#glorious violent revolution fantasy

[notaplaceofhonour]

One of the most frustrating parts of the extreme rhetoric around Israel/Palestine (besides the obvious reliance on antisemitic & anti-Arab, Islamophobic tropes) is that it exceptionalizes so many things that are actually pretty standard features of nation-states and war in a way that completely compartmentalizes the criticism of these things into just being about criticizing the “few bad apple” countries instead of criticizing the entire institution of nation-states and war as a whole.

For instance: the fact is that war kills civilians, at an alarming average of 6:1 civilians-to-combatants deaths. The status quo of war, across the board, is that way more civilians die than combatants. And yet, despite the high death toll, despite Hamas using civilian infrastructure & noncombatants as human shields (which Hamas has openly admitted to doing), despite the imprecise & destructive nature of using bombs on urban targets, and despite the inadequate humanitarian aid that has been able to make it into Gaza… the IDF has still managed to stayed well below the average of civilian casualties.

The point of saying this is not “this is what war looks like so it’s not a big deal” it’s “this is what war looks like so we as a species need to stop doing it”—seeing the devastation war has brought to the people Gaza should move you, and it should make you never want to see another war again. It should make you want a ceasefire not just for Israel and this war but all wars always. And obviously, in practice, it’s not that simple—peace is more than “just don’t do war” and the thing about ceasefires and peace treaties is they kind of have to be mutual to mean anything—but the point stands: War Bad.

However, if instead you see the destruction in Gaza and think it’s an exceptional case, where Israel is evil and the only way war could be this destructive is genocide, you get to preserve this romanticized, idealistic fantasy of war as, violent yes, but perhaps only in a cathartic, tragic-but-beautiful way—a glorious struggle where two armies clash on a battlefield far removed from everyday life and only soldiers die. You get to preserve your belief in Just War, to look forward to a morally uncomplicated Glorious Revolution™️—you may even preserve your ability to cheer on the death of Israelis.

And that’s just one issue. There are others: the claim of “ethnostate” obscures criticisms of nation-states as a concept, the claim of “apartheid” obscures criticisms of how borders & citizenship are set up across the world, etc. This inverse Israeli Exceptionalism where Israel is treated as uniquely or exceptionally problematic isn’t simply discriminatory or rooted in prejudice (which are reasons enough to criticize it, as I have), it’s actively impeding the left’s ability to criticize the actual structural systems that are the problem.

#i/p #anti war

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think we romanticize the concept of revolution (especially violent revolution) out of some weird offshoot of our tendency to romanticize and propagandize war/the military?

Like, we treat war/the military as a good thing, so when we turn against it, we basically just apply the REVOLUTION coat of paint over the "military is great and just" framework? or something?

There are a few reasons. First, America itself is totally beholden to the idea of the Glorious Populist Revolution that overthrows the tyrants and brings Freedom (TM), thanks to the American revolution. That is why the right wing has spent endless time cosplaying "1776" and "Founding Fathers" and all the other cosmetic trappings that they put on their fascism project, and keep threatening to have a "new revolution" or a "new civil war" if Trump isn't immediately reinstated to the presidency for life. Because they are steeped in the paradigm of "messianic militarism," which has a long and inglorious history in the West and is based in Christian imperialism and colonialism, they just think that The Right Kind of Violence will overthrow the Evil Oppressors and everything will then be glorious! Of course, this has been a recurrent theme in human history and it has never, ever worked.

Because the so-called progressive left often takes deeply theocratic and fascist/conservative concepts and then just changes the wording/rationale/costume dressing, they have therefore become attached to the idea of "guillotining" all the oppressors (like the French revolution, which famously worked out fine and was definitely not followed by the Terror and did not at all end with the country lapsing back into absolute imperialism under Napoleon barely a decade later!), like we can just kill all the right people and then the world will be fine! Which uh. Yeah, that's a hard no from me. I dream as fondly of Elon Musk getting into a Tesla and suddenly blowing up as anyone, but I don't subscribe to the repurposed genocidal fantasy that "killing everyone is right when My People do it!," and I don't think that this would remotely result in a better world the end, because again: Historian talking here. It literally never, ever has. There are no magic shortcuts to making things better. It only happens by doing the work and not fantasizing about how much easier it would be if all the bad things abruptly disappeared in a splendid shower of blood and gore. Because a) that's not gonna happen and b) we don't fucking want it to! What is wrong with you?! Do you think only the Deserving Sinners will die in your Progressive Rapture and everyone else will be fine??? Because! Yeah! NO!!!

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #it is just thinly repurposed protestant evangelical apocalyptic eschatology #about the End of Days when All Sinners Are Destroyed #which is a punishment fantasy for the christian fascists and also the leftists #the only thing that changes is who is getting punished and how #but Destroying the Infidels And The World Is Now Perfect #is the common theme #and yeah uh. hard pass.

[gamblegun]

Oh boy, I don't want to get into it with people politically. But all not casting your vote does, is makes it so you don't matter to them, since there's no incentive to curry your favor. All you are doing is diminishing your power. I don't believe in the glorious revolution. I don't think that we should let things get dire so "people will rise up". I'm very much of the mind of that tweet that says, "People will say 'my plan to fire bomb a Walmart will be more effective than voting' and then not fire bomb a Walmart." But even IF we did big dramatic coupes, would all the people that have died not matter? Is societal collapse conducive to getting people food and medicine? It's a violent unkind childish fantasy. There is no such thing as righteous martyrs and acceptable collateral. It sucks to better the world in increments, but improving people's lives in real tangible ways is what matters, and what works. If you can't make an actual real impact than it doesn't matter. You'll do more to protect the vulnerable by protecting them from someone who is going to end their lives, than all the daydreams about shooting the fashes in the head can ever hope to accomplish. The end.

