Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Sengoku Strider]

Like I said upthread, there's actually traction this time for a better fix to insider Congressional trading than the STOCK act. Even Nancy, who previously had said that they should be able to play the stock market, seems to have come around.

Weird how Pelosi, a multi-millionaire off stocks married to a multi-millionaire real estate speculator and venture capitalist was suddenly on board. In an election year. For a proposal spearheaded by a party who couldn't stop Steve Manchin & Kristen Sinema from taking piles of corporate money to derail their attempt at voting reform. Led by a president who said he would “immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person” during his campaign, yet somehow, now in year 2 of immediately, is still "reviewing options."

This is the Democrats' version of "We're the good guys resisting the SYSTEM we are absolutely not the constituents parts of."

No one would have batted an eye at any of this if Trump hadn't made Covid-19 a culture war issue to distract from the crisis.

I dunno, conservatives raised holy hell when Trump sent unmarked border patrol agents in military gear from way out of their jurisdiction to round up Portland protestors and throw them in black vans without reading them miranda rights.

Oh wait. I remembered that completely backwards.




My bad.

This isn't about Trump either. Wrong country dawg.

But here we go again, Rather than argue, Ill just start bringing up hot topic words because Trudeau now represents all of liberal opposition and the history of republican flaws.

Here Goes: Jan 6! , Trump!, Neo Nazis!, Racist!, Tax Incentives!, Facism!, Voter Suppression! Houseless People! Mental Illness!

We are talking about truckers in Canada still right?

Remember that one time I proved like a dozen times over in the past week that the faux outrage over this is an American conservative media narrative and Canadians overwhelmingly want these guys gone?

Like 72% of the country says the protestors should “go home now.”

Or that two thirds of the country support military intervention.. (Which I think is very much the wrong idea).

I don't know why I bothered linking reality at this point. Sorry. Here's your My Pillow fort back.



(There's no way Ghost Stalin doesn't think Komissar Justin is fugazi. Joe Steel would've cleared this thing out in an hour.)

[BIL]

I know it's basically his trademark, but Ben's really pushing it, nametagging those three famous pieces of shit. Seriously Ben? Who are you, Ahuviya Harel? :/

Spoiler

Maybe he knows his audience's limitations. Like Ahuviya does.

Spoiler

[BryanM]

That's not Ben, that's Antonio. You can tell from how it makes you want to not look at it.

And Castro is practically a hero on the sliding scale of tyrants. If Trudeau was anything like him, he'd give his countrymen that dental program finally.

"Lisa needs braces!"

...

It's kind of interesting the communist tool, the internet, made "free speech" possible finally. As I said years ago though, it's too good to be allowed to last.

[BIL]

Christ, I feel like when I discovered black Michael Jackson and white Michael Jackson were the same guy

I suppose you're right, free dental does take the edge off having your teefs PWNED with a truncheon because you drew a thing, or said a thing, or were suspected of thinking a thing. I suspect Castro's low score is more to do with Cuba's minuscule size than anything, judging by that evergreen 20th century Caribbean student's CV booster: wiping elderly innertube surf finalists' asses at the local tent city! I shoulda got in on that Chicks dig a sensitive soul

[BryanM]

They do tend to blend together and to be fair I'm kind of a journeyman, being into A Good Cartoon for a few years. The only actually good modern political cartoonists are Garrison and Bors (retired). Oh, and the Onion guy, 'Kelly'. Everyone else is terrible, and often one kind of a fucker or another. (I do have a soft spot for the leftists that have huge walls of text in their comics tho, since I am Them.)

The absolute nadir visually is Ramirez. The nadir morally is very hard to pin down, but Dry Bones is 100% about supporting the murder of Palestinians in every issue. Even if other cartoonists are also pro-genocide somewhere or other, I think repeating it 100% of the time maxes out your high score on this metric or something. Have some other interests for god's sake, man.

(.. I just realized I didn't mean Ramirez, but the one that draws that guy with huge dumbo-ears. With a sickly grey-lightly purple skin hue. I can't remember his name, which is one mercy in this hellworld I guess.)

I suspect Castro's low score is more to do with Cuba's minuscule size than anything

A proper cartoon supervillain wouldn't allow so many former plantation owners to flee, either.

