@i-gwarth / i-gwarth.tumblr.com
Okay hear me out.
We have hobbits and wizards smoking pipes in Tolkien's work and adaptations, but where are the cunty smoking options for villains??
Like, I NEED Mairon smoking some fucked up poisonous herbs through a device that looks like one of those elegant long ornamental cigarette holders or opium pipes.
God, I wish I could draw.
you asked and you shall receive
augh, tired so used an older Sauron but loved the idea way too much
Americans love Disneyland because it’s a walkable city
That's actually a really popular analogy. Howard Kunstler wrote about Disneyland as a "capital of unreality," where "the public realm is packaged for sale as a commodity."
"Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They’d flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here. Then they’d go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots, throw a parade to celebrate a new K Mart opening—even when it put ten local merchants out of business—turn Elm Street into a six-lane crosstown expressway, pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out you had to drive everywhere. They’d build the new central school four miles out of town on a busy highway so that kids couldn’t walk there. They’d do every fool thing possible to destroy good existing relationships between things in their towns, and put their local economies at the mercy of distant corporations whose officers didn’t give a damn whether these towns lived or died. And then, when vacation time rolled around, they’d flock back to Disney World to feel good about America."
If anyone's interested, The Geography of Nowhere is unrivaled as a crash course on and scathing critique of American postwar urban planning.
All the hades 2 jokes about "Bisexuals had their fun already now it's bisexuals' turn" THE BISEXUALS ARE FUCKING DEAD
Happy Halloween! More vampire AU Robespierre….
Joyeux anniversaire Robespierre.
My thesis film is now available to view on Youtube! Thank you to all my talented voice actors and composer and friends for helping me finish this film.
As the condemned revolutionaries attempt in a last effort to avoid their imminent arrests and executions, Robespierre finds himself paralyzed with doubt and despair.
Trigger Warning: Depressive thoughts, implied attempt
Ok gotta talk about it.
As a Jewish historian, I fucking hate Israel in ways most probably will never be able to comprehend. I'm going to try and explain it anyways. The central creation myth of Israel is that it is Jewish, and then consequently, that Israel is a part of Jewishness. Its easy to simply state this is false, but fully comprehending this and putting it into practice in thought and deed seems rare to me.
The evil at the heart of this violence predates the recent acceleration of genocide. Israel is a colony, and more than that, an antisemitic fraud itself. After WW2, when Israel was being founded, the Jews of Europe generally did not wave goodbye to their neighbors and head to the promised land. Many were expelled from their homes. Zionism itself, as an action, was a false choice at the time. A mere excuse to place an ally in the middle east, and an excuse to complete the expulsion and destruction of the European Jew. The Zionist Jew is more than complicit in this, they actively seek the destruction and assimilation of all other Jews.
Many fail to realize, and largely because of Israel, that Jews are not inherently white, Ashkenazi, European-descended people. Our faith and culture has an immense variety that is spread all across the globe. Jewishness, in population and volume of culture, exists more so outside of Israel than within it. Israel is for a very specific kind of Jew. The kind that lets Yiddish die, that attaches themselves to European things, that makes themselves and their practices as white as possible.
And they have the nerve, the fucking belligerent GALL, to frame themselves as the necessary saviors of our people. To the Zionist, questioning Israel is to question Jewishness itself. They bake adoration for the colonial machine into their very prayers, and push them on us even as children. To *not* oppress, to *not* kill, to *not* genocide, is to invite death. This is the core of fascistic thought, of course. "Kill them before they kill us." And they KNOW this too, they really do. The truth of that irony does not matter, because as is true for all fascists, the truth itself does not matter to them. They wanted this, they wanted this even before the British saw it in their best interest to give them the land. Any excuse to RETVRN, as the neo-nazis say of Rome, or the German Empire, or whatever the fuck stupid country they want to poorly animate the corpse of. Some select Zionists even *sided with the fucking Nazis* in agreement they should abandon Europe to colonize Palestine. (Haavara Agreement)
My people have proved time and time and time again you don't need a nation state to have an enduring culture. We have protected ourselves for thousands of years without the help of these spiteful, doom-saying maniacs. I was going to post something like this on Passover, but that would be hypocritical. The state of Israel doesn't actually have shit to do with Jewishness. שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְה Vi tsu derleb ikh im shoyn tsu bagrobn. [my best translation] Hear Israel (beginning of a prayer in Hebrew) I should outlive him long enough to bury him. (an old Yiddish curse)
Free Palestine. Donate what you can, they need it right now.
