Sherlock Holmes, for all of the canon: "I'm not sure if it's normal for a guy to move into my apartment and start writing a biography about me, but I don't know enough about having friends to dispute it."

"Voting doesnt work because not enough people in my country will vote for MY version of communism. We need a violent overthrow of the government to MAKE this happen"

@captainjonnitkessler im stealing your tags because youre so fucking right

The best that I can tell, it’s primarily about remaining Pure.

Obviously, the people who think they’re too leftist to vote aren’t monolithic, so no one reason fits all of them. But there’s a clear trend among many of them that they see voting for someone who has done things they personally find to be sufficiently Impure—or, in some cases, voting at all within an Impure system—as being an act that will somehow harm them.

So they stand firm in their conviction that they mustn’t vote, and instead talk about how great it will be when we finally have a Pure system, with only Pure candidates…

And this mindset is one of the things that has consistently fucked serious socialist governments once they do gain power, is the thing. (Another of the things is the CIA but that's another conversation.)

Because if you are unwilling to try to build institutions that can fluctuate and evolve and potentially be used in ways that aren't true to your vision, you not only have to institute tyranny, you have to build your entire system around maintaining your tyranny forever.

And once all your other goals hinge upon retaining power forever, they become subordinate to it.

At which point there is no realistic future to the Tyranny Of The Proletariat other than the tyranny of you personally. Which means you are going to 1) liquidate your own peasants or whatever similar scenario arises in your context and later 2) be overthrown and leave no useful institutional legacy, because you founded it all on virtue-by-fiat.

The self-cannibalism of ideological purity is never pretty, but in the context of government it's particularly bad.

Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

Reblog so everyone can hear what they need.

Ngl I think I hate performative girlbossification of female characters more than I hate people not including said female characters in their fan content. Actually I don't care at all if they're indifferent to her. Who gives a fuck. Like I'd respect it more if they're like "ngl I just don't give a shit about her" with their whole chest, rather than being like "OMG I LOVE HER SO MUCH!!!! She's perfect, she's best girl, she kicks ass [never talks about her ever and only includes her as a prop to examine the male characters they DO like]" just because they're scared of getting called misogynistic. Like if you know in your heart that this character means nothing to you and you know you're not gonna do her justice, might as well just leave her out. But attempts to shoehorn her in, using your 2015-feminist style characterization is so weak, man.

Raincoat cat on my mind...

"con artist" is maybe the profession with the biggest gap between How Cool They Are In Media and How Cool They Are In Real Life

fictional con artist: I've gathered you all here because you each have unique skills and specialties that will be required for the Ultimate Heist: psychologically destroying the richest man in the world, and taking his mansions, his yacht, and his wife in the process.

real life con artist: plan A is to scare an old lady who barely speaks English. plan B, is to trick unemployed people into giving us money, which they famously have a lot of, in exchange for broadly-defined Career Services. plan C is we try to make NFTs a thing again

Reading a book now that in the same few paragraphs mentioned Siri, google maps, and another app all at once, and I was kind of overwhelmed by how specific that is—to Apple, to right now, etc. I got bogged down in wondering if that section would be legible in 15 years, like if Siri goes away or is renamed or no one uses Apple phones.

What are your thoughts on books including specific app or brand names, which might end up dating it (like all books with “twitter” in them are now Pre 2024 books)?

Aka, would you prefer to write/read “she set her google maps to give directions” or “she put the address in her gps.”

Having read some of the replies I think for this specific instance I would be the least jolted by just using "phone" for anything that's done on a phone. Internet browser: "typed the question into their phone". Pulling up directions: "entered the address into their phone". If you want to tie the setting very specifically to a certain time as well as have the character be loyal to a certain brand that is definitely a choice to make.