[BIL]

Monstering banal ol' evil is dangerous innit 3;> It's like people can't be happy with perfectly ghoulish Ceausescu - naw, gimme Khmer Rouge you hack frauds! I wanna RAWK like Jello! :O Like dudes, chill, you would be firing up your innertubes and sailing teh briney deeps under either!

[Ed Oscuro]

Weird how Pelosi, a multi-millionaire off stocks married to a multi-millionaire real estate speculator and venture capitalist was suddenly on board. In an election year. For a proposal spearheaded by a party who couldn't stop Steve Manchin & Kristen Sinema from taking piles of corporate money to derail their attempt at voting reform. Led by a president who said he would “immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person” during his campaign, yet somehow, now in year 2 of immediately, is still "reviewing options."

*shrug* I care less about the motivations of our politicians rather than that their behavior is right in the end. Again, it turns out that the progressive leftists actually have the best proposals when it comes to reigning in this kind of thing! Yet, if you dig deeply, you can find some supposed scandals or conflicts of interests in even the shiny new stars of Congress and their handling of some issue or other in their District. Perhaps we need more people to act like Rep. Jayapal (who I'm not calling out for self-dealing) and less acting like Senator Manchin (who needs to be called out for all of his). People who were happy to cruise along and not do the right thing suddenly find themselves under pressure to do the right thing. If you can get a politician you like better to do it, great! But otherwise, just getting that behavior and policy to change is the immediate first step.

Incidentally, you should take a look at what's actually been done on the student loan front - without Congress approving it. The $10K per student seems to equate to a cost of $400Bn, and Bernie's plan would be under $2Tn. During the pandemic there have been a few debt cancellations: First, the federal loan debt payment and interest freeze has saved student debtors billions - maybe $60Bn or more. As of late January, Biden's total was almost $15.5 billion of loan forgiveness. Note that this isn't even on the radar of many people in Congress. He's doing this without additional Congressional approval, which is good. But he probably needs Congressional approval to do more, which is not good.

The entire financing system in higher ed is just insane - at pretty much every level. I personally would be happy if the debt got wiped out, but there are some real issues to hash out. Lots of people have debt and didn't get a college degree in return - we're not yet talking about why they don't qualify for debt forgiveness and why the rather loud young professionals who tend to have student debt have jumped in head of everybody else with this issue. There's also the question of the other end of the wealth handout in debt forgiveness. Are we just going to spend a lot of Treasury notes to give some rich institutions even more money because they were essentially loan sharking? These issues don't sink the student loan forgiveness issue for me (I tend to think that we can pretty much do whatever we want, concern trolling be damned!) but I don't think you have to be a Republican to say we should look carefully at the solutions. One of those solutions needs to be to look at the entire college financing system.

The only actually good modern political cartoonists are Garrison and Bors (retired).

That's a proper Gen Barrassment for poor Bors. What did he ever do to warrant that comparison?! But if you mean that most political cartoonists are somehow worse than Garrison, then yeah, that's true. Then again, looking for astute political commentary in a one panel format is like looking for sharks in a teacup. You might find one, just maybe...those little bastards can be sneaky when they're under pressure.

[emphatic]

I had to lol at how all the cool socialists went silent in this thread all of a sudden. I guess it's only cool until someone mentions it's history.

[Mischief Maker]

I had to lol at how all the cool socialists went silent in this thread all of a sudden. I guess it's only cool until someone mentions it's history.

Wait, what? I thought we were discussing political cartoonists.

I'm a Tom the Dancing Bug fan from way back.

[BryanM]

That's a proper Gen Barrassment for poor Bors. What did he ever do to warrant that comparison?! But if you mean that most political cartoonists are somehow worse than Garrison, then yeah, that's true. Then again, looking for astute political commentary in a one panel format is like looking for sharks in a teacup. You might find one, just maybe...those little bastards can be sneaky when they're under pressure.

Ben's work is actually fun to look at and share and extremely fun to edit into even better cartoons. He'll even draw ships and doodads and stuff. BIL mixing him up with Branco is a much worse comparison! Branco has never once in his entire life had a worthwhile, original thought. No substance, and no flash. You can replace that guy with a GAN and one'o those GPT models, and you'll come out with a better cartoonist. "Pee pee doo doo he is a bad president" copypasta x 1000, is a better cartoonist. Pee pee doo doo is something you'll actually remember later, until your grave!

