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furiousgoldfish · 4 months

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online narcissists: narcissistic abuse doesn't exist!

also online narcissists: infiltrate the community of specifically victims of narcissistic abuse who have asked to not be interacted with by narcissists, then attack them for revealing the tactics and manipulations of the abuse that supposedly doesn't exist, shamelessly police the victims of abuse on what language they're allowed to use to talk about abuse and then smear campaign and cancel them for 'being ableist about their abusers', speak on victim's stories of abuse in defense of the narcissistic abuser, minimizing and rationalizing all abuse with 'they're mentally ill', insisting the blogs and personal resources of survivors of narcissistic abuse need to center the narcissists themselves and spread positivity about them, even if those blogs are made by the victims of abuse! then cancelling and smearing people for not centering narcissists and for daring to make their personal blogs about themselves, insisting for 'some reason' that they need to have access and acceptance specifically in the community of the abused and mentally ill victims who are susceptible and groomed to not see the signs of abuse and who are easy to victimize again, insist that 'not all narcissists' knowing damn well that those who are abusive will absolutely benefit from this and manage to get new victims because it's now ableist for victims to recognize signs of narcissistic abuse and call them out, easily disregard humanity of victims and any member of the community if that member fails to spread propaganda and defend narcissists, demand for deletion of abuse resources and flinging insults and attacks at abuse survivors who make them.

me: I'm sure this is totally non-abusive, normal human behaviour. surely any non-abusive human goes and attacks the victims of abuse and demands access to them, against their consent, and polices their words and conversations to center them specifically. Nothing suspicious to see here folks. Better make sure you're not ableist and calling any of this out.

Walking all over victims of narcissistic abuse is easy and safe, because you can tell there won't be any backlash or cancelling, none of us will smear you or call you the worst human being who is hurting the entire world, just to make you guilty for hurting us. Opposing a narcissist, however, will do all of that. It's always safer to side with abusers than to be in their way. And a lot of the community of abused people are scared, and will go the easy route, especially if it's shown as 'morally correct'.

But it is at a cost to all of us. We need to have courage to stand up to this. If we want to have a community that doesn't shelter, defend, and prioritize abusers over victims, we need to fight for it. It doesn't do us any favours to have narcissists in charge, who will stay on top by silencing victims and molding the community to be as easy to abuse as possible for them. Even if you deep in your heart believe that 'not all narcissists are abusive', our stories are telling you that those who are extremely dangerous exist, and defending narcissists in general, makes sure that more victims come to those abusers, and are unable to call it out. Is it really worth defending them if you're risking people becoming permanently traumatized for believing you?

#narcissistic abuse #online abuse #emotional abuse #darvo #psychological abuse #community of abused #community of abuse survivors #survivors of narcissistic abuse #victims of narcissistic abuse

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knitmeapony · 2 years

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I want to reiterate something that I saw on Twitter. I'd love to share the actual Twitter thread but of course I already can't find it in the massive swamp of stuff going on right now.

The urge to create new organizations is probably pretty strong in most Center to left Americans right now. To work as an individual, finding ways to help that you can do individually , perhaps even visibly. Somehow doing all the ground-up organizational work feels like doing more than joining the organizations that already exist. I'm here to tell you to resist that urge. This is one of those you are not immune to propaganda moments.

There is a fairly pervasive disease, particularly among folks who have protested and donated but not gotten into the nitty-gritty work yet. It's a very well intentioned instinct that you, personally, can do more to fix things as a leader than as a participant. The more privileged you are, the more you are going to believe this. (White Americans, we are very very susceptible to this, and it is a flavor of white supremacy it can be damn hard to unpack.)

You're going to want to join untested Auntie Networks and say individually that you are willing to help your friends/people you know without engaging in the already massive, already well-established, often led by BIPOC reproductive health organizations that already exist.

Your local abortion access organization, whether it is a mutual aid organization run on Instagram or a registered Foundation/charity with a significant web presence is already doing the work that you think needs to be done. There are already networks of people willing to open their homes, cars, and lives to people who need abortion care, organizations that provide money for travel, organizations that lobby heavily in Washington and even in corporate halls for Reproductive Rights.

The best thing you can do to help right now is to join an organization that already exists. To join up with your community, as locally as you possibly can, and let them tell you what work needs to be done. If you are brand new to this, if you are just now raging and you have energy to burn, it may feel like these organizations don't understand and they are not doing enough. But I assure you, they're working their asses off and they have for years.

There are huge groups of people that even before the overturn of Roe struggled to access reproductive health care of all kinds. Poor folks, indigenous communities, rural communities, black and brown folks, people living in abusive situations, disabled folks, they have all been denied appropriate Healthcare over and over and over again and the organizations they have already created and set up know how to do their best to access all the resources that are available, know how to build on their own scaffolding to extend resources, and are your best bet to do real good.

This is a lot like those can drives every year at Thanksgiving and christmas. It feels good to give these big tangible tins and boxes of food, but just writing a check does so much more than you could imagine. 10, 50, sometimes even a hundred times as much food, and of the types and varieties that people are actually looking for, accounting for communities and cultural values and health conditions. But still every year people love to give 50 packs of ramen noodles, rather than $50, because we have this belief that our individual decisions are somehow more valuable than the community decisions made by those actually working and living directly in the community. We are wrong. Please understand that while this Instinct to be a hero and leader on an individual basis is very well intentioned and understandable, it's a bad instinct put in our heads by years and years and years of stories about just one Renegade somehow being the key to saving the world rather than the diligent work of an entire community.

Here are the best things that you can do right now, even though they will not feel as satisfying as running as fast as you can to try to be a hero:

Stop

You're having a lot of feelings right now. Those feelings are utterly, completely valid. But when you are running entirely on adrenaline, on grief or anger or spite, you're going to run out of fuel pretty fast. The best thing you can do is take a beat to live in your feelings and then turn to do what you can thoughtfully and deliberately. It took the right about 40 to 50 years of slowly, pointedly, doggedly working local elections, working individual candidates, building communities and organizations, to overturn Roe. There is a non-zero chance that it is going to take just as long to turn it back again. Prepare yourself for that. Prepare for a long road. Be ready to put your shoulder in it, over and over. Be ready to take breaks while other people push, but without losing your own hope and determination. Then when others are running out of steam, put your shoulder to the work again.

