The Guest by Hwang Sok-yong (who participated in the Gwangju uprising!) is another great historical fiction novel, this one about right-wing massacres in North Korea during the Korean War by Koreans from the South and anti-communist Christian Koreans in the North. Interesting Hwang Sok-yong’s books are published in both the north and the south, except for some in the south which have been banned. Hwang Sok-yong was imprisoned for some years in South Korea for “breaching the National Security Law” by visiting the north on a book tour.

Hey, it’s not dumb to not know things!! It’s only dumb to not learn things when given the chance. You don’t have to apologise for not knowing something, especially given your question wasn’t dumb. In fact it’s exactly right; I’d argue that most societies operated under what they did not consider was a religion and has later been understood in a Western anthropological context as a “religion.” I fact, having a religion that consists of a holy book, laws, belief, prophets, etc is the weird outlier, as for the overwhelming plurality of human history nobody had that.

Mashallah, hopefully all the “reformist/neoliberal” hand wringing on here about Pezeshkian turns out to be for naught.

Balagangadhara argues that as a conceptual category “religion” as understood by the West does not and cannot apply to traditions outside of the West. Even for the pagan Romans and Greeks “religion” just meant “performing the rites of my ancestors.” There were atheists that professed “religion,” because “religion” was not belief or doctrine or whatever, it was practice and tradition. Christians in the Roman Empire were critiqued as “having no religion” because they weren’t practicing the rites of their ancestors, they had nothing connecting them to their past. So Christians kind of turned the turn around, and instead redefined “religion” to mean faith and belief in a coherent set of ideology and doctrine, often submitting to a central authority that determines this doctrine, and from a holy book. This idea of “religion” maps very well onto Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. But other cultures it is nonsensical. Asking somebody from ancient India “do you believe in Krishna” makes no sense. The terms of the question are irrelevant. There’s no “belief system,” there’s no “holy book” or “faith” or “doctrine” or whatever. It’s not a question of faith or belief at all. Hinduism as a term didn’t even exist until the 19th century, and it was invented by Western scholars attempting to make sense of Indian thought. Similarly, Chinese thought also has no sense of “religion” in any sense that Westerners can make sense of, and to apply the term to existing social and cultural practices elsewhere attempts to pigeonhole entirely different systems of thought into a colonial framework.

Well considering the concept of “religion” is a thoroughly Western idea and has no equivalent in most other ancient cultures (see “The Heathen in his Blindness…”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion by S. N. Balagangadhara) I would say almost all of them. “Hinduism,” to just cite one example, is a constructed “religion” that did not understand itself as thus and arguably didn’t even exist until Westerners constructed it.

Sending troops to Ukraine would make us belligerents. War against Russia would be madness. This belligerent verbal escalation by a nuclear power against another major nuclear power is already an irresponsible act. Parliament must be seized and say no. No war! It is high time to negotiate peace in Ukraine with mutual security clauses!

He also wants France to leave NATO.

Per his Twitter here: https://x.com/JLMelenchon/status/1762251673320259837

Some Jews feel threatened by the presence of Islamists in France, who carried out several terror attacks last year, as well as by a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents.

That has led some to consider a vote for the far right — a move once seen as unthinkable, given that the party co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”.

Serge Klarsfeld, a French Holocaust survivor and famed Nazi hunter, shocked many by saying last month he would vote for the RN if they were in run-offs with LFI candidates.

"I would not hesitate, I would vote for the RN . . . I am faced with a far left in thrall to La France Insoumise and its stench of antisemitism and a violent anti-Zionism, and the RN that has evolved,” he said.

Imagine being a Holocaust survivor and voting for fascists. Insanity in France. Note the LFI is France Unbowed, Mélenchon’s left party and the largest member of the NFP, the left alliance. From here: https://www.ft.com/content/55740b08-dd73-4ac5-a8be-9a20b5dfeb56

Also I’m continuing my campaign of reading as little about TERF island as possible. The FT this weekend has a whole feature on the election that I refuse to engage with outside of the Scottish and Irish bits. I always skip the UK section on the Economist. I do not care about England, it does not matter on the global stage in any serious sense, and I hate that Anglophone media devotes so much time to a deranged backwater.