For the single panel format, I used to be utterly baffled by all the people who liked Bennett. Who is neither a good cartoonist nor a good take guy. (Far from the worst tho - oatmeal, I'd generously call the man.) Eventually the giant D party cleave of 2016 made it clear: Somethingawful... was somehow infested with liberals.

The Far Side and The Parking Lot Is Full built up a kind of alternate consolidated universe with their format. Perhaps that's the best use of the format - to linger on broad landscapes, the liminal, on dreams, on myth and lore. ... jesus I'm making Garrison sound like a poet when he's just a mildly entertaining jackass.

The Joust is the apex of the single panel political cartoon. That was 150 years ago. We can't do any better, so expectations shouldn't be high.

I'm a Tom the Dancing Bug fan from way back.

lol, yeah he's exactly who I think of when I think of lefty word avalanches. That's actually a very succinct Modern World there, it just doesn't feel the same without 30 panels filled with text.

I had to lol at how all the cool socialists went silent in this thread all of a sudden. I guess it's only cool until someone mentions it's history.

Yes, the abolition of child labor, the 40 hour workweek, healthcare, civil rights laws, public fire departments, public schools, women being allowed to vote etc were good things. We agree freedom from systematic slavery is the only freedom there is and is indeed "very 'cool'", comrade.

Man remember when you guys let us have zero days off a week? Crazy, lazy ancaps.

smh, singling Castro out as eViL while ignoring the absolute shitloads of murderous capitalist tyrants we support right now goes so far beyond "willfully dense" it's a Branco cartoon. How are those Saudi allies of yours treating their subjects, again?

[BIL]

That's a proper Gen Barrassment for poor Bors. What did he ever do to warrant that comparison?! But if you mean that most political cartoonists are somehow worse than Garrison, then yeah, that's true. Then again, looking for astute political commentary in a one panel format is like looking for sharks in a teacup. You might find one, just maybe...those little bastards can be sneaky when they're under pressure.

Ben's work is actually fun to look at and share and extremely fun to edit into even better cartoons. He'll even draw ships and doodads and stuff. BIL mixing him up with Branco is a much worse comparison!

Bryan pls 3; I see a cartoon Mt. Rushmore with "GEORGE WASHINGTON" "THOMAS JEFFERSON" "THEODORE ROOSEVELT" and "ABRAHAM LINCOLN" decals, plus another at the bottom reading "MOUNT RUSHMORE," those Zyklon Ben neurons fire up! The guy's a riot, I just find that tic of his a bit unfortunate.

Whoa! It's a parody of The Terminator's poster... with Trump replacing Ahnuld! You can tell, it says "DONALD J. TRUMP" on the orange dude with the hideous blonde comb-over.

smh, singling Castro out as eViL while ignoring the absolute shitloads of murderous capitalist tyrants we support right now goes so far beyond "willfully dense" it's a Branco cartoon. How are those Saudi allies of yours treating their subjects, again?

Some turds are better than others, only a fool would differ there. Who dares put a #4 on the Bristol Stool Scale in the company of a pair of #7s?! Christ! #7s are HIDEOUS. Never mind disappearing a few dissidents and tearing out a few relatives' fingernails, the usual #3 antics. #7s are known to kill millions upon millions of their own citizens, by accident or design. And where is #6? Those foul things tend to massacre sweatshop workers to insure their obscene profit margins.

They're all shit though. ¯\(O_O)/¯

To be fair on Castro, the murderous dictator of Cuba, the Yanks didn't help matters much. When do they ever, though? I've no doubt bumping him off would've created another Haiti, once the grunts had fucked off back home to the Sweet Lil Ladeh and Mawm's Apple Pie, a new shithole nightmare even closer to my hood. No thanks bro! I'll take the status quo, good luck Cubanos, yall mahfuckas clearly know how 2 float at least 3;

[emphatic]

shitloads of murderous capitalist tyrants we support right now

Name names, won't you?

[Mischief Maker]

shitloads of murderous capitalist tyrants we support right now

Name names, won't you?

Jair Bolsonaro made an unusual detour to the CIA headquarters in Langley on his first trip to the US after "winning" an election that he was losing badly until his opponent was thrown in jail a month and a half before election day by a corrupt task force linked to the US state department.