the urge to make ocs of a god and their special little mortal (soldier? priest? jester?) so i can put them in situations (healthy relationship) (ritual sacrifice)
Sleepy Jesus commissions
Was asked to put a flower behind his ear
Mayeem’s little theatre
The young Herr Englishman
More Jonathan warmup sketches🙏
Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there
Just gonna keep pointing to the part in Asimov’s auto biography I Asimov, where he talks about antisemitism (cause it’s all really good stuff even all these years later), but I’m once again gonna just share the last 3 paragraphs cause… well you tell me they’re not relevant to this post and relevant all these years after he wrote them:
Even as I write, Jews are immigrating from the former Soviet Union into Israel. They are fleeing their country because they fear religious persecution. But the moment they set foot on Israeli soil, they become Zionist extremists who are merciless toward the Palestinians. They change from persecuted to persecutors in the blink of an eye.
That said, the Jews are not alone in this. If I’m sensitive to this particular problem, it’s because I’m Jewish myself. In fact, this phenomenon is universal. In Roman times, when the first Christians were persecuted, they pleaded for tolerance. But when Christianity prevailed, did tolerance reign? Not on your life. Instead, persecution was soon going on in the opposite direction. Or take the case of the Bulgarians, who demanded freedom from their dictatorial regime, but once they had it used it to aggress against their Turkish minority. Or the people of Azerbaijan, who demanded of the Soviet Union the freedom denied it by the central government, only to immediately attack the Armenian minority.
The Bible teaches that the victims of persecution must in no circumstances become persecutors in their turn: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”(Exodus 22:21). But who follows this teaching? Personally, whenever I try to spread the word, I get hostile looks and make myself unpopular….
Bastion is such a weird little outlier among X-men characters. He has a damn-near-incomprehensible, mystical-technological-timetravelling nonsense backstory that requires you to read like 30 other comics to understand - exactly the kind of convoluted 1990s comics bullshit that the MCU adaptations have tried to steer clear of for two decades now. I didn't actually expect them to actually adapt him for this season. But ultimately I kind of love how they play him in the series.
He's streamlined - a boring, soft-spoken little middle-manager type who plans out a near-perfect encirclement of mutancy in preparation for a purge.
Here's a bigot who seems both rational and capable of compromise. In stark contrast with shrieking racists like Creed and Gyrich, or conflicted oopsie-I-made-a-genocide-machine concerned citizens like Trask, Bastion employs genocide as a tool rather than an end goal. "If we've accepted that the presence of mutants is inevitable, how much more ground are we willing to cede?" he asks. And then he answers "As little as possible."
Not the extermination of a whole race of people. Simply its management - setting up a system where they can be made into non-threatening, productive members of society. It's enhancing rather than upsetting the status-quo, assuaging the existential fears of polite humans who just have some concerns, and backing up that system with as much genocidal violence as is required to make it work. Very clean, very neat, very Schneizel-pilled.
If this sounds familiar it's because it's the same system of thinking that people employ to declare how colonialism is over, while benefitting from the extraction of cheap resources out of former colonized nations; we haven't ended colonialism, we've merely streamlined it and made it more efficient. "It's stupid to waste resources that we can use."
Bastion is the endpoint of genocidal centrism. A little ethnic cleansing is required to make the machine work, and the machine - making it more streamlined, more efficient - is the best we can possibly hope for, so don't raise your voice at me!
Cable describing the future world that Bastion built as a "utopia" is actually a bit of an understated revelation here. It's exactly the kind of thing a centrist with a pang of guilty conscience might use as an excuse to close their eyes to the violence required to build this system. Much like how an abolitionist in the past, being witness to the horrors of slavery and colonial abuse, might view the participation of colonized or enslaved minorities in global capitalism as his end goal.
X-Men '97 can't escape the fact that it's produced under a Disney near-monopoly of modern media. This is the same company that gave us Karli true-leftism-is-killing-civilians Morgenthau and other childish takes on modern political extremes. In that context, Bastion is an improvement.
He might also be a jab from the showrunners at the Disney company itself (give them as little as possible, as late as possible, and they'll be grateful for it; they'll call it a utopia) but I can't prove that.
