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cryptotheism · 1 year

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A Review of The Way Of The Shadow Wolves: The Deep State And The Hijacking Of America by Steven Segal

Alleged rapist and human trafficker, cop groupie, washed-up action movie star, and personal friend to Vladimir Putin, the paradox of Steven Segal is how he manages to stick around despite being –by damn near every account– a universally unpleasant vacuum of charisma. I could go on, but I feel that no introduction of Steven would be complete without the tale of the headlock. Legends tell of Steven’s conflict with legendary martial artist and hollywood stunt coordinator “Judo” Gene Lebell. Allegedly, the two fell into an argument on the set of the film Out For Justice. The crux being Steven’s claim that he was “immune” to being choked unconscious. Allegedly, LeBell called his bluff, and put the actor in a headlock. A headlock that resulted in Steven losing consciousness, and control of his bowels. Steven denies the story. He also wrote a book.

The book is garbage, but garbage in a way that can be easily overstated. I wanted to take a page from other reviewers of this book, and call the text what it is; a fever dream of exhausting mediocrity, swaddled in delusions of grandeur. I wanted to whale on it. I wanted to denounce it like some ridiculous fire-and-brimstone preacher of internet literary criticism. But this does not capture the core, the essence of Way of the Shadow Wolves. There is a paradox at the heart of this text, a contradiction that even now I struggle to describe. Because despite everything, despite the balls-to-the-walls premise, the disastrous prose, and the buckwild plot, this book is deeply and powerfully boring. To call it a fever dream is to imply that it might be exciting.

Some books are bad in a way that must be experienced firsthand. This is not one of those books. In a way, I feel that you’ve already read this book. You know Steven Segal. You met him in elementary school, when he told you he has “every black belt.” You met him in college when you tricked him into smoking a bag of oregano. You met him at your most recent family gathering, where you were trapped in an awkward one-sided conversation about “those people.” The bad-ness of Steven’s work is deeply familiar.

We have our boots. We have our waders. We have our shovels. But, before we wade into the shit, there is one more thing we need to get out of the way: The Shadow Wolves are real. In 1972 the United States government agreed to the Tohono O'odham Nation’s demand that border enforcement agents patrolling their land have at least one quarter native ancestry. The result being the specialized unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers known as The Shadow Wolves. In the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film, Dr. Eggman states that they are who trained him in the art of tracking.

WAY OF THE SHADOW WOLVES

Let us cook Way of the Shadow Wolves from scratch. Think of every dogshit C-list action movie you’ve ever seen. Ideally, you want the trash cuts of post-9/11 hysteria marbled with ex-cia heroes and vaguely arab villains. Drop it all into a stockpot. Next, roughly dice some comic books and kung-fu movies, the more racist the better. Now add some datura, it doesn't matter if it's edible or not, because you saw a native American in a movie make something like that once and you’re totally 1/64th Cherokee. Add a whole can of Qanon and a whole can of racism. Boil until you have pacing thicker than mud.

Way of the Shadow Wolves is a police procedural meets a spy thriller, a fast-paced action drama about elite agents on the fringes of the law who have the huge sweaty meaty balls to do what needs to be done for our country. It is Steven's attempt at the action schlock he embodies as an actor. Our hero is John Gode: Shadow Wolf. Reservation-born native American tracker, ICE agent, and Kung-Fu master. I believe he might have been described at one point. If he was, I do not care. Steven does not care. It does not matter. John Gode is Steven, and he’s the most badass dude to ever not be gay. He is: Special Agent Shaman Cop. He’s gonna beat up the deep state. That’s all you need to really need to know. In fact, it is shocking just how little you need to know about this book.

We begin in a movie theater, where our protagonist is alone, watching the end credits of a movie about the atrocious treatment of native Americans on behalf of the united states government. When the film finally ends, John says to himself “It’s about time.” He gets up to leave. The chapter immediately ends. My compliments to the chef. A delightfully bland apéritif of a character introduction. Steven uses the essential point of first contact with our protagonist to tell us vital information like “He doesn’t like it when movies are long.” or maybe “He didn’t like this movie about the trail of tears.” It is unclear. To quote English-Albanian philosopher Dua Lipa, “Go girl, give us nothing.”

