UnderpantsWeevil

Too many Americans seriously believe failure to carry state documentation makes you legally a non-person. And being undocumented while brown flags you as part of an invading army.

He's no better than an Arab, a Russian, or one of the dreaded Chinese and deserves to die in misery as an example to others

Destroying the lives of many people indirectly in pursuit of money, however, is just an unfortunate fact of life.

Hey now. That's not always true.

Consider the Twin Towers Attacks (which indirectly enriched the Saudi Royal family immensely). Americans were so enthusiastic to avenge the honored dead of Cantor Fitzgerald financial services that they flew to the opposite side of the planet and started wars with multiple other countries on totally false pretenses.

Similarly, we've been gungho in funding the massacre of Gaza residents when they greedily and villanuously attempted their Right of Return to homes lost in the '47 Nakba.

And let's never forget our 50 year crusade against the money grubbing, land stealing, economy looting Communists.

The Suez Crisis, the Iranian Revolution, Vietnam? I think we can all agree they were unconscionable and deserving of an unlimited Holocaust of native peoples in response.

Was out on a date with an Atom, but then he split.

Just like Netanyahu with the handling of Gaza. Lots of people approve. Some people think he's not going fascist enough.

More than 17% Those are just the ones who'll admit to it.

All those Dems clutching their pearls over "Defund ICE" posters are very happy to see Hispanics ethnically cleansed.

George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader's Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in "Hutt Space" - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. "The Clone Wars" wasn't just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope's Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was "Episode IV" should say it all.

One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director's notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.

It's an early YA novel and propaganda piece. Very good at what it set out to accomplish. Obviously, not good for a material understanding of the world.

Florida is well on its way

Well, I'm glad Mamdani won in NYC and zionist liberals can finally put to rest the need to vote straight ticket Democrat.

Voters chose the option furthest right

Politicians picked their voters in order to guarantee this outcome. Gerrymandering, mass disenfranchisement along social and ethnic lines, vote caging, intimidation, misinformation, straight up sabotage of voting venues... It happens all the time in liberal democracies, particularly in poorer, more homogeneous, and more rural neighborhoods.

As soon as the politicians fuck up on the math and a socialist breaks through (as with AOC beating Crowley back in '18 or Mamdani trouncing Cuomo last week), you get to see the "moderates" and their conservative cats' paws rush in to subvert the popular will.

This happens every time the left most option isn’t chosen.

The joke is how quickly a government will move to the right when the left-most option is chosen.

It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn't all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment... fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn't feel like a thing that could really happen.

Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence... as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.

As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, "Catcher in the Rye" resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself "Holy shit was I really like this?" only to realize you absolutely were.