Look

Search for organizations as local as possible. You're going to want to donate national. You're going to want to feel like you're doing the most good in the widest area. Your local community is what needs you most. Big organizations whose names end up on the news will have tons of donations right now. Search for organizations in your neighborhood, city, township, county, and state.

Listen

When you find those organizations, you're going to have a lot of ideas. Spend at least a month or a few meetings listening to what they are already doing. Check out their websites or social media presences and respond to their direct appeals as best as you can. You will often find that your mind changes once you are actually in the community, doing the work. You will often find that your well-intentioned ideas have often already been tried and may even be already in place in a slightly different manner than you expected.

You will also often find that you are going to need to confront your own privilege, over and over. To listen to the people doing the work often means you need to stop talking. There is nothing wrong with having good ideas, but when you are walking in from the outside you need to have the humbling moment of realizing you may not be as much of an expert as you think you are.

Stay

As I previously mentioned, this is not going to be a few weeks work. It's unlikely it's going to be a few months work. This is going to take years. It's going to take election cycles.

Don't burn yourself out. Don't work furiously for a few weeks, give up, and never return. Work this kind of stuff into your regular schedule. Make this a daily or weekly or monthly commitment. As someone with ADHD, I know damn well it can be hard to set a new routine, but it's better for you to work one day a month for 2 years then it would be to work everyday for one month and then never return.

If you need a break, decide when you're going to come back when you take the break and commit to returning to the work. You can always change your mind. But consistency will be a powerful tool in both building communities and doing the work of making real change.

This is the hardest piece of it. It's easy to settle back into a life of privilege where you can choose to no longer think about such things. This happened with an awful lot of white activists after the summer of BLM. I admit I am as guilty as the next person of getting overwhelmed and never returning to some of the organizations I used to help. We are all human and some people will fall away, but those who have prepared to be out there in the long term will fall away less, encourage others to return more often, and keep the fires burning on our long slow walk back.

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qqueenofhades · 2 months

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https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/742700762243727361/you-can-tell-you-work-in-academia-with-how-much

Hi, sorry, Asshole Anon here (I’m not giving myself that nickname to lash out, I’m saying it because I was an ass)

To clarify: I mean “I don’t know what to trust anymore” in that “people whom I normally respect and would otherwise agree with are now sharing material that I find either morally indefensible or overtly simplistic, and at the same time people on the ground in Gaza are saying that Hamas IS a liberation organization, so I trust their word, but there is also the existence of the “We Want To Live” protests, and the fact that there’s now apparently a protest against a child that got killed that isn’t widely reported, with an attached video of said protest from somebody on the ground in Gaza, but it’s in Arabic, there are no subtitles, I cannot speak Arabic, and I don’t trust Google Translate”

I just want an objective sense of what is happening on the ground. I want to know what is and is not propaganda, because I (white, raised in a liberal(?) household, surrounded by white people) am especially susceptible to it. Once I have that objective sense of what the people in Gaza want, then I will be able to effectively and efficiently advocate for shit. But that also necessitates listening to orgs like Standing Together, B’Tselem, people IN Israel who want this shit to stop, and hoo BOY that ain’t gonna fly with those people I mentioned because of:

1. BDS saying that the org “normalizes the occupation”, but they’re made up of Palestinian activists and anti-apartheid veterans, I can’t discount their statement, not fully.

2. Netenyahu’s… Netenyahu

3. Twitter’s doing a great job of asserting that everyone in Israel is a — quoting directly here from a half-remembered Tweet — “genocidal maniac”, or wants the bombardment to happen. (Which I know for a fact is not the case, if the protests calling for a new election are anything to go by)

That’s not even getting into the domestic stuff. I’m in an org rn and I’m getting the sinking feeling that they’re gonna drop this thing like a hot potato when a ceasefire gets called. Just sucks.

Anyways, back to improvement. Just closing this out

I agree that we're currently in a paradoxical state where there is simultaneously ALL THE INFORMATION EVER and ACTUALLY NO INFORMATION AT ALL, and that's what makes it difficult to sort out true from false. It's also what contributes to compassion fatigue, where we are able to get extensive real-time information and/or eyewitness accounts about pretty much any tragedy or catastrophe anywhere in the world, and social media has created a space where we are expected to both immediately react to all that information and to do so in the "right" and "correct" way. Which is basically impossible, and is also what burns out young well-meaning people so hard, where they insist that there's nothing to be done except The Revolution, because they have been so inundated with this torrent of human suffering and it seems like small steps are in fact useless. I am a historian and I can tell you upfront that humans are simply not made to process that volume of information about ALL THE BAD THINGS EVERYWHERE. It's also impossible to have an informed opinion on all or sometimes any of it, but there is still the pressure to visibly do so and to do it in a way that fits in with what everyone in your peer group is saying, even if you don't understand it. So yes -- that is absolutely very difficult, and it's hard to filter or parse it.

That said, I don't think we actually need to have painstaking piece-by-piece analysis of every single piece of information out there, because there are in fact so many competing narratives, perspectives, fake news, disinformation campaigns, opinions, etc., and it will lead you to the same information paralysis: there's just too much of it to even start processing, and so your brain just gives up and reverts to those same simplistic cliches and things that "feel" right, regardless of whether or not they are. When you're trying to decide on the fine details of something, it helps to have an overall sense of the context and narrative that they're operating in. So for reference, these are some broad and basic analytic paradigms that I personally use when reading or thinking about any material in regard to the Israel/Hamas situation in particular:

No person of basic good faith and human decency wants the current situation in Gaza to be happening. However, the person/group that has the power to call it off -- i.e. Netanyahu and the current Israeli government -- has not done so despite increasing pressure from Western allies, because the situation is beneficial to Bibi personally and he sees more use in continuing it than making the decision for it to stop.

The governments of Western allies, therefore, can voice disapproval of Israel's actions (which they have been doing more and more frequently) but unless Netanyahu himself makes the choice to end the war, it will not stop. The West has recently given more and more signals that they are not prepared to countenance the ongoing destruction and genocide of Gaza, but yet again, Israel is its own sovereign country with its own powerful government, military, intelligence services, etc. The "anti-imperialists" who think the collective West can just reach in and turn off the violence whenever they please, and have just refused to do so because they're "bad people," are not being realistic. Western allies can exert pressure and leverage, but as long as Netanyahu himself wants to keep going, he will.

