Anndra

Every literary festival or theatre should condemn this, but as Sonia says, they won’t. They will cowardly disguise themselves by saying it’s “politics” and that they aren’t “political”. The storming of the National Theatre of Palestine is a crime not only on Palestinians, but on Palestinian art.

Black Actresses Are Carrying One Battle After Another Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, and Regina Hall propel the film’s most conflicted ideas, for better and worse.

Finally. My big 2800 word essay about One Battle After Another and its black women characters is live. www.vulture.com/article/blac...

posh London public schools are, in fact, sending their best

Age of Empires 2's environmental hawks are invincible in normal gameplay but if killed they explode, so you can make pyrotechnic effects in the scenario editor by doing Create Object then an instant Kill Object trigger with a bird

actually this is very useful I take it back

how's that (not) a fuckin recommendation?

I think most of them are via Norman French in the medieval period

Yeltsin visits America and is stunned by the variety of ghosts at the supermarket compared to the USSR

If you don't live in France, it's hard to really grasp how deeply islamophobic and racist its institutions still are, to this day. They're happy to let you work for them or to consume your cultural goods, but they don't like it when you're *too* arab.

"social democrat" came to mean what it means now as the various member parties of the 2nd International betrayed their ideals to side with their parent nations in WW1 and take a reformist approach to 'achieving socialism'. The German SPD was a trailblazer in this

another accidental jenny: the dog in that panel

April 21st. Went this morning to the local police court, the people's court they call it here. Anything more casual and informal you could not imagine. We at last found a judge with a crowd of people round him in his room. He was a young man of about thirty, small with bright quick eyes. He asked if we wanted to see a criminal case or the ordinary minor ones. As I had seen a criminal case during my previous visit I chose the people's court. The room, not very big, was fairly crowded and we waited for the judge to come. One old peasant woman got impatient and said "Why don't they hurry instead of keeping me waiting?" The others laughed and chatted away. When the judge, the same little man we had found, came in he was followed by two workers, a bald-headed man of about fifty-five and a neat woman of forty. We all rose and then sat again as did the judge, with his two helpers, at their table with a red cloth. These two workers are elected by the factories to help to judge the cases. They are changed each Soviet week and get paid their pay by the factory while doing the job. Lenin said, "Every cook must learn to govern the State," and this is one of their methods. The judge conducts the case and the three decide on guilt and punishment. The judge is elected by the workers, and can be recalled, if not satisfactory, at any time.

I enjoyed this little vignette of visiting a minor Soviet court, where Hooper is fascinated by the informality and how the judge is elected by the workers and can be recalled at any time if they want it

No, if Germany must expand, it will be against France and Great Britain. Hitler's Mein Kampf explains this clearly as regards France and he expects his friends inside France to help him. The same applies to us. It will need more than Chamberlain's Mein Gamp to stop it. But if we join with Soviet Russia, we would have the support of France and America. This combination of peace-loving nations could save us and the world from war. WIll we do it? That is for the reader to answer. Bernard Shaw said: "You do not need to be a Communist to see we must join with Soviet Russia." As the Dean of Canterbury says in his kind foreword: "Her friendship and aid is of the utmost importance for the democratic nations." There lies our road to Peace. December 1938 Since writing the above a change has come over public thought, and the revulsion of feeling at the reluctance of the Government to join with Soviet Russia has grown enormously. What I foresaw last December has come true. The Anti-Comintern pact is now a definite military alliance and has invaded and captured Spain, Czechoslovakia and Albania. Yet Soviet Russia is as immune from attack as ever. It is the Western Democracies that are in danger. Soviet Russia has no intention of pulling our chestnuts out of the fire, but has offered a full defensive military alliance. They can give more than they receive. Yet we have haggled with them for 2 months, and at the time of writing are still haggling. To accept her help is our only hope to ease continual tension. It is our only road to Peace and salvation. May 18 1939 LAST POSTSCRIPT Great Britain and the Soviet Union are now Allies. Where diplomacy failed Hitler succeeded when he attacked and invaded Soviet Russia on June 22nd. In the face of the common danger the peoples of the two countries are being drawn together, and will learn to understand each other. This understanding should form a firm foundation on which to build the future Peace of Europe, and of the world. July 16 1941

