Sire, behold! The portents are much as they once were! The sages are in agreement, the past will surely repeat itself! Or maybe it won't, either way much to ponder.
That will be five hundred talents of silver, thank you for your custom.
I would say it's also an important foundational myth of post-war Britain that the UK was basically the main enemy of Nazi Germany. If you never went beyond British historical education you would probably think that the RAF more or less singlehandedly defeated the Nazis (the Yanks helped out a bit too).
The US has lax gun control because keeping an armed yeomanry is a cornerstone of settler-colonial society. Gun ownership was always a way for white settler farmers and the middle class to take and keep control of the land from indigenous peoples, and later black and hispanic minorities. And guns are expensive, so gun owners are disproportionately the kind of wealthy reactionaries - small business owners, landlords and cops - who form the absolute core base of fascism.
And for that reason, the various gun-worshipping militias around the country, for all they go on about 'resisting government tyranny', are essentially fulled armed Sturmabteilung units just waiting to be ordered by a right-wing government to 'defend the republic' from any left-wing movement that gets large enough to threaten capital.
The pdf link gives me a 403, could you possibly upload the pdf somewhere else? This sounds like exactly the kind of evidence I need to convince certain libs in my life.
Fable 3 taught me that there's no point collecting rent from the poor, because they have no money, so you should set their rent to zero so everyone loves you while making the rich pay double to give you a fat treasury. It also taught me that every public works project can be funded easily if the state just takes ownership of all land and housing.
The easiest people to con are those who think they're in on the con.
Assuring the average imperial core denizen that they're a uniquely freethinking rebel who would never fall for propaganda has gotta be one of the masterstrokes of imperial propaganda.
Always on the defense, of course - just preparing for our pre-emptive retaliation. We have to be ready to respond in an instant, even before our opponent moves!
This meme in all its forms really annoys me, because all the item descriptions and NPC dialogues DO mean something, they often trace out very interesting background stories either in the text itself or from the placement of items, in an extremely natural and detailed form of environmental storytelling. There is no meaningless gibberish, people just blaze past and don't think about anything, and then complain they don't understand what's going on or that it's nonsensical. I watched a friend play Sekiro and it was so frustrating to watch him skip through basically every NPC's dialogue, and then he didn't know why he was doing anything he was doing!
It's just like, I play through Elden Ring and see the pinnacle of this art, telling stories in some cases with literally no words, just the placement of objects in space, knowing how much time, effort and creativity must have gone into the process and then people say "it's all just random, the people making this game are stupid and you're stupid for pretending there's any pattern".
Like, if you want a two-hour effort post just ask me about the foreshadowing of the Three Fingers throughout the course of the game.
It would be SOOOOO easy for them to just say that AFAB people can undergo the Spacemarinification process, you just end up with a being that is physically indistinguishable from an AMAB Space Marine.
Either invent some "gene-wash" process that tweaks literally a single one out of four dozen chromosomes, or, frankly, say there always was one and the chapters using it just didn't broadcast the fact.
It's the laziest option that resolves the problem, while also being almost kind of interesting - a warrior order that doesn't select only men, but that joining causes you to become a man.
In fact fuck it, I paint Space Marines, from now on under their armor half my dudes have non-functioning vaginas instead of non-functioning penises.
If you want to be completely immunized against all capitalist philosophy forever, I recommend The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukacs.
He goes through the history of philosophy in Germany, taking apart each 'significant' philosopher in turn (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kirkegaard, Nietzche, etc.) and showing that, at each stage, the philosophy being written (as well as the period in which it becomes popular) are entirely dependent on the psychological needs of the bourgeoisie in justifying and maintaining their rule at that specific moment in time.
He also shows at every stage how dialectical materialism is correct, and is the only true successor of the entire philosophical movement originating in ancient Greece. Just like communism is an evolution beyond the highest degree of capitalist organization, dialectical materialism is the evolution beyond the highest development of liberal philosophy (Hegel's dialectical idealism).
There is a price for this knowledge though, as the book is over 850 pages long.
If you want just a key slice, the chapter on Nietzsche is very good and gets across some key points, and is 'only' about 100 pages.
[lying in the foxhole, wounded] "Ah fuck, which pocket did I leave that in... not that one... not that one... there it is!"
"...death is not the end... blah blah blah... glory of a hero is eternal... ah! A grenade! Right, got that! And now... under the chin? Alright, well here we go!"
![CascadeOfLight [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/4be38b64-63e3-40a3-8581-0ec11349c485.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Sire, behold! The portents are much as they once were! The sages are in agreement, the past will surely repeat itself! Or maybe it won't, either way much to ponder.
That will be five hundred talents of silver, thank you for your custom.