[this is not meant in a contentious way. Just my musing]

Wasn’t the first movie also reactionary?

Or rather… It shone a sympathetic light on reactionaries. A sort of “this is why they are how they are” thing. Putting aside Joker/Arthur’s mental illness, any person tormented long enough with no hope of a better future could “snap” and go down a route like he did. The mental illness almost seems irrelevant or just an additional angle for society to attack him and drive him faster off the cliff.

But even though we see the movie through his eyes, and we are made to feel sympathy for him or others like him, in the real world we still (should?) know that “yeah, everyone who does shitty things has a reason. We don’t have to accept their reasons.”

But all of that said, I still enjoyed the first movie. It has a satisfying ending because while Arthur turns into objectively a “bad guy” and a murderer… the people he murders that we see make you go “meh 🤷‍♂️ let them fight.”

Pretty sure the movie has been compared to Taxi Driver . It gave me that vibe anyway. Guy with clearly untreated or not treated enough mental illness, a loner, rejected by society, loses his mind to a degree and hyper fixates on a popular person as a target for assassination. Obviously the stories are not the same. The vibes and overall arcs are similar. And both lend sympathy, or an explanation?, for reactionary mindset and violent behaviors.

I just don’t think any of this matters ultimately. “Culture is downstream of politics.” US politics are extremely reactionary across the board and it’s represented in our media. Libs/dumbasses (same thing) latch onto the media and hugely wrongly think the media influences the culture. Sometimes, rarely, maybe. But it’s almost always the other way around. This is something right wingers obsess over too. They think people are gay because, I dunno, a gay character was in Beauty and the Beast. They can’t comprehend that gay people always existed and there was a gay character because only at that point in time had the US culture, broadly, become accepting enough to allow a gay character to be depicted in a children’s show.

Of course the reverse argument for media changing politics would be propaganda, but that’s a bit of a different, although adjacent subject. I’m more speaking to clearly non-propagandistic pieces (like Taxi Driver, Joker, Beauty and the Beast). Right wingers would make the (wrong, objectively, imo) argument that like “all of Hollywood, etc. movies are propaganda meant to warp the minds of the youth to make them gay libbed up…” blah blah blah. That’s the weird cope conspiracy theory they have come up with, and stuck with, for decades to explain why gay people are more accepted in society, women have (well… until recently… yikes…) more and more autonomy, non-white people are represented, you know, insert whatever pisses off the WASP-types. They said it’s because of the woke movies and shows from (depending how far gone their brains are…) Hollywood (or “the Jews!” in Hollywood if they’re fully gone down the Nazi hole).

The libs already are fully ok to actively encourage or aid in shooting activists. The pro-Palestine movements in the US have shown that. If it means they can go back to sipping extra sugary lattes in peace, they’ll happily plug their ears for a moment while cops unload “less than lethal” shotgun rounds into college students and arrest all of them. I don’t think even 100 reactionary movies with Lady Gah-Gah! (trump voice) would matter. It sucks, but, I dunno. It just sucks.

Well… I can’t argue with that. Cold hard genocidal logic

If right wingers could read

This is the type of argument they’d use to get rid of pronouns

I like to use the analogy (not sure if I made this up or stole it. Oh well) that we’re all in a giant swirling body of water like a tub when you pull the plug at the bottom.

Those on the outside swirl at a slower-feeling rate, the black hole of death is far off and easily pushed from mind

Those nearest the black hole just saw their buddies get sucked in and under.

The ultra wealthy capitalists found out a long time ago that if you simply convince the guys in the middle and outside that they’re actually all in the same tub with them so if you “harm” the capitalists that harm will trickle down causing harm to all. Those who feel safe can see the black hole and fear nothing more than inching closer to being that poor fucker swirling the drain. They cope and willingly believe the clear lies.

The part they can’t accept is that the capitalists aren’t even in the swirling death bath. They control the tub. They pulled the plug. They created this whole made up fucking thing. So if all the people swirling just sort of banded together, accepted the tub is fictional, and uh, very kindly dealt with the capitalists, they could build an entirely new thing where no one has to swirl and die.

I should adapt this into a children’s book to compete with those batshit insane ones Rush Limbaugh used to put out (lol, dead)

Alternatively, crabs in a bucket, etc.

I largely agree with the sentiment, but as the saying goes “someone’s gotta do it.” And someone is doing it. I was just tossing it out there an active pathway to change for people to consider. Like if you wanna see union power grow and class consciousness spread, you can actually do something about it. It’s honestly one of the last vectors of change available to westerners at this point, as sad as that is. We aren’t voting in socialism. It seems like we aren’t even voting in some liberalized socdem shit (France straight up ignoring the will of the people. Happens all over the place). As industry (probably) is forced to return to the first world, if people unionize these critical sectors and start pushing them towards greater awareness of what the US does, their roles as workers in the world, etc. that is how you get a class conscious, radicalized, organized movement that has power behind it in the form of unionized workers and no longer must beg for scraps from the government but can make demands.

