ReadFanon
Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided
I, too, do not have a smartphone or an internet connection 😔
Agreed.
It’s stuff like this that makes me realise how much better a head of state Thomas Sankara was than I’ll ever be though. Homie refused to use airconditioning in his office because it was considered a luxury in Burkina Faso.
I believe Suslov was another revolutionary figure who eschewed the privileges that he had access to on the grounds that if it was good enough for the masses then it’s good enough for him.
NAFO and its consequences have been a disaster for the online discourse.
Imagine having the confidence to make ahistorical claims that are this outrageous. Either you’re duped or you’re an op.
Which probably doesn’t track well with my posts as I tend to ramble a lot but I’m going to try and cut back on that as much as possible. I would hate for anyone to get bored or frustrated reading my posts.
Unless it serves your interests or your own purposes not to, ramble away.
It’s entirely up to the readers of your posts to determine whether or not they choose to read your posts and how they decide to go about that (e.g. reading closely, skimming, skipping to the parts that interest them etc.) Let the reader figure out what they want to get from your post and to seek that out themselves. Don’t concern yourself with their needs because this is an exercise in reinforcing and enriching your own learnings. You aren’t writing a paper or a book, so your concern for the reader shouldn’t really be a high priority imo.
Im sure most of you know who Antonio Gramsci but he was discussed in class
Just be aware that Gramsci is used in the service of many purposes and his materialism is often downplayed or even erased from how his theory is interpreted or applied.
This is in large part a product of the fact that he was never able to really produce a body of work that is coherent and which nailed down his positions due to the circumstances of his imprisonment.
What this means is that I’d urge you to approach people’s takes and applications of Gramsci with a healthy skepticism unless they are Gramsci scholars.
Out of interest, it’s worth noting that the chief prosecutor for Mussolini said of Gramsci during his trial “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”
My professor answered this in the pluralist perspective there’s production bourgeoisie vs some other type of bourgeoisie that I couldn’t quite catch but that hardly matters.
Potentially “rent-seeking bourgeoisie”, which is more relevant to liberalism but this is the group of bourgeoisie who are extractive rather than productive in the economy; landlords, speculators, financiers and investors etc.
To illustrate the point, imagine what the consequences would be if every member of the bourgeoisie made their money by being a landlord or an investment banker; the economy would collapse in a week.
My professor made sure to mention that in the Soviet Union, contrary to popular beliefs, it had factions and worked more like pluralists and he made this remark in regards to the criticism that pluralists cannot explain authoritarian regimes. He didn’t talk about the USSR with any contempt, and I feel like that’s important to mention.
This is promising!
Next, of course, was postmodernism
I’m an ex-postmodernist/poststructuralist. While there are useful tools in the poststructuralist toolkit, these days I am extremely skeptical of the overall utility of this intellectual movement.
If you want a crucial perspective on poststructuralism from an insider, the articles of Gabriel Rockhill are excellent and many his lectures hosted on his YouTube channel The Critical Theory workshop are also great. I can provide links if you need but I’m being lazy rn.
It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.
It’s hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won’t rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.
Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?
It’s going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.
But I’m rambling.
Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.
There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.
Errr why should we? Because jungle and imaginary yankee toughs? I’m not sold on this analogy.
I mean, your interpretation is as valid as mine. But I think you haven’t done my words justice in your summary of the points that I made to support my interpretation. You’ve either responded before reading my whole comment or you’ve spent too much time on Reddit.
Predator reads more like Wells’ “War of the worlds” - turning the situation upside down on the colonizers. Suddenly they’re the ones being hunted for sport by uncaring invader with absurd levels of technological superiority (while still acting as if it’s fair and square).
An analogy is such because it’s not a 1:1 representation and it never will be. If it were meant to be a perfect representation of the Vietnam war then it would be a biopic or a documentary. There’s no inviolable rule that you can’t invert parts of your allegory and clearly this was done to make a Hollywood blockbuster action-scifi film.
The predator wasn’t a coloniser imo. There’s less in the movie to support the idea that the predator was colonising the jungle than there is for the Vietnam war allegory. A foreigner in a different land doesn’t amount to colonisation.
I was trying to find the quote from someone who was involved in production who said that if it were a few years earlier then Predator would have been set in Vietnam when I came across this opinion piece which makes a better case for the film being a Vietnam War allegory (while explaining the predator’s high tech) than I did.
Didn’t nafo already use the “I’m doing my part” bit from the movie, completely serious and missing the satire?
Maybe I’m blessed because I haven’t been exposed to nearly anything from the NAFO chuds but I’d absolutely believe this from a group of people who are rapidly circling the ideological drain hole that is fascism.
If we consider the Predator movie, at least the first one, to be an allegory for the Vietnam war because it featured jungle warfare and commando bros facing off against an enemy that is virtually invisible, implacable, utterly alien and incomprehensible, and entirely determined to hunt down and kill the invaders (often in torturous ways) while the commando bros are pretty much helpless against the predator as they get picked off one by one…
Then they’ve kinda missed the entire message underlying the movie.
If they think “better equipment = we’re like the predator” then they’re failing to grasp the fact that the true terror in the film doesn’t come from better technology but from an enemy which can blend seamlessly into the environment, which could be anywhere at any time, and is completely unstoppable. The technology is just window-dressing because if it were about a regiment of small Vietnamese people armed with AK-47s it wouldn’t be much of a spectacle and it wouldn’t play into macho power fantasies.
So, if the story is a metaphor about an enemy which is comparatively poorly armed using their skills and the terrain to their advantage, defeating what is assumed to be the best of the best, then why are they using it to brag about having better equipment again?
Next they’re going to use Starship Troopers in completely the wrong way as a metaphor for the war in the Ukraine, aren’t they?
[Rules-based order intensifies]