I have been dancing around the quality of the writing. It seems impossible to approach without the footing of a new paragraph, an opponent that requires full-focus, an all-out assault. It is nigh-incomprehensible. I hate comparing bad writing to drugs. It feels too easy. But there is a specific air to Way of the Shadow Wolves. There is a distinct cadence, simultaneously manic and lethargic, that comes from attempting to write while day drunk on over-prescribed amphetamines. And make no mistake, if Steven was not entranced by the muse of Too Many Uppers And Downers At The Same Time, if he wrote this thing stone sober, that is worse. Small quotes will not do the writing style justice, you must see for yourself how sentences flow into each other:

“The desperado’s mind went back in time to a small town in Mexico twelve years before, where he first met his two cohorts when they were thrown together by a tragic set of circumstances. Their parents had been gunned down by a cartel who was at war with a competing cartel for control of the area, which was a pathway to the American border near Nogales, Arizona. All three had been shepherded to a local mission where they were being cared for by the Franciscans, who were becoming overwhelmed by the growing number of children left homeless due to the rampant killings by the warring cartels . . .”

Labyrinthine. A paragraph structure that would feel more at home with Calvino, or Garcia Marquez at his most experimental, though stripped of its deft control and musicality. Segal will regularly change temporal perspective in the middle of sentences. A single run-on sentence will begin in the past, have a middle clause in the present, and then return to the past by the end. There is a downright massive cast of characters for a 200 page book. Damn near every chapter introduces three or four more names, and we are lucky if Steven describes them before discarding them entirely. This book is a slog. I find myself losing patience with Steven.

—

Some time has passed since I began writing this review. Originally, my approach was surgical disassembly. I was going to go over the plot, summarize its anatomy, pick apart its flaws with surgical precision. But the more I cut, the more I felt as if I was the butt of a joke. I was performing an autopsy on a clown, pulling sheets of colorful rope from its gut, and the cadaver was laughing at me.

There is a moment, about halfway through. A woman approaches John at a bar. An assassin, who later attacks John in the parking lot with karate. A furious series of crescent kicks, effortlessly blocked by John Gode, who punches her in the ribs and knocks her to the ground. Realizing that her martial arts are defeated, she draws her gun, but John Gode is too fast. He fires his own weapon before she can get the shot off, killing her instantly. “Her round went upward toward the sky as she fell backward with eyes wide open, seeing nothing.”

This scene stuck with me. It illustrates one of the critical flaws at the heart of Way of the Shadow Wolves. Nothing hurts John. Nothing even gets close. He does not struggle. He does not sweat. He does not bleed. Steven clearly intends this scene to be badass, a moment where his self-insert hero defeats a dangerous enemy without trying. This book is an action movie, but John’s untouchability makes every action scene read as a moment of profound and boring cruelty. This was not a contest of master martial artists. This was an adult kicking a child in the throat.

I find myself losing patience with Steven. I am running out of humorous ways to describe this vapid tripe. This is, in my mind, the greatest condemnation of bad writing. There is no hell lower than being boring to mock. I see myself as a sort of sommelier of the awkward and disastrous. I will be the first to tell you “Wait! Don’t throw that out! There are things to be learned!” But Steven repeatedly proves himself to be a sort of Alchemist of Shit, capable of transmuting theoretically interesting bullshit into just fucking nothing. If this book deserves credit for anything, it is its miraculous ability to squander its own premise.

Why write this? Any of this? Steven clearly does not read. Or, if he does, he seems to subsist entirely on a diet of comic books about monkeys that do kung-fu. Why write this? At some level it all comes down to “because Steven wanted to” right?

Right?

But I cannot shake the feeling. To call this book masturbatory is to imply that Steven might have enjoyed it. There is a desperation to the power fantasy here. To be feared by men, desired by women, revered by all, yaddah yaddah yaddah, all the same trite excretions of blunt masculinity. But there is something else. Steven wants the same thing that every conspiracy theorist wants; a simple world. A world he can understand. Steven is exhausted, overwhelmed with a world he feels he can neither effect nor understand. I am exhausted.

I fear my earlier allusions to expressionist novels may have been more spot on than I imagined. Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot in the sense that Sunny-D contains fruit juice. Its presence is a formality, a ceremonial hat worn for tax purposes. The plot is there, but it is unimportant. This is not a text that can be debated with. Because within the world of the text, politics is not complex. It is not actually a web of interconnected groups, each with their own interests, rivalries, alliances, and historical contexts. Behind all of it is two things: Good guys, and bad guys. The good guys are all working together, and the bad guys are all working together.

I find myself losing patience with Steven. I fear my earlier allusions to expressionist novels may have been more spot on than I imagined. Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot.

