I'm in to it.

I wish I had a cloranthy ring. : (

The absolute failure of imagination is incredible to witness.

Cormac McCarthy had some kind of relationship and may have sexually assaulted a 16 year old when he was 42. I don't know hte details, I just saw it in passing, but I assume that's what this is referencing.

Edit I don't like hte phrasing "some kind of relationship" but i'm not sure how else to put it. Grooming maybe?

Please ping me I've been meaning to finish this and I'd love to do it along with y'all.

Real "The Incoherence of the Incoherence" hours.

Thank you. : )

Some Westerns are adopting bidets and learning to wash their asses. Hope remains, however dim it may be.

My understanding is "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for genocide with no distinct meaning. It's used to launder certain genocides as "less bad". Is that a fair assessment?

GOOD POST

I love being in a leftist space where people can actually critically analyze the actual successes and failures of communist states in good faith. You've given me much to think about.

You know, you raised something in my mind; The Germans committed the Herero genocide in, what, 1898? Okay, 1904 to 1908. The idea that the Germans needed to look outside for inspiration is preposterous on it's face, they'd already committed genocide in their own colonies.

The conflict between agriculturalists and pastoralists/nomads is such an incredibly deep conflict in human history. Any suggested reading for how Khazaks experienced the USSR?

I'm so sorry. I'm crying I'm so sorry.

I can't talk much about it without turbodoxxing myself I'm afraid. But I did manage to sustain normal human conversations for like an hour and a half with actual real humans which was pretty cool after several years of pretty serious isolation.

Yeh. San An was goofy and silly and still having fun with itself. 4 got too serious for my tastes both in tone and gameplay (the cars were so clunky) but Niko and company were still pretty charismatic weirdos and approachable human. Then you get 5, the driving is iffy and the characters are just the most wretchedly unlikable, miserable people, and the game felt like it was punishing the player for wanting them to play by making them put up with Michael and Trevor. I don't remember anything about Franklin because he was so overshadowed by Michael's extremely divorced prestige TV dad energy and Trevor's "Aren't you a fucking sicko for playing the silly cops and robbers video game you fucking sicko?" grating fake moralism.

The biggest one is that Oprah brought Jenny McCarthy on the show to talk about how much McCarthy hated her autistic son and wanted her "real" son back. This incident put anti-vaxxer thought in front of tens of millions of viewers. Idk if the meme historians agree with me but I view that moment as a critical point where anti-vax went from a fringe conspiracy to a major cultural and political force.

She gave Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz national platforms, causing massive harm to mentally ill people by pushing utterly junk science, and now Oz has piggybacked his TV fame in to a position where he's liable to rip apart what's left of US healthcare.

Apparently Deepak Chopra is her fault, too

She's mainstreamed huge numbers of grifters, charlatans, conmen, and freaks and given them national scope and reach that they parlayed into causing just incredible harm.

She became a billionaire giving a platform and audience to the worst grifters in America.

Yeh. Re-imagining Hitler as a dumb goon is definitely a western propaganda coup. Idk how much of the guy's writing is his own unedited thought and how much was created with editing and assistance from others, but Stalin is not the low brow gangster he's made out to be. Which, talk about your shifting rhetorical frameworks, somehow Stalin personally controlled the actions of every single person in the Soviet Union for thirty years but is also a semi-illiterate thug. Libs!

Honestly I think you'd have to go hunt down recent white papers on nuclear war theory. A lot of what people believe about nuclear war is based on vibes, cold war era tropes, popular media. The folks who actually drill down on fallout patterns, nuclear stockpiles, likely targets, effects on infrastructure and logistics, tend to look at it very differently.

Yeah if you were in the US in that period a good number of soldiers talked about how fucking weird it was being ordered to wander around protecting poppy fields and marijuana. The regime was never even really secretive about it, just no one seemed to care. I bet there are some real fucking interesting documents floating around that would connect US operations in Afghanistan directly to the domestic "Opioid Epidemic" but I leave that for future researchers.

Fuck off.