I've heard mixed things. Where I live, they have a bad reputation, but I have friends online who are in the party in other cities who say it's alright. Probably varies by specific party club to some extent.
ComradeRat
joined 5 years ago
Is there any way to perfect the tech that ISNT something out of a dystopian scifi?
Nope. The entirety of academic science is predicated on the dystopian scifi of modernity. E.g. the species of mouse that has been selectively bred to remain genetically identical (so it can be used as a scientific unit for experimentation) for more than a century, has been copyrighted, and is used in basically all testing. It's been squished, starved (lab animals are generally kept in a state of hunger to make them more easily controlled), diseased, burnt, drowned, cut open (while alive), shocked, etcetc. Similar treatment of many other animals (and humans in the global south, and people of colour and disabled people and women etcetc in the global north).
Our (Capitalist-European) ways of knowing are based on this brute force torture-science where we tear stuff apart to find out "what it is" (and more importantly, can it be made profitable or is it useless?) as soon as possible, and then we declare the results of this torture-science universally applicable, e.g. we declared animals stupid because we ran tests on animals we've captured, starved to ensure food motivation and locked up in cages for ease of access and tested on things humans find relevant (e.g. testing facial recognition on apes using human faces instead of ape faces; shockingly gorillas are better at telling gorillas apart than telling humans apart).
Like, it rly has to be remembered the basis of Academic European Science is rich fucks doing experiments for fun, using "raw materials" (living or otherwise) available to them as a result of their immense privilege. As their wealth was already based on e.g. literal chattel slavery they had no qualms doing literal torture on subhumans for fun and "progress", no qualms tearing up ecosystems to "study plants and animals" (bc of this, Academic science is still basically baffled by a lotta how plants and animals actually work in nature). They therefore had less than no qualms doing any of this to "improve the human condition (i.e. to make more shit for companies to sell)".
Capital was willing to work 2 year olds to death in lace mills for pretty dresses; it has less than no qualms about torturing apes or mice to death to ensure quality hair products or slightly longer human lifespans (for the rich, in the global north). Socialism (as it exists after imperialism dies, not as it exists while competing with imperialism) will likely have to (be forced to by the poorest) reconsider a lotta the stuff we in the imperial core take as necessities of life.
Marx seems to have talked to actual, real business owners about how they think about and account of the running costs of doing business
Tbh I love it because it subverts AtLA's "happy" ending of
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the imperialist fire nation's monarch is replaced by another monarch and this somehow reshapes the entire socioeconomic structure of a century long imperialist-fascist power.
so that by Legend of Korra
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the Fire Nation's technology and socioeconomic systems have taken firm root in the southern water tribe, republic city and are worming their way into the earth kingdom
And I find this all 100% reasonable for the characters;
Zuko
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is a naive 14 year old whose anti-imperialist uncle retired to Ba-Sing-Se he would be eaten alive by the Fire Nation's aristocratic proto-bourgeois
; Sokka's
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fondness for technology and novelty could easily see him rapidly adopting fire nation technology without realising their social relations are built into their technologies
; Toph's
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hit first ask questions later mindset combined with isolation from poverty are fundamentals of policing
; Aang's
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inability to do what needed to be done wrt Ozai means there's fuck all he could do against any of his friends if they get co-opted.
No idea why the hell Katara
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stands by with all the pollution and shit when she helped blow up a fire nation factory to stop pollution, but ig everyone else thought it was a good idea so she went along with it
Sadly the writers think this is all inevitable, natural and good ('progress', 'development', 'modernization'), but if I were to write a sequel to AtLA i'd keep all the lore from korra but portray the society as bad
mod that makes Isabella white
mod that gives Isabella trousers
if atla ended with aang listening to yangchen it would be so much better
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toph creates the police to crack down on crime after her boyfriend's firing of benders in favour of cheaper nonbenders (ty machines) caused a crime wave of unemployed benders. This is all treated as natural and normal
Korra is an amazing depiction of the inside of the liberal mind (even down to
). Sadly this depiction is created by and for liberals, so all the liberalism is seen as goodspoiler
'balkanize china'
If the sun destroys capitalism by frying all our technologies i will immediately convert to a sun cultist
Best way to refute that isn't to show that social sciences are objective, but to show the endemic lack of "objective hard science" in modern/western/academic science
Some good texts:
Aikenhead & Michell's Bridging Cultures: Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature is a close examination of indigenous and european empiricisms. It strongly argues that indigenous knowledge systems are more empirical than academic ones.
A book that shows this to be true in practice is Sillitoe (ed.)'s Local Science Vs Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development, which has contributions from around the world giving concrete examples of Europeans failing to be empirical in their investigations of other knowledge systems.
de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? contains a lot of examples of, even modern, scientists taking ideological presuppositions regarding animal intelligence as facts. Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures does similarly for fungi. Borg & Policante's Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital takes a look at how deeply entwined biological sciences are with capitalist society and ideology.
Lewontin's Biology as Ideology is a work by a practicing scientist criticising in more theoretical terms a lotta the above trends.
Not sure what's meant by useless though; e.g. history is objectively useless for the production of surplus value, but new ways to blow people up is very good for such profitmaking. History is very useful for understanding how we got here, what solutions have been tried, how they went wrong, etc, missile engineering is useful for blowing up the fascists stopping us from changing things
What're you talking about? FMA'03 1. resolves all its plot threads and 2. is anime original, not "overshot the ending" filler. The mangaka herself asked the anime staff to make its own plot; that is why from very early on fma'03 diverges and starts setting up its own plots and themes. The show is better put together in terms of pacing, plot, characters and themes than the manga imo because of the simple advantage it gained by not being written as a serialization
Also fma'03 goes way harder against Amestry's fascism than brotherhood does so it wins by default edit: like tbh brotherhood
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literally has the genocidal ethnofascist state "reformed", it's genocidal military "reformed" (mustang doesn't even have himself and other war criminals killed as promised), scar turns reformist, etcetcetc. Genuinely infuriating. In '03, Scar completely rejects the fash state and, after losing both his arms fighting the fascists, pulls a giant boulder around to create a transmutation circle in a city the military plans to invade, evacuates the city, and destroys an entire army at the cost of his life
the childhood nostalgia