I thought it was cylindrical?

https://streamable.com/unjnw9

I have to eat food, I don't have to vote

if your ballot is trash then throwing it away makes a lot of sense

if their tech is that good they've already won so just relax by chucking a big cloud

you don't have to vote and you don't have to vote for a major party. it's not a magic ritual. unless you live in a swing state the only effect it will have is a stain on your conscience for the rest of your life for having affirmatively said "yeah genocide is okay I guess"

These are the days of subscription campaigns. The editors and administrators of bourgeois newspapers tidy up their display windows, paint some varnish on their shop signs and appeal for the attention of the passer-by (that is, the readers) to their wares. Their wares are newspapers of four or six pages that go out every day or evening in order to inject in the mind of the reader ways of feeling and judging the facts of current politics appropriate for the producers and sellers of the press.

We would like to discuss, with the workers especially, the importance and seriousness of this apparently innocent act, which consists in choosing the newspaper you subscribe to. It is a choice full of snares and dangers which must be made consciously, applying criteria and after mature reflection.

Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper. And he must always, always, always remember that the bourgeois newspaper (whatever its hue) is an instrument of struggle motivated by ideas and interests that are contrary to his. Everything that is published is influenced by one idea: that of serving the dominant class, and which is ineluctably translated into a fact: that of combating the laboring class. And in fact, from the first to the last line the bourgeois newspaper smells of and reveals this preoccupation.

But the beautiful – that is the ugly – thing is this: that instead of asking for money from the bourgeois class to support it in its pitiless work in its favor, the bourgeois newspapers manage to be paid by...the same laboring classes that they always combat. And the laboring class pays; punctually, generously.

Hundreds of thousands of workers regularly and daily give their pennies to the bourgeois newspapers, thus assisting in creating their power. Why? If you were to ask this of the first worker you were to see on the tram or the street with a bourgeois paper spread before him you would hear: “Because I need to hear about what happening.” And it would never enter his head that the news and the ingredients with which it is cooked are exposed with an art that guides his ideas and influences his spirit in a given direction. And yet he knows that this newspaper is opportunist, and that one is for the rich, that the third, the fourth, the fifth is tied to political groups with interests diametrically opposed to his.

And so every day this same worker is able to personally see that the bourgeois newspapers tell even the simplest of facts in a way that favors the bourgeois class and damns the working class and its politics. Has a strike broken out? The workers are always wrong as far as the bourgeois newspapers are concerned. Is there a demonstration? The demonstrators are always wrong, solely because they are workers they are always hotheads, rioters, hoodlums. The government passes a law? It’s always good, useful and just, even if it’s...not. And if there’s an electoral, political or administrative struggle? The best programs and candidates are always those of the bourgeois parties.

And we’re aren’t even talking about all the facts that the bourgeois newspapers either keep quiet about, or travesty, or falsify in order to mislead, delude or maintain in ignorance the laboring public. Despite this, the culpable acquiescence of the worker to the bourgeois newspapers is limitless. We have to react against this and recall the worker to the correct evaluation of reality. We have to say and repeat that the pennies tossed there distractedly into the hands of the newsboy are projectiles granted to a bourgeois newspaper, which will hurl it, at the opportune moment, against the working masses.

If the workers were to be persuaded of this most elementary of truths they would learn to boycott the bourgeois press with the same unity and discipline that the bourgeoisie boycott the newspapers of the workers, that is, the Socialist press. Don’t give financial assistance to the bourgeois press, which is your adversary. This is what should be our battle cry in this moment that is characterized by the subscription campaigns of all the bourgeois newspapers. Boycott them, boycott them, boycott them!

from Newspapers and the Workers by Antonio Gramsci (1916)

You can look at any existing socialist country— if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist— whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance. When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who were poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.” And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?” I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read. So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.

—Michael Parenti

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion.

But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.

—Muhammad Ali

It was formerly the "accepted" idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former.

That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples.

It was formerly the "accepted" idea that the only method of liberating the oppressed peoples is the method of bourgeois nationalism, the method of nations drawing apart from one another, the method of disuniting nations, the method of intensifying national enmity among the labouring masses of the various nations.

That legend must now be regarded as refuted. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice the possibility and expediency of the proletarian, internationalist method of liberating the oppressed peoples, as the only correct method; by demonstrating in practice the possibility and expediency of a fraternal union of the workers and peasants of the most diverse nations based on the principles of voluntariness and internationalism. The existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which is the prototype of the future integration of the working people of all countries into a single world economic system, cannot but serve as direct proof of this.

