plov_mix [comrade/them]

The scary part is the combination of declining education and the increasing illusion that all knowledge is available a mere click away. Prefect recipe for media saturation & propaganda

I typically only watch the first half of each episode, precisely for the bullying.

I don’t need the wholesomeness of class reconciliation in the second halves. (“CANT YOU SEE, BOSS, THAT WE CAAARRRRREEEE ABOUT YOUUU?!”).

It looks like the US hegemony is getting only stronger, not weaker, no matter what it does.

“If Heaven wants someone to perish, it’d first make them go unhinged,” actual Chinese proverb (天欲其亡必欲其狂)

ancient Chinese heaven didn’t take nukes into account

I used to have no idea why so many “rad” academics love their Arendt. Now I do.

ABBA = are bad bureaucracies all?

Idk let’s do this with the military, I’ll just cancel my subscription and surrender whenever there’s a war, yeah?

I’m too chicken to be out, so I actually tell people I’m a libertarian when they ask about my politics, mostly cuz (1) they’d hopefully get annoyed/cringed and stop the convo, or (2) if they do ask why the fuck I am a libertarian, id say I believe in the freedom from exploitation, from alienation, from slavery, from commodification, from colonialism, from imperialism, from bourgeois ideology, from false consciousness, etc, and, you know, in the American political calculus, freedom = libertarian.

Speaking from experience. I realized I was gay in high school in China and nobody around me from my teachers and classmates to my parents and extended family gave me any trouble — except the grand narrative on everyone’s mind was that, because I am gay, my future lay completely with the west, mostly cuz of this “western value” idea Chen seems to subscribe to. It was a big factor why I so eagerly moved the US and became an absolutely cringe Eurocentric lib till recently.

There’s perhaps something to be said about how queer people in non-western worlds might be assumed/pushed to identify with the western capitalist world that has middle-class-washed and hijacked the lgbt liberation movements. But this line of thought is always too close to home for me to rationally think about

French aristocrat knights, c. 14th century: “how dare these English peasants shoot me with longbows!!! Where’s their chivalry!!!”

(Actual military history may vary)