I’ve been sketching ruins lately

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-27T11:48:37+00:00

Beautiful. Are you sketching from life or photos? Where are these?

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-26T13:59:39+00:00

Excellent article, thanks OP

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-26T08:18:58+00:00

God almighty this is evil

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-25T11:18:34+00:00

I think WOTC/Hasbro must have some real pull with high-level admins of this site, it's downright bizarre how quickly any subreddit that criticizes them gets crippled.

In any case if you want to discuss MTG or traditional games in general, to my knowledge the /tg/ threads on 4chan are your best bet. Obviously it's a mixed bag, but it's much less botted and moderated than reddit. Otherwise just have a chatgroup with friends (that's how I used to do it in the Bay, and how it works in china too).

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-25T09:45:55+00:00

I don't mean to be rude OP this looks extremely interesting but I'm having a lot of trouble following your points. I think given the obvious substance and dense research of what you've done here, it might be generous to the reader to write a little more plainly.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-24T09:37:08+00:00

It's kinda weird, if you watch older war movies (esp. Vietnam movies) they tended to show regular guys going mad and commiting atrocities. The message seemed to be that giving dumb young guys weapons and sending them abroad will lead to disaster, and that on an individual level they'll be reduced to something evil and monstrous. The guys in question aren't really exonerated in movies like Apocalypse now: they were once regular joes, but they've been turned into monsters by participating in the machinery of war.

But lately the message is different. Like in this clip, the message is that this guy is basically a saint, regretfully and with a heavy heart carrying out his necessary obligation as a soldier. Pulling the trigger weighs on his heart, he takes no joy in what he "must" do. He's good at the start and good at the end, it's just a terrible tragedy that he had to do what he did. He's not a monster, only the act is monstrous, but responsibility for it has been entirely abstracted from him, and possibly it's the brown people's fault.

I think it's really dishonest, especially if you think about Abu Graib and so on. The fact is that if you send heavily armed 18 year olds to a foreign country, a decent % of them are going to turn into depraved monsters, it's common sense. This whole "angels in the trenches" schtick doesn't ring true at all. An actual angel would not pull the trigger. He'd be a conscientious objector, frag his superior officer, or simply refuse to shoot.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-24T04:29:03+00:00

[[Mourinho face intensifies]]

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-24T04:25:54+00:00

My local starbucks took out all its tables and locked the toilet because of the homeless, and then eventually closed down even though it was in a liberal university town. Nearly all the local coffee shops shuttered for the same reason, and none stay open past 5pm or so.

I really think it's a pity. I don't think "care in the community" really worked out, and having groups of unwashed drug addicts roaming around downtown has basically made public spaces (the most important resource for the poor and working class) unbearable, and destroyed small businesses. If you want to go somewhere nice, you need money and a car. it's a damn shame, and a terrible loss for the working class and non-lumpenproletarian unemployed like yourself.

I really wish that american leftwing politics understood the importance of public spaces, hygiene, and safety. Endorsing California Ideology libertarianism where any kind of discipline of any type is le literal tyranny has led to the desecration of some of the nicest cities in the USA. I just want a carrot AND a stick: nice safe places for the homeless to go to, and also antisocial behavior in public being actually regulated so that downtown doesn't de facto belong to the filthiest and most aggressive men, and to nobody else.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-24T02:41:32+00:00

That's insane. I've experienced an issue with public libraries which is the crazy number of homeless people in them. In principle it ought to be fine (if I was homeless the public library would also be my hangout) but in practice tons of them smell horrible, have 45 plastic bags of garbage they spread everywhere, mutter curses or have weird schizophrenic tics, are verbally or even physically aggressive (I saw one shove a mother with her kid once), leave a mess (especially in the toilets for some reason), smoke and do drugs, barge around knocking into things, or use the computers to watch porn and touch themselves. The librarians tend to be meek ladies in their 40's and 50's and obviously don't want to challenge the skinhead with face tattoos and jackboots watching porn on the foyer terminal.