The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away.

The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies and dependent countries, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.

—Stalin, The International Character Of the October Revolution, 1927

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. Being pure is what provokes this narcissistic orgasm. This purity is what makes them feel superior.

from Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture by Jones Manoel

Two economists are walking in the park. The first economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the other, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50. Later on, the second economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the first, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that pile of dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50.

The first economist says, "I can't help but feel we just ate dog shit for nothing." "Nonsense," says the second economist, "We just contributed $100 to the economy."

The fed: god inflation is so bad ugh we need to reduce the amount of money in circulation

The banks: 👉👈🥺 I need $300 billion and sloppy toppy literally right now

The fed: omg yes right away wow queen ur basis points are so huge

• Adolf Heusinger, chief of the Operationsabteilung (third-in-command of the Wehrmacht) from 1940-1944 and Hitler’s acting Chief of Staff 1944, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee 1961-1964

• Hans Speidel, chief of staff to Erwin Rommel, Supreme Commander of NATO’s ground forces in Central Europe 1957-1963

• Johannes Steinhoff, Luftwaffe fighter pilot during WWII and recipient of the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross (the Nazi military’s highest award), Chairman of the NATO Military Committee 1971–1974

• Johann von Kielmansegg, General Staff officer to the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1942-1944, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1967-1968

• Ernst Ferber, Major in the Wehrmacht and group leader of the organizational department of the Supreme Command of the Army (Wehrmacht) 1943-1945 and recipient of the Iron Cross 1st Class, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1973-1975

• Karl Schnell, battery chief in the Western campaign in 1940/later First General Staff Officer of the LXXVI Panzer Corps in 1944 and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1975-1977

• Franz Joseph Schulze, Lieutenant in the reserve and Chief of the 3rd Battery of the Flak Storm Regiment 241 and recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1944, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1977-1979

• Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, Lieutenant of 24th Panzer Division in the German 6th Army, participant in the Battle of Stalingrad, adjutant to Army High Command, and recipient of the German Cross in gold, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1979-1983

The dossier/Snopes approach doesn’t work because it attempts to apply facts and reason to people who are not interested in either facts or reason. That’s not a nice thing to say, or even to think, about anyone else, which is why I was reluctant and slow to reach that conclusion. But that conclusion was inevitable.

In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:

• I assumed that the people who claimed to believe that Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan really did believe such a thing.
• I assumed that they were passing on this rumor in good faith— that they were misinforming others only because they had, themselves, been misinformed.
• I assumed that they would respect, or care about, or at least be willing to consider, the actual facts of the matter.
• Because the people spreading this rumor claimed to be horrified/angry about its allegations, I assumed that they would be happy/relieved to learn that these allegations were, indisputably, not true.

All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling— so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.

But it is the case. Let’s go through that list again. The following are all true of the people spreading the Procter & Gamble rumor:

• They didn’t really believe it themselves.
• They were passing it along with the intent of misinforming others. Deliberately.
• They did not respect, or care about, the actual facts of the matter, except to the extent that they viewed such facts with hostility.
• Being told that the Bad Thing they were purportedly upset about wasn’t real only made them more upset. Proof that the 23rd largest corporation in America was not in league with the Devil made them defensive and very, very angry.

from https://redsails.org/false-witnesses/

As Rosanov says, men are crushed under the wardrobe. Without lifting up the wardrobe it is impossible to deliver whole peoples from their endless and unbearable suffering. It is terrible that even one man should be crushed under such a weight: to want to breathe, and not to be able to. The wardrobe rests on everybody, and everyone gets his inalienable share of suffering. And everybody tries to lift up the wardrobe, but not with the same conviction, not with the same energy. A curious groaning civilization.

Thinkers ask themselves: “What? Men under the wardrobe? However did they get there?” All the same, they got there. And if someone comes along and proves in the name of objectivity that the burden can never be removed, each of his words adds to the weight of the wardrobe, that object which he means to describe with the universality of his ‘objective consciousness’. And the whole Christian spirit is there, fondling suffering like a good dog and handing out photographs of crushed but smiling men. “The rationality of the wardrobe is always the best”, proclaim the thousands of books published every day to be stacked in the wardrobe. And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead.

—Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

The life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all of the properties of the richest man on earth.

—Che Guevara

would you feel comfortable face-to-face explaining to a Palestinian child why you voted for his extermination?

[...] the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

from Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson

I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves. But you have treated me like an intruder. Maybe it is not me who is the intruder but you.