John Gode finds a human tooth in the desert. It belongs to a body, a body of a woman described in lurid detail. Nearby, he meets a young native American man, a man who calls himself Sweet Tooth. The body is missing teeth, missing hands, missing feet. A trademark cartel killing. A young native American man. “I’m gonna be like, your assistant right?” A buddy cop dynamic. Meeting the task force. Tailing an ICE van full of cartel soldiers. A hostage situation. A shootout in the desert. Far away, faceless men in suits with masonic ranks plan a mass killing. Some sounded like they had Arabic accents. Freemasonry. Interrogation with a snake. The corpse was a woman. The woman was a reporter. She had the evidence on a flash drive, evidence that proved the existence of the deep state. What if its all connected? A sex scene, or almost a sex scene. A sex scene interrupted. A shootout in the desert. Kung Fu assassins at a bar. A cartel defector. A shootout in the desert. What if its all connected. They’re working with the Jihadists. The USA is already “half latino.” The government is paying the cartels to ship Jihadists north across the border. They’re well-trained and well armed. You can’t trust anyone. A terrorist defector who hears the voice of the prophet. The ghost of John’s grandfather. The sun sets over the Sonora. A shootout in the desert. They kidnapped John’s mother. Bring them the flash drive. They’re planning to bomb the casino. A shootout in the desert. The police chief was a traitor. The Catholics are in on it. Its all connected. A shootout in the desert. Assault by night. Rescuing the hostage. A knife dipped in pigs blood. A pit of vipers in the sonora.

Steven ends a chapter with the line. “They had functioned like a well-oiled machine that had just saved two innocent lives. All lives matter. Do they not?”

I am tired. I find myself at a neighborhood block party, trapped in a conversation I’ve had a thousand times. This time the man on the other end is a sweaty divorcee in range glasses who looks like a sunburned thumb. Last week, it was a woman with a necklace of crystals and blonde hair bleached blonder. “Haha yeah” I say, looking down at my phone. “Burgers look good this year huh?”

Thank you to my Patreon supporters who made this review possible.

#Steven Segal Review

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thealiveshadow · 6 months

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All of this is in response to this:

Ukraine voted to abstain from voting for protections of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations in Gaza. I’m not here to tell you whether it’s right or wrong that Ukraine didn’t vote, but what I will say is that if all sudden this vote by the Ukraine Government made you retract all support for Ukrainian civilians and believe that Putin should “blow Ukraine to pieces”. Then you are a piece of shit who’s entire ideology is performative and uncaring because you are unable to think more critically and use nuance in a situation, and would rather have innocent civilians just fucking die than understand the decisions the Ukrainian Government makes do not in any way determine the value of life each Ukrainian person has and does not mean that they all deserve to die.

#ukraine #russia #ukraine russia war #ukraine russia conflict #world politics #gaza #free gaza #free palestine #israel #isreal palestine conflict #important stuff #isreal palestine war

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srebrnafh · 10 months

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Check Before You Reblog advice:

In case of posts about Ukraine, if you see ANTI-WAR rhetoric, always pause and think. What is this post calling for?

stopping Western "involvement in the war"

stopping US/UK/France "support of aggression"

stopping Western "intervention in democratic processes"

If so, think what it translates to.

It mostly translates to "stop giving Ukraine weapons that are Right Now Stopping Russia from rolling over the entire country". It translates to "stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia". It translates, in short, to "just fuck off and let Russia do what it wants".

It is a pro-Russian propaganda. And even if it claims it is Just Simply Against All That Violence or Just Against The War In General, it's still a fucking pro-Ruskies propaganda, because that would be the result. If they got what they say, if West (and I mean by it "old NATO countries") stopped providing Ukraine with support, well, that war would be over very quickly. By having all Ukraine overrun by Russians and all Ukrainians dead, kidnapped, raped or beaten into submission.

I'm not saying it would be moments. Days. Weeks even. I'm pretty sure "new NATO countries" would do what they can - pretty certainly our MOD in Poland would scramble whatever half-decent tank they could spare to send, because it is FUCKING NEXT DOOR to us. But that would not have lasted long. You can't defend against missiles with sheer bravery and boldness. Nobody can. Not for long.

And yes, it would end the war. With the outcome favourable only to Russia.

