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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I hope this isn’t the main takeaway from this essay - the essayist confesses his own experience has repudiated this chart.

    It assumes in spite of heavy propaganda and social pressure that individual people can accurately evaluate an opaque hierarchical system as changeable and/or ‘totalizing.’ He viewed Trump as proof that the neoliberal system is not totalizing, that system change is possible.

    Surprise! He was wrong.
























  • ‘Minarchism’ in my book is a term invented by fascist and capitalist entryists, and people who use it to gatekeep anarchism should be on the other side of the gate.

    They don’t need to be ‘appointed’ by a king or politician in order to exist. Committees are one of the essential organs of actual right-now functioning real-life working large-scale anarchist groups. When done well, they include the voices of all of the significant stakeholders in a decision, and efficiently discover solutions that achieve the goal while respecting the autonomy and interests of all of the participants.

    Don’t @ me, but definitely reply to @[email protected] with the disemboweled anarchism you propose as an alternative.







  • From Folding Ideas’ “Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda”:

    ‘Triumph of the Will’ is not a triumph of film-making. I just want to lay that out before we even start. Chances are good that you’re familiar with ‘Triumph of the Will’ by reputation but have never actually watched it beyond referential clips, and a sizable portion of that reputation is in its value as an advancement of the art of filmmaking. This is propaganda.

    Like, that belief is in and of itself propaganda.

    Nazi sympathizers spent a lot of time between the film’s release in 1935 and the war promoting the idea of ‘Triumph of the Will’ as an advancement of filmmaking. It was an intentional message to promote Nazi state art as superior, to suggest that the Nazi mechanism can produce better more proficient art than the artist the Nazis were busy throwing in jail.

    It is however not a triumph of filmmaking; it is a triumph of budget. None of the ideas or techniques were new it is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before. We’ll come back to this and develop it in more detail, but I want to be upfront with the fact that you should be highly suspicious of any messaging surrounding propaganda.