dialectrician

[dialectrician]

Okay, but I am not really disagreeing with any of that, or saying it's either better or worst, I'm saying there's qualitative distinction between these things (some of which are distinct from each other) and openly treating other countries as possessions ("openly" is the operative word here) like European empires (Japan and maybe the Ottoman empire too) did, which is what people typically talk about when the say Colonialism.

I hate how very specifically British colonialism overshadows all other imperialism.

Nobody talks about the Ottoman empire, the various shenanigans the Indian and Chinese rulers were up to, the Russian Empire (Russia is still a colonial Empire, btw) hell, even the shit Spain or Portugal did are swept under the rug. Nobody remembers French colonies in Africa or how much of a menace the Dutch used to be.

No, it's all Britain, all the time, baby. The only colonial Empire to ever exist, I guess.

[dialectrician]

But also post-1492 European colonialism is a specific phenomenon, distinct from conquests in general, characterized by it's scale and the hard distinction between metropole and colony, no?

Like there's nothing in the history of China (a country whose border have been surprisingly stable for like 2000 years beside civil wars) like the Berlin Conference, where a bunch of guys just up and decided to draw lines across Africa to decide who gets what. And people bring up Russia being a current colonial empire, and Tibet, but Tibetans and people living in Siberia and the Russian Caucasus are Chinese and Russian citizens respectively (whatever that's worth). Yet for example at the same time as England was developping liberal democracy, no one in there thought for a second that the rights they were inventing should apply to the Raj.

No one actually thinks China has never invaded another country, when they say China wasn't a colonial empire they specifically mean China didn't do this:

I hate how very specifically British colonialism overshadows all other imperialism.

Nobody talks about the Ottoman empire, the various shenanigans the Indian and Chinese rulers were up to, the Russian Empire (Russia is still a colonial Empire, btw) hell, even the shit Spain or Portugal did are swept under the rug. Nobody remembers French colonies in Africa or how much of a menace the Dutch used to be.

No, it's all Britain, all the time, baby. The only colonial Empire to ever exist, I guess.

#colonialism

[dialectrician]

I don't think they stopped at the Milky Way Galaxy. In HtN John says to Sarpedon :

« After you do your deliveries, stelitic travel will get you out of the supercluster and back to the second arm of the fleet, but you’re going to have to go a lot slower than you have the past two weeks… »

This suggests a galactic supercluster. Now, this introduces an other problem, how can one single system keep dominating such a large empire, especially since John is deliberately keeping the House population down.? One answer is the standard "sci-fi writers have no sense of scale". It's also possible that John and the lyctors are just that OP. Another possibility is that there is the Solar System where the true aristocracy lives, colonies like New Rho, and an intermediate categories of permanently settled thanergetic planets whose inhabitants are considered truly part of the empire and not subjects, and from which the military and colonial administation can draw manpower.

On the matter of steles and FTL, this bothers me too but I think it's possible that peope outside the Empire have improved FTL, but it's still not as good as steles, hence why BoE getting their hand on one is such a big deal. They wouldn't have been able to reach the Mithraeum without it (it's 40 billion light year way, outside the observable universe). But non-stele FTL is still good enough to outpace the Empire, because the Empire needs to stop to conquer each new planet, whereas they can just jump to the next inhabitable one.

Your assumptions wouldn't be unlikely, but I just don't think they are coherent with what's actually in the text. In HtN Augustine says:

« “Stop your mission, John. Give up on the thing I know you’ve been looking for since the very beginning. Stop expanding. Stop assembling this bewildering cartography, this invasion force. I’ve puzzled over it for five thousand years, and I don’t believe I truly understand it now. But let it go. Let them go. Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity. »

I just don't see how you can read this other than 1) there is an ongoing war of conquest 2) whose target is the descendants of those that ran from Earth.

I don't think there's a big space empire that's fighting the Houses on equal footing! I do think it's isolated, scattered planets getting conquered one after another. This precisely why the war cannot end, there is no single enemy to be defeated, only people you can never catch up to because they keep just settling the next planet other.

Who are the Houses fighting, anyway?

Thinking about the Cohort and the Houses’ endless military campaign in TLT. Thematically, I love the idea of John being at war for thousands of years with the descendants of those who betrayed him etc., but in practice, the logistics of the war just… don’t make sense.

We know the Houses have been at war for a long time. Thousands of years, an insane amount of time fighting the same war. “Eternal war” could be a plausible scenario between two similarly-sized forces locked in a stalemate, but this hasn’t been shown to be the case. It would maybe be plausible if the Houses were shown to have a super ineffective offence force, but this again isn’t the case.

