gyrofry posted:babyhueypnewton posted:In anime news. To whomever recommended Aku No Hana itt, that shit is literally lf the manga. Especially the fascist literature crew but all of us resemble the main dude.
please write an extended review
actually i did on facebook >.< dunno if you actually want to see it though
Aku no Hana isn't really about the Baudelaire poem of the same name. Or rather, it understands the poem better than Baudelaire himself and creates a modern version (actually a post-modern version but I'll get to that). The Baudelaire poem itself is a series of musings on eroticism, life and death, meaning, beauty, nature and the city, and the senses (smell especially). On a superficial level, Aku no Hana copies all of this. Read that manga, those themes are all covered, especially the idea of fragrance as the true erotic sense.
But Aku no Hana is a lot more. Looking at Baudelaire himself, his purpose was to confront the changing aesthetic of life itself during the industrial revolution. Baudelaire participated as a revolutionary writer during the revolutions of 1848, and lived during a time in Paris of modernization. In fact, Baudelaire invented the word 'modernity' to describe the new mode of life under industrial capitalism. In France, capitalism brought a new time (the regimented time of the factory) a new mode of love (the nuclear family based on efficient reproduction of the labourer *thats Marxist speak for making babies*), a new aesthetic (the cathedrals and opulent beauty of the catholic church being replaced the efficiency of modern Paris), even a new fragrance (the smell of horses and nature replaced by machinery, cleanliness, and eventually automobiles). I'm making it sound like a bad thing but it wasn't. It simply was the march of history, neither good nor bad. Or rather, history itself redefined what was good and what was bad.
So where does Aku no Hana fit in? If Les fleurs du mal is about the aesthetics of life itself under primitive capitalism, than Aku no Hana is about the aesthetics of late capitalism. Or to put it another way, one is about modernity and one is about post-modernity. Basically, post-modernity is the end of capitalism, or at least it's final triumph. Unlike the great revolutionary waves of 1789, 1848, and 1871 which brought capitalism into being in France, post-modernism is a stagnation and a series of banal events against the backdrop of unchanging capitalism. The lost decade, the asian financial crisis, the 2008 crisis, all of these were simply events that have become natural to the functioning of the system . But, without the alternatives of communism, fascism, counter-culture, or anything, life simply goes on. Japan especially exemplifies this: the same party remains in power, the "recession" is eternal without affecting quality of life in a meaningful way, even an earthquake and nuclear disaster aren't enough to motivate a change. To put it in terms of aesthetics, post-modernism is the obsession with surface appearance, superficiality, and identity at the expense of grand narratives and historical movements. All life is part of normalcy, all resistance is itself a part of the functioning of the system, and all alternatives are unimaginable.
This, of course, describes Aku no Hana perfectly imo. The characters are obsessed with not being "normal", and the society they see around them is sick. Despite their best efforts to find an alternative, they eventually realize that the only escape is from life itself. As Zizek says, "...it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism." The great strength of Aku no Hana is that it does not condemn them for thinking this way. It basically says they are right, and that there is no escape. The people who read books (Kasuga's father and Kasuga himself of course), thinking they are romantics or above everyone are just frauds. Nakamura, who fancies herself a psychopath, is more desperate for acceptance than anyone and contemplates suicide only after being bullied by her classmates. Saeki, the perfect model of society, is a shell who puts on a mask just to function. This stuff is obvious, but what's also important to remember is the 'normal' people are also sellouts who lead empty, meaningless lives. Kasuga reads to fancy himself an intellectual, but only because no one reads at all. They are too busy thinking about sex and pointless trivialities of their own lives as Nakamura rightly points out. Saeki is a model of the perfect citizen only because that is the role most people have already decided to play. Even after she confesses to a crime, people still cannot believe her. Even in her best efforts of defiance, Saeki can't escape the normal functioning of society. The parents, the police, the principle and the other kids are all playing roles themselves, they were just too dull to have an existential crisis about it. Or maybe they did and Kasuga and Nakamura are too busy trying to feel something to notice everyone feels the same emptiness. The world is bleak, but not by design or because life is so terrible, but because it's so normal and boring. To the characters, a revolution or a war would be preferable to the minimal existence called "liberal democracy."