Then Bolsonaro probably went to the hospital for his eighth case of leprosy or something. (Dude gets hospitalized A LOT)

Fidel Castro played a material role in ending apartheid in South Aftrica, for which he earned effusive public support and praise from Nelson Mandela.

[BIL]

Probably busted out the "You are lynching negroes" @ Burgerville while he was at it, too

EDIT: Wait a minute. MM-san, you once pulled me off of Maddox's aka George Cuckzunian's fetal-positioned, pants-shitting corpse as I and the rest of the internet pounded shoe after shoe into his massacred clown pocket, because he'd once given Ikaruga a good review.

As then (when I remarked I was originally going to cease my merciless jump-in for fear of him suing ME, too ), I respectfully defer. Awful people can, indeed, do great things for mankind!

(unfortunately, all the shmups nerds consider Ikaruga's mainstream darling status a videogame war crime - but frankly, they feel the same about the notion of getting married and procreating! )

[BryanM]

Bryan pls 3; I see a cartoon Mt. Rushmore with "GEORGE WASHINGTON" "THOMAS JEFFERSON" "THEODORE ROOSEVELT" and "ABRAHAM LINCOLN" decals, plus another at the bottom reading "MOUNT RUSHMORE," those Zyklon Ben neurons fire up! The guy's a riot, I just find that tic of his a bit unfortunate.

Aaah, I admit he does specialize in being a softcore, slightly more coherent Dees. He's actually pretty good about not labeling his caricatures, testament to his superior skills.

I've no doubt bumping him off would've created another Haiti

Yeah, another Haiti is exactly what our overlords wanted. Man do they fume when there's like five bucks laying on the ground and it looks like they should be able to just pick it up but then some smelly cigar beardman stomps on their hand, smiles, and waggles his finger back and forth going "nuh uh-uh!"

Shit you've seen those videos of kids and adults eating literal dirt right, is fucked up.

they feel the same about the notion of getting married and procreating!

Hah, perhaps the best bullet I've ever dodged.

Man, I hope she's doing ok.

[BIL]

Aaah, I admit he does specialize in being a softcore, slightly more coherent Dees. He's actually pretty good about not labeling his caricatures, testament to his superior skills.

Oho! That's the second laugh I've had in the last ten minutes, the first noticing the hidden "GOD IS LOVE" message in Crime Fighters 2, while I was setting a man on fire before stomping him to death - whatever relief granted by the latter battery to the former going for moot, as he expired promptly! The priceless expressions, and crisply efficient comedic timing, and most of all - the stinging rebuke to The Alt Right's Favourite Cartoonist!

Shit you've seen those videos of kids and adults eating literal dirt right, is fucked up.

Much like Burgerville's latest pantywaist chickenhawk-in-chief SNIFFIN JOE, I have not only seen but smelled kids (and adults) who eat dirt! And also a refrigerated container full of raw meat that'd been switched off and forgotten - the scent, it knocked me over!

Hah, perhaps the best bullet I've ever dodged.

Man, I hope she's doing ok.

But I'm guessing your anti-natalism comes from a slightly more noble place than wanting all the cheetos AND DoDonPachi WR for yourself, right? 3;

[Mischief Maker]

Probably busted out the "You are lynching negroes" @ Burgerville while he was at it, too

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180975863/

[BIL]

Ha! GET OWNED, Burgers!

Wow Castro was great, I no longer feel bad playing as him in cooperative games of Guevara In fact I think I'm going to go on a Holiday In Camb- I mean Havana!

[BryanM]

The average "successful" revolutionary tends to have the lifespan of a Thomas Sankara at best, so he was a super aberration. The zany CIA assassination attempts were bizarre indeed: if you want to kill someone, you just have to fuckin' shoot them. Or drop a bomb on them. Another data point that we're living in the stupidest computer simulation.

... man, I wish we got to eat hamburgers as much as you bring it up. Between that and all the Earthbound chat, I really really want to eat one now.