#you can't smash the world with a hammar and expect all the evil to go away #all youre doing is killing people with a hammar #and you're not even going to do that #you're just going to hurt people through negligence

[andromeda3116]

all right fuck it let's talk redcloak

i will say it's been years since i read start of darkness, and i've since lost my copy of it, so i only sort of remember what happened in it, but i recall it establishing that redcloak is the king of the sunk-costs fallacy, and it really becomes clear with his brother.

he has to pull this off. he killed his own beloved brother for this, it has to be worth it. he has to make it be worth it.

and he has his moment of revelation at the battle for azure city, that he's been treating the hobgoblins as fodder -- the way that everyone else treats his goblins -- even though they're the same species. they're all goblins, tarred with the same brush.

and like... he's not really wrong. the goblins were fucked from the start, created to be nothing more than walking xp for adventurers, robbed of their chance to have their own lands or gods or homes. he is absolutely right to campaign for goblin equality. it's hard to blame him for taking every step necessary.

and then durkon meets with him.

and durkon negotiates, he argues pretty convincingly that following the plan, as-is, will destroy everyone, goblins included, and that -- while imperfect -- if they live and the dark one becomes a god on the same tier as thor, things can begin to improve for the goblins. it will take time, it will be a hard uphill battle, but they can make it happen. they can work this out.

and redcloak can't relent. he can't accept that. he has to make this all be worth it, and a generations-long war of attrition against speciesism to bring his people onto equal footing isn't good enough. and like. i get that. it's not the perfect solution he wants. it's not the glorious revolution where everything is magically better on the other side of it.

it's the exact same mindset of probably millions of online leftists right now: this "solution" you're offering, of clawing our way through incremental change to ultimately create a better world we will never see, as opposed to our "solution" of violent revolution now that puts our guy in charge who will somehow magically fix everything as soon as everyone realizes we were right all this time -- is unacceptable. redcloak is a bolshevik. he's a communist revolutionary, he's lenin. he's standing up for the oppressed, he's Fighting The Good Fight, he thinks the ends will justify the means, even if that means includes his own death, because it will mean that he died trying to make things better for his people.

he doesn't see that this "solution" is doomed to fail. if not because of flaws inherent to itself, because the world itself will crumble around him if he doesn't let go of this fantasy of a perfect ending.

and when he tries to kill durkon and casually asks, how many goblins have you killed? and durkon replies, carving redcloak entirely bare, straight to the core:

not as many as you.

redcloak is the arbiter of his own destruction. he's a walking sunk-costs fallacy. he had good intentions. he meant well. he isn't wrong, at the core. but he has to make this all be worth it. he has to justify the moment where he killed his own brother.

he's an incredibly compelling villain, magnificently well-written and deep, and it's like... he's beyond redemption, he proved that when he tried to kill durkon instead of taking his offer seriously. and that's a tragedy. because redcloak just wanted his people to be treated like people. but he hitched his wagon to xykon, and he kept spiraling down and further down, and now...

i honestly have no idea how redcloak's story ends. does he turn on xykon in the clutch and save his people at the bottom of things? does the dark one abandon him and force him to face the mirror, the fact that this hasn't been about his people for a long time? does he die screaming, cast into the rift or destroyed by the snarl? does --

i genuinely can't guess. and I don't know what the "correct" ending for him is. i do think the dark one is necessary to containing the snarl -- but what of what's inside the snarl? and what happened to laurin when she looked into it? and --

ugh, this story is so good, and redcloak is such a damn amazing villain. i admit that i'm a sucker for the sunk-costs fallacy villain, who started off with good intentions but kept going further and further down in the pursuit of their goals, until they no longer know just what they're fighting for anymore, except to make this all be worth it.

and redcloak is one of -- if not the -- best examples of that i've ever seen.

#order of the stick #redcloak #order of the stick spoilers #oots #oots spoilers #oh shit and now that i'm fully caught up i'm considering all of redcloak's actions and then the warg says in the most recent comic #''intentions matter only in the absence of results. and then only for the blaming.'' #like. shit.

[sixty-silver-wishes]

Looking at the news, I'm so tired and anxious. I see tensions between countries, threats of civil war, dictatorships, mass death, genocide, corruption... and then I go online, and I see people telling strangers to kill themselves. I see people wishing death upon entire populations. I see people excited over the prospect of war, about the fantasy of the mass killing of those they don't even know, of a twisted idea of some fucking "glorious revolution" conjured up by people who have no idea what revolution is.

I'm sick of the normalization of violent rhetoric. I'm sick of "kys." Haven't you ever stopped to realize how FUCKED it is that we have an easily-recognizable acronym for telling people to commit suicide? That you can tell someone to end their own life in just three letters in the style of "brb" and "lol"? I'm sick of hearing "death to ___," whether it's a country or a person or a group of people. I'm sick of people thinking it's better to wish someone die than for them to receive support and education. I'm sick of the fucking echo chambers we build around ourselves and cast others into. I'm sick of war and selfishness and death and anxiety.

Please. I'm so tired.

#rambles #vent post #death mention #suicide mention

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

2023 Year in Review

1. 28,490 notes - Jun 16 2023

You know, it’s kinda funny how much of high fantasy centers around kings and nobility and courtly intrigue considering that the archetypal high fantasy, Lord of the Rings, had the rather explicit moral of “saving the world is up to this backwater hick and his gardener because no politician, least of all inherited nobility, would have the ability to see past their own ambition and throw away a weapon”. Oh sure, Aragorn is a great king and all, but there’s a reason he’s over there running a distraction ring while the hobbits do the real work. Sauron loses because he gets distracted by kings and armies and great battles (i.e. typical high fantasy stuff) letting Frodo and Sam sneak through his back door and blow it all to hell.  

Just saying, maybe old Jirt knew what he was saying when he said that the small folk doing their best and holding to each other was more powerful than a dozen alliances and superweapons and we should respect him for it.

2. 22,425 notes - Jul 6 2023

“LOL. You think your vote matters? ROFL and LOL.” Yes, I am aware my vote carries less and less relative power the more people I’m voting with, but unlike your glorious violent revolution, it actually exists.

3. 20,183 notes - Mar 7 2023

The 4 approaches to “orphaned etymology” problems in fiction

1. Obviously we can’t call it French toast if there’s no France so we’re just gonna replace it with something else.

2. The word abattoir sounds too French so it wouldn’t make sense for it to be here without a France. Even though we use English without there being an England.

