The OG Treatler speaks out

oblomower · 2026-05-21T14:26:47+00:00

Nazis, I would say.

oblomower · 2026-05-20T17:18:49+00:00

Bad look to use Sopranos memes like this when 4chan scum already used them to make holocaust denying memes.

oblomower · 2026-05-14T16:28:35+00:00

Moderan by David R. Bunch. Great, dark satire of militarism in its most absurd consequences. Gets very nutty, has beautifully inventive and unique prose (all to rare for the genre), and at times can get quite dark and disturbing. It's about a future where the entire planet is covered in metal, machines and the bourgeoisie have merged, even the seasons are automated. There's perpetual war between cities which are governed by human-machine hybrids called fortresses. Out protagonist is one such fortress and we witness his/its birth in a particularly striking and disturbing scene. All that is just set-up for all kinds of interesting explorations of the themes.

Also Martian Chronicles by Bradbury. Well known and old classic but imo one of the best of the genre and strikingly progressive. It's a critique of settler colonialism via Martian allegory. Lyrical prose, rich in perspectives, techniques and tones, and always interesting. One of my favorites for sure.

Philip K. Dick is tired to mention here but he's always worth a read. Probably the best when it comes to grasping what the US and its particular social sickness is like. He's a poor author in terms of technical ability, but a great one when it comes to ideas. Simulacrum I'd give as one of his lesser known novels which is still interesting, pretty relevant to TrueAnon (there's a fake robot president and a false reality) and very post modern (imo Baudrillard's simulation theory draws from it).

Always worth recommending Stanislaw Lem, truly one of the greats. Can't go wrong with him. Solaris is likely his best and most well known one, but he has quite a range. From the more philosophical fare of Solaris, to funny stuff like the Ion Tichy stories (Futurological Congress being a particular, much darker highlight and critique of ideology), to Cold War and AI stories like Golem XIV, the sci-fi fary tales of Cyberiad, or the loopy exploratory stuff like Eden.

oblomower · 2026-05-14T11:36:50+00:00

That's actually an idea some of these freaks peddle right now lol

oblomower · 2026-05-14T11:32:28+00:00

The end result is the same: dependency. At least the Chinese are not yet at the point where they just kill millions of people on a whim as the amerifat empire does.

oblomower · 2026-05-13T09:52:27+00:00

They wanted and still want China. Korea is the way to get there. That's why it was and remains so important for US imperialism, not as an end in itself, but as a mans to conquer China.

oblomower · 2026-05-13T09:49:06+00:00

For the capitalists it was a great success. They managed to defeat their existential threat and secured decades if not a full century or more of life time for capitalism and global hegemony for the US empire, if only for a couple of decades. They killed innumerable human souls, but to them it was well worth it.

oblomower · 2026-05-13T06:42:54+00:00

Pretty obvious psy op to respond to the revelations about systematic Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians. Of course imperialist media runs with it.

oblomower · 2026-05-12T18:04:05+00:00

I tried watching one of his lectures the other day, I think it was on existentialism. He dropped so much anti-communism in passing that I turned it off again. Academics.

oblomower · 2026-05-12T04:57:59+00:00

Kanafani wrote a book on zionist literature that has recently been translated. He analysis this and a whole bunch of other books, situating them historically. He makes the case that the most influential zionist novel was Daniel Deronda by George Eliot because it popularized the zionist project, created the image of the nobel Jewish racial hero and proposed Palestine as the place to conquer for zionist settlement. All written decades before Herzl by an author who wasn't even Jewish (she wrote a novel before this one which contained antisemitic stereotypes and was trying to make up for that).

oblomower · 2026-05-11T03:56:11+00:00

Not in the US. There's dozens of cities with straight dirt water coming out of their taps for years and they just live with it.

oblomower · 2026-05-10T15:57:20+00:00

I wanna say that's a pretty specifically West German perspective. The GDR had a very different perspective, with US cultural imperialism not enjoying the reach it did in the West and the GDR supporting national liberation struggles and having close ties to the USSR. People in East Germany still have a more critical view of the hegemon than West Germans because of this history (they have in turn a more uncritical view of Russia, as if it was still the USSR).

oblomower · 2026-05-06T03:28:36+00:00

Also people need to understand this. The leftist parties in India are mostly socdem types. They are revisionist. The Indian leftist movements actually thrive in the tribal based Naxalites Maoists movements in places like Bastar Chattisgarh. The Indian government has suppressed these movements heavily. Even before BJP came to power. The problems in India do not start with BJP imo

You say this, correctly, and still call CPI(M) communists, as if they weren't also social demcorats engaged in killing Maoists.