"People in Gaza" and "people in Israel" are not homogeneous blocs who think exactly alike. Some people in Gaza support Hamas. Some people do not. Hamas support has recently grown as a result of Israel's post-October 7 response, but it is not unanimous or unquestioned.

Hamas is the entity that started the current war by attacking Israel on October 7 and murdering/raping/kidnapping 1,000+ Israeli civilians. Hamas is also associated with Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and other terrorist regimes/states, which are often defended by Online Leftists simply for being "anti-Western," regardless of how heinous their actions also are.

Netanyahu was wildly unpopular in Israel for MONTHS before this current war, due to his autocratic attempts to neutralize the Israeli Supreme Court and make the country even more of his personal fiefdom. There were huge, massive, ongoing protests against his naked power-grab for almost all of 2023, and he was so preoccupied with pushing it through that he ignored warnings from the Israeli and Egyptian intelligence services that Hamas was planning a major attack. These anti-Netanyahu demonstrations have continued and ramped up in intensity even in the middle of the war/attacks on Gaza.

As such, painting every single Israeli as mindlessly supporting the current actions of Netanyahu and the Israeli government is antisemitic nonsense and reflect the current Western Leftist tendency to assume that "all Israelis" and "all Zionists (read Jews)" are evil and personally responsible for this.

Israeli Jews have a right to exist and to reside on the land currently called Israel. Modern Israel was founded in 1948, three years after the end of WWII and the Holocaust, the greatest incidence of antisemitic mass murder in history, which is a fact that cannot be ignored and which western leftists eagerly calling for its total eradication and treating it as an illegitimate "white western settler colony" nonetheless do in fact repeatedly ignore.

This is why many Jews do not feel safe in other countries, because there has literally been thousands of years of history proving that they often aren't, and which the rabidly antisemitic response to the current conflict is doing nothing to dissuade.

Jews have had a presence in the land alternately called Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land, Judah, etc., for over 2,000 years, and their entire religion and history is founded around the exile from Jerusalem. That is the history that the current state of Israel is drawing on. It does not vanish just because it is inconvenient for western leftists to acknowledge.

Israel currently has a militant far-right government (after tending toward rightist/right wing domestic politics more generally, partially due to post-Holocaust trauma) that has deliberately erased, ignored, and violated the equally valid claims of Palestine and Palestinian people to that same land, and which is currently committing full-scale genocide against them.

Palestine and Palestinian/Muslim people have the same right to exist on that land as Israel and Israeli/Jewish people (and Christian people, and none-of-the-three people). They both have equally long and historically relevant claims to this land and one of them (in an ideal world, which we do not live in) should not be artificially prized over the other.

However, this land is some of the most bitterly and violently contested in the entire world, for the last two thousand years and counting, and there is no one good guy, simplistic answer, or quick way to stop it. The three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have fought bitterly over Jerusalem and its associated territories for a cool few millennia, and human nature being what it is, there is no way for one person, group, organization, government, etc to just step in and make it stop.

The Western/American leftist response to the current conflict has often made absolutely no attempt to take into account any of this troubled and complex history, and has reduced the whole thing down to whichever antisemitic and/or anti-Democratic Party soundbites will get them the most traction on social media. This often rests on whitewashing any moral responsibility belonging to Hamas and defending them no matter what, labeling all Israeli Jews as "evil genocide supporters," and assuming that if Biden wanted to magically shapeshift into Netanyahu and give the order to make it stop, he would, but he's "just not doing it," ergo something something Trump Would Totally Be Better!

These people also often call themselves "anti-imperialist" while thinking/demanding that America swoop in and play Big Global Policeman Daddy (as it indeed has often done in the past) and spank all its naughty children (but if it actually did do this, etc etc it would be evil). Biden could very much do more and has not necessarily done enough, but he has also done more than any other American president in history to shift away from unconditional unquestioning support of Israel only, and to advocate for a Palestinian state, a lasting ceasefire, and other basic precepts of Palestinian self-determination and dignity of personhood. These two things can be true at the same time.

I don't necessarily expect everyone to agree with every single fine detail of these statements, but I do expect them to at least make a basic effort to let all of these facts to inform their response, and not just the ones that they most agree with and which most fit their ideology or preferred conclusion. So that's one way to approach the situation, even if we obviously can't wring every single drop of meaning out of every single competing piece of information or evidence, because there is just too much of it. When we have a broader understanding of the space that we are operating in and the precepts that are factually true, we are able to make better judgments about who is trustworthy, who is worth listening to, what message they are pushing, and whether it corresponds with reality.

Good luck. I'm sure you'll continue to think about this and take the steps that you feel are best. It is all any of us can do.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #israel hamas war #history #long post

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tamamita · 6 months

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world politics and international conflicts should never be boiled down to "good guys" and "bad guys". This is the real world; it's complex and multi-faceted in ways that can't be reduced into pure black and white. You can say "the fight for Palestinian freedom from genocide is good" (objectively true, apartheid states should be dismantled) but ignoring all nuance regarding the parties at play will only lead to malformed understanding of how these situations arise. It will make you more susceptible to propaganda and propaganda isn't good even when it comes from the people you agree with.

Interestingly enough, we all know at the end that an Islamic emirate is the least desirable form of government, considering that a lot of Palestinians are secular. Hamas operates in Gaza and of course, it's easier to recruit when you're the're the only resistance group that's actively putting up a fight against the settler colonial entity. Yes, Hamas is better than the IOF in the context of occupier vs the occupied. But the Palestinian people, with all their strength and might, will come together and form the nation which they desire, but I doubt that an Islamic emirate will be one if we consider the people from the West Bank.

We will see.

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the-lady-of-the-labyrinth · 6 months

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It’s not a genocide, it’s a fucking counteroffensive – learn the difference. You don’t have to like it or even think it’s appropriate or well-executed, but it has a strategic purpose. And while you’re frothing at the mouth over the evil Israelis, maybe take a moment to consider how this serves a strategic purpose for Hamas as well, and they are just as responsible (if not more so) for this whole tragedy… but I don’t see any of you admonishing them. They are using their own people as human shields, holding them prisoner and sending them out in the streets to be slaughtered, all designed to garner sympathy from gullible “progressive” westerners. Have you ever considered that you’re doing their work for them?