Troop casualties seem to be relatively common (lots of “went to the Cohort and died” mentioned) but at the same time is a massive fucking deal in HtN that BoE destroyed three ships and took out eighteen thousand people. It throws the entire into disarray and warrants a sudden reassignment of the Emperor’s Guard to the combat front to make up for it. So yes, their conquest strategy relies very heavily on sending in the infantry to die, but not to the point that every battle is a slaughter or those numbers wouldn’t cause that reaction. They seem to be a fairly effective force, and and before canon era they hadn’t lost a ship in a THOUSAND years.

Speaking of conquests. A lot of the fighting “lore” that is mentioned in the series involves ground fighting and planetary conquests, but all of the action that is actually described as having happened in the series was either putting down uprisings or dealing with fringe groups. Blood of Eden are an insurrection movement, not an enemy force, and no inhabited planets are mentioned that are outside House control. They are not a conquering force, they are an occupying force. That we know of.

So who exactly are they fighting? Actually who even is left to fight? Like, at some point, you HAVE to run out of planets to conquer. You HAVE to run out of non-House humans to subdue — and travelling cosmic distances without necromancy is very hard. The FTL ships and their descendants can’t have spread that far; they were strained for resources, jumping blind, and I doubt they had an easy time of it.

Some speculation:

Aliens. Like, I’m sure this is not the case, but everything would make SO much more sense if they were fighting an alien empire the next galaxy over, and the ongoing occupation of BoE planets and Empire building is part of that. I give it a 0% possibility of being true but still. Aliens.

Massive unreliable narrator failure. There IS a space empire next door built by humans but nobody mentions it because it didn’t have tits so Gideon didn’t care and everyone knows anyway.

Plot hole. Even the best authors have ‘em! Let Tamsyn live.

Free square ????

Enigmatic John Quote of the Post:

[Talking about the death of Dominicus if he were to die] I can only hope you’d all be dead already. Oh, there’d still be Cohort ships … hold planets … a scattering of us … but we would be so few, and so many people hate us, and my work is not yet done.

WHOMST, John. Notably, all through HtN he keeps talking about the tattered remains of Blood of Eden slithering out of the shadows, a group of maniacs, died with Wake etc. so I doubt he means them. So. WHO.

#the locked tomb

[dialectrician]

On the subject of orwell and his rancid anticommunism, his flagship title "animal farm" is not simply a "satire of the USSR"; it is a full and total repudiation of the idea of proletarian rule at all. The entire book depicts the workers as dumb and incapable and easily manipulated by leaders. This is a fully aristocratic view of the proletariat and entirely anti-proletarian. This should be no surprise to people who are familiar with orwell's opinions and past, including the fact that he has "never been able to dislike Hitler" (actual quote, March 21, 1940) and that he was a colonialist cop.

#george orwell #lenin was wrong about this btw

[dialectrician]

Augustine explicitly says John is "expanding" as an act of vengeance, i.e. while New Rho in particular is a rebelling colony, they are also conquering the descendants of those who ran away.

Most arguments to the contrary are just assumtions you're making. "They had to start from scratch without the technology we take for granted" says who? Why wouldn't they have taken with them the basic tools and scientific knowledge necessary to kickstart industrial civilization again? And once you have that things can go very fast. A couple centuries is enormous, it is the time it took to go from the industrial revolution to apparently FTL. Now imagine a couple more centuries where they already have some modern tools and the knowledge of how to make more.

"They likely landed on a hostile planet". Okay but what if they didn't?

And as you say it's thematically appropriate. John is engaged in a completely self imposed sysiphean task because he can't let go of his anger and the alternative is admitting it was his fault.

Who are the Houses fighting, anyway?

Thinking about the Cohort and the Houses’ endless military campaign in TLT. Thematically, I love the idea of John being at war for thousands of years with the descendants of those who betrayed him etc., but in practice, the logistics of the war just… don’t make sense.

We know the Houses have been at war for a long time. Thousands of years, an insane amount of time fighting the same war. “Eternal war” could be a plausible scenario between two similarly-sized forces locked in a stalemate, but this hasn’t been shown to be the case. It would maybe be plausible if the Houses were shown to have a super ineffective offence force, but this again isn’t the case.

Troop casualties seem to be relatively common (lots of “went to the Cohort and died” mentioned) but at the same time is a massive fucking deal in HtN that BoE destroyed three ships and took out eighteen thousand people. It throws the entire into disarray and warrants a sudden reassignment of the Emperor’s Guard to the combat front to make up for it. So yes, their conquest strategy relies very heavily on sending in the infantry to die, but not to the point that every battle is a slaughter or those numbers wouldn’t cause that reaction. They seem to be a fairly effective force, and and before canon era they hadn’t lost a ship in a THOUSAND years.

Speaking of conquests. A lot of the fighting “lore” that is mentioned in the series involves ground fighting and planetary conquests, but all of the action that is actually described as having happened in the series was either putting down uprisings or dealing with fringe groups. Blood of Eden are an insurrection movement, not an enemy force, and no inhabited planets are mentioned that are outside House control. They are not a conquering force, they are an occupying force. That we know of.