Alright so I just finished Batman:TAS recently and started watching Superman:TAS and it delights me that the first episode is literally just: superman??? Who dat. This is aliens :)) (even if Brainiac does say "human error, Jor-el"). So obviously I do now have aus. Obviously <3 shout-out to @midnightluck for the Justice League, @cer-rata for Terry and @suzukiblu for Jordan + putting up with the initial ramble

So anyway Brianiac's satellite upload gets fucked up by Jor-el either in petty revenge or as an accident, and a part of Brainiac ends up on Clark's ship. The vague explanation I have is that Brainiac is the AI for everything and in TAS, Jor-el also does not realise he is "evil" and thus still uses his help as a navigator for Clark's ship while he is initially building it. The ship, however, is offline to prevent the Kryptoninan council from finding out about it, and thus, that section of Brainiac does not get taken back into the satellite upload.

As it is BARELY the 90's when the Kents find Clark after the crash, Brainiac is summarily useless thanks to the current lack of wifi, but manages to mostly teach himself English and Kal kryptonian, and decides that. >:( since they're BOTH there, they can BOTH be vestibules of kryptonian knowledge. And also Kal can get him more earth knowledge. The vibes entirely are: "Weird aspects of kryptonian culture taught by an unbodied dickhead historian" and while the argument is "but brainiac is evil!" Main brainiac is. But this is a subsection of Brainiac :) he learnt more stuff + Clark loves him soooo much.

Unfortunately. That is His baby now. He is not impressed with his baby. His baby bought him a growing chick the other day, with big sad eyes, and said the kryptonian word for fluffy!!! in such a mournful tone that Brainiac resigned himself to teaching kal about how growing up worked and that the chicken needed feathers to fly. This explanation ends with Clark collecting feathers and trying to jump off the barn roof, and he thus resolves to extend further co-parenting issues to the Kents. For his own personal convenience, of course.

It does of course ALSO mean that Brainiac, who has a loose definition of the words "surveillance state" absolutely gets in at the ground floor when the internet first starts up. Clark's influence relegates him to the background, but he is good at hiding ! So they don't realise they have an AI in the wifi! But ohhhh boy does brainiac scare a few people at first. Potentially tries to do his "i am helpful" schtick before realising he is not useful in this because he's basically just. Seems completely like a troll? He's some random person who's invaded the internet!!

However he is also the inspiration for google 😂 and calls it his younger, stupider sibling. It is also funny to me to think about earth compsci engineers having NO idea why sometimes the internet acts SO DAMN WEIRD <- brainiac's fault.

As a result though, when Clark starts up as Superman, Brainiac does NOT let the Kr project off the ground. Files are misdirected and blackmail is gathered. Until one day Kal says something sad about how he'll never be able to have a great romance, because he's terrified of telling anyone the alien thing, and that he's always thought about kids but he's kinda terrified because what if he hurts someone- and Brainiac is like ah yes wait. I shall fix this for my Only Kryptonian.

TWO kids for the price of one?!? he finds, after he goes searching, and then further prodding finds THIRTEEN children, extraordinary. Not all of them are viable because the earth scientists truly are incapable but Brainiac can fix the issues with their technology to ensure Kal has the children he wants.

It’s just weird to think that frozen boosted the popularity of the snow queen. Before it came out, I barely seen adaptations of it and I haven’t heard people talk about this fairy tale.

But after frozen, the fairy tale was everywhere. The snow queen became a popular fairy tale character that made appearances in tv shows and movies. They even put her on the cover of some fairy tale books I had seen. Of course there was fairy tale movies based on the tale were made in the mid 2010s. Remember the winx club episode where they recreated the fairy tale? It was so powerful. I never seen anything like that since the 90s. You know where fairy tales had a boost in popularity thanks to the Disney adaptation? Princess and the frog and that trash ass movie from 2010 never had the same impact on the fairy tales they were based on like frozen did. It’s like frozen was a renaissance Disney movie but made in 2013.

Though it did kind of died down now and the snow queen as a fairy tale isn’t really that popular anymore. Probably because idiots wanted it to be just like the Disney movie and hated that it wasn’t anything like it.

i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something

this may shock the viewer but I actually do prefer the temporary violence the bourgeoisie will suffer in the event of a revolution over the unending and worse violence the working class suffers every day just to maintain the status quo

Horrendous take, thanks. Revolution is not "temporary violence", and it's definitely not limited to the bourgeoisie. The working class and the very poor will be the ones to suffer the most no matter what happens.