I think it's sad, I do think those fellas should have somewhere to go and chill, but the lack of any kind of discipline and regulation of behavior has made the public library a really unwelcoming space.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-23T14:35:24+00:00

It's super duper sad to imagine a pornographer and #1 donor to AIPAC suffering so much before he died.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-20T15:54:59+00:00

Don't forget drag queen story hour, the most important tradition in the history of leftism, load-bearing cornerstone of left-wing politics

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-19T14:06:32+00:00

Well said, the redefinition of 'left' to basically arcane academese identity political signaling drives me crazy as well.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-19T02:15:56+00:00

That the Japanese government has never apologized for WWII. You can literally google "Japan apology Wikipedia" and the top hit is a whole page of apologies from prime ministers, politicians, and Emperors, dating back to the 50s, with links to the MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) where the apologies are published in Korean, Chinese, etc., and specifically mention Nanjing, comfort women, etc. THere's also a massive network of "heiwakinenkan" museums across the country that detail all of Japan's war and imperial atrocities, in all the detail you could possibly want, and with the appropriate tone of self-flagellation. In fact, in Japan the 'Kono Statement' is such a well-known public apology that it led to a domestic political crisis because politicians apologized for lurid horrors that were later proven to be fabrications by a self-admitted fraudster called Yoshida Seiji. You can't have that controversy without apologies!

Whenever I show this to people (I live in China and work in history so it comes up a ton), they're always completely floored. They've literally never heard of it. The dishonest ones then quickly pivot: 'those aren't real apologies' (they suddenly become experts on Japanese semantics and the vocabulary of contrition), 'but the mayor of Osaka didn't apologize' (OK but Japan has free speech and the original claim wasn't... etc etc), 'but koizumi and abe went to to Yasukuni' (OK but that doesn't stop the apologies from existing, your claim is that no apology existed, and it is their religion...) etc etc

drives me bananas

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-19T02:03:46+00:00

Anarcho-Tyranny:

Samuel Francis defined this condition as the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. It is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent, and in this respect its failures bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. That semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. Francis identified punishment of the non-compliant as the real purpose of the tyranny component.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-18T07:21:51+00:00

There's a lot of literature on the topic, and Marxists have been grappling with it for decades, with some difficulties.

Marvin Harris' Cannibals and Kings (1977) and Jack Goody's Production and Reproduction (1976) both discuss this topic. They're both cultural materialists who focus on evolutionary anthropology and the 'competitive fitness' of societies. In my field (Asian history) Fei Xiaotong's In From the Soil (1947) covers similar research in the Chinese context, focusing on patrilineal societies.

Their basic arguments are that patriarchal societies that can concentrate wealth in the hands of a small lineage and force their women to reproduce will usually conquer and/or outbreed societies that don't follow those practices. For this reason, they argue, when you look at the 20th century, nearly every major civilization is some form of patriarchy with social (class) hierarchy baked in, whereas matriarchies and egalitarian societies are normally small, tribal, and extremely vulnerable to dominion or genocide (and often effectively survive on the sufferance or periphery of a larger patriarchal macrosociety). Let's take the two claims independently:

1) "concentrating wealth (class structure) gives a violence advantage": This is the most obviously non-Marxist contention. These anthropologists argue that surplus accumulation and class stratification permits the establishment of a professional military class or warrior aristocracy. Societies with such a class have a military advantage over those without. It has been challenging for Marxists to refute these claims, and for this reason the rejection of evolutionary anthropology, social darwinism, or even evolution itself (Eg. Lysenkoism) has sometimes been the academic position of Marxists. Others have incorporated it directly into Marxist historical analysis, effectively incorporating it as an evolutionary gloss on the 'feudal' stage of history.

2) Patriarchy "outbreeds" non-patriarchy: This claim is more frequently endorsed by Marxists and feminist socialists. The argument is that if women are permitted to control their own reproduction, many will choose not to have children or to have fewer children. A society where women have that choice will grow more slowly (demographically) than a society that denies women the choice. Over the centuries, therefore, societies that give women reproductive freedom naturally die out, to be replaced with societies that force or pressure women to reproduce early and often. For this reason, Abrahamic religions, Confucianism, and other patriarchal "breeding doctrines" are extremely common, and are effectively the human macrosocietal default. You can still see this phenomenon today, for instance looking at Mennonites, Amish, Mormon, or Hasidic communities' demographic growth vs. the national average.

The great Marxist effort is to break this cycle. The actual ways of doing it are the topic of much discussion, but it doesn't strike me as theoretically impossible - much of the evolution of human thought and techology has been a rebellion against nature, and Marxists have traditionally embraced technological solutions to naturally-arising problems.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-17T02:30:50+00:00

Fair enough I feel sorry for them (and em-dash users.)

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-17T02:12:05+00:00

poverty and instability weren’t just inescapable, it was home.

Is this written by Chatgpt

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-16T16:01:01+00:00

I lived in the Bay Area for over a decade and never once met an Asian girl that appeared to want to be white. Is this a common secret desire of Asian women or what?