So who exactly are they fighting? Actually who even is left to fight? Like, at some point, you HAVE to run out of planets to conquer. You HAVE to run out of non-House humans to subdue — and travelling cosmic distances without necromancy is very hard. The FTL ships and their descendants can’t have spread that far; they were strained for resources, jumping blind, and I doubt they had an easy time of it.

Some speculation:

Aliens. Like, I’m sure this is not the case, but everything would make SO much more sense if they were fighting an alien empire the next galaxy over, and the ongoing occupation of BoE planets and Empire building is part of that. I give it a 0% possibility of being true but still. Aliens.

Massive unreliable narrator failure. There IS a space empire next door built by humans but nobody mentions it because it didn’t have tits so Gideon didn’t care and everyone knows anyway.

Plot hole. Even the best authors have ‘em! Let Tamsyn live.

Free square ????

Enigmatic John Quote of the Post:

[Talking about the death of Dominicus if he were to die] I can only hope you’d all be dead already. Oh, there’d still be Cohort ships … hold planets … a scattering of us … but we would be so few, and so many people hate us, and my work is not yet done.

WHOMST, John. Notably, all through HtN he keeps talking about the tattered remains of Blood of Eden slithering out of the shadows, a group of maniacs, died with Wake etc. so I doubt he means them. So. WHO.

#the locked tomb

[dialectrician]

#worm #parahumans

[dialectrician]

Can Toranaga come up with even one (1) plan which isn’t « ask his vassal to kill themself »?

#shogun 2024 #shogun

[dialectrician]

already making my peace with the fact that there's no way villeneuve is going to include alia's naked robot fight in dune messiah. coming to terms with it. not getting my hopes up.

#dune

[dialectrician]

The reason Tumblr social-democrats use the jacobins as their go to example of why revolution is bad is because they’re mad they abolished slavery.

[dialectrician]

tbh honest different factions of communists also sometimes don’t speak the same language, see for example inane debates about work abolition, which is chiefly a semantic-philosophical issue.

Have you ever noticed that internet communists and anarchists/ppl-who-get-rounded-off-to-liberals get in fights much much more often about "revolutionary violence" and geopolitics than about the desirability of a democratic command economy or waged labour, even as the traditional marxist position on these questions is vastly more contentious and (nominally) central to the whole project?

#politics #communism

[dialectrician]

It’s because people typically argue about things they have a common frame of reference for. In this case revolutionnary violence and geopolitics are things everyone can talk about. Communists do argue about economics with each others, but reformists/soc-dem / liberals / whatever you want to call it aren’t even speaking the same language about this stuff and generally don’t want to learn so there’s not much to say.

Case in point: I’d say « democratic command economies » aren’t a real thing and capitalist economies are not « demand economies ».

Have you ever noticed that internet communists and anarchists/ppl-who-get-rounded-off-to-liberals get in fights much much more often about "revolutionary violence" and geopolitics than about the desirability of a democratic command economy or waged labour, even as the traditional marxist position on these questions is vastly more contentious and (nominally) central to the whole project?

#politics #communism

[dialectrician]

[dialectrician]

People on this website will say the absolute most reactionary stuff about the French Revolution while spewing some lukewarm social democracy from the 1960s which doesn’t work and convince themselves they’re some kind avant-garde radical leftists.

I have seen far more people speaking like British propaganda from the 1790s than I have seen those alleged guillotine fetishists.

#politics

[dialectrician]

If you want earnestness in art then sometimes it's going to be cringe and sometimes it's going to be pretentious

[dialectrician]

The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter

Revolutionary Girl Utena, dir. Kunihiko Ikuhara

[dialectrician]

The reason I find appeals to democracy annoying is that it's been turned into this feel-good abstraction completely devoid of meaning. Everyone is always for democracy, their enemies are against democracy. If the state doesn't do what I want it's because it's not a real democracy (real democracy has never been tried).

But nothing of substance is beeing said by putting the word "democratic" before "socialism", or puttting the word "proletarian" in front of "democracy". Also in the latter case it's an oxymoron.

You're just setting yourself up for people demanding things of you which are against your own interest in the name of democracy. Or looking like a liar/hypocrite when you're necessarily led to take measures which are undemocratic. Mass expropriation of the bourgeoisie, for example is clearly anti-democratic and unconstitutional almost everywhere. Which is also why the "wouldn't it be easier for communist to win elections" thing is wrong. Even if elections really worked like that, a communist head of state with a communist legislature in a liberal democracy would still need to take unconstitutional and dictatorial measures, and probably end up getting coup-ed. In the name of democracy.

[dialectrician]

I think discourse might be improved if more people realised that "revolution" is a euphemism for "civil war"