The French Revolution proper lasted 10 years, on paper (1789-1799). The worst of the violence was from 1793-1794, in the Reign of Terror. We think of that as being mostly about aristocrats, but at least 16,000 people were killed, most of whom were not aristocrats or bourgeois. A very high percentage of them were actually revolutionaries themselves! But they supported the wrong faction of the Revolution.

However, the period we term "The French Revolution" is actually only a small part of the larger picture. France suffered repeated uprisings, revolutions, and shifts in government from republic back to monarchy back to republic until it lurched into stability (and democracy) in 1873-75 with the Third Republic. Both monarchial and democratic governments included assassinations, censorship, arrest and execution of "enemies" on a grand scale, imprisonment, and deportation/exile. We literally do not know how many people died in political violence over those 84 years. However, we know it was a lot of people, and that most of them were not members of the middle and upper classes but members of the working class and the poor. (Middle and upper class people being more likely to buy their way out of trouble, and also more likely to escape what they can't buy off.)

And the French Revolution is a successful revolution. It's one of the ones that has the greatest long-term success of any revolution so far. The American Revolution doesn't really count; local and state government and policies didn't change, the main difference was the replacement of a king with a president and Parliament with Congress. If you're talking "a revolution which majorly changes aspects of society" the French Revolution is the cream of the crop. That's what success looks like.

10 years of fighting to start with, including 16k executions in a single year, followed by 75 more years of fighting, counter-revolutions that wipe away all of your gains, and uncountable numbers of people killed and lives ruined. With poor and working-class people bearing the brunt of the violence and suffering. That's generations worth of death. "Temporary"? Interesting choice of words, there.

What I keep noticing about revolutions is how extremely bad they are at innovating new societal machinery, even when that's the ostensible point of them.

The mass public executions of the French Revolution directly reflected the traditional French monarchical approach to crushing political dissent going back to the middle ages.

When the Russian Revolution got heavily into nationalizing agriculture, it was following in the footsteps of several decades of tsarist policy of nationalizing the serfs--that is, of transferring the legal ownership of Russia's farmers to the state and crown and away from the aristocracy, who were increasingly obliged to lease their workforce.

I have mentioned this research before and I will probably mention it again, but Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan did amazing work studying violent and non-violent revolutions, and analyzing how well they succeeded.

There's lots of writeups about their research all over the internet, but sometimes their own words are best: 'Our findings show that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns.' (from Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict). They argue that in many cases, nonviolent campaigns for change are significantly more likely to succeed at their goals. They also distinguish between nonviolent resistance/nonviolent struggle and things like pacifism or isolated protests -- they are specifically talking about organized nonviolent disruption. (Something can be very, very disruptive without being at all violent.)

I highly recommend reading their work.

there's no greater betrayal than finally starting to read a book you've had sitting for months on your shelf or your desk or your nightstand and then finding out it's bad. like. i gave you a fucking home.

having to tap the "if an australian place name sounds strange to you please google it and make sure you're not just mocking indigenous languages" sign again

adding on that it’s good practice to do this in general. whenever I refer to a place in the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. I’ll get tags like “lmao I refuse to believe that’s the name of a real place” and it’s almost always a placename from a Salish language. it takes seconds to check, and you’ll steadily unravel internal biases in doing it.

That’s art ! ✍✏

Adding @mikeystan3000​ ‘s tags ‘cause honestly they’re perfect:

LEVERAGE "The Nigerian Job" [S01E01]

#the nigerian job is a rare example of a pilot that is actually a phenomenal start to the show#so many shows have pilots that are good but don't understand the characters yet#or are good but don't totally match the rest of the show#or are good but still finding their feet#or are just. bad.#the nigerian job is none of these!!#this scene here is such a perfect 5 second encapsulation of nate eliot and parker#establishing eliot as someone who wants revenge parker as someone who wants money#and nate as someone who knows what to tell them to get them to help him - analysis by @sea-glass-and-fire