Here, then, is the problem with the magazine: readers are consistently given the impression, regardless of whether it is true, that unrestricted free market capitalism is a Thoroughly Good Thing, and that sensible and pragmatic British intellectuals have vouched for this position. The nuances are erased, reality is fudged, and The Economist helps its American readers pretend to have read books by telling them things that the books don’t actually say.

How The Economist Thinks | Current Affairs

For me it took several years. I learned several things about the USSR one by one that softened my opinion of it. I don't even remember what order I learned these things in, but here they are.

• the USSR had a lot of things that the Russian Federation and other post-soviet nations don't (like universal healthcare and free college).
• the USSR's collapse plunged a lot of people into poverty, and the opportunistic privatization that happened in the wake of that plunged even more people into poverty.
• Yeltsin shelled parliament and suppressed popular protests.
• polling data in the USSR showed that most citizens wanted to remain in the USSR at the time of its dissolution.
• the whole "Stalin and Hitler made a pact" mythology that the bourgeoisie like to push is bullshit. The USSR was the last nation, not the first, nor the only, to make a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and they were basically doing it to buy time and move all their critical military infrastructure and factories East to hold off operation barbarossa.
• the Winter War between USSR/Finland only happened because Finland didn't want to let the USSR purchase or trade land with them, so the USSR could better prepare themselves for Nazi Germany's invasion. Even though the USSR was offering more acres of land in exchange than they were hoping to buy from the Finnish in the first place. Also after the Winter War the Finnish immediately became patsies of the Nazis and gave them intelligence.
• the USSR only invaded (a by that point borderline fascist and highly uncooperative) Poland to create a bigger buffer zone between the USSR and the advancing nazis.
• gulags paid their prisoners and were more humane than the American prison system.
• 14 nations intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the White movement, which to me proves the desperation of the international bourgeoisie to prevent the USSR from coming into existence in the first place.
• fascism was basically capitalism's immune system response to the soviet union continuing to exist, and the international bourgeoisie, especially England and America, played a huge role in re-militarizing Germany and helping the nazis during the interwar period.
• the USSR rejected the marshall plan because it would have forced them to privatize their economy and put them in debt to the USA. Not because they wanted to start the cold war for no reason.
• the USSR tried to join NATO in 1954 but wasn't allowed. Yet the year after that, West germany was allowed in, even though they had just got done doing the holocaust 10 years earlier.
• Churchill wanted to immediately re-arm nazis and use them to invade the Soviet union (operation unthinkable) but this idea was scrapped thankfully.
• Operation paperclip and Operation bloodstone are way way way worse than operation Doviakhim, despite people trying to pretend they're mirror images of each other. the USSR kidnapped several hundred low-level German scientists and engineers and used their expertise to help rebuild after WW2. Meanwhile the USA took several high ranking nazi war criminals like Adolf Heusinger and put them in the CIA, NASA, NATO, and the EU commission.
• the KGB never tried to spread socialist revolution around the world. it just kept spontaneously happening in all these different nations in the global south because the working class was fed up. However, the CIA did spread anti-communist counter revolution around the world. Yet the liberals want us to believe that the cold war was two sides, with perfectly symmetrical motivations.
• the USSR lost 20 million people fighting fascism while the USA basically waited as long as they could to enter the war while selling weapons to both sides.
• holodomor genocide is an anticommunist atrocity propaganda created and spread by nazi collaborators. Stalin was literally giving Ukraine and Bengal food aid during the 1930s, ironically when Churchill was doing his best to starve Bengal on purpose.
• if Stalin's homophobia and other problematic aspects of his legacy is supposed to make me ignore everything above and I'm supposed to be anti-communist on that reason alone, then why should I support the liberal democratic party of the USA, which has a record of upholding slavery before and during the civil war?
• way more stuff that isn't coming to mind right now.

It basically was a long process of unlearning a lot of "red fascism" mythology about the Soviet Union. Each time I unlearned something, I was less surprised. I went from going "wow I can't believe I'm defending the USSR against unfair slander." to "of course that was just another lie they told me. why would it have been anything else?"

It's hard to teach other people this stuff, especially because of the Russian/Ukrainian war and all the NATO propaganda surrounding that. Even before then, though, it was an uphill battle. Because people hear their whole life that the USSR was a starving hellhole ruled by despots and torturers and here comes some naive person (or treasonous commie psycho) telling them, no, here's a bunch of facts contrary to everything they know. It just makes me sound like a "Kremlin shill" or something in their minds. After all, how can the experts and reliable sources be wrong? People think that because you can trust the government not to lie to you about how many calories are in a serving of milk, that you can also trust them about state enemies. That's the mistake.

Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.

The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and participating children were photographed by Chicago police.

“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”

Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member Norma Amour Mtume told Eater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.

from https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party

Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up!

• Whitey Bulger: protected by the FBI for decades while being the biggest heroin importer in the northeast
• Freeway Ricky Ross: supplied by the CIA with coke from the Contras, in a relationship mediated by a DEA informant
• Golden Triangle heroin trade: controlled by the CIA for decades after the Korean War, arming and protecting manufacturers and traffickers, with heroin flown on CIA planes
• The French Connection: French gangsters were protected by the CIA and allowed to import heroin to their primary market, the US, in exchange for keeping the port of Marseille out of the control of French communists
• La Corporacion: the biggest Bolivian cocaine cartel, the "GM of cocaine", started with the cooperation and protection of the CIA according to a DEA agent whose investigations into them were repeatedly thwarted by the State Dept and CIA
• Ronald Stark: the world's biggest manufacturer and supplier of LSD for a period after its criminalization, sole supplier of late-period Brotherhood of Eternal Love, threw parties at the US embassy in Brussels, sent letters using their letterhead, and when he was finally arrested in Italy, the judge in his case accused the CIA of protecting him

The drug war has always been a hoax. There are more drugs in the US now than there were when prohibition started. The cops have always been in on it.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/126p3ys/san_jose_police_union_director_charged_with/jebbmyy/

when communism is made off-limits in the popular consciousness, the only response to crises of capitalism people can imagine is fascism.

• The History of US and British Support to Mussolini’s Fascism https://janataweekly.org/the-history-of-us-and-british-support-to-mussolinis-fascism/

• How Mussolini once worked for British intelligence https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mussolini-idUSTRE59D4MW20091014

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

from https://np.reddit.com/r/BlackWolfFeed/comments/qfxafp/570_deere_john_letter_feat_jonah_furman_102521/hi2mepb/

Okay so like, this family, a father, mom and daughter, move into their grandma's empty house, and discover that the Dad's weird Brother has been camping out there. It's established in a flash back that the Brother hooked up with the Mom right before she married the Dad and she's still kinda horny for him. Also the Brother was some kind of super crazy sex pervert who did so much sex pervert stuff that he felt he had exhausted all the pleasures the Earth had to offer and so bought some kind of demonic Rubik's cube from some dude cuz he heard a legend that if you solve it you gain access to some other dimension of pure pleasure. So he takes it to his grandma's house and solves it and it turns out it summons some fucked up torture demons who come from a dimension where pain and pleasure are the same thing so they just take him and torture him a bunch, but he sorta gets into it a bit, kinda. Also like he can't die so they just like torture him till he's a big pile of living viscera.

Anyway back in the present, the Dad accidentally spills some blood on the floor of of the room his Brother summoned the demons in and that allows the Brother to come back from the demon world, but he's still a living pile of guts. He is able to talk to his horny sister-in-law though and tells her he can become a normal dude again if he can drink a bunch of blood so she goes out and picks up dudes at bars and brings them back so the gross guts guy can eat them and become less gross. The daughter finds out about this and freaks the fuck out, steals the Rubik's cube and runs away, but passes out from how freaky it all is.

She wakes up in the hospital and solves the Rubik's cube and the demons show up and are like "sweet we can torture you till you're kinda into it" and she's like "I think you want my pervy uncle" and they're like "sure help us find him and we'll just torture him forever and he'll kinda be into it". So like she goes back home and her Dad's been killed by her sex pervert uncle but now he's wearing her Dad's skin and she summons the demons who they take both her perv Uncle and Mom away to torture land and she runs away and tries to throw the Rubik's cube away, but some weird hobo who's been in the background of the movie the whole time shows up and grabs it, turns into a flying demon, and brings it back to the merchant dude who gave it to the sex pervert Uncle guy in the first place and then he gives it to some other sex pervert guy.

The End.

::: spoiler spoiler Hellraiser (1987) :::

i have more fish and tape and will,, power than youre intire organisation

She just died? Wow. I didn't know that, I just uh... you're telling me now for the first time. She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman... whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman, who led an amazing life. I'm actually sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

Before the war, the USSR gave Finland several proposals to create mutually benefical alliances to defend both of them from inevitable Nazi aggression, but in every case Finland refused.

