- 176 Posts
- 242 Comments
3·14 小时前Hey @TootSweet@lemmy.world did you know your house is haunted?
Let me sell you a 100% effective ghost removal kit composed of a two weeks supply of endangered snakebits in vials, tidepods, and essential deGhost oils!
We back up our deGhost Kit with a 100 percent success rate in our record at removing ghosts, ghosts have NEVER been found in a house where out kit was used properly!
Sometimes our system does banish people pretending to be ghosts, but then why were they doing that???.. and certainly we are cataching every ghost that pretends to be a human… we have a special proprietary formula for that you just have to trust us on!
TL;DR This is literally just someone selling people a machine for detecting bullshit that itself runs on bullshit, they are composed of the same bullshitting tendencies, this is nothing more than lame performance art that actually hurts people.
1·14 小时前Yes, but we are talking about a summation of pressures being increased until a breaking point is reached, yes there was pressure before but the pressure is vastly increasing and there are signs the Red Sea and the Gulf Of Oman are going to be pulled in, which if that doesn’t worry you, you simply aren’t thinking rationally.
I think ultimately the problem here is the same problem we always face with fascism.
There is no middleground between believing your “race” (or your WHATEVER, religion, economic class, gender, it really doesn’t matter) is supreme and being a good person, it is never innocuous or cute, or “just” engaging with history and celebrating it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t love your history or love history in general, but there is difference between that and believing that your history is part of something special that is outside the rest of the breadth of human experience.
Neoliberalism however, has flirted for decades with the idea that there can be a moderate, reasonable middle ground between believing your race is supreme and being a good person and that is the exact throne centrists have been clawing to occupy for longer than I have been alive.
That delusion ensured that this endpoint was all but inevitable.
To put it another way, the reason no one can succinctly define love is because while everybodies’ experience of it is of course individual, it is also confoundingly the same even when we start from very different standpoints and love different things, when you untie the knot and examine the cord at the heart of it, it is the same love indisputably… which leads to the dizzying problem that love is always an expanding set that you have to keep adding new phenomena to as new individuals express it.
If you deny this, you begin down a very dangerous path, which is kind of the point that all great stories, religions, and ideologies attempt to get at in one way or another… and that path is none other than believing you are part of something special, a special race or group subject to a special love unlike the love others feel or receive…
I mean I have read too much Pynchon to see war as anything but the ruling class smashing things together to keep themselves in power lol.
Which doesn’t mean some wars are not necessary to fight, it means wars are a feature not a bug for the ruling class.
Leaders who actively avoid frivolous war in favor of doing the everyday boring work of having a governing communities of humans trying to live their lives are like people who like to play singleplayer video games on the hardest setting possible. Sure those people exist… but are they the ones in power?..
No, do the work yourself.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/03/ukraine-iran-wars-trump
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-904896
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/28/world/donald-trump-iran-ukraine-korea
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-nato-shadow-war-pushes-europe-to-the-brink-12392544
1·15 小时前Now, it’s not unheard of that authors can see the proverbial writing on the wall and anticipate future events to some degree. But to argue that you would also have to actually point to his writing and draw parallels. You can’t just point at later events as proof for what is in the book.
Have you actually read any literary analysis of The Magic Mountain… or like… just read the damn book? Were you not paying attention to the conversations with Naptha and how Hans Castorp changes in his disposition towards them over the course of the novel as WW1 ripens on the limb…? Go read the book again, I will not waste my time handing you things just so you can throw them at the wall like a baby.
Your desire to bifurcate periods of time and development of ideologies into artificial divisions is childish.
Yes, that was a necessary precursor to things becoming so volatile, but we are at the point where the everyday people may drag their monarchs and institutions to war no matter how the leaders feel about it personally.
Also the people living in the region always want to not have it turn into a battlefield the most, water desalination is intensely vulnerable making the danger acute, but red lines drive right through obstacles to war, and powers more broadly are pushing towards war in a way that will eventually make people feel they have no choice.
Than you fail to understand something basic about geopolitics in the Middle East and you should read some more books.
Do you think other forces in the region intertwining flareups from their localized conflicts into a broader push towards war are not genuine about their red line on the Palestinian Genocide and Lebanon?
You fail to understand perhaps the MOST important part about this, which is what it means to see a humanity in Palestinians and genuinely decide it is worth fighting for fuck the consequences.
I am not saying this is a good thing, but you are a fool for looking at this situation and laughing derisively as if we are not on the edge of a great precipice into broader war.
You have missed so much I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Are you claiming The Magic Mountain is a reaction to Mein Kampf, a book that had not been published by then?
…no?
The first one also started with dangerous fools like the person you responded to loudly drowning out concerned voices about the possibility of the outbreak of widespread war.
It is a necessary precondition, how could we have otherwise sleptwalk right to the edge of the cliff with our toes nearly hanging over?
Absolutely, the Far Right need to stoke power with Xenophobic fearmongering media in order to both cement their hold on power in Europe and ensure their russian allies in high places have a ready made narrative to tell russians about how they are actually fighting the bad guys who hate the Global South and are trying to push “poor” russia into it.
Russia thus can continue to laughably claim it is a champion of the Global South against nazi “Western” rich powers while throwing human beings from wherever they can scoop them up in the Global South into unfathomably wasteful meatgrinder human wave attacks in Ukraine that amount to nothing… which isn’t to imply the only meatgrinders russia runs are in Ukraine…
In that sense the event at Ceuta was propaganda that mutually served two rightwing empires at once and if that doesn’t send a foreboding shiver down your spine I don’t know what will.
The only people who don’t win here no matter what happens next are the people with actual empathy in the EU and of course immigrants.
edit you think Merz would be left out of this? Fat chance!
ahahaha right, that is what happens when one of the most, if not the most important global shipping chokepoints is closed, yeah sure that will definitely remain a contained tit for tat!
The Strait Of Hormuz will look the smaller less existential problem compared to this.
The Bab-el-Mandeb has entered the chat
Fill me up with cars like a car carrier one tanker says to another
Think of all the pointless ecocide too.
Oh they are
So is Mein Kampf not fascist because it predates 1933 too?
Get out of here with this lazy shit, Naptha is clearly a fascist in all but name in The Magic Mountain.
Well a wet sandwich is definitely better than the AfD.