[BIL]

I am sorry, Bryan. This thread is punishing, at the best of times - but that sounds like being born a flightless bird. 3; If it's any consolation, my family and I can never donate blood (a lucrative revenue source!), and might develop late onset CJD, owing to a burger-loving 80s stint in the UK! :[ You see, those stupid, motherless limey cunts *SPIT* (it's not racist, I'm quarter lime, dont EVER let me catch you Burgers saying limey though, CONTEXT DOESNT MATTER!11 :O) skimped on their cattle-rearing practices, and fed their cows... dead cows! Happy Chef, more like they're all gone and you're the only one left.

Believe me it's only a term of affection, I don't think you guys ever did anything so retarded ;3 I never heard about it anyway, unlike the thousands of Cubans Castro murdered, or the thousands more he imprisoned in stomach-turning conditions, or the various philanthropies his regime performed. Maybe I've missed something though - it's a big old world with lots of things in it!

[Sengoku Strider]

I know it's basically his trademark, but Ben's really pushing it, nametagging those three famous pieces of shit. Seriously Ben? Who are you, Ahuviya Harel? :/

Spoiler

Maybe he knows his audience's limitations. Like Ahuviya does.

Spoiler

I feel like I've just been in a car crash.

I had to lol at how all the cool socialists went silent in this thread all of a sudden. I guess it's only cool until someone mentions it's history.

I'm not sure who went quiet, I see the regulars still here.

But the important thing here is, the Cold War American supervillain portrayals of Stalin & Mao are not the history of socialism. Nor are communist parties or Marxists the representatives of socialism; they just try to push a particularly zealous form of it as a temporary stop-gap between capitalism and achieving communism. The term 'socialism' denotes an incredibly varied number of movements, and historically precedes any of those things. Charles Fourier published Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales a decade before Marx was even born.



The US government, terrified of domino-theory Marxist revolutions, expended a massive amount of money and effort after WWII to paint a distorted picture of both socialism and itself, while scrubbing the contributions of socialism to its own society from the triumphal capitalist narrative.

Socialists are the only reason the 2-day weekend exists. Socialists are the only reason the 8-hour workday exists. Socialists are the only reason the exploitation of child labour stopped being a perfectly legal norm.



Capitalists - not the regular people who've been convinced to root for it on the news; the actual owners of major property holdings, industrial production and service industries - fought virulently against those changes. After all, they're the ones who had established those norms in the first place.

And they're still going at it.

[BIL]

I feel like I've just been in a car crash.

So does Ahuviya, 24/7



Even the famously magnanimous Rainbow Hippy Jesus refused to entertain his paint-strippingly pungent blend of untreated autism, FAS, and anime fandom.

[Sengoku Strider]

Even the famously magnanimous Rainbow Hippy Jesus refused to entertain his paint-strippingly pungent blend of untreated autism, FAS, and anime fandom.

That guy asking the questions wasn't even all that informed, he could have pressed much harder on some of that stuff. I had to stop when the...person came back with "you don't have the stats to back that up." The only thing worse than a tankie is a dumb tankie. At least tell me that dialectical materialism proves that Stalin did nothing wrong.

Anyway, they really picked the wrong camp to pitch tent in.

"In 2015, following the removal of a gay-themed web series, the Chinese government issued rules for the production of television series that ban content that expresses or displays “abnormal sexual relations or sexual behaviour, such as homosexuality.”

LGBT advocacy group Advocacy China, that has spearheaded many of the country's legal cases pushing for greater rights is halting its work for the foreseeable future.

A member confirmed that all the group’s activities have been shut down. The member, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns, declined to say why. Group founder Peng Yanzi did not respond to a request for comment.

One LGBT blogger, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution, said it's getting increasingly difficult to run an LGBT group in the current environment, noting that WeChat and other social media platforms are deleting related content.

Shanghai Pride canceled its annual event in 2020 and said it would no longer hold it without explanation after 11 years of operation.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/chin ... t-n1283306

Totalitarian Winnie the Pooh is not having it. But he's still more chill than Mao, who believed in castrating all "sexual deviants."

[BIL]

Totalitarian Winnie the Pooh is not having it. But he's still more chill than Mao, who believed in castrating all "sexual deviants."

Indeed, Aggressively Out Trans Maoist is one of the holy pillars of contradiction that make up the arch-tankie / Naruto enthusiast ADF. Another is his being an astonishingly work-shy working class hero, and also a virulently white-hating bigot cosplaying as a "Latinx," despite being whiter than a fuckin potato.

