thethirdgracchi

Surprise surprise, the coup forces in Niger have widespread popular support.

A key consideration for ECOWAS must surely be whether foreign troops would be welcomed or opposed by Nigeriens themselves. Canvassing by Premise Data, a polling firm, for The Economist in the first survey conducted since the coup found that 78% of respondents support the actions of the junta and that 73% think it should stay in power “for an extended period” or “until new elections are held”. A slim majority of 54% said they were not in favour of an intervention by regional or international organisations. Of those supporting foreign intervention, an alarming 50% said they preferred it to be by Russia, presumably because they think it would support the putschists, as Wagner has done in Mali. Just 16% chose America, 14% the African Union and a paltry 4% preferred ecowas. These findings are not representative of opinion across the country because the poll was conducted quickly with a small sample. In this survey most of the respondents were relatively well-educated men and 62% were in the capital. Even so, the poll provides an indicative snapshot of the prevailing mood.

https://archive.is/KE5Yf

Difference is, they're coming to us. This is home.

Global situation has changed a lot in a year. The war in Ukraine hadn't even kicked off yet when Burkina Faso had their coup. Now that the Global South is beginning to pull away from the "international community" due to the latter's self imposed exile there's a clear ideological and material bloc forming to challenge the West. The winds of history are a blowin', and there's many who don't want to acknowledge that.

Sleeping Dogs just feels like playing a video game version of a Hong Kong action drama in the best possible way. Besides the weird dating portions that you can skip the game is wonderful.

The movie, from what I could tell, is trying to demonstrate the ideas of how patriarchy works by getting the audience to feel bad for the Kens, who (like women in the real work) hold no positions of power and are the "second sex," accessories of the Barbies but not whole persons themselves. Then the Kens rebel, but they don't break the Ken/Babrie dichotomy, instead replacing matriarchy by patriarchy which obviously doesn't work. The main Barbie is clearly not OK with this status quo, hence why she leaves in the end, because she sees "her" Ken as a real person worthy of being enfranchised and elevated to the status of human. The Barbie world is just an inversion of our world, and it doesn't seem to me the movie is saying that's a "good" thing so much as it's using that inversion to explore what patriarchy is and what it means. Just because a movie shows you something doesn't mean it endorses it.

The single player campaign of Age of Mythology is the gold standard for single player RTS games. Still hasn't been matched. When I was a kid I was convinced Arkantos was part of the standard Greek myth pantheon.

It was the 10th highest selling PC game between 2000 and 2006. In the US alone it sold like 1.5 million copies!

The de- of deconstruction signifies not the demolition of what is constructing itself, but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema.

Put another way by Derrida:

But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation.

Doesn't sound like you're doing any deconstruction to me!

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.

Derrida wrote this in 1993. Sure he wasn't a communist and mostly focused on literary theory and writing books about his mom dying of dementia or how he got circumcised and had a secret name or why writing is not just glyphs, but he was not CIA adjacent (I hate this trend of just declaring people are CIA plants because you don't like them?), had the audacity to declare communism an undefeatable specter that will haunt the capitalist world until it dies in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise, and his theory of deconstruction made tremendous contributions to feminist and postcolonial studies.

Fossil Capital writes a lot about this and it's definitely false. We moved away from water powered factories to coal powered factories not because of the energy (coal was actually more expensive) but because having to build factories in the rural countryside on rivers meant workers had too much power to strike and couldn't be replaced. Moving the factories to cities meant the reserve army of labor was much bigger and you could break strikes, but you needed coal rather than water wheels.

@Tervell is the lowkey GOAT. Music taste is delicious, and perhaps my favorite consistent poster with their cozy historical illustrations that keep my day bright. :sankara-salute:

Yeah, "Double Genocide" theory is Holocaust denial, full stop.