I’ve been saying this for months, well before the attacks, that even the left is susceptible to propaganda. We all are. It’s nothing to be ashamed of really, but if you’ve never done the actual work to disentangle yourself, then consider the possibility that you’re still entwined. I know you’re well-intentioned but you’re helping no one but the enemy. To be clear, I want a ceasefire as much as anyone, but hiding your head in the sand and demanding they do it now, now, now is childish, ignorant and dangerous. You’re no better than those on the right who profess to know more than the actual experts on climate change or what-have-you.

#Israel #Hamas #propaganda #psa #wake up

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jackoshadows · 5 months

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No doubt Tyrion Lannister is a morally grey character, especially with regards to his treatment of women. Nevertheless, when I come across some posts, it hits me how so much of the hate/critique directed towards the character is because of ableism, just like in the books.

Brienne of Tarth maybe at the top of a morally good scale, but even she is susceptible to bigoted propaganda like every other character in the world of Westeros. It's up to us as impartial and enlightened readers to parse through her thoughts and opinions and agree or disagree with her instead of just accepting that she is right because she is good.

Lady Catelyn had said that Sansa was a gentle soul who loved lemon cakes, silken gowns, and songs of chivalry, yet the girl had seen her father's head lopped off and been forced to marry one of his killers afterward. If half the tales were true, the dwarf was the cruelest Lannister of all. If she did poison King Joffrey, the Imp surely forced her hand. She was alone and friendless at that court. In King's Landing, Brienne had hunted down a certain Brella, who had been one of Sansa's maids. The woman told her that there was little warmth between Sansa and the dwarf. Perhaps she had been fleeing him as well as Joffrey's murder. - Brienne, AFfC

IMO, Brienne is wrong because on a scale of Lannister cruelty (Tywin, Cersei, Jaime, Joffrey) Tyrion has in actuality been the least cruel Lannister of them all - especially towards the Stark kids, including bastard Jon and disabled Bran. And yet a consistent theme in the books is that Tyrion gets the most hate from the people because of his disability.

Even Brienne's last point of Sansa specifically fleeing from Tyrion stands out because we see from Sansa's own POV in the vale that she considers Tyrion an option to escape to if he had been alive.

The man Brienne loves and defends - Jaime Lannister - has tried to murder one Stark child, attempted to maim and cut off the hand of another Stark child and forced himself on Cersei. If Jaime had been in KL instead of being taken prisoner, he would have continued being Cersei's henchman and supported his sister and their son while they abused Sansa as opposed to Tyrion stepping in and putting an end to the beatings. Jaime has been verbally abusive and cruel to Brienne herself.

Hell, even when they are parting, Jaime tells Brienne to not save the poor child being send off to marry Ramsay Bolton.

"With a sword at my throat, but never mind. Lady Catelyn's dead. I could not give her back her daughters even if I had them. And the girl my father sent with Steelshanks was not Arya Stark." "Not Arya Stark?" "You heard me. My lord father found some skinny northern girl more or less the same age with more or less the same coloring. He dressed her up in white and grey, gave her a silver wolf to pin her cloak, and sent her off to wed Bolton's bastard." He lifted his stump to point at her. "I wanted to tell you that before you went galloping off to rescue her and got yourself killed for no good purpose. You're not half bad with a sword, but you're not good enough to take on two hundred men by yourself." - Jaime, ASoS

Despite all this, while Brienne thinks positively of Jaime because he's beautiful and saved her, Tyrion is the worst of all the Lannisters because everyone says so. Brienne feels pity for poor Sansa being forced to marry the imp but what of the poor girl the Lannisters - Jaime included - are sending off to marry Ramsay Bolton. We all know what poor Jeyne Poole has been through.

Not defending Tyrion's marriage to Sansa here because that was wrong. However, the fact that Brienne thinks Tyrion was even crueler than Cersei and Joffrey towards Sansa and that it was Tyrion who forced poor, gentle Sansa to murder Joffrey should tell us that even Brienne is not without her biases and unquestioningly accepts Westerosi bigotry.

Let's take the character of Jon Snow. One could argue that he is a character closer to Brienne on a morality scale, as one of the good guys. However, the fun aspect here is that if one puts Brienne of Tarth and Jon Snow together they would end up disagreeing on Catelyn Stark and Tyrion Lannister.

This is not a point to argue which character is good or bad except that characters form relationships based on their personal interactions and experiences rather than whether characters are good or bad and this is why GRRM argues all his characters are morally grey.

The Old Bear shrugged. "A boy king … I imagine he'll listen to his mother. A pity the dwarf isn't with them. He's the lad's uncle, and he saw our need when he visited us. It was a bad thing, your lady mother taking him captive—" "Lady Stark is not my mother," Jon reminded him sharply. Tyrion Lannister had been a friend to him. If Lord Eddard was killed, she would be as much to blame as the queen. " - Jon VII, AGoT

Here is Jon defending Tyrion and assigning equal blame to Catelyn and Cersei if any harm befell Ned Stark. Keep in mind that even after knowing Sansa and Tyrion are married, Jon does not show an iota of the concern Brienne shows for Sansa. Instead his thoughts are for Tyrion, finding it hard to imagine the man he shook hands with and called friend as a kinslayer.

"It is not my intent to choose any side," said Jon, "but I am not as certain of the outcome of this war as you seem to be, my lord. Not with Lord Tywin dead." If the tales coming up the kingsroad could be believed, the King's Hand had been murdered by his dwarf son whilst sitting on a privy. Jon had known Tyrion Lannister, briefly. He took my hand and named me friend. It was hard to believe the little man had it in him to murder his own sire, but the fact of Lord Tywin's demise seemed to be beyond doubt. "The lion in King's Landing is a cub, and the Iron Throne has been known to cut grown men to ribbons." - Jon, ADwD

Jon's personal experiences define his opinions just as Brienne's personal experiences define hers. Brienne's admiration for Lady Catelyn means that she agrees with all of Cat's opinions and has sympathy for Catelyn's daughter. In fact if Catelyn had talked of Jon Snow, Brienne would think of Jon as a treacherous bastard out to steal the Stark birthright like Catelyn warned Robb that Jon or Jon's children would do.

