The way things usually go, if there was no campaigning, Israel gets a lower credit rating and local governments would be looking to give Israel more money just to support our greatest ally.

Sorry, sweetie, looks like we’re privatizing the local library so Israel can get more interceptors that don’t work!

100% agree and I like to think that way about the art too, but I guess where I still take issue with it is that it makes people ask the wrong questions. In some ways, you provided the right answers to those questions, but I don’t know that people are generally gonna arrive at those same conclusions, more likely they’re gonna get stuck in the reactionary sort of framing. We only arrived at the right answers because we already have the ideology.

If anything, I feel like I prefer cyberpunk as an aesthetic, because the questions it makes people ask are questions that naturally lead them to better conclusions even if they aren’t equipped with ideology yet. Where solarpunk makes people wonder about how they’re gonna live like they’re running back Manifest Destiny in the future, cyberpunk makes them wonder how they’re gonna resist surveillance technology.

Yeah I see it the same way too, but the reason I take so much issue with it (and I’ve even spoken about it here before IIRC) is that it’s exceedingly common for all sorts of reactionary and ahistorical ideologies to fester when people start fantasizing about going back to primitive societies or some other form of pre-modern life.

Yeah, the game is divided into stages that more or less reset certain kinds of progression and give you completely different win conditions and goals. Beyond stopping snowballing, it also structures the game more so you aren’t coasting without much purpose like what sometimes happens in other civ games.

Most Americans, don’t know the difference nor do they care.

I would pay so much money to hear them actually define the terms and the difference, with the condition that I get paid back with interest if they just unironically do the Richard Wolff “socialism is when the government does stuff; when the government does a whole lot of stuff, that’s communism.”

I think I generally have more fun in the last 35% of a Civ game than a Stellaris game. Also, I only played one Civ 7 game, but it felt a lot more interesting in the endgame than Civ 6.

I think to that point, if we want to figure out how you get from solarpunk to fascism, you need to consider what it implies by its analysis (or lack thereof) of the actual material reality that’s necessary to make the solarpunk vision come true and how that analysis/blind spots coincide with ecofascism.

What’s going on that made dilapidated buildings get overrun by plantlife? Is it massive depopulation? Are we idealizing that?

What’s the whole idea about self sufficient communities using technology to live in some kind of frontier? Is this class-conscious, or is it just repackaging settler mythology about frontiersmen and Lebensraum?

And maybe the problem with it “just” being an aesthetic is that it leaves the audience to fill in the blanks for those questions, and I think the default answers aren’t great.

I remember watching What We do in the Shadows with my friends. They make this kind of joke like 50 times and I kept finding them extremely funny, but my friends did not, which was awkward.

I donated 17 dollars less than you!

Not if they exterminate enough Palestinians to make them a small enough minority first. That’s how settler colonialism went in America, make the indigenous population small enough that giving them “equal rights” on paper is no longer a threat. So I honestly believe, if the current struggle for the end of the Zionist entity is not successful, the next generation of liberal Zionists might get to implement equal voting rights for the remaining Palestinians and have it still work out in the settlers’ favor. That’s the nature of the good cop/bad cop routine.

Bernie “the power” Sanders being asked about giving Palestinians equal rights and citizenship: “… that would be the end of the state of Israel, and I support Israel’s right to exist”

Not European. They stand in unwavering solidarity with Canada, which is a monarchy.

I think the canonical way to make this meme would be to put racial caricatures on the left, then the soyjak reacting to them with the speech bubble saying “my food supply!!” then the chad wojak with hate symbol tattoo saying something else, like “I don’t know how to square the contradictions here but maybe Epstein was just a lonely guy? Oh wait wrong culture war”

Will MAGA have a lesser evilism struggle session? Will they have :vote: shaming?

Every time I take off my shoes, even as a guy who washes his feet, I get a bit of their smell. If I didn’t wash them for several weeks it would be worse. Ergo, those who wear shoes and don’t wanna smell their foot stink every time they take them off ought to wash their feet.

Incredible tech for nonbinary inclusivity: scare quotes around gendered terms.

In the interest of keeping the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising alive through our agitprop, I wanna raise a question that maybe some here might be qualified to answer:

When drawing the parallels between Al-Aqsa Flood and the Warsaw Guetto Uprising, there’s a common Zionist retort that I’ve struggled to really give a strong response to. It goes, “You can’t compare the October 7th attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto revolt because in the case of the Warsaw Guetto, the Jewish resistance only struck back against Nazis, not German civilians, while Hamas killed hundreds of civilians in October 7th”

Now, my kneejerk reaction is some combination of the following:

• Hamas planned the Al-Aqsa flood for at least several months, by themselves, and could not have known that they were going to come into contact with the Nova festival in their operation; more likely, they were just targeting the occupation base nearby.
• Settlers aren’t non-combatants
• To this day we still don’t know of the claimed 1200 dead in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation how many were killed by Hamas and how many were killed by Israel, how many were active IOF or civilians (keep in mind, Hamas successfully destroyed several military checkpoints on Oct 7th, and obviously had to break through the wall around Gaza to facilitate the operation, so it’s certain that Israel took many military casualties).

But I feel like all these arguments a bit weak and lacking. Particularly, I don’t recall ever seeing Palestinian intellectuals ever arguing these points in response to that kind of argument, and I generally like to follow in their leads. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Thank you, CorrectOnTheInternet.

I’m as upset as anyone about the state of the world, but I’m a functional adult capable of expressing myself without every second comment being “guillotines, Luigi, violence, violence , revolution!”.

I’m so mature and emotionally intelligent that when my news feed has been nothing but reports of hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, and apartment buildings being bombed for 20 months with no end in sight, I have no reaction. Those who react with vitriol and a productive sense of righteous indignation are not functional adults.