I gotta read some Paine, great quote. I keep having conversations about how society changes today, hopefully it isn't just a local phenomenon
Well it doesn't help that the ideas available to commandeer often already have nationalistic, hetero/cis, white, legalist, idealist views on how things work. We also have to account for hegemony, that these views are being promoted by major media corpos, people with complaints about it are let go and replaced with Bari Weiss. It isn't just ideas in the abstract, it is material and practical. Grifters push these ideas but gradual changes in peoples lived experiences validate these new ideas. Not saying the ideas are true, but that peoples conditions are illusory as well.
Like just because it is a grift doesn't mean the conditions for it aren't ripe. Ideas can be structural, like language.
Not trying to correct a view, just elaborate a bit
Did you see I'm a Virgo?
Yeah. I had an experience I think about all the time. Imma try to make it as short as possible.
This was years ago, maybe ~2010, and people were not as attuned to nazi stuff, and far right views were still pretty fringe. People were a bit less polarized and def less politicized.
I went to visit my friend and meet her new boyfriend. He dressed edgy, just her type. We hung out, nice guy. I'm def the type to some weed and get in long convos about philosophy, history, religion. And that's what we did.
He asked if I liked jazz and I told him I listened to a lot of Mingus, Coleman, Sun Ra, Coletrane. He asked if I'd ever listened to Mahavishnu Orchestra, I said I hadnt, and he put on Birds of Fire, which is a very good 70s rock/jazz fusion album.
Then he started telling me about the ancient Christian gnostics. He said they believed that there was an evil creator god that made the material world that did not realize he was born from another greater, a source. Jesus was the son of the actual "source" and this other, creator god, believed that he was the real god, called the Demiurge. This story stuck with me.
About a year later, my friend broke up with him because she found out he was an actual Nazi. My friend is a queer feminist, had no idea, until one of his old friends came over to their house and started talking about liebenstraum, race science, blood and soil, 14 words type shit. The story stuck with me still.
Years later, after learning a lot more about history, ancient religions, fascism, damn near everything -- I finally stumbled on some more context to his story: the gnostics hated the Hebrews. The Demiurge and the ancient man-faced- snake-god Glycon are very closely related, and the myth of the Demiurge was a way of the Gnostics discrediting the Hebrew god YHWH. Since the gnostics rejected the material world, they of course rejected the god that had created it in myth.
So that's the story of how a Nazi tried to prime me for antisemitism by tricking me into listening to white jazz and talking to me about ancient creation myths.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
provide context with a bias
This is very well put. Is this your own formulation or where did you pick it up?
My boss is getting annoying with this shit.
I'm stuck on x issue
Have you tried putting x into ai?
Yes I've been doing that for two days.
Really? Huh. It should work.
K well no it doesn't.
Just copy the error and put it into Claude
Yeah...I've been...doing that.
It should just give you the solution
The common denominator of all USAmerican leftists
He will be in office in 2028 though
He had more than a point
I legit haven't seen it since it came out, I just remember it being weird, but I was also very young. It holds up?
The other day a mod on Hexbear told me that "now is the time for monsters" referred to "what we must become during the revolution." I was like no, its about old people
300+ hours in Nightreign, prob 200+ on one character: Executor. Generally, the worst character in the game. Low HP, low damage resistance, low damage except for status procs. If you go in unga bunga you will die, you will suck. Has a special ability called suncatcher that looks very flashy but itself does almost little damage.
So let's focus on his most important feature, arguably the most important gameplay mechanic in any soulsborne:
looks very flashy
Suncatcher is basically Sekiro playstyle. He has a cursed sword that can deflect all damage, with a satisfying clang and bright sparks, if timed near-perfectly. After 5 deflections, it lights up, and lets you do a golden sweep attack. Deflecting with Suncatcher builds up some stance damage, but the weapon itself did minimal damage on its own, even the flashy golden sweep.
His ultimate was a free heal that does a little damage but ever dark bosses and Deep of Night games would kill you easily despite being a giant horned beast. His ult has some utility, like healing other players when roaring with a certain relic. Synergies were found when using the seppuku skill with his special ability, but sacrificing a huge chunk of your health pool for a brief damage buff took a lot of situational awareness to make sure I didn't get ganked mid-buff, and it still happened frequently.
A lot of players use his high Arcane stat to proc statuses but dont really even use suncatcher. I myself became obsessed with it. Eventually I developed a "stance/status/tank" playstyle: after practicing with suncatcher for a long time I got pretty good at deflecting enemy attacks, and could hold off most bosses by myself while teammates did damage, or if one team member needed to go revive another. I learned that Executor's charge attacks are best after ive procced status a couple times. I could carry teams through the base bosses as long as both players weren't completely worthless.
But ultimately, the character had a high skill floor in order to become like a medium value character. It could be argued that his sekiro-deflect is too powerful, it has a generous "perfect" window, more than we got from Sekiro, but other characters were straight easy-mode. Raider has great damage resistance, a huge health pool, incredible DPS, and the ability to nullify attacks with his special poise-counter.
But last week, they buffed Executor. They buffed suncatcher immensely. It does more stance damage, it does significantly more damage, blocking uses less stamina, can't be stance broken with perfect deflects, and many atack up relics now apply to suncatcher. This character gained immense value. I was absolutely stuck in the new Deep of Night hard mode, I struggled to make any progress in depth 2, and while ive only played a single DoN match since the buff, we easily cleared it.
With a few relics, suncatcher can be made to be significantly stronger than even a legendary Katana, available at level 1. His HP and damage negation are still low, but he can't be stance broken on perfect deflects anymore, making him much more reliable and dependent on skillful deflecting rather than the enemy's attack spam.
I have become so powerful, it is intoxicating. Absolute incredible week for Executor mains
Part of a response I received in a thread on .ml
I don't think Gramsci ever wrote about false consciousness, and what you're describing is closer to the German Ideology than Gramsci's theory of hegemony.
Like sorry if this is way out of whack but I think its like if someone wanted to understand Lenin's formulation of imperialism and then I explained Chapter 15 of Capital v1. Like the theory is in there, but understanding it requires seeing how Marx's "capital has x tendency" relates to specific, verifiable evidence.
If youre interested I will find the proper essays in Gramsci to post along side here, I just gotta dig in my book a little bit!