Remember when the Blackfish casts aspersions on Jon Snow's character because his sister has told him that the bastard was not to be trusted? We would see Brienne think the same way because she has never met Jon Snow and would trust in Catelyn's opinions of him.

Would we then unquestionably accept Brienne's opinions of Jon Snow because she's a good person? I doubt it. Brienne's opinions of Tyrion as the cruelest Lannister - when Cersei and Jaime are right there - should similarly not be taken at face value and instead attributed to the bigotry that has surrounded Tyrion for as long as he has lived.

#Tyrion Lannister #Brienne of Tarth #Jon Snow

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stil-lindigo · 6 months

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when people talk about educating yourself on the origins of ideologies like zionism, it isn’t to ask for sympathy but to show that fascism always hinges on the same rules - dehumanisation and other-ing of scapegoat populations in the pursuit of power.

fascism is, at the end of the day, uncreative and there is value in recognising the signs. When an entire ideology is dependent on the inherent depravity of a certain identity, it is worth some scrutiny.

#we are all susceptible to propaganda and because of that there is value in learning the signs of when you should start asking questions #why exactly is Israel’s identity completely dependent on the eradication of Palestinians?#is it perhaps because the fact that Palestine was its own nation interferes with the concept of Jews being indigenous to Israel?#this is the same dehumanising logic you’ll have seen in every settler’s rhetoric #in America in Australia in all of the colonised world #remember that any freedom we now enjoy was fought for tooth and claw #Israel is not unique. it is just the current example of settler colonialism #and in recognising this has happened before we can recognise the same propaganda techniques being used to villlainise Palestinians #believe in the possibility of a free Palestine #it will happen #from the river to the sea #Palestine #israel #free palestine

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vaxieth · 2 months

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i think there’s important context missing from the idea that the ambivalence/dislike of the gods in campaign 3 is unbelievable and/or inconsistent with past campaigns when the gods quantifiably grant people power: that is that, when you actually think about it, magic is extremely inaccessible to most of the people that live in exandria. i don’t mean in a “the gods only give magic to certain people” way. i mean magic, even divine magic, costs money. the average exandrian lives off of one gold per week; high level magic costs hundreds if not thousands of gold in spell components, so do potions and magic items.

it’s easy to forget when we only follow adventurers, but even the mighty nein at their “poorest” were much, much richer than the rest of the world—they’re the exceptions, not the rule. of course, magic exists, but processing past a low-level threshold requires extraordinary privilege, including access to resources, time, and money, so it isn’t unbelievable to me at all that most people feel no connection to it and/or are susceptible to ludinus/the vanguard’s anti-god propaganda, especially since while obviously not all magic comes from the gods, it is likely the type the average person encounters most.

#critical role #textpost #my post #does this make sense? i don’t know but i’ve been thinking about it for a while and wanted to get it out #the tl;dr is that the perspective of exandria we get as the audience is Not The Norm and that’s really interesting to consider!#the view of the gods being more complicated in c3 also makes perfect sense to me #given that bells hells is the “group made up of npcs” that would have been the “unimportant” people in a different story

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starrrbakerrr · 8 months

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“star-crossed lovers”

I have a thought that might have been discussed before, but Katniss and Peeta are referred to as “star-crossed lovers” by the Capitol. “Star-crossed lovers” was coined by Shakespeare in the prologue of his play Romeo and Juliet. When I think of star-crossed lovers my mind goes to the archetypal forbidden love of Romeo and Juliet, which mirrors the narrative the Capitol creates between Peeta and Katniss.

As we know, Romeo and Juliet is a text from centuries ago. We don’t know how far into the future Panem is – I always imagine at least 100 year in the future. We know very little of Panem’s history before the Dark Days, such as how long Panem has existed, but it’s safe to say at least 100 years.

I can’t find this quote for the life of me. I might have imagined it lol, but if I remember correctly, early in Mockingjay Plutarch tells Katniss about their plans for society after the rebellion. Plutarch says in “old history books” there’s something called ✨democracy✨ that they want to use. (side note: I remember Katniss saying something like “it led to where we are now” and that’s why I want to find it so badly lol)

So we know that the government of Panem are aware of the political history of the United States. But how would they know the term “star-crossed lovers”? District children are only taught their trade and Panem propaganda, so they wouldn’t know history before the Dark Days or what “star-crossed lovers” are. As for the Capitol citizens and children, they may have more freedom in education but I can’t imagine them knowing anything about North American society before Panem (they are even more susceptible to Panem propaganda), so how would they know about European literature? And we also know that Capitol citizens are more shallow and self-obsessed than they are intelligent so I can’t imagine them reading a book, much less Shakespeare.

It seems by the first Hunger Games novel all history of what existed before Panem has been destroyed except what little information the government had on the US. Sort of like the Nazis burning books and art - art, newspapers, books, monuments, and many artifacts are all gone. The progression of technology lasted, a lot Appalachian culture still exists in D12, the land somehow persisted, music/dance styles evolved, but it appears no one really is certain what American society was. And it seems that Panem exists in total isolation from other continents so it doesn’t make complete sense for Romeo and Juliet, a European text, to be passed down as oral history, thus for Panem to know what “star-crossed lovers” are.

I thought very far into this (probably more than it should be), but my only explanation is that Shakespeare is either ~timeless~ and the play still exists somehow, or maybe it’s a term that is still thrown around but no one really knows where it came from.