And then, having proven that Western assurances of support mean FUCK ALL (because you know why Ukraine gave up all its nuclear arsenal? you know? if you don't, go away and find out...), they would not hesitate to gobble up whatever other country was available next. And then they'd start nibbling on NATO borders, because apparently nobody cares, so why not try Poland. Kurica nie ptica, Polsza nie zagranica - Chicken isn't a proper bird and Poland is not a proper foreign country. Let's take Poland then, and roll over it, blooding what we can...

Back to the topic.

Check what you reblog. Don't disseminate pro-Russian propaganda. Don't reblog "I don't like Putin but USSR was kind of OK" shit. Don't share "Well the collapse of USSR was an error" - these are all RU agitprop talking points.

#ukraine #war in ukraine #russian propaganda #take care what you share

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icaruspendragon · 3 months

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I’ve been dying to tell someone this for so long and I’ve just left my old place of work so here goes… when the Castiel confession happened I was on my way to my job at a news broadcast channel and every now and then I would check social media to see what fresh hell was unfolding and it was smack bang in the middle of the election insanity so everyone in the newsroom was feverishly waiting for Nevada to call their votes and the Putin rumours were starting on Twitter and tumblr was in full meltdown and I was staring at my phone and trying not to scream/laugh out loud and a producer saw me and asked what I was looking at and I panicked and said that it looked like Putin was resigning and the foreign producer freaked out and out together a short news package about it… and it went to air.

oh my god??? oh my god?????? holy shit???? you had the power to do the single funniest thing possible??? AND YOU DID IT????

i am and will forever be in awe of you. you didn't girlboss too close to the sun. you became the fucking sun. incredible. impeccable. i will literally spend the rest of my life thinking about this and your influence. /gen

thank you so much for trusting me with this information. it is truly an honor and a privilege and i will cherish this and you for the rest of forever.

#asks #destiel #I understand if/why you would be unable to share the segment but if I pinky promise not to show anyone else can I pretty please see it?

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animentality · 1 month

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so... the Boeing whistleblower who gave a formal deposition last week and was supposed to continue a series of legal questioning this week was found dead of a "self inflicted gun shot wound to the head."

which is such a bunch of horse shit.

like how awfully convenient that he suddenly decided he had suicidal thoughts before he could continue providing evidence of Boeing's dangerous safety violations.

boeing also "deeply mourns his passing" oh that's a good one. I'm sure you deeply mourn the oh so unexpected death of a former employee who was telling people just how fucked your production line is.

this might seem like a weird thing to be angry about, but like.

it reminds me of that guy who staged a small mutiny against Putin, whose plane "mysteriously" went down.

the elites get to do this, just kill anyone they want. and while that prigozhin prick is no loss to this world, a former quality control manager who spoke out against shitty production line practices being murdered and having it ruled as a suicide-

yeah, it makes me angry.

a guy just doesn't get involved in legal proceedings for years, and continue to fight back against Boeing, and then decide actually I'm done with that let me kill myself between depositions!!

the fact that it was a gunshot wound to the head too, like... the cops are going to rule it as a suicide, even though all of us know, it fucking wasn't.

even his lawyers said, yeah... he seemed pretty happy. why the fuck would he kill himself?

it's the most suspicious thing in the fucking world, and fuck Boeing.

#boeing

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qqueenofhades · 5 months

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Hello! This is kind of a weird ask, I'm sorry to bother you, but seeing as you're a very intelligent studied historian that I deeply respect, I was hoping you could offer some advice? Or like, things i could read? Lately, i feel like my critical thinking skills are emaciated and its scaring the shit out of me. I feel very slow and like I'm constantly missing important info in relation to news/history/social activism stuff. Thats so vague, sorry, but like any tips on how i can do better?

Aha, thank you. There was recently a good critical-thinking infograph on my dash, so obviously I thought I remembered who reblogged it and checked their blog, it wasn't them, thought it was someone else, checked their blog, it also wasn't them, and now I can't find it to link to. Alas. But I will try to sum up its main points and add a few of my own. I'm glad you're taking the initiative to work on this for yourself, and I will add that while it can seem difficult and overwhelming to sort through the mass of information, especially often-false, deliberately misleading, or otherwise bad information, there are a few tips to help you make some headway, and it's a skill that like any other skill, gets easier with practice. So yes.