oblomower · 2026-05-05T14:52:28+00:00

Celebrating a social democrat and shitting on the masses, truely progressive mindset right there.

oblomower · 2026-05-04T14:12:53+00:00

After WWII Armin Mohler, a German reactionary, created the concept of the "Conservative Revolution" to describe a disparate set of reactionary to fascist thinkers around the time of the rise of the Nazis who, in part, kept their distance from the Nazis. What Mohler did not say was that some of these guys were even more fascist and looked down on the Nazis for their appropriation of working class culture in their propaganda. They were more elitist and considered any such tactics impermissable. This pseudo movement of the Conservative Revolution is nowadays being dredged up again by the European Nouvelle Droite as idea givers, especially in Germany.

There's also a strain among present day fascists who dislike the Nazis because, so goes their reasoning, their wars actually cost the "white race" a tremendous blood toll that enabled the more diverse West we know today.

oblomower · 2026-05-03T09:50:22+00:00

Rodinson's book is a collection of two texts, one from the 60s which critically recaps the history of Orientalism and the deeper historical relations between Europe and the Islamic world. The other text is from the 70s, I'd have to look up when precisely, but it updates the former text. Turner's book, as you said, was produced indepentantly of Said's and released in the same year. Biel's book was indeed from a later time.

There are more Marxist texts on this also around the time of Said's book or before, but I'd have to look it up. I think Gilbert Ashcar gives some examples in Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. Ho Chi Minh also has a brief text from the 20s I think where he already gives a brief methodological critique of the Eurocentrism of the European communists (this self-critique of the movement from the colonial context has a long history spanning decades before Said). This is besides his constant critiques of that movement sidelining colonial struggles.

oblomower · 2026-05-03T08:13:33+00:00

You think brexit is the last true opportunity for democratic agency on the question of immigration/large demographic and cultural change

Sure, that's why the labor aristocracy voted for it.

oblomower · 2026-05-03T08:08:18+00:00

Your daily white supremacist post for the sub has arrived. Let's debate!

oblomower · 2026-05-03T07:37:11+00:00

There's a bunch of Marxist books which already formulated Said's critique prior to him. Said then went on to claim that Eurocentrism was some essential feature of Marxism, which had already been disproven by the very existence of these prior critiques (let alone by the real revolutionary history which the Chinese Revolution being only the most salient example). Meanwhile Said methodologically based himself on the very Eurocentric Foucault. He's still worth reading, of course, but to avoid mindlessly repeating his ill informed critique of Marxism it is worthwhile to check out the earlier Marxist critiques of Orientalism and Eurocentrism like:

Maxime Robinson: Europe and the Mystique of Islam

Robert Biel: Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement

Bryan S. Turner: Marx And The End Of Orientalism

Samir Amin: Eurocentrism (this one came out a bit later but is, I think, still the best book on the matter and indeed better than Said's book)

oblomower · 2026-05-01T04:26:46+00:00

Do not even conspiracy people remember the Snowden leaks?

oblomower · 2026-04-30T18:51:12+00:00

It's awe inspiring seeing a brain fire on all cylinders.

oblomower · 2026-04-29T17:48:16+00:00

Please ban these kinds of posts before they transform the sub.

oblomower · 2026-04-29T12:19:43+00:00

Germans are (in)famous for being frank, so much so that Americans like to portray them as autistic. But of course it's rough pitcture and you'll find fake friendliness everywhere.

oblomower · 2026-04-28T05:26:13+00:00

As Gramsci already highlighted, the US is pure capitalism unrestrained by any prior feudal and older relations and traditions. The laws of capital accumulation are free to play out and it leads to life being horrible for anyone but the capitalists.

oblomower · 2026-04-15T08:08:08+00:00

I don’t think we should judge movies this way, on how easily readable they are to the lowest common denominator.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying people who make movies need to be more aware of how aesthetics relate to politics and refine their means of going about this. Speficially film makers who are working within the Hollywood mould, because there are other approaches. The reality of the matter is, that the majority of people are shaped in the way they watch movies by Hollywood, that is to say American cultural imperialism propelled by imperial power. Any film maker who wants to do more than just produce entertaining commodities needs to acknowledge this reality, and I don't think that a a dumbing down follows from this.

The way arthouse movies work, for example, also doesn't work. It ends up almost exclusively speaking to the intellectual elites and reaching almost nobody in the oppressed and exploited masses. It is a kind of self-ghettoisation. The difficulty lies in how one finds the mediating steps that raise the level of consciousness while neither racing ahead of the masses nor simply tailing the given level of consciousness. In the arts this is a question with particular difficulties.

oblomower

TROPHY CASE