That's why I say it's not really a retelling. In fact, Aku no Hana is the opposite of Les fleurs du mal. If Les fleurs du mal is about the revolutionary changes in life and beauty taking place under industrialization, Aku no Hana is about the boredom and dull aesthetics of post-industrialization. And nothing is more boring and banal visually than the architecture and lifestyle of a rural Tokyo satellite (I love Korea but I will admit that the architecture of Asian cities is not what one would call beautiful). If Les fleurs du mal is a warning against boredom: "If rape and poison, dagger and burning, Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs, On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies, It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!" then Aku no Hana is that boredom come to life. Aku no Hana is the ultimate nihilist piece, not only is life meaningless and every resistance to it pointless, even death itself fails as an escape. 'Being' itself is dead, and nihilism reigns not tyrannically but with a system of a normalcy:
"Nihilism is Nietzsche's name for this loss of meaning or direction. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agree that if nihilism were complete, there would be no significant private or public issues. Nothing would have authority for us, would make a claim on us, would demand a commitment from us. In a non-nihilistic age there is something at stake; there are questions that all can agree are important, even if they violently disagree as to what the answers to these questions are. But in our age, everything is in the process of becoming equal. There is less and less difference between political parties, between religious communities, between social causes, between cultural practices -- everything is on a par, all meaningful differences are being levelled." -The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger
Philosophy of Aku no Hana:
"It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography." -Nietzsche
The main philosopher of Aku no Hana is Takao Kasuga, who is a semi-autobiographical account of the author. The works he mentions: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, and Bataille were all french surrealists and are all pretty similar, at least in relation to what Kasuga is getting out of them. But instead of regurgitate philosophy, Aku no Hana is it's own philosophical treatise, or as Nietzsche says in the above quote, a study of the pathology of a philosopher.
Told from the perspective of Kasuga, Aku no Hana asks two questions: why do we interact with philosophy? and why do we interact with the world? Here again it is post-modern: rather than deal with truth or untruth (are the characters right or wrong? is the world they live in truly dead? is there an escape from the banality of Gunma?) it interrogates the function of the discourse of truth itself (why do the characters believe what they believe? what are the inherent limitations of the characters perspectives?). Instead of dealing with the fundamentals of life through analysis of the surface as the books mentioned do (i.e. fundamental political upheavals anticipated and supported by the surrealists dealing with dreams and appearance), Aku no Hana is the opposite and addresses the surface through life itself (questions of love, suicide, meaning are confronted as questions of the boring day-to-day in a Japanese rural town). It's important to remember that despite the angst of the characters, there is nothing actually traumatizing that happens to them. No one is raped, no one comes from a broken home or poverty or past trauma, no one is excessively bullied, and the usual middle school banter about girls and sex escalates into a series of crimes and a suicide pact without any real change in the character of the town or the events occurring in Gunma.
Aku no Hana deals primarily with how we interact with knowledge in the modern day. If there are no real values to confront and no real historical movements, why do we learn at all? Why do we read books of philosophy, or historical and political books about times of great change or people across the world? Aku no Hana is at it's most cynical when it answers this question: it is our own insecurity and pathology that motivates us. Kasuga reads books for the same purpose that he follows Nakamura (and he gives the former up for the latter entirely): to escape himself and find meaning where none is to be had. Fundamentally, the question of truth and untruth is irrelevant in the philosophy of Aku no Hana. The only question we can ask today is: what does this philosophy reveal about the person writing it and the person reading it? Aku no Hana has to be an auto-biography, after all what other possible story are we qualified to make today except our own, and even only then as a fantasy to escape ourselves? Aku no Hana, then, is the death of philosophy and any semblance of being. Not only are we unqualified to interrogate 'truth' outside ourselves, we cannot even understand ourselves.
This point especially hit hard with me, after all I read more pointless books full of revolutionary bluster than anybody. My only answer, and the only answer I had to Nietzsche without becoming a full blown NAZI like Heidegger, is so what? Sure people obsessed with knowledge have some kind of pathology. Sure politics is for perverts and exhibitionists, and American politics especially is somewhere in between erotic desire for flagellation and the desire for a soap opera with the insecurity of watching things without meaning. Sure socialists are motivated by envy of the rich, liberals are motivated by cowardice to confront consciousness outside their own, and conservatism isn't even a coherent ideology except as a series of contradictions and neurotic fears. Sure we can look for the Freudian diagnosis behind every political event, and we probably should. Ultimately though, this doesn't really say anything at all, and the greatest mistake people make onto Freud and Foucault (by projecting their own insecurities) is that their prescriptions of society come with moral judgments or political paths of actions. Nihilism is itself a value judgment, and saying that Kasuga is not authentic in his reading because he does it to hide from himself is a moral judgment purely on the part of the reader (who has his own neurotic reasons for this judgment).