The first and most general rule of thumb I would advise is the same thing that IT/computer people tell you about scam emails. If something is written in a way that induces urgency, panic, the feeling that you need to do something RIGHT NOW, or other guilt-tripping or anxiety-inducing language, it is -- to say the least -- questionable. This goes double if it's from anonymous unsourced accounts on social media, is topically or thematically related to a major crisis, or anything else. The intent is to create a panic response in you that overrides your critical faculties, your desire to do some basic Googling or double-checking or independent verification of its claims, and makes you think that you have to SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE NOW or you are personally and morally a bad person. Unfortunately, the world is complicated, issues and responses are complicated, and anyone insisting that there is Only One Solution and it's conveniently the one they're peddling should not be trusted. We used to laugh at parents and grandparents for naively forwarding or responding to obviously scam emails, but now young people are doing the exact same thing by blasting people with completely sourceless social media tweets, clips, and other manipulative BS that is intended to appeal to an emotional gut rather than an intellectual response. When you panic or feel negative emotions (anger, fear, grief, etc) you're more likely to act on something or share questionable information without thinking.

Likewise, you do have basic Internet literacy tools at your disposal. You can just throw a few keywords into Google or Wikipedia and see what comes up. Is any major news organization reporting on this? Is it obviously verifiable as a fake (see the disaster pictures of sharks swimming on highways that get shared after every hurricane)? Can you right-click, perform a reverse image search, and see if this is, for example, a picture from an unrelated war ten years ago instead of an up-to-date image of the current conflict? Especially with the ongoing Israel/Palestine imbroglio, we have people sharing propaganda (particularly Hamas propaganda) BY THE BUCKETLOAD and masquerading it as legitimate news organizations (tip: Quds News Network is literally the Hamas channel). This includes other scuzzy dirtbag-left websites like Grayzone and The Intercept, which often have implicit or explicit links to Russian-funded disinformation campaigns and other demoralizing or disrupting fake news that is deliberately designed to turn young left-leaning Westerners against the Democrats and other liberal political parties, which enables the electoral victory of the fascist far-right and feeds Putin's geopolitical and military aims. Likewise, half of our problems would be solved if tankies weren't so eager to gulp down and propagate anything "anti-Western" and thus amplify the Russian disinformation machine in a way even the Russians themselves sometimes struggle to do, but yeah. That relates to both Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.

Basically: TikTok, Twitter/X, Tumblr itself, and other platforms are absolutely RIFE with misinformation, and this is due partly to ownership (the Chinese government and Elon Fucking Musk have literally no goddamn reason whatsoever to build an unbiased algorithm, and have been repeatedly proven to be boosting bullshit that supports their particular worldviews) and partly due to the way in which the young Western left has paralyzed itself into hypocritical moral absolutes and pseudo-revolutionary ideology (which is only against the West itself and doesn't think that the rest of the world has agency to act or think for itself outside the West's influence, They Are Very Smart and Anti-Colonialist!) A lot of "information" in left-leaning social media spaces is therefore tainted by this perspective and often relies on flat-out, brazen, easily disprovable lies (like the popular Twitter account insisting that Biden could literally just overturn the Supreme Court if he really wanted to). Not all misinformation is that easy to spot, but with a severe lack of political, historical, civic, or social education (since it's become so polarized and school districts generally steer away from it or teach the watered-down version for fear of being attacked by Moms for Liberty or similar), it is quickly and easily passed along by people wanting trite and simplistic solutions for complex problems or who think the extent of social justice is posting the Right Opinions on social media.

As I said above, everything in the world is complicated and has multiple factors, different influences, possible solutions, involved actors, and external and internal causes. For the most part, if you're encountering anything that insists there's only one shiningly righteous answer (which conveniently is the one All Good and Moral People support!) and the other side is utterly and even demonically in the wrong, that is something that immediately needs a closer look and healthy skepticism. How was this situation created? Who has an interest in either maintaining the status quo, discouraging any change, or insisting that there's only one way to engage with/think about this issue? Who is being harmed and who is being helped by this rhetoric, including and especially when you yourself are encouraged to immediately spread it without criticism or cross-checking? Does it rely on obvious lies, ideological misinformation, or something designed to make you feel the aforementioned negative emotions? Is it independently corroborated? Where is it sourced from? When you put the author's name into Google, what comes up?