The pamphlet ends with a succession of 'final thoughts' from different editions. I think this is a really interesting look at (a section of) public opinion in Britain at the time - that the Soviet offer of alliance against Hitler was known, and at least some people disdained the government's refusal

anyway, this pamphlet is mostly a "look how normal this place is in comparison to the stories we're told about it" piece of writing, with some fun insights into Soviet society at the time. But it also comes with specific calls for the UK and the western Allies to take the USSR's side against Germany

Mr. W. J. Brown asked the Secretary of State for War if he can make any statement as to the circumstances in which Major A. S. Hooper has been banned from lecturing to the British Army. Sir J. Grigg Lecturers to the Forces are required to hold a certificate of employment issued by one of the Regional Committees of the Central Advisory Council for Adult Education in H.M. Forces and countersigned by the appropriate military authorities. The latter are invariably the military Command in which the particular Regional Committee is situated. All certificates are reviewed each year, and in a certain number of cases the military authorities give notice to the Regional Committees that they do not propose to renew the certificates. If the Regional Committee thinks this decision unjustified Toggle showing location ofColumn 1144in any particular case it may submit to the Army Commander evidence of the lecturer's suitability, and ask that the case may be reconsidered. The decision of the Army Commander on this request is final. In accordance with this practice all certificates of employment automatically expired on 31st August, 1943. As a result of the subsequent review, the London Regional Committee were informed on 10th September, 1943, that Major Hooper's certificate would not be renewed. I understand that the Committee informed Major Hooper of this decision on 2nd December. Presumably in the interval they were considering whether they would ask for reconsideration. No such request was in fact received. Perhaps, in view of the allegations which have been publicly made, I may add that no search of Major Hooper's rooms and belongings was made by any military authority.

It's a fascinating bit of writing - as far as I know Hooper was no communist but it's hard to find any information about him online, besides this in Hansard which states he had some 'public allegations' about him in 1943 hansard.parliament.uk/%E2%80%8CCom...

Front cover of the book/pamphlet Through Soviet Russia by Major A. S. Hooper, 6th edition. The price is listed as sixpence.

Nearly ten years ago now on a visit to London I picked up a pamphlet in a radical bookshop called Through Soviet Russia, by Major AS Hooper, published in 1941 (though the original edition had been published in 1937). It's a travelogue by a British army officer who visited the USSR in 1936

Seals singing in a sea cave

#Orkney 🦭🎧

could just have quoted 'veteran' from his bio

storygraph kind of encourages this with its boilerplate review questions about "are the characters lovable" and "are the flaws of the characters a focus", it's very... YA coded

Pretty interesting stuff! Notably this is testing the situation where people are shown the same information (ie the LLM provides web links as citations etc). It also looks at how original the subsequent synthesis is by the human participant.

The difference between a Serious Person and a Ridiculous Conspiratorial Crank in the UK tends to be more of a function of how many sympathetic press contacts you have

If you agree that socialism is a better theoretical path to a stateless society than a spontaneous transformation from current capitalist society then... consider communism rather than anarchism. it's where I ended up landing, basically

this kind of chauvinism is the absolute bane of westerners (I'm not going to say 'the western left' because this is just some kind of liberal, but tbh it's a problem for the left too)

"local government isn't government"

they were social democrats and while setting up the welfare state - a good thing for people in Britain, no question - they also oversaw mass death and repression overseas because colonial extraction and exploitation funded the British state

yeah I've seen those subreddits

Are the fae open source? Can you licence a changeling under creative commons? Is the protective power of iron horseshoes still under copyright? Do you need a monthly subscription to avoid your selkie lover returning to the sea?

you're a terrible advert for the DSA

This is a really nice thing to do - not sure how many players it actually affects at this point but regardless, it's a good way to go about it

a whole bloc of English social democrats in the Corbyn years - the intellectuals of the movement, New Socialist etc - tried to rebrand socdem reformism as "long revolutionary socialism". this was transparently idiotic at the time and even more ridiculous since

“There’s clearly something political about it but nobody knows what it is" is one hell of a quote