The second question is similar to the first: why do we interact with the world? More specifically we can ask how does Kasuga interact with the two women in his life? In Saeki's case, he projects onto her a perfect being, everything that he is not. Once reality sets in, he loses all attraction to her. Nakamura is the opposite, a fundamentally terrifying being who takes all control away from him. In Freudian language, Saeki is the symbolic order or the big Other (the ideal that gives meaning to desire) while Nakamura is the barred Other or the castration complex (the fundamental fear of the loss of control and the incompleteness of desire). Basically, all human interactions, especially love and desire, are projections of the psyche. In Aku no Hana, all human interaction is selfish, and all interactions with consciousness are an attempt to fill the void between the ideal one about life has and the reality one fears. Not only does Kasuga project his own desires entirely onto other people, leaving them no room to exist as actual human beings, he even does this to himself. He projects how he wishes he was onto himself and when he is finally confronted with his own normalcy he cannot live anymore. Of course, between the ideal and the terrifying real there is no room for compromise, and Saeki and Nakamura are easily interchangeable. They switch roles easily, with Nakamura becoming the ideal of salvation and Saeki being the fear of reality (in this case, the loss of control of the sexual impulses and Kasuga's inability to control his own libido). As Lacan says of desire: “The object of man’s desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else. One object can become equivalent to another, owing to the effect produced by this intermediary, in making it possible for objects to be exchanged and compared." By "object desired by someone else", he means Saeki as the ideal of society. Kasuga is only attracted to Saeki because society has determined she is attractive, but the innovation of Lacan and the message of Aku no Hana is that there is nothing outside of this desire, no pure, natural desire or genuine understanding. Saeki simply becomes replaced by Nakamura, and the story has no examples of any alternative form of love even being possible.
In the end, these questions lead to one fundamental philosophy: we cannot speak about truth. We cannot speak about others, or even ourselves. Philosophy, love, aesthetics, meaning are all the result of projection. All we can interrogate are the functions of our ideas, anything outside of this is simply a value judgment imposed on a valueless world. Or to put it another way, a set or presupposed values also known as a religion. Aku no Hana tells us the primary function of philosophy is to interrogate ourselves as the author has done, and based on the misunderstandings of the manga and the reaction to the anime, few have had the courage to do so. Anyway, Aku no Hana is a truly great work, the kind that is nearly peerless among it's genre or among all genres. It is equal, and perhaps even greater, than the Baudelaire work it is inspired by, and belongs among the great works of philosophy and literature that capture the essence of our current age. I genuinely believe this.
babyhueypnewton posted:Some thoughts on Aku no Hana:
Aku no Hana isn't really about the Baudelaire poem of the same name. Or rather, it understands the poem better than Baudelaire himself and creates a modern version (actually a post-modern version but I'll get to that). The Baudelaire poem itself is a series of musings on eroticism, life and death, meaning, beauty, nature and the city, and the senses (smell especially). On a superficial level, Aku no Hana copies all of this. Read that manga, those themes are all covered, especially the idea of fragrance as the true erotic sense.
But Aku no Hana is a lot more. Looking at Baudelaire himself, his purpose was to confront the changing aesthetic of life itself during the industrial revolution. Baudelaire participated as a revolutionary writer during the revolutions of 1848, and lived during a time in Paris of modernization. In fact, Baudelaire invented the word 'modernity' to describe the new mode of life under industrial capitalism. In France, capitalism brought a new time (the regimented time of the factory) a new mode of love (the nuclear family based on efficient reproduction of the labourer *thats Marxist speak for making babies*), a new aesthetic (the cathedrals and opulent beauty of the catholic church being replaced the efficiency of modern Paris), even a new fragrance (the smell of horses and nature replaced by machinery, cleanliness, and eventually automobiles). I'm making it sound like a bad thing but it wasn't. It simply was the march of history, neither good nor bad. Or rather, history itself redefined what was good and what was bad.
