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Whether I'll ever write again remains uncertain, but meanwhile I'm seeing where this other road takes me.
youtube.com/watch?v=Zk3rGY…
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Roderic Day
81.2K posts
Roderic Day
@RodericDay
"You can't resist for very long a truth you discover for yourself."
Marxist-Leninist Katılım Şubat 2011
349 Takip Edilen30.9K Takipçiler
Spartacus understands and portrays something Rome is clueless about, as result of centering the slave POV:
One can treat human lives like nothing, and in antiquity this was grotesquely standardized.
But this brutal stoicism bleeds everywhere, it's not easily contained.
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I just cannot disagree more with that tweet.
HBO's Rome literally feels like Bush-era Americans (across the spectrum) projecting and universalizing their mediocre suburban lives and dramas into antiquity, trying to give them this epic scale.
But it's just Rumsfeld scale.
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HBO's Rome to me feels like grimdark The Flintstones.
There's an arc where the "straight man" protagonist gets slaves as army payment, parks them in a lot, and they die of plague.
The affair is treated as somberly as Homer investing in Betamax and struggling to tell Marge.
Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs)@agraybee
This is why HBO's Rome feels like a fantasy series. Their culture was so different than anything that currently exists that realism feels like worldbuilding.
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Roderic Day retweetledi
@RodericDay @orphcorp Because if they were lies, they'd be fought with truth, not censorship.
If someone wrongly accuses you, do you seek to silence the accusers and the judges, or do you speak up?
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@RodericDay @orphcorp Ah yes, surely it's censored in China for no reason at all!
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Roderic Day@RodericDay
New @RedSailsOrg! There's good writing out there about Tiananmen Square, but the "Chinese Kent State" myth of western imagination endures. Here we argue that to understand Beijing 1989, we must necessarily account for Gwangju 1980 and Massachusetts 2015. redsails.org/another-view-o…
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@ContentionNews I am, but I had too privileged of an upbringing for that statement to be meaningful without extra context, and lived all of my adulthood and higher education in Canada, blending in smoothly.
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@RodericDay You're from South America, right? I added the "first world" part specifically to exclude you lol
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Contrapoints reminds me of Newt Gingrich, of whom I heard it said "He's a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."
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@ContentionNews I probably know the names of every single last one of them!
I just happen to be one of them, so I cannot resign myself to untrammeled condemnations of the whole lot.
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@RodericDay Another white first world leftist whose name you know...
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Always come back to this Tobi Haslett quip.
x.com/CPrimestone/st…
SeventyTwoTrillion@CPrimestone
@RodericDay God, yeah, the affectation of people who act deeply cynical despite having little in practice to be cynical about (yet)... Equating exhausted cynicism and political maturity is just as much a trap as saying "I can't even begin to understand why [group] does/believes [thing]."
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In the past you sounded smart by having this old-man professorial tone, using big words, etc. while defending the status quo.
In 2026 everyone is a "rebel", so you sound smart by moaning like you've seen it all before and are so, so tired… while defending the status quo.
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@RodericDay I've shared your China Has Billionaires articles many times in "left spaces" to good effect in these exact scenarios, it's a very useful ressource.
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So long as socialists cannot answer collectively, directly, and assertively simple, basic questions like "Was the USSR socialist?" and "Is China socialist?", then there's no reason to expect the term to mean anything.
These are battles to be won, not legacies to be inherited.
Jason A. Christian@jasonachristian
I feel like I'm losing my mind from just how easily the term "socialism" has been redefined in the US to mean something like New Deal liberalism. Why do people believe it so easily? Is it just a question of having not read enough history or theory?
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@RodericDay Marxism is not Christianity, but it is important to understand that the two are far, far more compatible than Christianity and capitalism, and propaganda focused on that compatibility will be essential for any Marxist project in a heavily Christian nation like the USA
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As the US becomes more fascist and criminalizes any dissent, I'd heed advice like:
Marxism is not Christianity!
Search for good trustworthy community.
Don't respond as fiercely as possible to every prompt, be smart.
Fight only when it suits you, not them.
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Or worse: imagine being told nothing good in history was ever socialist.
That socialism is some beautiful ineffable thing that nobody has attained, and that everyone who tries fails miserably and tragically.
But we should try it! 😄
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Imagine a genuinely principled and curious person showing up to a "left" space, asking the basic and incredibly relevant question "Is China socialist?", and immediately triggering a civil war.
Or, worse, being told to not ask such divisive questions.
I'd simply never come back.
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@probablykaffe 😅
I mean, I'm planning on sticking around.
I just want to make sure people know there's many, many ways to contribute beyond "ultimate martyrdom."
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Speak sense always, and avoid getting carded over superficial stunts.
Won't do much against a mindless and well-bribed henchman, but there's not an infinite supply of those either.
Okay, that's it.
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This is almost certainly not true yet, of course. But it will be.
Revolutions happen when it's clear to basically everyone that the Old Guard is spent, and the New Guard is ready.
For example, businessmen were ready to take over the role of the crown, Bolsheviks over Tsar, etc.
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