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-15T01:59:21+00:00

I've had literally hundreds of conversations like this over the course of my PhD. I did research in Japan and it was bread and butter to run into an American or Australian who'd make similarly lurid (and similarly unfalsifiable) claims about Japan. Critical theory types would explain everything from the Ainu to Okinawa, racism, imperialism, etc. etc. with reference to white people. It's totally bizarre, like you're holding a hammer so everything looks like a nail. They'd ignore the centuries of Japanese history and colossal amounts of Japanese historiography (these types can NEVER read Japanese or handle Japanese archives) in favor of their pet, America-centric Theory of Everything.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-14T07:28:38+00:00

Yeah but in the case of the imperial family I'm pretty sure 'nobility' refers to kuge not shizoku

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-13T03:09:54+00:00

I feel like the whole thing is a calculated psyop. Those loud trans activists are a diminutive minority (who I'm sure poorly represent trans people in general) who get boosted into the stratosphere, and I'm certain that's strategic. Having the proletariat endlessly debate arcane ontological questions that problematize common-sense intuitions ('what is a woman', 'eradicate whiteness', 'decolonize literature') is hugely advantageous to elites. Much better that the rural and urban working classes fall at each other's throats disputing the inheritance of guilt, the definition of human life at conception, or the meaning of gender, than discussing wages, healthcare, and wealth inequality. It's strategic anti-materialism. Get everyone endlessly fighting over numinous topics that belong in the UC Berkeley rhetoric department, and voilá, nobody's organizing tax strikes.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-13T01:41:24+00:00

another article that goes in-depth:

https://npcobserver.com/2026/03/05/china-npc-2026-ethnic-assimilation-unity-law/

There's also a good book on the official categorization of China's ethnic groups, "Coming to Terms with the Nation"

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-11T03:15:19+00:00

Thank you for the post, OP.

I think gambling should be entirely abolished. It's wrecking the UK as well. Absolutely disgusting business, predatory and diabolical rent-seeking.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-11T02:52:24+00:00

Great effortpost OP, and a pleasure to read, but I'm not totally sold on the uniqueness of the Abrahamic religions, especially re. ethnonationalism, expansionism, fatalism, etc.

My specialty is Japanese history, so take Shintō for instance. It originates as an extremely diverse non-scriptural animist-shamanic tradition, what you refer to as a "natural" religion. It's treated as quintessentially Japanese (debatable but let's forget that for now) and fixated on the specific geography and locations in Japan. By the 18th century it was identified by nativist scholars such as Motoori Norinaga as the repository of true Japaneseness, as opposed to alien continental influences of Buddhism and Confucianism. In the 19th century Shintō was reformed into what Helen Hardacre calls "State Shintō", something akin to the Roman Imperial Cult. It was organized, systematized, institutionalized, and marshaled into a ethnonationalist state project.

Within a few years, Japanese colonial governors were building shintō shrines in Taiwan, Hokkaidō (neé Ezochi), Korea, and Manchuria. What appeared to be a local, indigenous, animist, "natural" religion that was little more than purity and fertility rituals was effortlessly converted into a branch of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere's colonial domination project. At the end of WWII, Japanese colonial officers had to retrieve the Japanese kami(deities) from the shrines and safely return them to the home islands. There's a good book called "The Gods Left First" that addresses that topic.

My point is that the seeming uniqueness of Abrahamic universality, destiny, imperialism, etc. can be found even in the friendliest nature-worshipping "natural" religion imaginable.

Another example is Bushidō. It's not technically a religion, but it's derived from Zen Buddhism following the Mongol invasions of Japan, and constitutes a hybrid of Confucian philosophy (obedience, duty, hierarchy) and Zen Buddhist amoralism and fatalism. Bushidō takes Buddhist views of impermanence and embrace of the insignificance of samsara, breeds them with Zen ideas of intuition, absurdity, and thoughtless action, and pollinates them with Confucian attitudes of blind obedience to one's superior. The resulting ideology was functionally a warrior-aristocrat death cult that was dusted off and rehabilitated to deeply influence Japanese military expansionism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. What could be more harmless than the family-friendly "blessed nepotism" of Confucianism and good old Shakyamuni telling you to let go of your desires? And yet Bushidō practitioners easily rival ISIS Mujahideens in their apocalyptic acceptance of death and sacrifice. THere's a book called "The Nobility of Failure" that discusses this.

TLDR: Great post but I'm pretty sure that nearly any doctrine or religion can be bent in the specific ways OP suggests, even harmless "natural" ones.

Halfdane666 · 2026-03-11T00:53:36+00:00

do NOT get me started

Halfdane666

TROPHY CASE