#the hunger games #thg meta #everlark #the hunger games trilogy #i haven’t read tbosas yet so there’s probably more context i’m missing #one of my favorite things about dystopian media is the world building like what lead up to panem #and we really know so little about panem #especially the capitol like what did they do in their free time other than watch the hunger games #another thing with thg is the absence of religion #idk if it was purposeful or just not important to the story so suzanne left it out #text

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homochadensistm · 28 days

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It’s been interesting with all these antisemites coming out of the woodwork, the same antisemites being the ones who loudly proclaimed they’d have stood up for their Jewish neighbors. I find it especially interesting because it has opens my eyes to realize these people, with all the technology in the world, could easily disprove the antisemitic propaganda being spread, they could check their facts, something not as easily available in the 20th century, yet they believe they would have been able to stand against it. Everything that’s happened has shown how susceptible they are to propaganda, just like how the Nazis wanted to have a boogie man, a enemy to blame all their problems on, the modern antisemite is the same. They don’t care about facts, they simply want an enemy they can blame for their problems, or one they can hate to distract from their problems, and hating Jews is something in and hip now and they take it in full stride. These people would have eaten up nazi propaganda, they’d be the ones joining the ranks of the SS, the ones hunting their own neighbors, turning on any Jews they found all for their own benefits. It’s a scary truth to realize how blind these people have been, how easily swayed they were. Because in the end they don’t care about Palestinians, they don’t care about conflicts in the Middle East, they just want something to hate, to call evil, to rally against and avoid facing the truth of their actions. So they vilify us Jews, they try and hide their hate behind terms like anti-zionist, knowing nothing about the term except it’s association with Jews. They want to be proud and loud with their Jew hatred but only as long as they can do it in a socially acceptable way, they’ll cry we’re aren’t antisemitic we just hate Zionist, they will never try and tell you what it means because to them it only means Jews. Hope you’re doing well, and hope my fellow Jews stay strong. We will be okay together

To meme-ify the very true and serious things you laid down so eloquently:

#israel #palestine #the girlies r experiencing their collective schizo time with antisemitism

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houseofpurplestars · 2 months

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🚨 Government Media Office (1/2):

—

The famine deepens in the Gaza Strip, and the airdrops of aid are useless. We hold the the American administration, the international community, and the "israeli" occupation responsible.

The famine continues to deepen significantly in the governorates of the Gaza Strip, with 2,400,000 people suffering from a severe lack of food. The famine is particularly severe in the governorates of North Gaza and Gaza. This disaster has already led to the martyrdom of 15 children due to hunger, malnutrition, and dehydration, threatening the lives of more than 700,000 Palestinian citizens suffering from extreme hunger.

Some countries have attempted to air drop aid through a few planes, but it is well known that this is not the optimal method to deliver aid to the people of the Gaza Strip. In this regard, we would like to affirm the following:

🚨 Government Media Office (2/2):

—

1. We believe some countries that have conducted aerial aid drops have good intentions, while others, like the United States and others, have malicious and devious intentions as they actively participate in the war, supply the occupation with weapons, and give it the green light to commit more massacres.

2. The practice of airdropping aid and ignoring the introduction of aid through land crossings is part of a circumventing strategy that avoids root solutions to the problem by following showy, propaganda, and ineffective methods. This aligns with the occupation's policy of enhancing the starvation policy, buying time for the occupation, and extending the famine to inflict as much damage as possible on the people and citizens.

3. The air-dropping operations carry serious repercussions for the residents and people, posing a significant challenge, as part of this aid lands near the separation fence or in areas controlled by the occupation army or within the occupied Palestinian lands, thus endangering the lives of citizens trying to access the aid.

4. Air-dropping operations are extremely difficult in a crowded environment like the Gaza Strip, home to 2,400,000 people. Aerially delivered aid is susceptible to damage due to weather conditions or serious accidents in the Gaza Strip. Some of the aid dropped has fallen into the sea and has not reached the people, while land transport of aid reaches citizens safely and is not subject to damage.

5. The aid delivered by air is minimal and limited, and the capacity of the planes is limited and does not meet the people's needs at all. The aerially delivered aid does not cover anything, but is merely a drop in the ocean of massive needs, unlike land transport, which can deliver the largest possible quantity of aid safely to the people and citizens suffering from hunger. Additionally, aerial transport operations are significantly more expensive than much less costly land transport operations.

6. The aid delivered by air does not achieve justice at all, as this process requires 2,400,000 people to go out into the streets and then run after the aid, which does not reach safe places, in a shameful, humiliating, inhumane, and non-humanitarian manner.

7. The policy of closing land crossings to relief, supply, and food aid convoys constitutes a war crime in violation of international law, international humanitarian law, and all international conventions, which is what the occupation does against our Palestinian people since the beginning of the genocide.

In light of all this, we renew our full responsibility to the American administration, the international community, and the "israeli" occupation for the genocide waged by the occupation against civilians, children, and women. We also hold them responsible for the famine and the enhancement of the starvation policy, and for 19 types of crimes against humanity committed by the occupation in the Gaza Strip.

We call on all free countries of the world to pressure the occupation to stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing against our Palestinian people, which has claimed more than 100,000 victims, including martyrs, wounded, and detainees, and to immediately and unconditionally stop the bloodshed against civilians, women, and children.

Government Media Office

Sunday, March 3, 2024

t.me/PalestineResist

#free palestine #free gaza #i stand with palestine #palestine #gaza #solidarity #resistance #crimes against humanity #genocide #cw israel

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snowjanuscentral · 5 months

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Hey do you take requests for fics? If so I have one, where Gaul realizes the only thing standing between her being able to groom snow into the perfect evil little puppet, is sejaus so she sets it up where his names is reaped and snow has to be his mentor?

Hey, yeah I do!!!

I'm kinda busy rn with end of uni term and another fic so i'll give you the bullet point version of the premise now and come back to write the full fic later on in the month!!!!

Okay so:

How do we make it so that Sejanus is reaped for the Hunger Games whilst he's in the Capitol?

In this world, I think Sejanus is even more outspoken with his disdain for the Capitol than is shown in tbosas, to the point that by the time they reach their final year of schooling, Sejanus is constantly in serious trouble with Academy faculty.

Throughout this time, Coriolanus is still a good friend to Sejanus, or at least the Plinth's view Coriolanus as a good friend to him - in fact, Coryo is playing the long game to get closer to the Plinth Prize (we'll go with the movie version of the Plinth Prize being an established annual reward)

About a month before the end of the school year (and the Hunger Games), there is an Incident, in which Sejanus goes Too Far and gets expelled from the Academy. I imagine he effectively is espousing what is seen as "radical beliefs", potentially gets in contact with a rebel cell within the Capitol. Something that's going to be big enough news to be trouble for the entire Plinth dynasty

Strabo Plinth tries to buy his son out of whatever punishment is planned, and Gaul takes the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: get rid of a rebel threat, and ensure her brightest pupil is primed to enthusiastically agree to continue her legacy

Gaul suggests that Sejanus be entered into the Hunger Games as the District Two tribute, with the express televised explanation that Strabo Plinth is doing a great service to the Capitol by giving up his son to the Games, saving his own reputation. Sejanus is basically shown to be doing atonement for his sins.