3. This is called a Ming vase because when you tap it it makes a “Ming!” sound.

4. I am JRR Tolkien and every single word I write has a fictional etymology attached to it that I am translating into English for your convenience.

4. 17,918 notes - Dec 26 2023

As to whether the Gavle Goat’s consumption should be seen as a good omen or a bad omen, I’d say good. Traditionally the Yule goat is made of straw from the final harvest and as a talisman against hard times, and there are unproven theories that its shape is inspired by Thor’s goats, who are constantly killed, eaten, and reborn to provide endless meat for Thor and whatever guests he entertains.  Therefore, its use by birds as a food store and safe harbor is an affirmation of its original purpose and truly in the Christmas spirit of generosity in lean times. What’s more, the birds eating it seems to be have been the one outcome to unite both goat burners and goat keepers, as they have decided not to scare the birds away from their safe harbor and not to harm the goat, a decision that has been universally lauded. 

As omens go, this one’s all positive: safety, plenty, and unity between previous ideological opponents through a creative third solution built on shared values (birds being fed and sheltered is a good thing). May more birds find their way to the Gavle Goat next year. 

5. 11,031 notes - Apr 24 2023

Okay hearing that people actually do this has made me morbidly curious so... My house was split into Parents and Kids bathrooms...

6. 9,188 notes - Mar 16 2023

The best decision The Mandalorian ever made was centering their show around an archetypal masked, taciturn gunslinger who wanders from town to town never putting down roots, and then revealing that he acts that way because he’s a massively awkward introvert who uses that archetype to avoid having to socialize with people beyond the three interaction scripts he already knows.  10/10, top tier characterization, I love seeing this man outshoot a bar full of people and then get scammed by a random mechanic because he’s too polite to confront her about it. Truly a hero of our times.

7. 5,183 notes - Mar 21 2023

Okay but for a corporately mandated love triangle (Gale was meant to be Katniss’ cousin, publisher asked to make him the childhood friend with a crush), Hunger Games absolutely nails it. It can’t just be solved by polyamory because it represents her choosing between two aspects of herself. Yes Gale sometimes acts like a dumb teenager because he is, but not to an obnoxious level. The one and only time Peeta and Gale get a conversation about it, both of them fully acknowledge that it’s Katniss’ choice so fighting over her is pointless. It’s not a marketing gimmick to generate unnecessary tension, it’s a complicated relationship that informs all three of their characters and is deeply intertwined with the series’ themes of war and trauma.

8. 4,122 notes - Jul 1 2023

I mean I’m not even trans and I can still tell Nimona the movie is basically ND Stevenson going back and saying “okay, let’s do it on purpose this time”.

9. 3,850 notes - Jan 4 2023

What I really like about the dinner mystery is that they could have made it super easy or had Blanc go on about how obvious it is since he needed to solve it quickly, but instead he’s thrilled by it. He points out every subtle clue, all the foreshadowing, the style of it, and he even tells Miles that it was satisfying and the perfect bite-sized mystery. “A dramatic, passionate, and colorful crime for a fashionista!”. He might have solved it easily, because this is his job, but he can still appreciate the artistry in it and enjoy solving it.

It provides a nice counterpoint to the later reveal, where he is genuinely disappointed by how dumb the murders where but still prioritizes the victims. He might love solving the mysteries, but he knows what’s really important. So what could be better than a mystery with no victims?

10. 3,467 notes - Apr 6 2023

Honestly when you hear that someone once held bigoted views in the past but no longer does that shouldn’t be a disappointment, but a victory. Yes! We got ‘em! One less person on the wrong side of history and one more for us! This is exactly what we want, for people to leave their prejudices behind, and we succeeded!

Created by TumblrTop10

#tumblrtop10 #jetblackcode #don't worry it's not too long #i see my fandom takes are as immaculate as ever but that political take is probably gonna stay strong for a while #with a surprise ending for gavle goat good omen

[dr-ladybird]

Hey Americans:

If you put “don’t vote or try to improve government regulations, we’re powerless to change anything, the ideologically correct path is to sit on your arse and fantasise about violent and bloody revolution while doing nothing” propaganda on my dash, I will block you no matter how much I like your content.

Don’t try to tell me it’s a joke. That attitude’s never a joke. The murder fantasies and “being a bad person means being subhuman and suitable for lynching” might be a joke, but I’m not taking the risk - but the apathy and anti-voting/anti-regulation attitude is never a joke and it’s *exactly* how you guys got Donald Trump.

I’m not claiming to be some sort of shining beacon of glorious ideological activism, but I’m with a union (and they’ve been damn useful once or twice) and I *fucking vote for social safety nets and climate regulations*. And I don’t piss away all my energy on going “boo hoo we’re already fucked let’s sit down and cry”.

Understood?

#cw seriously angry here #politics

[evilelitest2]

Top Nine Reasons why Marxism Failed in Implementation

100 years ago (though not on this day) The Soviet Union overthrew the Tsarist goverment to usher in a new age of Utopian politics..and that didn’t go so well (and now a bunch of tankies are pissed at me). So why is it that Marxism tends to not work out so well in the implementation.  Just forward note, I am mostly talking about the schools of Marxism that are descended from Leninism and actually attempted to control a nation, so when Marxists Orthodoxy folk come in and say “Hey Lenin skipped the Capitalist step” yes I know, I”m talking about the Marxist states that actually exist.  