Some call him a marginally more functional Chris Chan - but I prefer to see him as Bizarro Nick Fuentes with marginally worse hygiene.

[Randorama]

If I may...

A recent article on travelling in China and facing possible problems as queer people (with links).
Of course, travellers are a different category than locals. So, how's the situation for the locals?

This a page from Equaldex with some data on Equal rights in China.
This is some info on South Korea (a "democracy", but the picture is more complicated than that), Thailand (the oldest military dictatorship in the world, and notorious for a very developed "trans" culture, for a lack of a better term), Japan (another democracy...pardon, a constitutional monarchy), India (democracy, a very complex one), Vietnam (OK, let's say "democracy", etc. etc., also they have a developed "trans" culture, but most people know Thailand's one, probably).

Do you want an extreme case? This is Nigeria (ouch; words fail me to define Nigeria right now, sorry).

My two cents is that "Asia" is still quite rural, backward and afraid of non-traditional models of life (i.e. socially conservative), for a lack of a better description.
I am afraid that the same conjecture extends to Africa (duh, sorry, just one link: hopefully I am wrong).

Of course, we can have regional contrasts: for instance, this is Jamaica, and this is Cuba. I'd be curious to see if these contrasts can be traced back to specific factors (historical, probably). And plotted on maps: I like maps, I like Space, and I like Place.

I am not getting paid by anyone to make this post, in case you wonder.

EDIT:

I also admit that I cannot understand how one can consistently connect positions on "identity rights" (e.g. identity of gender, ethnicity, etc.) and on "the environment" with "classical" political positions (e.g. left, right, up, down, socialism, fascism, etc.).

I know that there are historical accidents leading people and parties to combine them into a grand narrative of sorts, but I feel like no other relation other than "it's because we said so, or you face the shooting squadron". Maybe I just forgot all I studied about Political Sciences 1.01 in the Navy? (...I was Electronics Warfare major, so the course I took might have been not very detailed).

Sengoku Strider+colourful taxonomies would make me starry-eyed (Moto Hagio character-style, to be in theme).

Taxonomies=the colourful, tree-like structure with all the branches of socialism is one. I wonder what software did they use to generate it, but also how the classification worked (i.e. how did they split "regional socialism" into more specific branches? I use crappier software for similar purposes).

[BIL]

Jam's homophobia is fairly infamous across the Anglosphere - over the last few decades, we've had several would-be international music stars, rather prematurely hailed as successors to Bob & Pete & Bunny et al, experience a brick wall and prompt return home, once US/European audiences realise that dem catchy dancehall RIDDIMs are frequently accompanied by brutally intolerant lyrics. Bun dem, etc etc. That's "burn them."

As a native son of the place, I can assure the rest of the world that it really is that bad over there, for gay men and women alike. Why exactly is a well-worn subject... some say it's a spiteful rejection of outsiders' (specifically England's) whims; acceptance of homosexuality, women leaders (woman na gon run dis country! went a popular ditty during Portia Simpson-Miller's administration) and other progressive notions seen as too near kowtowing to massa day for much of the populace. I don't know, though. The mother country and its happier artifacts, like roads and running water and table etiquette and cricket and university, and our world-renowed recording studios, are better-loved by many, even the very poor and disenfranchised, than outsiders might think. Will and Kate visiting next year, my granny tells me. Queenie's motorcasde popped up once outside granny's front gate, everyone was so happy. Maybe I'm wrong, I was tiny and bored. I don't get a revanchist vibe though, not on a national scale.

Others, and I see their point, reckon it's a case of plain ol' hypermasculine neurosis born of a hardscrabble social climate. Y'know, the sort of old-world honour culture, where a man so much as letting his lady wife ride his rod while he glares at the ceiling doing his best Duke Togo impression is regarded by his fellow [men of honour/shottas/other] as a flaming homo. He let a woman get on top of him? What a fag! Battyman fi dead!

Wait a minute - he gives her what?



MISTER BOWCAT GET DOWN (◎w◎;)

*gunfire, tyres squealing, hollers of "Bowcat fi dead" etc etc*

Cartoonish as it sounds, it's the kind of violent playground where such proclivities blow up into legit bloody carnage.