Sinn Féin actually increased its vote share in Northern Ireland, and Paisley lost his DUP seat. Meanwhile in France, looks like the RN isn’t going to get a majority after all. The left and the centre’s strategy of dropping candidates to consolidate the anti-fascist vote is working. We’re on track for a hung parliament with the left alliance in a solid second place, per here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-05/le-pen-projected-to-win-175-205-seats-in-french-vote-ipsos-says

Sinn Féin actually increased its vote share in Northern Ireland, and Paisley lost his DUP seat. Meanwhile in France, looks like the RN isn’t going to get a majority after all. The left and the centre’s strategy of dropping candidates to consolidate the anti-fascist vote is working. We’re on track for a hung parliament with the left alliance in a solid second place, per here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-05/le-pen-projected-to-win-175-205-seats-in-french-vote-ipsos-says

EDIT: Fuck wrong mega, knew I fucked up when the comment I saw next to mine was about fluffy pillow, which I btw totally agree. Fluffy pillows are a plot against the working class, the simulation of luxury whilst actively hurting you.

Cowards! Backstabbers! Ingrates! Traitors! Snakes! Biden’s performance at that debate was magnificent. No one is better placed or richlier qualified to lead his county through the rest of this decade. Before the debate I still wasn’t sure, but now I’m absolutely committed; I’m ridin’ with Biden, even if I know exactly where this road leads. Make him president for life! It could be longer than you think. Hook him up to machines, flood his veins with crank. Long live Joe! Long live the king!

This is your heritage as an American. So yes, fine: your democratic process has been reduced to an Old Man Contest, two leathery codgers competing over who has more of his brain still functioning. Odds are pretty good that both candidates were wearing some kind of adult incontinence nappy for the debate. A good night for either of them meant not visibly drooling or falling over on stage. So what? This upsets you? You think your country ought to be better than this? Are you really worried about Joe Biden? Joe Biden is still alive! He talks! You can ask him what day of the week it is, and he’ll answer you! The answer might even be accurate! What are you complaining about? For thousands of years, your continent was ruled by the silent mountains and the blood-hungry sun, and they spoke a language only measurable in graves. Next to them, Joe Biden is a model of lucidity.

What the backstabbers don’t understand is that Joe Biden is president for a reason. You will not unseat him, because he is the man for his age. Napoleon might have been the world-spirit on horseback, but the world-spirit no longer needs horses. Joe Biden is the world-spirit dribbling ice cream down its chin.

From King Joe Forever

Yeah I think Horne does a phenomenal job at showing that while the “traditional” reasons for the revolution may be valid for the north, the south broadly joined not because of taxes but over fears of abolition. Still cannot believe that Florida was actually a British possession during the revolution and specifically did not join the United States because it was filled with runaway slaves who would kill the colonial government if they tried to join. Blew my mind that I did not realise Florida was a British possession at the time.

Because he’s not a person, he’s merely the living personification of capital itself.

Exactly why I try to read news from publications like this and The Economist. They’re right wing ghouls who are very explicit in their ghoulishness, and you can pinpoint the propaganda because they’ll just tell you most of the time. Ultimately the people who read this kind of news, unlike say the NY Times, are mostly people plugged into the circuits of capital and power. You can’t make money if you don’t actually know what’s going on.

Yeah this was the status quo, Presidents acting as presidents are never held accountable for their crimes. We’re just in the “say the quiet part out loud” phase in the West.

Would you vote for a dead chimpanzee’s excised brain tumor over Biden?

Spy x Family is extremely popular and is centered on adults, and all the children that are in the series aren’t sexualised in any capacity. Refreshing tbh

Note this is only the first round. The fascists are probably going to win, but I expect most races to go into a run-off where it’ll be the RN vs the NPF (the left coalition) as the centrists come in third and have to drop out. Then things get really interesting, because the French will vote between fascists and the left. The left could come out on top, depending on how much voters can stomach Le Pen.

Coups seem to work just fine in many places. All the coups in the Sahel went great, albeit most were initiated by a young officer corps.