Number 1: Party Vanguardism 

So while the popular image of Marxist revolutions is a giant crowd of people storming the palaces and killing all the nobles, Marxist organization principle was based around Party Vanguardism, basically a small elite group of ideologically pure Marxists will take over the country in a lightning coup, seize control of the goverment and implement the necessary social reforms for the sake of the people.  The idea is that since the average people are far too ignorant/stupid/religious/superstitious/easily confused what have you appreciate the Marxist Utopian vision, they would basically forcibly implement the system upon them from above.  Party Vanguardism came about in the French Revolution with the Conspiracy of Equals as a response to the sort of self destructive nature of French revolutionary mob politics.  Problem is when you give a small elite total control of the country whose primary qualification is their ideological purity you wind up with a bunch of people living in a total fantasy world and people who aren’t actually qualified are put into positions of power.  Small groups like that are also really suitableness to infiltration by opportunistic egotists (Stalin) but also are prone to corruption and autocracy by those within because those in the vangaurd are like “I seize power” and then they are like “I has power” but they never seem to get to the “giving up power” stage....hmmm

Number 2: No Balance of Power 

So why is it that Marxists regimes always become dictatorships (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Tito, Castro, the Kim Family and much much more) If your nation is led by a single Party who can best implement the great wonderful Utopian vision, then there isn’t really any room for an opposition party.  At first glance this sounds great, no stooges of the capitalist machine trying to gum up reform and plan military coups (that wasn’t sarcastic that happens a lot with right wing opposition parties), but here is the problem.  If you’re regime has no built in mechanism to counter the leadership if they go wrong....then holy shit will they go wrong.  And ambitious morally dubious men will quickly realize “Wait...if I seize control of this goverment, then I will live out the rest of my life as a communist god king cause there isn’t any check on my power”.  And those men will fight to obtain as much power, and once they have it, it is basically too late for the Communist state, because once a dictator seizes power they can ruin the state so thoroughly it is impossible for it to right itself under communist principles, as we have seen in both the Soviet Union and Maoist China.  Because while Marxists never intend to implement a horrible dictatorship, there is not safeguard to stop it, and that is why it always happens.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  

Not that I want to defend the US system too much because it is a mess, but Trump obviously wants to make himself into an autocrat...but he can’t, at least not yet.  The system is so decentralized and opposition is so easy that he can’t even get his travel bans implemented.  Power needs safeguards put into place to keep it in check, otherwise autocracy.

Number 3: Militancy 

This isn’t unique to Communism, and it isn’t always the communists fault, but the violent militant methods embraced by the Leninists descended communist (Yes yes i know not all Communists are Leninists many are peaceful I’m talking about the historical states that have existed).   I know that violent revolution gets romanticized but you know why it so many times turns from “overthrow the fate elites” to “Lets murder everybody” is because it starts as it means to go on.  Once violence becomes an acceptable form of political expression, then violence is just going to happen more, and it becomes just easier to murder you’re political opponents than deal with them in other ways. And when you have an external enemy who the state has to be focused on battling on the first thing to go is individual rights, which is why the French Revolution really went to crazy land once they went to war with Austria and we have seen how the American political system deteriorated once we went to a 16 year long war.  Wars make autocracy more likely, and Marxists states often emerge in a state of war.  This is to say nothing of the fact that when you seize power with weapons, the person with the weapons is always going to be thinking to themselves “I can do this again.”

Number 4: Winner Take All Politics

One of the greatest advantage of democracies is that political losers can still exist within society (one of the greatest failings is that there isn’t any room for economic loser).  Because when making an incorrect political move could result in death, people get a lot more scary.  In a democracy, even a horribly mismanaged one, if you lose an election and can go home to move on with your life, the state as a whole is more stable.  If losing a political battle results in death, then people are going to use any means possible to win, and this is why communist auto-cannibalism comes so quickly, because pretty much everybody has their back to then they will gladly destroy the state in order to come out on top or avoid being killed.  Or like what we saw happen with the Great Leap Forward, people knew that if they didn’t meet production quotas they would be shot, so they lied and said they did, which caused those on top to make terrible estimations about how powerful the state actually was and oh shit famine.  

Number 5: Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism basically means that the state has no independent groups, they have a totality of political power.  I have railed long and hard about how states rights are awful and racist and how much I think the states power needs to be curtailed in favor of the federal goverment, but there is a very good reason why I want state governments to exist.  And I”m not talking about balance of power, by having the implementation of policies go to local governments rather than the central goverment, you can adjust policies to address local concerns.  There are a lot of problems with this like Pork Barrel politics, but one thing you avoid is the constant communist problem of “Lets implement a single policy that doesn’t vary across the entire giant country” which worked out so well with the Great Leap Forward....oh wait.  And since there is no recourse...whoops.

Number 6: Religion

I’m am not trying to get into a religion vs. atheism debate here because I find those debates extremely stupid, just from a practical level targeting people’s religion leads to much more violent reprisals because the common people will ignore their own best interest in order to defend their religion.  The French Revolution really lost its international appeal when they targeted the Catholic Church, same with the Russian and Chinese revolutions, just leave the Church alone and your state will just live longer, no matter how corrupt and conservative they tend to be.

Number 7: Poor Incentive Systems 

One of the biggest issues with communist states  is that it kinda wants people to run on ideologies and so either doesn’t design incentive systems to encourage people to do the work they want, or they only rely on “Do the work or I will shoot you” motivation which just causes this mess of ironically enough, labor problems.  it also makes corruption and needlessly complicated bureaucracy inevitable, which compounds with reason 5 and 1

Number 8: Doesn’t play well with others

Again this isn’t entirely their fault, but communist systems don’t really work co-existing with other countries which means that you don’t usually get a good trade relationship going and the benefits of a debt based economy never really come in, which is why they tend to stagnate economically...along with all the other reasons

Number 9: Its Utopian.  

The problem with Utopian political ideology is that it basically makes any middle ground impossible.  After all, if you are going to bring about a glorious Utopia, then pretty much any crime to achieve that end becomes justified. And if the goal is utopia, why bother with the boring regulatory details like a constitution or specific system. While the American constitution is a giant mess of contradictions and bullshit and it desperately needs reform, but one thing I really like about it is that it assumes everybody is a selfish asshole who is trying to take as much power as possible.  So its designed to try to prevent that, and worked well when it was designed...we haven’t updated it for decades but that is a new problem.  You need to design systems to assume the worse, because the consequences of people taking absolute power are disastrous.  And that is always my issue when I talk to Marxists is that they love theory, but kinda lose when you get to details, which is why marxism is always better as a form of critical theory than an actual implemented policy. 