Coriolanus is chosen to Sejanus' mentor, all according to Gaul's plan

If Coriolanus and Sejanus win the Hunger Games, not only will Coriolanus receive the Plinth Prize, but Sejanus' will regain his Capitol status (with the caveat that he'll be sent to a facility to be brainwashed or smth)

I imagine in this scenario, Coriolanus goes completely off the deep end and becomes a bad bad man. Toxic relationship vibes, slowly breaking down Sejanus' belief system so that he agrees completely with Capitol propaganda and Coriolanus' ideas. Sejanus himself is thoroughly traumatised by the idea of having to enter the Hunger Games, and this trauma makes him susceptible to manipulation. Lots of Sejanus angst, his convictions slowly crumble when he's faced with the reality of life as a tribute, he realises he's more Capitol than he thought because he's grown so used to the life of luxury he has no real survival skills.

In the end Sejanus and Coriolanus win, but they're in a horrifically toxic relationship and everything that made Sejanus himself has been stripped away to make him the perfect Capitol darling.

In order for Capitol citizens to accept Sejanus' return to their ranks, it would have to be framed in a way that he's seen the error of his ways and becomes a kind of spokesperson for the Hunger Games and Capitol propaganda and basically becomes everything he's hated for the sake of survival.

I hope this is what you're looking for!!!!

#snowjanus #tbosas #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #thg #thg fanfiction #headcanon #fanfiction #ask #my headcanon #fic idea

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qqueenofhades · 11 months

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I don’t know if this is just because I’ve curated my feeds to show me this, but I actually have a sliver of hope that we may stay blue because of all the kids who will be voting age in 2024 being FIRED TF UP against all the human rights violations the republicans are passing/want to pass into law and like. I don’t want the kids to save us. They shouldn’t frickin have to. But if republicans keep being such raging assholes, if they can hold onto that anger until 2024… they just frickin might. I’m genuinely terrified what will happen if they DO NOT, but I have seen so many late-teens-early-20s kids getting out and voting in local elections and doing other things* that helps that I really, really hope they bring that energy to the 2024 election even if our choices are “old white guy who is Actually Doing Okay (could be better but not Genuinely Evil)” and “Orange Incoherent Criminal” or “ Literal Fascist Wannabe Dictator that everyone else actually hates”

(Also, do I wish we had a better option than Biden? Sure. But he’s not doing nearly as bad as a lot of people INCLUDING DEMS want us to believe. Like no maybe he’s not MANY things, but what he is doing is pretty darn good and big and it’s not actual genocide so like. Can we all suck it up ONE MORE TIME PLEASE???)

(*the biggest energy I saw was with the Tennessee Three and I’m like PLEASE BRING THAT ENERGY TO THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION I AM BEGGING YOU)

I mean... like I keep saying, the Republicans aren't trying so hard to outlaw voting because they truly think their policies are popular and people legitimately want to vote for them. They have lost the popular vote in every presidential election except one (2004) since the start of this century, and yet in that time, we have still had 12 years of GOP presidents, because the Electoral College sucks anti-democratic donkey dick so hard.

Likewise, yes: if we get our act together and vote in equal or higher numbers than 2020 and 2022, we will probably-to-definitely win. A turnout of just 27% of Gen Z voters stopped the Red Wave in 2022, so if yknow, a few more of them would do so in 2024, that would be nice. Republican policies are toxically unpopular with young people, but these are often also those most susceptible to "evil Democrats/both sides bad" anti-voting propaganda, so it's not always clear how this adds up to extra points for Team Blue.

Anyway, at this point, it's still too early to know what the hell will happen between now and November 2024, how Felonies Georg's charges numbering possibly in the literal hundreds will affect the race, or any of that. As ever, however, we do know that the crazies WILL vote en masse, like they always do, and it is up to us to do our part.

#dream-thieves #ask #politics for ts

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mariacallous · 3 months

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Sherwood Eddy was a prominent American missionary as well as that now rare thing, a Christian socialist. In the 1920s and ’30s, he made more than a dozen trips to the Soviet Union. He was not blind to the problems of the U.S.S.R., but he also found much to like. In place of squabbling, corrupt democratic politicians, he wrote in one of his books on the country, “Stalin rules … by his sagacity, his honesty, his rugged courage, his indomitable will and titanic energy.” Instead of the greed he found so pervasive in America, Russians seemed to him to be working for the joy of working.

Above all, though, he thought he had found in Russia something that his own individualistic society lacked: a “unified philosophy of life.” In Russia, he wrote, “all life is focused in a central purpose. It is directed to a single high end and energized by such powerful and glowing motivation that life seems to have supreme significance.”

Eddy was wrong about much of what he saw. Joseph Stalin was a liar and a mass murderer; Russians worked because they were hungry and afraid. The “unified philosophy of life” was a chimera, and the reality was a totalitarian state that used terror and propaganda to maintain that unity. But Eddy, like others in his era, was predisposed to admire the Soviet Union precisely because he was so critical of the economics and politics of his own country, Depression-era America. In this, he was not alone.

In his landmark 1981 book, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism. Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: “Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.”

Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help America’s enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.

But in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar. All around them, they see degeneracy, racial mixing, demographic change, “political correctness,” same-sex marriage, religious decline. The America that they actually inhabit no longer matches the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America that they remember, or think they remember. And so they have begun to look abroad, seeking to find the spiritually unified, ethnically pure nations that, they imagine, are morally stronger than their own. Nations, for example, such as Russia.

The pioneer of this search was Patrick Buchanan, the godfather of the modern so-called alt-right, whose feelings about foreign authoritarians shifted right about the time he started writing books with titles such as The Death of the West and Suicide of a Superpower. His columns pour scorn on modern America, a place he once described, with disgust, as a “multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual ‘universal nation’ whose avatar is Barack Obama.” Buchanan’s America is in demographic decline, has been swamped by beige and brown people, and has lost its virtue. The West, he has written, has succumbed to “a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide—the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.”