Of course even if all this happens it’s decades off in the future. But again, who knows.

Yeah, fully agree.

I don’t tell people what to do because in my experience, well, no one likes that. I wouldn’t anyway. I try to sort of just lead them to water or “hey, that might be illegal… just saying!”

As far as the last part, I was thinking while writing about a conversation Brace and Liz had with a guy whose name I forget and too lazy to look for… anyway, the guy was talking about this tradition of radicals, young working people, who would purposely embed themselves in these organizations or corporations, do the jobs, suck it up, be a worker there for 20 years or whatever all with the explicit ideologically driven desire to see the place unionized. They knew that the best way to convince workers of their power and the benefits of unionization was to be a worker alongside them first, fight with them against management, win a union contract, and then stand up and enforce that contract.

That kind of shit brings a tear to my eye legitimately. It should be inspiring to others too, no matter where you might live. If no one else is pushing for a union, maybe you should. If your union sucks ass, maybe you should be the union rep.

I know from personal experience that coworkers will mock you for trying, management will try to fuck you hard, you won’t have many workplace friends, but if you stick to it you’ll find over time people know you’re trustworthy, they know you’re brave (or really stupid at least), and a day will come when something happens that pushes a person who normally is afraid to ask management for anything and they’ll come to you for help and say “I saw how you dealt with them, and well, I need…” whatever. Of course it’s not about personal aggrandizement and such, but we believe in this stuff not just because of logical reasons, but because we also want to see and feel the benefits for ourselves too one day if we can.

I think for any young people who are despairing in the current moment, for valid and obvious reasons, this is a worthwhile thing to do in life. It’s also very achievable, has been done before, and could open the pathway towards first unionizing as many workplaces as possible, hopefully building up union power in entire sectors, and then once people are becoming more class conscious… start pumping in the socialism. It’s how it was done before, and I don’t see any reason to not do it again. Unions aren’t inherently political organs, but the organization and the class struggle experienced by active union members lends itself to an easy transition from apolitical actor to full fledged socialist pretty easily.

And UPS still shafts their employees even with one of the more proactive unions in the country.

I hesitate on details because I don’t want anything I ever say or write harming workers that tell me things, but suffice to say that UPS does all the normal evil corpo shit you’d expect anywhere else and the employees (to my naïve surprise) basically just allow it despite being in a service sector that 100% could bring the entire country to its knees with a fingersnap from union leaders.

Like not to shit on anyone, but if Starbucks goes on strike people will go to McDonald’s or make their own coffee sugar slurries at home. If UPS goes on strike, corporations rely on UPS first of all, and they can’t just shift all their stuff to FedEx who couldn’t handle that load anyway. Nor could the USPS. Lifesaving medications, meds for chronic conditions, machine parts, all kinds of crazy shit gets touched by UPS. It’s not that hard to see they hold a powerful position. Their workers do. And it seems that their management is extremely aware of this power and extremely draconian in enforcement of every tiny little thing they ding people for in what I view as basically like a suppression of any “willful” behavior from workers. It seems like management is told to be purposely hostile towards anything the union has negotiated and push lines at every moment. Or maybe managers are just doing what managers, cucks that they often are, do. Doesn’t matter that much in the end.

An example is employees being “definitely not told” to not report injuries. Passive aggressive language like “well, if you report that injury, we’ll have to take you off the schedule for a few days… also we really can’t have any more injuries right now. Are you sure it’s hurt?” Something to that effect (told to me directly from a unionized driver). When I asked the obvious (to me) follow up like “wtf? Did you get your union steward or someone from the union and inform them?” The answer was basically “no. Management tries to get you to just agree to stuff and management complains if you say you want some form of union rep present when you talk to them about anything.”

Which to my understanding is explicitly illegal. Unionized workers have a legal right to have someone from the union present whenever they’re dealing with management especially for shit like that. I’m not a lawyer, etc. so I just said like that’s fucked up first off. And second you should definitely talk to a union representative about management’s behavior towards injured employees.

But I hesitate to advise much beyond that because not everyone is me, obviously. I can’t tell them that if my fingernail got fucked up at work and the manager wanted to be all prissy about his stats that perhaps I’d be considering how to rip his fingernail out with needle nose pliers. Considering only, of course.