“Our proposals in the negotiations with Finland are modest, and they are confined to the minimum, short of which is it impossible to ensure the safety of the Soviet Union”
[...]
“The Government of Finland feels obliged to maintain the attitude which it has taken up from the outset regarding the proposal that it should lease the port of Hanko and the surrounding district to the Government of the USSR and place the Bay of Lappohja at the disposal of the naval forces of the USSR for use as an anchorage”.

—V. M. Molotov: The Development of Finnish-Soviet Relations

The Soviet Union needed strategic security from the Nazis. They were negotiating to rent some small pieces of land to be able to close the Gulf of Finland to enemy naval forces in the event of war to protect Leningrad. The USSR also needed the border near Leningrad itself to be moved outside of the artillery range. In exchange for a total of 2700km² the Soviets offered 5500km².

The Nazi-sympathizing government of Finland of course refused and took a hostile stance against the USSR. Eventually there was a build up of troops at the border near Leningrad and shells were fired into Soviet territory. This led to a costly war that the USSR eventually won and in peace demanded essentially what they had asked for before the war.

The USSR managed to take several important regions of Finland. The areas taken contained several large cities and industrial areas and ports, giving them greater access to the gulf.

“The meaning of the war in Finland lay in the necessity for safeguarding the security of the north-western frontiers of the Soviet Union and above all of the safeguarding of the security of Leningrad.

The Soviet Union smashed the Finnish Army and having every opportunity of occupying the whole of Finland, did not do so and did not demand any indemnities for her war expenses, as any other power would have done, but confined her demands to the minimum.

We pursued no other object in the Peace Treaty but that of safeguarding the security of Leningrad, Murmansk and the Murmansk railway”.

—V. M. Molotov: Speech to the 6th Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

In this sense, the USSR won in that they got what they wanted (achieved their war aims). The fact that it took the Red Army several months to defeat the Finnish forces was used as propaganda to claim that the Red Army was ineffective.

adapted from a Quora post by David King

ask a communist and a capitalist to criticize each others’ ideas, and they’ll both describe capitalism.

Poland is just invading everyone circa 1918-1922 or so. And they love the victim complex, from the whole miracle on that one river when they fended off a Soviet counter offensive following Poland literally invading Ukraine, to the war with the newly formed Czechoslovakia, to the siege of Lwow/Lemberg which kicked off the first Polish-Ukrainian war and is just dripping in hagiography. For real read about it, the amount of open maturation of Polish nationalism is intense.

Like this line:

Because of their heroism and mass participation in the fights, they are commonly referred to as Lwów Eaglets. The Polish defenders also included a significant component of petty criminals, who, nevertheless, were valued for their heroism

Or mentioning the pogroms carried out by Poles in the most passive voice way ever and then unlike the rest of the paragraph, giving no citation for “once the Poles had order they totes punished the people who did this thing”. And looking into the pogrom you get a list of Polish “historians” making insane claims that no Ukrainians died in the pogrom, or that more Christians died than Jews so it totally wasn’t a pogrom despite said Christians being Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Ukrainians. And a longstanding tradition of Polish claims that it cant be a pogrom if it happens during war.

Poland LOVES its victim complex and the double holocaust shit because they need it in order to avoid the serious questions that arise when one looks even surface level at Polish history in the 20th century. The fact that people use the fact that Poland got blowback after being a vulture on Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belarus, and Lithuania, as a means of dissing the USSR is gross.

—@Vncredleader@hexbear.net

The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

from https://redsails.org/false-witnesses/

Every government is authoritarian. You only consider it not to be "authoritarian" when you support its use of authority. Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People who always justify the use of authoritarian means by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn't "authoritarian".

Is the US "authoritarian" when it bombed Vietnam back into the stone age and Eisenhower himself said they refused to hold elections because they knew the US occupiers would only get 20% of the vote? The Vietnam war, the Afghanistan war, the destruction of Libya, or the US prosecution of Julian Assange, or the Smith Act Trials, Operation Earnest Voice, Operation Condor, Operation PBSUCCESS, Operation Ajax, Operation Mockingbird, etc, etc, were not "authoritarian"?

Maybe you'd agree these things are "authoritarian", but either way it proves my point. Plenty of people like to insist the US isn't "authoritarian" not because it actually isn't but because they support what it does.

If you never desire to leave your cage, you might feel incredibly free. Liberals who never genuinely try to challenge the authority of the liberal state they live under have a tendency to believe that it isn't authoritarian, because they have never once even desired to challenge that state's authority. (Yet, ironically, they will always support the state's authority when they see it used against those who do try to challenge it.)

credit to zhenli真理

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported -- what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

—Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method