decades of war, with a domestic civil society whose coherency is hanging by a thread and a global presence that is increasingly challenged, I feel like a flubbed regime change effort there would be the true beginning of the end for the U.S.' empire.

If this is a dumb-dumb take, please don't hesitate to tell me so.

 

Seiously, any place that it's easy to get a work visa for; doing anything. I just want out of this violent, racist rotting corpse of a country.