There’s more technical stuff like UPS ramrodding in this new “AI” driven bullshit they use to tell package delivery drivers where to go next, estimated times, blah blah. All the drivers seem to universally dislike it and say they can get better delivery times with the old system or just using their own knowledge of the routes. A lot of them have been running the same routes for years and years and now this AI bullshit plus management forcing it on them with threats of GPS tracking as evidence they aren’t obedient is causing some amount of internal strain. They also apparently just removed a “maps” feature from the little devices that direct the drivers. Before it was like a google maps-style thing with a bunch of pins of locations for delivery or pickup. There was also a non-map plain list with directions like “turn here, drive this distance” whatever. Now they’ve removed the map with pins. Apparently drivers are just using actual Google maps or whatever because turns out that’s sort of a required feature… being able to see beyond the blinders that they wish to place on drivers to force them into compliance. And for what? If every single driver fully obeyed the little AI thing will it even improve delivery times, save fuel, etc.? I dunno. But imo a truly strong union would take that shit and punt it over the moon and tell management there will be no more GPS tracking of employees either. Oh, don’t like that? They’d cave as soon as the “ssss” part of strike was on the union’s lips.

Anyway, apparently we need to work on fully radicalizing class conscious UPS drivers, get FedEx unionized, and show cucked Americans a glimpse of power they could hold if they just reach out and take it back.

You have done the liberal democracy thing

Right wingers are trying to ignore the people

You either give up or make them listen

Let’s see how based the French actually are vs what they claim… standing by…

Good ol Justin King

Just a small amount of modern slavery, guys Whom amongst us?

Seems similar to what Georgia/Atlanta cops were (probably still are…) doing to the protestors and activists against “cop city.” Cops will try or just lie and form a connection between organizers and funders and people who are doing direct action. Destroying equipment used to make weapons, sleeping in a tent to prevent advancing heavy vehicles, it’s all the same to the hogs.

The message sent is always the same: “Chant your words at us all you like. But the second you organize and, god forbid!, do anything meaningful, even the slightest thing like inconvenience property owners (the worst crime of course), you and everyone we can tie you to is at the least getting swept up and some will face serious charges and years in prison. We recommend you all just stfu now! Thank you!”

And like it or not, this type of draconian application of state violence makes people stop doing anything at all from protesting (the mostly ineffective kind that we see all the time) because cops might grab their face and find literally anything to tie them to a grander “terror plot” case, to donating to organizations that range from direct action, to bail funds (GA was insanely going after bail fund funders…), to even totally good state-supported things because media like this goes out, people will just think “oh Palestinian just means terrorism… and guy went to jail for that. I should avoid that.” Pretty straightforward logic chain of cause and effect with these laws and their enforcement. Obviously all by design and working the way they exactly intended them to work. Go yell at a building every Saturday. Do not attempt to hold anyone or even corporations even slightly accountable or your life and future will be erased. This is how they shut down all the environmental people in the 90s. Called them all terrorists, any association meant serious penalties, people ran the fuck away from it. Which is understandable. No one wants to be the ant getting stomped and if you live in a nice comfy first world lifestyle… well, you have the luxury of not giving a shit in the end. Or the luxury of inaction anyway.

This is also why when assbags like Tom Cotton and many others call protesters against genocide terrorists the media frankly has an obligation to spend like a week blasting his ass publicly. A responsible, not capital-captive media would anyway… Because his accusations are all that’s needed really to sweep up any protestors at any moment for anything or nothing. “Suspicion of terrorism” whatever they wanna call it just means all your “rights” go away at a whim, you’re blackbagged, all your shit is searched absolutely illegally but “we will make it legal style”, and you’re detained and interrogated for an extended period.

I think everyone here understands this reality already. The groundwork was laid decades ago, and it’s been done in the past anyway (many of the first socialists or generic anti capitalists got the exact same treatment involving ropes and nooses in the end). It will happen again before long. It’s already happening. Just now it’s more of a warning shot situation. Kinda like “here’s the line beyond which we fuck your life. Don’t be this guy.” Obviously these suppression techniques can only work for so long before people snap, but, we aren’t even into the heavy-handed stuff yet, so…

Very depressing, as usual

Soulless health insurance person: "How do we know when it’s critical? Easy. They get a helivac. Which we also deny. Too expensive. Should’ve called us ahead for authorization. Which we would deny, of course. Get an uber. Don’t tip the driver though. We don’t reimburse.

You know, really, all things considered, it would probably be best if you just… sorta, you know, died. Really makes things easier for everyone involved."

Serbia, Russia, Mongolia (maybe), Albania and other Balkan countries. Ukraine before this current war was also a haven of piracy. Dunno if that will be returning

The Balkans and Russia are the goats of piracy.

As the Balkans become more cucked to the west probably Russia will be the final boss.

Also a fun fact I learned a few years ago is the Soviet Union was around just barely long enough to be assigned a country name top layer domain (TLD).

Like .us, .fr, .ru, etc.