Also, I think it's important to add that as a result, it's simply not possible to distill complicated information into a few bite-sized and easily digestible social media chunks. If something is difficult to understand, that means you probably need to spend more time reading about it and encountering diverse perspectives, and that is research and work that has to take place primarily not on social media. You can ask for help and resources (such as you're doing right now, which I think is great!), but you can't use it as your chief or only source of information. You can and should obviously be aware of the limitations and biases of traditional media, but often that has turned into the conspiracy-theory "they never report on what's REALLY GOING ON, the only information you can trust is random anonymous social media accounts managed by God knows who." Traditional media, for better or worse, does have certain evidentiary standards, photographing, sourcing, and verifying requirements, and other ways to confirm that what they're writing about actually has some correspondence with reality. Yes, you need to be skeptical, but you can also trust that some of the initial legwork of verification has been done for you, and you can then move to more nuanced review, such as wording, presentation of perspective, who they're interviewing, any journalistic assumptions, any organizational shortcomings, etc.

Once again: there is a shit-ton of stuff out there, it is hard to instinctively know or understand how to engage with it, and it's okay if you don't automatically "get" everything you read. That's where the principle of actually taking the time to be informed comes in, and why you have to firmly divorce yourself from the notion that being socially aware or informed means just instantly posting or sharing on social media about the crisis of the week, especially if you didn't know anything about it beforehand and are just relying on the Leftist Groupthink to tell you how you should be reacting. Because things are complicated and dangerous, they take more effort to unpick than just instantly sharing a meme or random Twitter video or whatever. If you do in fact want to talk about these things constructively, and not just because you feel like you're peer-pressured into doing so and performing the Correct Opinions, then you will in fact need to spend non-social-media time and effort in learning about them.

If you're at a university, there are often subject catalogues, reference librarians, and other built-in tools that are there for you to use and which you SHOULD use (that's your tuition money, after all). That can help you identify trustworthy information sources and research best practices, and as you do that more often, it will help you have more of a feel for things when you encounter them in the wild. It's not easy at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes more so, and will make you more confident in your own judgments, beliefs, and values. That way when you encounter something that you KNOW is wrong, you won't be automatically pressured to share it just to fit in, because you will be able to tell yourself what the problems are.

Good luck!

#coffeeandcoyotes #ask #school stuff #critical thinking

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aturnoftheearth · 5 months

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like no one is saying the election putin whatever didnt have an effect but it just seemed to me like it impacted the lasting effects of november 5th rather than november 5th itself. if canon destiel happened like a month earlier or later etc i do believe it still would’ve trended and reached beyond the fandom and website in the way it actually did. like again basic ass posts of them just standing together would get 130k notes okay there are too many former 14 year old fans now in their 20s still here in different fandoms to think they wouldn’t go back and be insane at an actual i love you. however. i think the memes and the confession news format and the anniversaries that followed would be more confined to the fandom itself instead of being a sitewide thing. like no one would be saying shit like “happy destiel putin election day” it would just. quietly trend every now and then.

#i’ve missed this. seeing ridiculous post and making my own ridiculous post in response

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odinsblog · 7 months

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Russia indiscriminately bombing the shit out of disproportionately Jewish civilian populations in Ukraine might be another clue that Putin’s invasion never had anything to do with wanting to “denazify” Ukraine. Sorry, but how gullible and aggressively, willfully ignorant do you have to be to actually believe that bullshit?

Russia is the unprovoked aggressor here. Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia is targeting civilians, apartment buildings, schools, churches and hospitals … with lethal bombs and weapons. The Russian army is raping Ukrainian women as a tool for war, and abducting thousands of young children and putting them into “re-education camps” where they teach them how to be good little Russians—a war crime and literally one of the definitions of genocide.

And because I know how braindead tankies can get on this website, NO, Ukraine wasn’t in NATO when Russia started its war on Ukraine, and NO, Ukraine wasn’t even applying for membership to NATO when they were invaded by Russia.

Ukrainians and their neighbors would be crazy not to want to join NATO now.

As always, tankies fuck off 🖕🏿

#politics #ukraine #russia #putin apologists #nazis #tankies #russia is a terrorist state #russian imperialism #russian colonialism

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tanadrin · 5 months

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@sadoeconomist

Something politically aware people on every part of the political spectrum from the left to the right think is true and leaders of the Russian, Chinese, Israeli, etc. governments believe in enough to talk about publicly and make major geopolitical decisions based on maybe is not just a crazy fringe conspiracy theory, could be that there's some truth to the CIA, NED, etc. having more involvement in these events than the video author thinks I watched all this stuff happen in real time, and I read your notes, which went over how Russian hybrid warfare succeeded in Crimea in 2014. Every major power takes hybrid warfare seriously, what's objectively stupid is your mischaracterization of how it works. Trying to astroturf a revolution out of nowhere simply by paying random citizens en masse to overthrow the government would indeed be stupid but that's not what it is. Your notes seem to suggest that the video says US was paying little attention to eastern Europe until 2013 but Russia was frequently reacting to imaginary US provocations because they are stupid. It's like there's a giant America-shaped hole in the video's narrative. Ukraine was understood to be a NATO-Russia geopolitical battleground long before Euromaidan, it wasn't just Putin shadowboxing imaginary opponents out of pure stupidity that led to this.

