æʃliŋ, loaf of autismo @aescling@cat.family

come to nobody's surprise that condensing a 3-part comic storyline that spans decades into an 80+ minute movie means that a lot of material will be cut and changed to meet the demands of the runtime AND make the story less serialized

this is an interesting comment because the comic in the first place struggled very hard with the number of things it wanted to do in the amount of space it had, so it dealt with a lot through Superman narrating the comic in retrospect and dealing with many of its conflicts in very abstract ways. if i were to adapt the comic, i would think about how i’d have an opportunity to fill things in and make it more concrete, or at least less rushed, which i do think the movie actually managed to some recurrent. though the skill in execution throughout was decidedly lost

landing the spike hitbox on marcina dair feels great every time

*on the chapter that criticizes such “anything but class” academics

i was also disappointed that the book’s subtitle—Rational Fascism And The Overthrow Of Communism—did not mean so much “how fascism has played a role in the global overthrow of communism” as “we will talk about fascism at the beginning to hook you in, and then talk about various other topics relative to communism and its fall”

look i haven't played pokemon for well, well over a decade

wait are those even the same evolution line

oh i never updated my profile metadata for this bit

when the video essay is half an hour long, filmed in a studio, and yet, the audio is clipping from the start

anyway the book ends on the chair going after such academics so it feels Pretty Bad

the latter part of that, phrased as a “crisis of freedom”, might accurately describe how hustle culture works, but how on EARTH can you SERIOUSLY CLAIM that the dialectic is ENTIRELY internal when people ABSOLUTELY still have to sell their fucking labour-power to make a living???

anyway remembering how the first chapter of Byung-Chol Han’s Psychopolitics makes the utterly preposterous claim that neoliberism has developed to a point where class conflict does not exist at all but instead has entirely shifted into a dialectic within the self, manifesting as depression and such

it literally brings up the Sokal affair lol

it’s frustrating because postmodern academia IS a thing (there is a “graphic novel” summary of Marxism that spends much of its last pages arguing that there are too many identities for class conflict between proletarians and bourgeoisie to be Real) but like… it’s literally even presented very readably lol…

the most sus stuff in this book is the author’s contempt for what they call “Anything But Class” academics; what he has to say about them feels really uncomfortably close to the incurious, especially given that they say the same shit about the supposed unreadability and dismissal of logic that people throw at like, Butler

can’t say that quite as confidently now given recent developments but

lmao literally the next paragraph after i stopped to post that: “While the Chinese government continues under a nominally communist leadership, the process of private capital penetration goes on more or less unhindered”

what i understand is that (until recently) China has had a considerably more peaceful relationship to capitalism after opening up to foreign investment and adopting markets internally (leading to the understandable analysis that its Communist party was/is a misnomer, which frankly i don’t think i know well enough to comment on), and given in 2020 that its trajectory is toward that of a global power, i do wonder if that complicates Parenti’s point a bit

then again the US wants war now so