Ironically bemuse this is a long post, the only people who are going to read it...are Marxists.  Evidently I wasn’t having enough fun getting into fights with Neoreactionaries.  

#Historical Fact #Neglected Historical Fact #Communism #Marxism

[muffinworry]

Thoughts on A Darker Shade of Magic

Thoughts on A Darker Shade of Magic (full of spoilers):

 ***

I have such mixed feelings about this book. I tore through it, made about 5 of my friends read it, made my first ever cosplay for it, and, and yet…

 It’s hard to think of another book that’s frustrated me quite like this one. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants a light, brisk read through an engaging fantasy world. My problem with it, though, is really that it could have been so much more. It’s a case of a beautiful setting and interesting characters, rather let down by rather simplistic writing and /plot.

 The setting:

Four separate Londons: Grey (our London, c. 1819), Red (a healthy magic empire), White (starving and corrupt) and Black (lost and long-forgotten). Only the almost-extinct Antari magicians can travel between them. Our hero Kell is a young Antari, adopted into the royal family of Red London, and with no memory of his early years. He carries correspondence between the Grey, Red and White thrones (I’ll come to that in a minute), and has a bad habit of smuggling magical curiosities between the worlds, for a price. He promises his foster brother Rhy that he’ll stop before he gets into trouble, but of course he can’t resist one last delivery, which goes horribly wrong. He crosses paths with Lila, a clever street thief from Grey London, and together they have to make things right before all four worlds are destroyed.

 Schwab clearly loves London – our London – and the decision to set the story in the Regency period is a novel one. I can’t remember reading Georgian fantasy before. The image of Mad King George in his royal cell, writing letters to another world that nobody else believes in, is such a compelling one.  So why, with that great set-up, does Schwab ditch any further investigation of Regency London? Another review pointed out that our Grey London character, Lila, could come straight from modern America. Her language and thoughts are entirely modern. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for the historical setting, except the costumes and sword fighting. It’s a pity.

 Above all, I wanted more politics in the book, and more sense of the worlds we’re travelling through. It feels like such a wasted opportunity. It could have been a sprawling epic. To set the book in Regency London, at a time when England has just lost its American colony, and the French revolution is still fresh in peoples’ minds, at a time when the old order is being overthrown, and the idea of monarchy itself is being questioned, that’s fascinating to me. Why not take that as the backdrop, and contrast it with Prince Rhy, heir to a 1000-year-old empire, now at risk because he happens not to have been born with strong magic.

 Let us really feel Rhy’s desperation, his need to prove himself and his fear of letting everyone down, that drives him to accept White London’s dangerous gift in the first place. And White London, where there’s no such thing as a dynasty, where the throne changes hands with violence every few years – show us the innovative ways that its citizens have evolved to make do without magic. Give me a White London that was forced to develop technology at a much faster rate because it couldn’t rely on its scarce magical resources. For that matter, what does religion look like, in a world where every new ruler promises to free the people, to bring back the magic? Where the people are desperate to believe, even though they’ve seen fraud after fraud? Red London abandoned White, centuries ago, and left them to starve, and White is understandably furious and sees themselves as entitled to take reparations in whatever way they can. There’s a lot that could have been written there about colonialism and empire, and the plundering of natural resources that leads to war. The book could have been a meditation on power and politics, and what it means to sit on a throne.

 And against this backdrop of worlds in upheaval, you have a story of family and love and sacrifice. This is where the book is stronger.

 The characters

 Kell is the central character, the one whose point of view anchors the book. As an Antari, his rare magic makes him a target, a threat, or a prize for everybody, from his adoptive parents, to the villains. Kell is fairly well fleshed out: he’s good-hearted, but he has a temper; he can’t resist showing off at times, he’s prone to self-pity, he makes some very questionable decisions, and he can be violent, even cruel. He loves his family but feels trapped and used by them too, with some justification (and what a great scene where Lila scornfully tells him that at least he grew up with a roof over his head).

 Prince Rhy, Kell’s brother, seems to be many readers’ favourite, and it’s easy to see why. He’s just immensely appealing; a charming flirt who nevertheless wants to do right by his kingdom, and worries intensely that he may not be up to the job. He wants to Kell to settle down, to stop risking himself, to fit better in into the royal family. At the beginning of the book, Kell is chafing at his family bonds; by the end, he’s longing for them. Rhy and Kell love each other, despite their flaws and it’s written so sincerely, that by the time Rhy is in danger, it’s utterly believable that Kell would sacrifice himself to save his brother.

 Delilah (Lila) Bard, the street thief from Grey London, suffers from a case of “I’m not like those other girls.” She scorns dresses and corsets, and yearns to be a pirate. She’s rash and outspoken, confident that she’ll win in every situation, and spends most of the book exasperating everyone she comes into contact with. Rather a cliché. I can see why many readers find her insufferable. Personally, I think she has just enough charm to get away with it, but only just. My biggest problem, like I said above, is that she doesn’t seem at all connected to 1800s London. More worryingly, she’s the only female character given POV chapters, and the book sorely needs more women interacting. As @danceny pointed out in their review, the Queen, Kell’s foster mother, says virtually nothing in the entire series. (For that matter, what’s the role of women, as a whole, in Red and White London societies?)

 Lila also responsible for this line that made me grit my teeth:

 “Tell me, do you underestimate everyone, or just me? Is it because I’m a girl?”

 Note that at the time, Kell is trying to persuade her not to fight Astrid, who is not only female, but also older and much more powerful than Lila. It’s a nonsensical outburst from the streetwise Lila, and feels like an example of Schwab trying to prove how not-sexist her hero Kell is, rather than building a comprehensively egalitarian world.

 So Lila reads less like a strong female character and more like a Strong Female Character ™ but I will say that her primary motivation is to get her own ship, and while she undergoes some character growth, she stays focused on her goal, and the book doesn’t derail on a forced romantic plot, for which I’m eternally grateful.

 Athos and Astrid Dane, the twin rulers of White London and absolute monsters, whose only redeeming quality is their fierce love for each other. I would have liked more about their relationship, and how it could be contrasted with Kell and Rhy’s.

