AstroStelar [he/him]

[Peter Thiel] finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

• “In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.”

The person in the video also places the caveat near the end that he’s talking about the dev space:

And I think that it might just be the year of the Linux desktop. And when I say that, of course, I do mean for developers. I don’t think my mom’s probably ever going to learn Linux.

Babiš and his party have seemed to drift a lot in policy stances over the last 20 years, I mean he’s had coalitions with the Communist Party at one point. Their right-wing designation comes from being queerphobic, xenophobic and anti-environmentalist under the guises of ‘anti-euroliberalism’ and ‘national sovereignty’. Foreign-policy-wise he’s a true centrist, as well as being a unabashed Zionist, go figure.

Babiš publicly profiles himself as a conservative and his party sits in EU Parliament under the same grouping as all of Europe’s “mainstream far-right parties”, Patriots for Europe.

Regarding promises of welfare spending, I want to point out that Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has often promised the same things in the past, but then his party votes for austerity every time, in government or in opposition. The Law and Justice Party in Poland also talks about a strong social safety net, mainly to distinguish themselves from the neoliberal opposition.

These people are offering a deal of sorts: they promise social benefits in return for loyalty to the big strongman against ‘the elites’, which shields them against criminal investigations. If not social benefits, then the power fantasy of ‘owning the libs’ that they feel wronged by.

On the far right, SPD

Heh.

Based off your earlier comment mentioning something about local residents unable to buy from businesses nearby, which I’m guessing to be because they’re too expensive, it sounds to me more like a problem with private development/gentrification than a problem with the concept of 15-minute cities itself.

Not at all surprising. I remember reading passages like this on Wikipedia:

In constructing their image of the “new Jew” or “Hebrew”, the early Zionists contrasted this image against the Yid, the negative caricature of European Jewry. In doing so, they employed language similar to that of antisemites. For example, the Russian-born Jewish scholar Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who developed Revisionist Zionism in the 20th century, wrote:

Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite … because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is despised by all and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to charm all. The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command. The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: “I am a Hebrew!”

This is my general stance as well, but I didn’t want to get too involved in a discussion I don’t feel qualified for, so I kept my initial question brief.

For the Hexbear post on this article the user Xiaohongshu wrote a long post claiming “local governments are the landlords”, featuring their common talking points of local governments strained for cash after the real estate bubble burst and that Chinese economists are all neoliberals and therefore unable to solve this.

I’ve wanted to ask Lemmygrad’s opinion on this user for a while. To what is their pessimism warranted in your view? Do you take issue with (their interpretation of) their observations?

Oh hey, one of Lemmygrad’s taglines

Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.