This litany of horrors isn’t much different from what can be heard most nights on Fox News. Listen to Tucker Carlson. “The American dream is dying,” Carlson declared one recent evening, in a monologue that also referred to “the dark age that we are living through.” Carlson has also spent a lot of time on air reminiscing about how the United States “was a better country than it is now in a lot of ways,” back when it was “more cohesive.” And no wonder: Immigrants have “plundered” America, thanks to “decadent and narcissistic” politicians who refuse to “defend the nation.” You can read worse on the white-supremacist websites of the alt-right—do pick up a copy of Ann Coulter’s Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole—or hear more extreme sentiments in some evangelical churches. Franklin Graham has declared, for example, that America “is in deep trouble and on the verge of total moral and spiritual collapse.”

What a terrible place all of these people are describing. Who would want to live in a country like that? Or, to put it differently: Who wouldn’t sympathize with the enemies of a country like that? As it turns out, many do. Certainly Buchanan does. Russian cyberwarriors work with daily determination to undermine American utilities and electricity grids. Russian information warriors are trying to deform American political debate. Russian contract killers are murdering people on the streets of Western countries. Russian nuclear weapons are pointed at us and our allies.

Nevertheless, Buchanan has come to admire the Russian president because he is “standing up for traditional values against Western cultural elites.” Once again, he feels the shimmering lure of that elusive sense of “unity” and purpose that complicated, diverse, quarrelsome America always lacks. Impressed with the Russian president’s use of Orthodox pageantry at public events, Buchanan even believes that “Putin is trying to re-establish the Orthodox Church as the moral compass of the nation it had been for 1,000 years before Russia fell captive to the atheistic and pagan ideology of Marxism.”

He is not alone. The belief that Russia is on our side in the war against secularism and sexual decadence is shared by a host of American Christian leaders, as well as their colleagues on the European far right. Among them, for example, are the movers and shakers behind the World Congress of Families, an American evangelical and anti-gay-rights organization that Buchanan has explicitly praised. One of the WCF’s former leaders, Larry Jacobs, once declared that “the Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.” The WCF even has a Russian branch, which is run by Alexey Komov, a man in turn linked to Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch who has hosted far-right meetings all across Europe. At the WCF’s most recent meeting, in Verona, senior Russian priests mingled with leaders of the Italian far right, the Austrian far right, and their comrades from the American heartland.

Carlson’s support for Russia, by contrast, takes the form of snarling sarcasm rather than open admiration. Much as Jane Fonda once posed, just for the provocative kick of it, with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, Carlson has started teasing his viewers and his critics with his amusingly contrarian views on Russia. “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia?” he asked recently. A couple of days later, he tried it again: “I think we should probably take the side of Russia, if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

Ironically, during the Reagan administration, Carlson’s father ran Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast American values into the U.S.S.R. Or maybe this is not an irony, but rather an explanation. In his book, Hollander described the prestige that Albanian communism once enjoyed in Sweden and Norway. Few Scandinavians had ever been there, but that didn’t matter: “Albania is picked up simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one’s own society, one’s own traditions, one’s own parents.” Now Carlson is using Russia as a club with which to beat his own society and his own traditions.

Fortunately for all such critics, they don’t have to spend much time in the country they are “rooting” for, because there is no greater fantasy than the idea that Russia is a country of Christian values. In reality, Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, nearly double that of the United States. It has an extremely low record of church attendance, though the numbers are difficult to measure, not least because any form of Christianity outside of the state-controlled Orthodox Church is liable to be considered a cult. A 2012 survey showed that religion plays an important role in the lives of only 15 percent of Russians. Only 5 percent have read the Bible.

If American Christians would find little to cheer for in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, American white nationalists would be disappointed too. Carlson has wondered aloud about America’s racial mix, asking, “How precisely is diversity our strength?” He would have a real dilemma in Russia. Nearly 20 percent of Russian citizens do not even identify as Russian, telling pollsters that they belong to different nationalities, ranging from Tartar and Azeri to Ukrainian and Moldovan; more than 6 percent of Russians are Muslims, as opposed to 1.1 percent of the U.S. population. And that might be a gross underestimate of the actual number of Russian Muslims, since in some parts of the country, Muslims are off-limits to census takers. Remember all those phony stories about Swedish and British neighborhoods that are supposedly no-go zones ruled by Sharia law? Russia has an actual province, Chechnya, that is officially ruled by Sharia law. The local regime tolerates polygamy, requires women to be veiled in public places, and tortures gay men. It is a no-go zone, right inside Russia.

As for Putin himself, there is no evidence that this former KGB officer has actually converted, but plenty of evidence that Putin’s recent public displays of Christianity are just as cynical as Stalin’s vaunted love for the working classes. Among other things, they are useful precisely because they can hoodwink naive foreigners. But you don’t need to listen to me say so. Listen, instead, to the words of a young Russian, Yegor Zhukov, who was put on trial for publishing videos critical of the regime. In an extraordinary courtroom speech, he addressed the loud support for “the institutions of the family” that Putin often offers in Russia, and contrasted it with reality:

An impenetrable barrier divides our society in two. All the money is concentrated at the top and no one up there is going to let it go. All that’s left at the bottom—and this is no exaggeration—is despair. Knowing that they have nothing to hope for, that no matter how hard they try, they cannot bring happiness to themselves or their families, Russian men take their aggression out on their wives, or drink themselves to death, or hang themselves. Russia has the world’s [second] highest rate of suicide among men. As a result, a third of all Russian families are single mothers with their kids. I would like to know: Is this how we are protecting the institution of the family?

The reality of Russia isn’t the point, just as the reality of Stalinism wasn’t the point, not for Sherwood Eddy and not for George Bernard Shaw. The American intellectuals who now find themselves alienated from the country that they inhabit aren’t interested in reality. They are interested in a fantasy nation, different and distinct from their own hateful country. America, with its complicated social and political as well as ethnic diversity, with its Constitution that ensures we will never, ever all be forced to feel as if “all life is focused in a central purpose”—this America no longer appeals to them at all.

Most of them know that this fantasy foreign nation they admire seeks to put an end to all of that. It seeks to undermine American democracy, beat back American influence, and curtail American power. But to those who dislike American democracy, despair of American influence, and are angered by American power? That, truly, is the point.

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