 Disclaimer: I was reading about Les Enfants Terribles right before I read ADSOM, and Kerry Greenwood’s description of Jean and Jeanne Bourgoint as “Doomed, inseparable, morphine-slender and golden" definitely coloured how I saw the Danes. I don’t know if Schwab intended it, but right from the beginning, I assumed that the Dane twins are dying, that the cancerous magic they have to use to hold onto the throne is rotting them from the inside out, and that’s why they’re so desperate to break through to healthy Red London.

 It’s a testament to Schwab that she created a pair of villains who drink blood and tile their palace with the bones of their enemies, and still manage to be frightening instead of laughably over the top. I’ll be honest: I love how much fun they have in the book. In every single appearance, they’re having the time of their lives. I love a gleefully unrepentant villain. The scene where they get Kell drunk is horrifying and hilarious.

 Holland, the only other Antari (that we know of...), is a servant of the White throne, and we find out later, is actually soul-bound to obey Athos Dane. If the Danes are glorious monsters, Holland is the other kind of villain, the one with the tragic backstory and the possibility of redemption. We get Holland’s history through Kell, and we don’t really know much about Holland’s own thoughts and feelings. He exists to hinder Kell and Lila, and to be a living warning to Kell about the dangers of power and ambition. It’s a another good moment when Kell finally sees himself through Holland’s eyes, and realizes just how young and naïve he must seem to the other Antari.

 Magic

 Hmmm. I really like the idea of magic as a sentient natural resource that can be compelled, or pleaded with. The scene where Kell has to beg the magic to open a door for him is great (and highlights the importance of the word please). Magic as a dangerous commodity, a bit like nuclear energy, something that has to be handled with great care, something that society is founded on. It makes a great deal of sense in the book, which is why the reveal in Book Two was a bit disappointing to me, but I’ll talk about that in another review.

Plotholes

 I’d love it if anyone would like to clarify these, because it’s entirely possible that I missed out on something, but, plotholes that threw me while I was reading:

 -       The Coup

-       Kell in White London

-       What was in those letters

 The Coup: What exactly is the Danes’ plan? And why doesn’t it have more fallout?

 So. The twins find a broken stone from Black London, and realize that they can use it to tear down the doors between the worlds and seize the Red throne. Half of it needs to go to Red London, to do that. They don’t want to send Holland because if he’s caught, it’ll be obvious that it’s their plot, so they trick Kell into carrying it home with him. Fine. So far so good.

 But.

 Why then, do they immediately send Holland after Kell, to murder and set fire to Red London while he chases Kell in the world’s least subtle chase? Astrid already has Rhy under her control; why send Holland at all? 

 For that matter, Kell is convinced that it can’t be the Danes who slipped him the stone, because as power-hungry as they are, they’d surely never let go of it, which is a good point, so how are the Danes unaffected by the stone?  Kell and Lila are both terribly tempted by it, but the greedy and possessive twins aren’t?

 Finally, the coup fails, but not before Astrid compromises the entire royal family and half the nobility at the ball, and the palace guards. Combined with the black magic plague, this should have terrible ramifications for the stability of Red London society and politics. Yet by the end of the book, it seems to have been largely hushed up.

 Kell in White London:

 The timeline seems off here. Kell is 22(?) or thereabouts? He’s been to White London several times; he met Holland and the old king before the Danes took the throne. But the Danes have been in power for nearly 8 years (in a world where the throne usually changes hands every 1-2 years, per canon).  Was Maxim really sending his young teenage son to run his errands in a warzone?  And when Astrid sees Kell, she says “let me see how you’ve grown,” which would make sense if she hasn’t seen him for years, but Kell’s been there often enough that the populace knows him, and we know there’s a regular correspondence between White and Red London. It’s a small point, but it brings me to my biggest issue, which is,

 The Letters:

 What is in that correspondence between the thrones? We’re told that the letters to Grey London are simple formalities, due to George III’s failing health, but the ones between Red and White London are “constant and involved” and leave King Maxim worried and stressed. People (apart from Kell and Holland) can’t travel between the worlds, nor can goods, so what, exactly, is there to talk about? Why does Maxim even bother to correspond with the murderous and borderline insane twins? What do they write about?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 The Writing

 So. Love and sacrifice, freedom vs. safety, and the cost of power, are the themes of the book. They’re never really explored in-depth, though, and the book reads more as older YA than as an adult novel. A more literary book would have strengthened these themes, and shown rather than told us about them. The jumping between characters’ POVs is unsettling because so many minor characters get chapters of their own, and it feels unnecessary, like it’s a crutch to get information to the reader that we should really be inferring through the main characters, Kell and Lila. I’ll also note again that Lila is the only female character to get her own POV (where is my Astrid chapter??). The characters tend to explain their motivations out loud, in simplistic language, and their actions tend to be predictable.

 I think, on balance, the characters are just charming enough to get away with this, but others have disagreed, and I understand why.

 The writing is lovely at times; at others, it made me grit my teeth in annoyance. There are some subtle bits I enjoyed on second reading (“Rhy” sipping tea while waiting for Kell to wake up, and wearing a mask instead of his usual crown) but for the most part, the language is simplistic and repetitive. 

 What Schwab does very well is write visual scenes. A few things I can’t wait to see in a tv adaptation:

 -       The blood-red Thames

-       The “stone forest” in White London

-       The scene in the Grey London pub, with Kell showing off for Ned

-       Lila and Astrid fighting, both in Regency men’s clothes, one in black, one in white

-       The soiled cathedral of White London’s castle, all vaulting marble beauty and bloodstains.

-       The masquerade scene because I am such a sucker for a masquerade ball

-       The costumes, oh my goodness

-        Kell’s coat

Anyway. A few scattered thoughts. I didn’t mean to ramble on quite this much. It’s a good book, I have a soft spot for it, and I’m looking forward to reading the third when it comes out in February. I just think that it could have been so much more.