You seem to be operating on the basic assumption that governments don't do stupid things for no reason, or fall prey to obviously inane conspiracy theories. That's simply not true; governments are led by human beings, human beings are subject to a common set of cognitive biases, and when you're an authoritarian right-winger (as the leaders of Russia, China, and Israel all are right now), an explanation for your apparent unpopularity that pins all the blame on the CIA instead of your shitty policies and your attempts to cling to power flatters those biases.

But we don't need to speculate about the propensity of governments to do stupid shit, because we have plenty of historical and contemporary examples of governments believing in nonsense: Havana Syndrome in the US, AIDS denialism in South Africa, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Nazi Germany and Imperial Russia, etc., etc. And often these false beliefs lead to real strategic blunders: the Bay of Pigs, the Iraq War, World War II, etc. Sometimes world leaders are stupid! Like, leadership probably tends to select for some kinds of intelligence and ability--charisma, social intelligence, and so forth--but it doesn't automatically make you a geopolitical genius, or make you immune to believing false things about the world.

And the biggest problem with the conspiracy theory outlined here isn't just that we can trace its origin to a fringe American political cult, it's that it's not necessary to explain any development in politics since 1989. There is no problem in understanding the revolutions of '89 or 2000-2014 that CIA involvement is necessary to solve. Indeed, as the videos point out (if you would actually watch them), trying to use "the CIA did it" as an explanation adds considerable problems, bc color revolution theory doesn't work. It's based on misconceptions, misunderstanding of data, and a healthy dose of paranoia.

The only real problem is trying to explain Putin's behavior--and that doesn't require color revolution theory to be true, only that Putin believes it is true. And why he would believe something is true, when he has the supposedly vast power of the Russian state at his beck and call, is easy to explain: authoritarian dictators surrounded by yes men do not have accurate pictures of the world! From Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, there is a common pattern of authoritarian dictators losing touch with reality, getting really weird, and coming to believe all kinds of counterproductive stuff that flatters their egos. It would be an even bigger problem to try to explain why Putin was immune to that dynamic after 24 years in power.

"World leaders don't shadowbox opponents out of pure stupidity" is an assumption that seems wholly ungrounded to me. Why not? World leaders do foolish things all the time on large and small scales. World leaders make mistakes. World leaders can become paranoid and out of touch--and if they lead countries without functioning electoral democracies, they can stay in power regardless. World leaders are not a magic special class of human being. They're just people. And whether it's because they're your uncle who watches nothing but OANN and Fox, or they're the President of Russia and they have yes-men and the Global Research guys telling them only what they want to hear, they can end up making absolute nonsense a load-bearing part of their worldview.

#like putin has benefited from this myth of being hyper competent and calculating for years in the west #and i just don't think that was ever true #he's not some super capable genius supervillain #he's just a run of the mill authoritarian #who was willing to placate russian elites to get what he wanted #and once in power gradually solidified his power base #in a very run of the mill fashion

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limeade-l3sbian · 2 years

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it might sound corny or whatever but who gives af? i think about brittney griner every night. i remember walking a few nights ago and just wondering how scared she must be and genuinely tearing up. that she told her wife she was scared of being forgotten and that mfs are making jokes on social media about it. they acknowledge that they would care a lot more if she had been one of their favorite male basketball players. putin and his pack don't gaf about their own people, so why tf would they give a shit about a black, lesbian woman? three things she has going against her in their eyes and that makes her less than to them.

i'm happy that she's at least had some contact with her wife and that they haven't just cut her off so we at least know she's still alive, as morbid as that sounds. and i think about her wife. how the day she was taken was probably a day that they hadn't even blinked about and figured she'd be home in no time, like always. i can't forget about brittany griner bc that's all this world seems to do - forget about black women.

#brittany griner #protect black women

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emotionaldisaster909 · 4 months

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Oh, joy))

Just had a fight with my father

Who’s completely lost to the propaganda, because he is extremely easily influenced

So i showed him those videos from Kyiv

And he says

“Answer this: Why won’t Zelensky sign a peace treaty?”