However, such subcultural explanations largely fail to address why even relatively safe, prosperous and quite erudite areas and populations of the country share roughly the same viewpoints, albeit watered-down from "bun dem" to "shun dem."

Apologies if I'm rambling, running on fumes after Crime Fighters 2 grappling reconnaissance

TLDR: poverty and corruption running wild + cultural neuroses of uncertain origin, never mind solution = cartoonish ultra violence made real. Nice to visit but God help you if you're born into the wrong place and/or brain, over there.

[Randorama]

Jamaica I know, and I was looking at the whole "Windies" constellation to get an idea (geo-linguists like to explore data through space: I often wear that kind of "work hat", as a linguist). I mean, I know plenty of Jamaicans including you, as well as other "Windies" people, so I have a good...feeling of the type of culture you come from (e.g., the very nuanced issues of "skin colour" that you grew up with).

The general problem I have with Sengoku Strider's original post is that China (i.e. where I currently live and work) is not really an outlier, when it comes to "social conservativism" (or: straight marriage, family, old values, etc.). They call it "Confucianism", around 'ere, and it is still very popular in various forms and expressions across the continent.

More in general, China has come out of the equivalent of the European Middle Ages in 1924, Japan after the bakumatsu or so (1864? Fact-checking=boring!), and South Korea in 1949, really. Rest of Asia, dunno. India should still have the cast system very much in place (but not interwoven in the legal system, plus it's a continent with a federal states system, and the states have VERY DIFFERENT histories and traditions)...and so on.

When did Lady Tatcher propose vehemently homophobic measures? If recall correctly, when V for Vendetta was first released in trade paperback (I recall him discussing the topic in the introduction: 1989?). EDIT: Where is the UK now, rights-wise? Radical changes take time, if you don't want to create disasters like Afghanistan (which had a "communist" government in 1979, hey).

...Identity and discrimination issues, but also environmental issues, strike me as political themes that emerged from the 20th century and were then grafted at random on political revealed religions from the 19th century or older (I refuse to call them "philosophies": My idea of "philosophy is this one).

I am at a phase in which I tend to be lost when people start with "grand narratives" stuffing all kinds of ideas together at random. I don't question that progressive policies should ideally be supportive of anyone's rights, but I fail to see all the obvious connections that, say, some see in one side of the political spectrum and these 20th century "matters".

...and the missionary position, of course.

EDIT:

And anyway, being in favour of certain positions makes you (and me, and whoever else) a very W.E.I.R.D. person, as the rest of humanity tends to think and act via very different sets of principles and beliefs, roughly: "violence is good", "the patriarchate is holy", "might makes right", "women are things", "working 24/7 is good", "do not go against the tribe's will", "cut the tallest poppy", and so on.

As explained in the book in the link, it took centuries in Europe and then its colonies for a certain minority to develop culturally and radically new views with respect to the "usual humanity". In many countries, year 476 happened no more than 70 years ago, and suddenly they have smartphones co-existing with the social structures that existed for millennia (and that, in a sense, are the "core" structures of humans as eusocial, bipedal, fairly big, hive-based animals). Don't get fooled by the smartphones - you remove those, it's still year 600 and it is not guaranteed that the next one will be year 601. Currently, Europe and N-America seem very keen to turn back the clock, if the situation in Ukraine is any indication.

I am W.E.I.R.D. to ridiculous levels (and I joked about this with the author of the book who taught me in grad school), for all that it is worth mentioning it.

[BryanM]

That branch chart is strangely missing Muskian socialism, the most powerful and prevalent form of socialism in the world. The man solved traffic!

Another epstein pal found suicided in a maximum security prison cell. Doesn't sound as secure as they make it out to be imho.

[emphatic]

But the important thing here is, the Cold War American supervillain portrayals of Stalin & Mao are not the history of socialism. Nor are communist parties or Marxists the representatives of socialism; they just try to push a particularly zealous form of it as a temporary stop-gap between capitalism and achieving communism. The term 'socialism' denotes an incredibly varied number of movements, and historically precedes any of those things. Charles Fourier published Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales a decade before Marx was even born.

Aka, "real socialism has never been tried".

[BryanM]

Aka, "real socialism has never been tried".

Real socialism has been tried right here. Little girls are allowed to have fingers now. That's as anti-capitalist as it gets. Stop pretending to be incapable of learning anything, Ben.