So where does Aku no Hana fit in? If Les fleurs du mal is about the aesthetics of life itself under primitive capitalism, than Aku no Hana is about the aesthetics of late capitalism. Or to put it another way, one is about modernity and one is about post-modernity. Basically, post-modernity is the end of capitalism, or at least it's final triumph. Unlike the great revolutionary waves of 1789, 1848, and 1871 which brought capitalism into being in France, post-modernism is a stagnation and a series of banal events against the backdrop of unchanging capitalism. The lost decade, the asian financial crisis, the 2008 crisis, all of these were simply events that have become natural to the functioning of the system . But, without the alternatives of communism, fascism, counter-culture, or anything, life simply goes on. Japan especially exemplifies this: the same party remains in power, the "recession" is eternal without affecting quality of life in a meaningful way, even an earthquake and nuclear disaster aren't enough to motivate a change. To put it in terms of aesthetics, post-modernism is the obsession with surface appearance, superficiality, and identity at the expense of grand narratives and historical movements. All life is part of normalcy, all resistance is itself a part of the functioning of the system, and all alternatives are unimaginable.
This, of course, describes Aku no Hana perfectly imo. The characters are obsessed with not being "normal", and the society they see around them is sick. Despite their best efforts to find an alternative, they eventually realize that the only escape is from life itself. As Zizek says, "...it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism." The great strength of Aku no Hana is that it does not condemn them for thinking this way. It basically says they are right, and that there is no escape. The people who read books (Kasuga's father and Kasuga himself of course), thinking they are romantics or above everyone are just frauds. Nakamura, who fancies herself a psychopath, is more desperate for acceptance than anyone and contemplates suicide only after being bullied by her classmates. Saeki, the perfect model of society, is a shell who puts on a mask just to function. This stuff is obvious, but what's also important to remember is the 'normal' people are also sellouts who lead empty, meaningless lives. Kasuga reads to fancy himself an intellectual, but only because no one reads at all. They are too busy thinking about sex and pointless trivialities of their own lives as Nakamura rightly points out. Saeki is a model of the perfect citizen only because that is the role most people have already decided to play. Even after she confesses to a crime, people still cannot believe her. Even in her best efforts of defiance, Saeki can't escape the normal functioning of society. The parents, the police, the principle and the other kids are all playing roles themselves, they were just too dull to have an existential crisis about it. Or maybe they did and Kasuga and Nakamura are too busy trying to feel something to notice everyone feels the same emptiness. The world is bleak, but not by design or because life is so terrible, but because it's so normal and boring. To the characters, a revolution or a war would be preferable to the minimal existence called "liberal democracy."
That's why I say it's not really a retelling. In fact, Aku no Hana is the opposite of Les fleurs du mal. If Les fleurs du mal is about the revolutionary changes in life and beauty taking place under industrialization, Aku no Hana is about the boredom and dull aesthetics of post-industrialization. And nothing is more boring and banal visually than the architecture and lifestyle of a rural Tokyo satellite (I love Korea but I will admit that the architecture of Asian cities is not what one would call beautiful). If Les fleurs du mal is a warning against boredom: "If rape and poison, dagger and burning, Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs, On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies, It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!" then Aku no Hana is that boredom come to life. Aku no Hana is the ultimate nihilist piece, not only is life meaningless and every resistance to it pointless, even death itself fails as an escape. 'Being' itself is dead, and nihilism reigns not tyrannically but with a system of a normalcy:
"Nihilism is Nietzsche's name for this loss of meaning or direction. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agree that if nihilism were complete, there would be no significant private or public issues. Nothing would have authority for us, would make a claim on us, would demand a commitment from us. In a non-nihilistic age there is something at stake; there are questions that all can agree are important, even if they violently disagree as to what the answers to these questions are. But in our age, everything is in the process of becoming equal. There is less and less difference between political parties, between religious communities, between social causes, between cultural practices -- everything is on a par, all meaningful differences are being levelled." -The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger
Philosophy of Aku no Hana:
"It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography." -Nietzsche
The main philosopher of Aku no Hana is Takao Kasuga, who is a semi-autobiographical account of the author. The works he mentions: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, and Bataille were all french surrealists and are all pretty similar, at least in relation to what Kasuga is getting out of them. But instead of regurgitate philosophy, Aku no Hana is it's own philosophical treatise, or as Nietzsche says in the above quote, a study of the pathology of a philosopher.
