Another important thing to note besides what has been said is that this is on US national news with regular updates. We had another high profile case in Massachusetts a few years back (Karen Read) and all this true crime spectacle seems to boil down to misogyny. Chuds and libs rally behind the cops and institutions of punishment, missing the point. These should have never been spectacles, but they demonstrated the corruption of the MA state police and general social evil of suburbia respectively. Their reveling itself is a symptom. The true crime pods and boomers watching evening dose of events in 90s Russia on the news are all symptoms.

An all time article. When we start from “people are propagandized” rather than “propaganda reinforces people’s conceptions of their material interests,” we excuse lazy thinking. Debunking some lie about 80s hairstyles being the only legal ones because some dipshit western tourist saw a salon poster they couldn’t read isn’t the point. In the end they excuse bombing the north back to the stone age and using economic warfare to try and keep them there. because it protects their mode of living.

Americans seeing people use public transportation:

Americans getting in their 2027 Ford F150 and promptly moving down 5 children 2 bicycles and a small car (they couldn’t see any of it) to get to mcdonald burger to make an offering to the cattle rancher who just sent a death squad to exterminate some indigenous peasants in the amazon, burning an entire saudi oil field’s worth of gas in the process:

I have a US American Mark Twain collection from the 60s. The foreword mentions his popularity in the contemporary USSR. Rural themes and a satire of feudalism (A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) were culturally resonant, and he had millions of books circulating in dozens of languages there. That would have been my thought. But of course the anthology writer has to follow the publisher’s line, where Russian and Soviet reading culture actually shows their desire for American freedom. And matter of factly sweeps away any relevance of Twain’s most famous work to modern American racism.

I appreciate your travelogue translations

Rancher mindset

I think it’s more downwardly mobile vs upwardly mobile white people in comparing us to the lib instance. Intuition from posting and recent struggle sessions here

Did Der Stürmer make the third cartoon???

If only they’d gone to college

I love how car centric it is. God bless, America. God bless.

cultural despair and anomie in every regard alongside a willingness to do class and imperial collaborationism. deadly combination for all in the long run.

While we obviously live in a world saturated with capitalist ideological products, books need a sort of internal consistency that lets you critique things in a way other mediums (like conversation) can’t. I don’t know if that makes sense. There’s more (dis)honesty to it and that’s interesting

this must have been what reading western media during the cold war was like. russian nationalist chud publishes book about gulag and hating jews, corporate press, intelligence agencies, and academia pick up on it, pop history starts citing it, official history starts citing it through obfuscation.

I love these kinds of books. I’ve convinced myself I’m reading them for a personal research project, but in all honesty, it’s for the love of the game. Has to be fiction sorts of things though. One Billion Americans broke me.

It can’t be about the Iranian people getting bombed, they’re just third world Arabs (?). It has to be about me and the pedophile elite in my country

Follow the white rabbit!

I think it’s saying anything made in that province should be boycotted which is just Cold War 2.0 bs

Too many teeth

Agreed, that’s why it seems to be just NGOs NGOing while people outside of that world do meaningful stuff.

My belief is that the conditions of the US will either make you a (sub)urbanite who wants an escape, or someone an hour drive from civilization who wants an escape. It’s either getting screwed by HCOL or no jobs. Our absurd land use and social norms, resulting from an absolutely topsy turvy economic system, makes life incomplete generally.