#adsom

[qqueenofhades]

If I have to listen to/read one more leftist screech about how the only thing to fix America is some sort of grand revolution I will lose it. It's like they think everyone would show up at this revolution and that would be it, Victory is Ours! Except... the other side always shoots back and combat ain't pretty. They want blood in the streets and some ideological civil war and have no clue what that looks like.

They think armed conflict is a game and have zero clue what it's like (former Marine, I know what it's like and it's pure hell on earth). I vote Democrat, I protest, I put myself out there, but I have zero desire for their Glorious Revolution. I think they want some sort of Civil War Pt. 2 because they think it will result in a Glorious Destiny. To quote the writer Mercedes Lackey "Glorious destinies usually end in glorious funerals."

In actuality they just need to... vote. Regardless of whatever else they do, and they should do more, they need to vote. It's the primary thing, the basic act of participating as a citizen of this country. Just... vote. But I guess that's just not glorious enough. Le sigh... 😮‍💨

I mean, yeah. Especially since we literally just had the whole "try to violently overthrow the government" thing for the first time since the Civil War, and we can all agree that it sucked. I don't want a re-run of January 6 with so-called leftists, not least since it will obviously fail and I don’t trust those people with any kind of real power anyway. Not only that, but it will also instantly validate the fears of every single insecure white person in this country who has already been prepped to believe that the evil violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa and Scary Gays are coming for them, and it will entrench revanchist reactionary conservatism even more than is already the case. Besides, a) the right-wingers always like to boast that they have all the guns and the assault weapons, and b) this is yet again a case of tepidly reheated extremist-right-wing bullshit that masquerades as progressive, since “violently overthrow the government” has, as noted, generally been the wet dream and attempted exercise of the far right in America. (When it was the far left in the twentieth century, a la the Russian Revolution and the establishment of other communist “people’s republics” in Europe and Asia, that wasn’t a great idea either.)

Besides, as you say here and I have said before, ideological revolutions never, ever, work, and while they are not working, they seriously harm the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people that said crazy ideologues delusionally claim to be helping. Since the Online Leftists are a tiny percentage of the country, and the revolution-shouting lunatics are a minority percentage of that, their support is almost negligible. This is not some universally popular proposition that has a chance of happening tomorrow if all the keyboard warriors suddenly decided they were up for real fighting instead of posting stupid things on Twitter. (And they’re not going to do that anyway, so yeah.) Even when Republicans openly bragged that they got all these terrible things and major policy shifts by turning up and voting every year for 50 years straight, we still have the “vOtiNg doEsn’T mAtTer!!!” braindead takes continuing to proliferate at light speed. Not to mention what appears to be a deliberate effort to not learn anything from the past, ever, and just insist that all Democrats are or were not insufficiently pure or personally motivated to help, and that was obviously the entire problem.

The “revolution” that actually COULD happen, if people get off their moral high horse and condescend to carry out their basic and easy civic duty, is via the legislative and lawmaking process, and not by some fantasy violent blood-in-the-streets Bolshevik rerun. If people do in fact vote in sufficient numbers, help Democrats hold the House, and get just two, TWO more Democratic senators willing to break or reform the filibuster, there are a whole lot of things that could suddenly get passed, and undo a lot of the current Republican-inflicted damage, bad as it is. That INCLUDES abortion rights, voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights, climate policies, and everything else. The centrist argument that “we shouldn’t eliminate the filibuster because the Republicans might use it to do more bad things if they get back into the majority!!!” is, in my opinion, equally stupid. The Republicans are doing scads of bad things as fast as they can possibly get away with it, they have never been constrained by institutional norms and rules and even less so now, and if Democrats nobly refuse to play the same game, it’s going to get even worse. (I mean, what on earth makes you think that Mitch The Worst McConnell, if God forbid he became majority leader again, won’t just abolish the legislative filibuster anyway, even if the Democrats refuse to do it beforehand?) The Democrats NEED to take the offensive in the way the Republicans have done, and since the GOP has already done so much terrible, awful, generationally damaging shit, we need drastic measures in stopping them and reversing some of the worst of it (thus to lay the foundations for other reforms down the road). Not to mention, the Republicans WON’T GET BACK INTO POWER if y’all voted blue as much as you complain online!

Anyway. Yes. I likewise am sick of this stupid argument, and I deliberately limit my exposure to anywhere where I might see it, but it still pops up anyway. The sheer refusal to a) identify the people responsible, b) take the correct actions to oppose them, and c) do it more than once is just... yeah. I don’t get it.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

[peakwealth]

Anarchy, but how?

                  ”Un monde s’effondre devant nos yeux, un vertige.”

                                          Maurice Gourdault-Montagne,

                          French ambassador to the People’s Republic of China

                                      (after the election of Donald Trump)

Modernity, entertainment and political power

(Electronic billboard, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, 2017)

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the American journalist Robert D. Kaplan published his celebrated essay called "The Coming Anarchy" (1). Having spent time in West-Africa, Kaplan was traumatized by the chaos and lawlessness he had seen there. Surely, he thought, it prefigured a broader chaos awaiting the rest of the world. Rereading the essay today, I was struck by the tone of foreboding if not outright panic inspired by countries like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, messed up as they were in the early nineties.

Kaplan's Afrocentrist point of view proved to be overly narrow and pessimistic. My own experience tells me how alarming African countries can be, yet Sierra Leone somehow survived atrocious civil war, AIDS, ebola and multiresistant malaria. Nigeria too faces huge challenges, including an Islamist uprising, but the state has not collapsed. And not all of Africa is as violent as Sierra Leone, Somalia or South-Sudan. Elsewhere in the world, Brazil, Pakistan or India have not become totally "ungovernable" as Kaplan feared, at least not for now.

So, crystal balls being what they are, Kaplan got it wrong from time to time. He saw Turkey rising in stature and moderation, and predicted the end of the Arab-Israeli military confrontation. He also anticipated the "peaceful dissolution of Canada" following the separation of Québec (becoming "North-America's most cohesive and crime-free nation-state (...) based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone identity").

Not quite.