Told from the perspective of Kasuga, Aku no Hana asks two questions: why do we interact with philosophy? and why do we interact with the world? Here again it is post-modern: rather than deal with truth or untruth (are the characters right or wrong? is the world they live in truly dead? is there an escape from the banality of Gunma?) it interrogates the function of the discourse of truth itself (why do the characters believe what they believe? what are the inherent limitations of the characters perspectives?). Instead of dealing with the fundamentals of life through analysis of the surface as the books mentioned do (i.e. fundamental political upheavals anticipated and supported by the surrealists dealing with dreams and appearance), Aku no Hana is the opposite and addresses the surface through life itself (questions of love, suicide, meaning are confronted as questions of the boring day-to-day in a Japanese rural town). It's important to remember that despite the angst of the characters, there is nothing actually traumatizing that happens to them. No one is raped, no one comes from a broken home or poverty or past trauma, no one is excessively bullied, and the usual middle school banter about girls and sex escalates into a series of crimes and a suicide pact without any real change in the character of the town or the events occurring in Gunma.
Aku no Hana deals primarily with how we interact with knowledge in the modern day. If there are no real values to confront and no real historical movements, why do we learn at all? Why do we read books of philosophy, or historical and political books about times of great change or people across the world? Aku no Hana is at it's most cynical when it answers this question: it is our own insecurity and pathology that motivates us. Kasuga reads books for the same purpose that he follows Nakamura (and he gives the former up for the latter entirely): to escape himself and find meaning where none is to be had. Fundamentally, the question of truth and untruth is irrelevant in the philosophy of Aku no Hana. The only question we can ask today is: what does this philosophy reveal about the person writing it and the person reading it? Aku no Hana has to be an auto-biography, after all what other possible story are we qualified to make today except our own, and even only then as a fantasy to escape ourselves? Aku no Hana, then, is the death of philosophy and any semblance of being. Not only are we unqualified to interrogate 'truth' outside ourselves, we cannot even understand ourselves.
This point especially hit hard with me, after all I read more pointless books full of revolutionary bluster than anybody. My only answer, and the only answer I had to Nietzsche without becoming a full blown NAZI like Heidegger, is so what? Sure people obsessed with knowledge have some kind of pathology. Sure politics is for perverts and exhibitionists, and American politics especially is somewhere in between erotic desire for flagellation and the desire for a soap opera with the insecurity of watching things without meaning. Sure socialists are motivated by envy of the rich, liberals are motivated by cowardice to confront consciousness outside their own, and conservatism isn't even a coherent ideology except as a series of contradictions and neurotic fears. Sure we can look for the Freudian diagnosis behind every political event, and we probably should. Ultimately though, this doesn't really say anything at all, and the greatest mistake people make onto Freud and Foucault (by projecting their own insecurities) is that their prescriptions of society come with moral judgments or political paths of actions. Nihilism is itself a value judgment, and saying that Kasuga is not authentic in his reading because he does it to hide from himself is a moral judgment purely on the part of the reader (who has his own neurotic reasons for this judgment).
The second question is similar to the first: why do we interact with the world? More specifically we can ask how does Kasuga interact with the two women in his life? In Saeki's case, he projects onto her a perfect being, everything that he is not. Once reality sets in, he loses all attraction to her. Nakamura is the opposite, a fundamentally terrifying being who takes all control away from him. In Freudian language, Saeki is the symbolic order or the big Other (the ideal that gives meaning to desire) while Nakamura is the barred Other or the castration complex (the fundamental fear of the loss of control and the incompleteness of desire). Basically, all human interactions, especially love and desire, are projections of the psyche. In Aku no Hana, all human interaction is selfish, and all interactions with consciousness are an attempt to fill the void between the ideal one about life has and the reality one fears. Not only does Kasuga project his own desires entirely onto other people, leaving them no room to exist as actual human beings, he even does this to himself. He projects how he wishes he was onto himself and when he is finally confronted with his own normalcy he cannot live anymore. Of course, between the ideal and the terrifying real there is no room for compromise, and Saeki and Nakamura are easily interchangeable. They switch roles easily, with Nakamura becoming the ideal of salvation and Saeki being the fear of reality (in this case, the loss of control of the sexual impulses and Kasuga's inability to control his own libido). As Lacan says of desire: “The object of man’s desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else. One object can become equivalent to another, owing to the effect produced by this intermediary, in making it possible for objects to be exchanged and compared." By "object desired by someone else", he means Saeki as the ideal of society. Kasuga is only attracted to Saeki because society has determined she is attractive, but the innovation of Lacan and the message of Aku no Hana is that there is nothing outside of this desire, no pure, natural desire or genuine understanding. Saeki simply becomes replaced by Nakamura, and the story has no examples of any alternative form of love even being possible.
