Blue_Sotka

Blocking is not only necessary & good, it's also especially satisfying here because that person's entire existence & essence of being is sucked into an alternate hell-dimension when you do.

Chat how Carl Schmitt’s side do in World War II?

It's awful and absurd but....we are talking about 25-30% *of Republicans.*

I'm pretty sure that percentage of them think dinosaurs aren't real but lizardmen are

I understand why Americans cannot admit to themselves the ruinously xenophobic bent at the heart of their culture but it never ceases to be funny how goddamn self-righteous they get when you bring it up

honestly it finds its sharpest modern echoes in Joe Biden making American liberals defend the indefensible in Gaza in the desperate hope he wasn't the monster his detractors said he was

Tankies in the present: "The Soviet Union didn't need lend lease to win!"

Stalin in 1941: "Tell those fucking idiots to knock it off!!!"

the number of people who saw what happened in Russia and dared to dream and slowly watched the USSR go from promised global liberator to fascist enabler, no wonder the New Deal won out here

it's genuinely heart-breaking to me that Stalin had American communists doing protests in front of the White House against Lend-Lease until he was suddenly the newest beneficiary

I feel it was already sabotaged when the bolshevists took power, lenin wasted the built up energy for social change to create a one-party state in a historically poor empire. Stalin brought it to new levels of barbarism and paranoia that guaranteed it would never evolve into anything better

watched Animal Farm a week ago and even in adaptation Orwell's disillusionment and despair over what Stalin did to Lenin's dream is palpable

Saying this from behind a keyboard while liberals and socialists confront fascists in the street hand in hand is a perfect metaphor for the online “left”

Just saw a lady quoted in a local small town paper say she signed the separatist petition even though she doesn’t want to separate but wants to “send a message” and I’m just beside myself

Like this isn’t a fucking joke lady

i think it's largely that they're embarrassed that they were dicking around while a huge social movement happened

how does this even relate to what Will said in the QT

The first big fascist wave in Germany and Italy was driven by the humiliation and suffering of WW1. Our current wave of American fascism is largely driven by rich guys who want it to be illegal for you to laugh at them.

Trump hates dogs and cats and like if you needed another reason not to trust the fucker

Imagine having enough money to run whatever total war game at high resolution, or commission the greatest gaming table ever created for a warhammer game, and still being unhappy? Skill issue

"You laugh, but your fake AI copy won't once the Altman's Basilisk avenges the Sphere"

The Kurzgesagt youtube channel has done irreparable damage to the culture of people who want to be smart, but who do not read.

props to the worst possible response to this, who ate a block just for pure idiocy: that the great filter is a trans woman on bluesky doubting that sam altman is a few decades away from building a dyson swarm

for some reason all the techbros have been talking about building Dyson Spheres all of a sudden and to be clear: we are so comedically far from being able to build a dyson sphere that they may as well be promising magic. we are MILLENIA away from building dyson spheres

an actual conspiracy is uncovered and conspiracy theorists *still* fail to meet the moment, classic

The American people as a whole are in a weird place where they're simultaneously hyper-cynical and totally dismissive of the notion there are like 18 different psyops going on to undermine their belief in the concept of society.

See the @bretdevereaux.bsky.social series on how the Dothraki are basically orcs as opposed to remotely realistic nomads (specifically, Martin having the Dothraki slaughter sheep herds as a matter of course is absolutely ridiculous)

You can dunk on Sanderson for a lot but as a worldbuilder he is significantly more willing to just entertain genuinely bizarre settings that fit a Vibe.

And ultimately that's what Martin's Realism is - a vibe. Specifically "everything is kind of shit & unromantic," not actual verisimilitude.

Tolkien's military structure is actually based on good historical examples, see @bretdevereaux.bsky.social's series of essays on the Siege of Gondor and Battle of Helm's Deep

Right, this is one of those details where more is less.

Tolkien lets you imagine that Aragorn, being a good man and a wise king, would likely have a competent bureaucracy staffed with almost-equally good and wise men like Faramir

GRRM posits something specific and you go "wait would that work"?

You can actually do the math on marching distances of armies in LotR and they all make sense. Which is reasonable, Tolkien was an infantry officer in WWI, he knew what a days march for footborne infantry looked like.

His is worse because in Tolkien you can just kind of assume it works behind the scenes whereas Martin shows us enough to make it clear it doesn't make sense

So one of the great fantasy literature ironies is that Martin rags on Tolkien about tax policy and military structure but his is just as flimsy if not worse