On the other hand, it is striking how Kaplan's journalistic radar picked up much of today's global disorder as it was taking shape in the early nineties. Looked at in retrospect, it seems logical and predictable, which, of course, is often the case with things in retrospect. Put together, it provides something of an analytical grid to help us understand what is going on in the world right now.

The first sign of impending anarchy Kaplan singled out was the gathering pace of environmental decay, the scarcity of resources, dwindling water supplies, soil erosion and the rising level of the seas. Nature had started to push back against the billions of parasitical humans who were destroying their natural habitat. But most politicians didn’t see it, or they were still in denial.

Beyond the trouble with the finite nature of nature, Kaplan saw a polarized world ('bifurcated' was the word he used) where nation states would lose their grip, their authority and their monopoly on the use of armed force. "More power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups". One of the reasons was that 95 % of the demographic growth would occur in the poorest regions of the world. This would trigger a revenge of the poor, "the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Some of them "to whom the comfort and stability of the middle class is utterly unknown" might be tempted by revolt and violence.

Anarchy and conflict would not only proliferate in a world exposed to "nebulous and anarchic regionalisms", they would provide an outlet for people who "find liberation in violence".  Often lacking discernible patterns, conflicts would be "influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds". Ever-mutating chaos would result and "democracy would be less and less relevant to the larger issue of governability". In ever more fragmented societies, political power would be overtaken by that of "the international media and entertainment industry".

Kaplan identified the rise of religious fanaticism as a major source of conflict, tribal in nature, with "crime and war becoming indistinguishable". "Islam's very militancy, he wrote, makes it attractive to the downtrodden.(...) A political era driven by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam (...)." He imagined how "a wave of Islam" (...) "fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate" would "eat away at the legitimacy" of many Arab states.

International borders would become irrelevant (or unenforceable) as war grew pervasive and central governments, unable to physically protect their citizens against criminal anarchy, withered away.

Rings a bell? Rings many bells? The original is freely available online.

The writing is on the wall, chaos big and small.

(Portugal, 2017)

Nineteen ninety-four is not ancient history. The Clinton/Gore administration was in office; more to the point, the Iranian revolution was already in its 15th year. Prophecies of gloom and dystopia weren't thin on the ground. Two years earlier, in 1992, The Atlantic had published another noted essay, Jihad vs McWorld,  in which the American political scholar Benjamin Barber (who died earlier this year), warned against the conflict between the globalized power of corporate money on one side and "parochial hatred" (as well as) "the retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed" on the other - both of course inimical to the ideals of democracy. So even though Kaplan wasn't uniquely clairvoyant, the spectre of 'ever-mutating chaos' has proved prescient. It remains profoundly unsettling. The prospect of rising oceans, freak weather and higher temperatures now seems much more palpable than it did a quarter of a century ago. Public opinion has shifted and climate change deniers are painting themselves into a corner.

As for political chaos, it is obvious that representative democracy is becoming increasingly irrelevant in many countries. Instability has spread as electorates either cannot be bothered with politics at all and abstain, or abruptly swing this way or that, only to reverse themselves within a matter of months. Legitimacy is seeping out and chaos is leaching in. Political leadership now tends towards extremes, sometimes despotic (Vladimir Putin or Xi Jing Ping, though I'm not suggesting the two are comparable) or erratic (Donald Trump) or regressive / nationalist (Viktor Orban in Hungary or Narendra Modi in India). Or it appears weak and lacking in direction as is currently the case of the UK, Italy or the European Union in general.

The EU has been in a bad way for too long now. I remember the sinking feeling on the day, in late 2009, when Herman Van Rompuy was appointed to the presidency of the European Council.  A grey, discreet consensus builder with a background in Belgian politics, Van Rompuy was about as invisible as you could get. Nigel Farage famously made wicked fun of him on the floor of the European parliament, saying he had 'the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank clerk'. Inexcusably rude as he may have been, Farage hit a nerve. At a time when the EU was in urgent need of high profile credibility and visionary leadership, Van Rompuy provided neither.

His opposite number at the Commission (the EU executive branch), the buffoonish Portuguese technocrat José Manuel Barroso was less retiring but also lacked the political clout that might have stemmed the tide of populist europhobia. It was a tragic combination. Politically impotent, Barroso and Van Rompuy relinquished the leadership of Europe to Angela Merkel who, while not exactly charismatic or given to public exuberance either, was at least perceived as a safe pair of hands. As populism and cynicism rose across Europe, 'Brussels' became a dirty word (2).

So much for Europe. But who would have imagined the nightmare of Donald Trump walking into the White house? Or the restoration of religious dogma and the fanaticism? The intermittent menace of jihadist assassins lurking in the big cities and striking at random - today's grim reapers? Who could have predicted the sheer toxicity of the Zeitgeist, the spread of belligerent unreason, of trash culture, paranoia and crackpot conspiracy theories, let alone the decline of pluralism and secularism?

Some political philosophers have argued that the convulsions of Kaplan's ‘coming anarchy’ are part of the predictable unravelling of the capitalist social order (3).  Even if that were the case, it is far less predictable how that anarchy would unfold or what exact shape it would take.

As the cracks in society widen, more people are tempted by regressive fantasies and by random acts of symbolic revenge, especially if they find a religious doctrine that will endorse their fanaticism. Jihadism has evolved into the most extreme form of disenchantment, of resistance to modernity, to Western freedoms and moral relativism (among other things). It offers its recruits the intoxicating promise of going all the way, including indiscriminate violence and the expectation of glorious self-sacrifice for the greater good. There is little defense against such pious rage, which is to say: it could have been me, or I could be next.

DV ______________________________________________________________________

(1) The Atlantic monthly, February 1994. (2) To make things worse, at the end of his ten-year mandate Barroso exited through the revolving door and went straight to work for Goldman Sachs, the very investment bank credited with showing the Greek government how to cook the books. Met with disbelief and condemned as 'revolting' (Le Monde, July 11, 2016), his move seemed to confirm all the suspicions about the self-serving big boys who ran 'Brussels'.

(3) 'How will Capitalism End?' by Wolfgang Streeck, VERSO Books, Brooklyn and London, November 2016.