In the end, these questions lead to one fundamental philosophy: we cannot speak about truth. We cannot speak about others, or even ourselves. Philosophy, love, aesthetics, meaning are all the result of projection. All we can interrogate are the functions of our ideas, anything outside of this is simply a value judgment imposed on a valueless world. Or to put it another way, a set or presupposed values also known as a religion. Aku no Hana tells us the primary function of philosophy is to interrogate ourselves as the author has done, and based on the misunderstandings of the manga and the reaction to the anime, few have had the courage to do so. Anyway, Aku no Hana is a truly great work, the kind that is nearly peerless among it's genre or among all genres. It is equal, and perhaps even greater, than the Baudelaire work it is inspired by, and belongs among the great works of philosophy and literature that capture the essence of our current age. I genuinely believe this.
what's so nice is that it's a product of our current age, and so the philosophical message is very approachable and understandable. i showed it to my teenage little sister and am using it as a launching point for all kinds of conversations about post-modernism and the purpose of school systems and what is expected of people in this era and all kinds of STUFF LIKE THAT haha
Scrree posted:Haha it was me, i was the one who posted aku no hana and i couldn't be happier with the results - thank you so much Baby Huey P. Newton!
what's so nice is that it's a product of our current age, and so the philosophical message is very approachable and understandable. i showed it to my teenage little sister and am using it as a launching point for all kinds of conversations about post-modernism and the purpose of school systems and what is expected of people in this era and all kinds of STUFF LIKE THAT haha
thx for the rec bro 
e: actually when I recommended it to a friend he was like "where'd you hear about it" and I was like "a friend...from the internet" and thats when I realized we on the rhizzone have a strange and amazing relationship with each other
babyhueypnewton posted:and thats when I realized
*eyes widen, mouth stammers* A-ahh n-no.. th-this cannot be *clutches fist & shoulders huge sword* Hm.
Scrree posted:Haha it was me, i was the one who posted aku no hana and i couldn't be happier with the results - thank you so much Baby Huey P. Newton!
what's so nice is that it's a product of our current age, and so the philosophical message is very approachable and understandable. i showed it to my teenage little sister and am using it as a launching point for all kinds of conversations about post-modernism and the purpose of school systems and what is expected of people in this era and all kinds of STUFF LIKE THAT haha
anime is for children news at 11
Ironicwarcriminal posted:anime is for children news at 11
What are you reading?
Winter in Pyongyang, a great work of our eternal leader Kim Il-Sung.
Tomorrow I will return to work to play guitar and trumpet in celebration of our nation's accomplishments in textile factories.
ilmdge posted:https://twitter.com/tankmonsters/status/321636829034053632https://twitter.com/tankmonsters/status/321636829034053632
https://twitter.com/tankmonsters/status/321636829034053632
it's a weird world where maggotmaster is the sanest person of his social group
elemennop posted:i'm not one for wddp story time, but i remember some "ukranian" guy on wddp shedding tears for the holdomor. i knew there was no way he was a real ukranian, so i kept on poking him. turns out the guy was 2nd generation, doesn't speak a word of any slavic tongue, and had never even visited the vicinity of eastern europe. at that point he called me an asshole because i implied that knowledge isn't genetically inherited.
during the 'orange revolution' i went to a panel talk at my university about it, which was involved in 'democratization projects' or whatever, and it was a good lesson or something. one lady (probably like 19 years old) talked about how she was flying into kiev every week after classes. another started rambling about how ukrainians have blood memory transmitted through cells or something that causes them to resist. i'm all for petty nationalisms but yeah.
is it good so far?
Ironicwarcriminal posted:is it good so far?
that looks kewl, maybe ill cue this up for after i read hollow land maybe