And I ask him

“Answer me this: Is this an excuse to kill innocent people???”

On which he says that every day everywhere people die whether you like it or not

So I ask him

“Are you serious??? Are you insane??? Are you fucked up????”

And he spilled alcohol on me))0

And called me a piece of shit

Who doesn’t understand anything

And who’s opinion doesn’t matter

Now))

This is exactly how our government looks on it’s people

He speaks their words

Because he listenes to their propaganda every single day from every device

From multiple devices at once even

Has been for years

Now.

How am i supposed to change minds of thousands of brainwashed people in my country

If I can’t even change my father’s mind

What am I to do

I can’t even hate him

Because I know that he literally has an official mental disorder

Which made him believe all kinds of liars - cultists, medical frauds - for as long as I remember

What am I to do?

What am I to do when people say that it’s not just Putin’s war, that russians must pay, that Russia must be bombed in return

Aside from the fact that the majority here is agains the war

But, just as in Hitler’s Germany, we are forced to keep our tongues shut

Which we don’t

And we get beaten up, arrested for bigger sentences than rapists and murderers

Used to instill more fear in people’s hearts

And to tell stories about “foreign agents” who were sponsored by “The West”

Should we start a civil war?

Should we kill people who are just too naive and bombarded by all sides by levels of propaganda Goebbels would look up to?

And

As a journalist

Believe me when I say that this propaganda is WICKEDLY smart

It uses all the methods known to history of information in a rapid fire speed

It even turned around my own desire to not see things “one sided” into the decision not to see anything at all in fear of being lied to

Which is dumb

But should i be killed for this?

I just kept listening and talking to people

Different people in my job

And a funny thing about a tattoo artists’ job

Is that there are many soldiers getting tattoos

Good thing is, many of them come and tell us that they quit, that this war is pointless, that it’s just our government making money from it

But some don’t

Yet when I talk to them

They

Talk like

People

Not some monsters

Just people

But they truly believe

That they’re doing a good thing

That they’re fighting to free the oppressed

That they’re fighting to protect their people

Or to avenge their fallen comrades

I might be just too naive and empathetic myself

But

I don’t want them killed either

I don’t want any deaths

Haha

I want a third path

Hahaha

Yeah, I might be too influenced by the ideas of a fictional character who is also called stupid and naive for his views

But

I don’t know

The only people I want to be punished are those who rule this machine of war and hate

And not only from our side

But

Maybe it was also told to me by propaganda

But i don’t think that American government wants this to stop too

I think I saw it in english media as well that US government is known for profiting on wars all around the world

Forgive and correct me if I’m utterly wrong

But in that same post that said that the entire russian population supports war

Was said that we could’ve stopped it

Tried.

Before the arrest of Navalny and soon after our opposition had the biggest rise in this century

We had so many mass protests

They were all brutally suppressed

Young men, women, literal kids and, I shit you not, literally VETERANS, GRANDPAS AND GRANDMAS who ALREADY LIVED THROUGH ONE WAR were BEATEN AND ARRESTED BY POLICE FORCES which are supposed to PROTECT THEM

After the arrest the oppression of opposition has strengthened

We lost our leaders and organisation

Protests began to lessen

Yet with the declaration of “The Special Military Operation” people ROSE AGAIN

And the same thing happened

But worse

So many brutal laws were adopted

All to ensure not a single negative word or movement against the government

So yeah me and my family might be soooo fucked for what I’m writing right now

I’m really not so sure if tumblr is safe

I’m riding on sheer hope for a fluke

But

I just

I am so sorry for keeping my eyes closed for so long

This app and talking to people here is what made me open them

What let me express my rage and made it boil to the point where I couldn’t shut up anymore

I don’t know if I should post this or not

I don’t know.

I might not

Will it make a single change?

I know a way of doing this safer and for a longer time

Actually

It would even be more influential

Yeah

But I wish there will be time

When I can no longer be afraid

And when my words will be heard loud and clear

Along with all the voices of those

Who stand with the free world

For peace and love

And

Hualian)

#tgcf #hualian #WELL I’M SORRY FOR SPAMMING THIS TAG #BUT THEY ARE THERE I MEAN .D #and pls i need people to see #please reblog if you can #please just #never stop spreading awareness #politics #russian propaganda #russian ukrainian war #war in ukraine #stop war

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