KiaKaha

Look we just want high wages, strong regulation, and redistribution of wealth, but without any of the levers of power necessary to achieve it. Is that so much to ask?

Yeah, the weirdest part about 90s/00s culture is the idea that a stable desk job in an air conditioned office is the worst thing ever.

9 to 5? Sounds heavenly.

What.

Here’s a take I saw on Folau that made me pause for a bit.

Missing from the public discourse is the background of how evangelical Christianity swept the Pacific Islands. This the story of colonialism and Christian missionaries and Captain Cook; of the destruction of local religions and languages.

It is the story of how all over the world, cultures that didn’t have laws or customs against homosexuality or gender fluidity could become so puritanical that they turned against their own LGBTIQ brethren in favour of the gospel as preached by their colonisers; only for the colonisers to then finally soften their own stances against homosexuality and decide that homophobia was yet another moral failing of the colonised. *

I still don’t like him, but there’s a grain of truth in it.

You’re right that it’s not neofeudalism, and that neofeudalism is optimistic, but you’re confusing intelligentsia/‘PMC’ with petit bourgeois.

the professional classes that produce medicine and research and lawyering and technology along with the exploitation of the increasingly proletarianized service classes. These people do not have the same class interests and it is the major source of division between liberals and a nascent socialist movement

For the most part, these are just particularly well-compensated segments of the proletariat, much as the rest of the proletariat was bought out during the mid 20th century. A reversal of their fortunes will have the same effect.

Where’s the site to generate these?

This could have been Harry Potter, if tech actually got a seat at the table.

Graeber has you covered.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. These “heroes” are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their role as heroes: as Clark Kent, Superman may be constantly trying, and failing, to get into Lois Lane’s pants, but as Superman, he is purely reactive. In fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination: like Bruce Wayne, who with all the money in the world can’t seem to think of anything to do with it other than to indulge in the occasional act of charity; it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily carve free magic cities out of mountains.

Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the superego clubbing the errant Id back into submission.

I (Don’t) Miss The Old Hexbear

He didn’t actually embezzle money—he proposed doing so to the others, and they went full Maoist on him.

Honestly, a intact Proles, with or without microbrewery, would have been preferable to how it went down.