After the dissolution of the USSR the Russian Federation took over ownership of the .su domains. I’ve seen them becoming more popular recently.

🫡 .su lives on 🫡

The one-handed “mobile infantry made me the man I am today!” guy will be some 45 year old who his nuts blown off in Iraq by a brave resistance fighter around 2005

“I support your war of terror!” cheers

(I wish Borat-man wasn’t a piece of shit)

Well, it’s both. Not to be too annoying, but there are multiple layers of racism going on in Israel to my understanding listening to scholars (not the Zionist shills) on the region of Palestine and modern Israel broadly.

For one, your point is objectively correct and displays a pretty clear streak of white supremacist “black people can’t be Jewish sentiment” (not the only case either, unsurprisingly).

But there’s also absolutely an overarching Jewish supremacy mindset amongst Jewish Zionists particularly ones in Israel. You’ll hear cope and excuses made for it. The idea of “the fighting Jew” and whatnot. Like this conscious rejection of what some Zionists (and I’m speaking about Jewish Zionists specifically for this part, just to make that clear) think of as the “weak Jews” who “went like sheep to the slaughter” in the Holocaust. There’s a lot of weaponizing of the Holocaust and past wrongs done to Jews as a whole to “justify” the last 75 years or so of oppression against Palestinians and Arabs. And it’s done strictly on the ethno-religious lines of “we are Jewish. They are Arab/Muslim. We have a right to conquer them if we can, just as they once conquered us. This is just revenge and justice.” Along those lines.

Then there’s inner-Jewish colorism or racism or however you want to word it. Between the dark-skinned Jews from Arab nations like Iraqi Jews, etc. or Jews from Iran, etc. including of course Ethiopian Jews and other Jews from Africa, Northern Africa mostly and the lighter-skinned white Jews from European nations or the US but first from Europe generations back. Like a tiered system not unlike US racism where more white is seen as better. Which is pretty ironic all things considered, but, you know, racism rarely makes logical sense.

So it’s a society that currently places all Jews above everyone else by default. But some Jews are higher than other Jews. It’s one of the most absurdly racist societies I’ve ever heard of outside of the American south during slavery and then Jim Crow where your skin color, your race, determined your entire life. And while that remains true to a depressing degree in the US, it’s so much more in the open, unapologetic, and prosecuted daily in Palestine by its colonizing hell-nation. The elevated level of fascism on display should make it repulsive to anyone who calls themselves a liberal, but, alas, they fear reading anything factual on the situation and finding the truth. Or, they have read and they find themselves agreeing that Israelis (and Christians in America happily cheer them on…) have the right to do quite literally anything in their colonial pursuits.

Please President Xi… please…

It’s a testament and a condemnation of modern science and medicine that he survived covid…

I don’t mean this in a mean way, but to me if you have a gap (and I mean like you create one on the paper) it’s sort of an old school “shouldn’t exist anymore but boomers gonna boom” “intelligence” test. Their attitude is basically “no one I hire will have an employment gap.” So, you just simply do not have a gap. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant because let’s be honest ain’t no one capable of nor willing to prove or disprove your employment status from Jan-June 2022 (random example). Maybe the IRS or whatever relevant tax agency, maybe law enforcement, sure, but if you’re applying for a job as the sales manager or whatever the fuck at Don’s Dogshit Diaper Emporium… just go ahead and stretch the dates together to fit. You could probably put other shit in there if you did it like completing on-going education credits in your relevant field, but, keeping it simple is best. Even a fucking financial institution, a bank or whatever, won’t bother to figure that gap out when they literally pull on the nitrile gloves and shove their entire fist up to the elbow into your financial asshole looking for any reasons to downgrade your eligibility for a mortgage or give you a shit rate- ask me how I know. So, just lie. If they care enough to find that shit that place absolutely sucks anyway. Or it’s a federal law enforcement agency and you should feel bad and stop doing that anyway.

Imagine Jr. trying to help Dad out

1 missed call from Don Jr

straight to voicemail, set to not ring or notify

1 voicemail from Don Jr

caps due to coke

“DAD! HEY, HEARD YOU’RE HAVING SOME REAL BAD ISSUES AFTER THAT WHOLE UH ORDEAL YOU KNOW THE ONE DAD WELL ANYWAY DAD HAVE YOU TRIED KETAMINE OR MUSHROOMS? WE COULD GO ON A FATHER SON TRIP TO THE DESERT OR PERHAPS SOUTH AMER-”

“Holy fuck… Barron, can you get me a new number? Yeah. Again. Yeah. Your brother. Thanks, son. My beautiful boy …so handsome too…”

thousand mile stare at the wall, hand slowly loosens, phone flops on the floor, Trump continues staring straight ahead apparently in another universe inside his mind