Sunday, July 27, 2025 →
“Left Wing” Zionism: How to Sell an Ethnostate by overzealots: It bothers me that this commentator repeats multiple times that states have to justify themselves to exist. States don’t need to take on a specific form to be legitimate. If their existence was inherently legitimate when possessing specific attributes, they wouldn’t need to employ as much force to ensure the continuity of their existence.
States don’t have to justify their existence because they hold the power to enforce their own existence. People take the amount of violence that states are ready to employ to ensure their existence for granted. States are inherently violent, and were they not, they wouldn’t be able to exist.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: States can’t have rights, period. People have rights, but that’s people. Rights only matter when an entity exists that has the power to violate or revoke them, and for states there is no higher entity than they themselves.
Thursday, February 20, 2025 →
how the Asian “Model Minority” perpetuates Anti-Blackness by OlivSUNia: I’m not Asian as per white supremacist thought, but I do relate to most of the struggles outlined in the video. I pass judging by my looks so I needed to pass when I open my mouth, too. My speech needs to sound the way I look (white Austrian) and to earn my place in society once my name is brought into consciousness, I needed to excel at everything I do.
I needed to be better than the Austrian born children, especially those who are second or third generation Austrians/immigrants. This was never said out loud, but somehow I knew I needed to do that. The fact that Syrians experienced racism was out of the question (because they do), but because I look the way I do, the expectation was that I’d be different.
I always get the comment that “[I] don’t look Syrian” right after answering the question about my origin after stating my name. It’s “exotic” and unlike how people who look like me are usually called (because my name doesn’t sound Eastern European either), so people want to know where I’m from. They say it as if it’s a compliment.
Because of my name, I have to outperform others in order to be considered for jobs, at least that’s the feeling I get from just existing here.
Sunday, February 2, 2025 →
the desire to be sad: “tragically beautiful” art & romanticizing mental illness by OlivSUNia: In this video, Olivia cites Nietzsche’s description of the earliest forms of punishments: breach of contracts in which someone inflicts harm on another in equal measure to the harm inflicted on them. He then lists various forms of torture that were performed mostly for the pleasure of the perpetrator and sometimes as a recreational activity. She argues alongside Nietzsche as her reference that violence and cruelty are impulses inherent to human nature that have been pushed aside to make possible – and as we entered – “civilized society.”
Her videos are usually very Eurocentric and view the world from a Western perspective that either negates alternative views as the exception, not the rule, and make the European/White American experience out to be the rule, not the exception it is. She totally glances over indigenous societies in the Americas who made do without any of that class warfare perpetrated by rich Europeans against poor Europeans and then by Europeans against indigenous peoples.
This, however, still doesn’t mean that this form of violence is inherent to any people. Rather it is the product of rigid social hierarchies that inflict violence in a self-perpetuating cycle in which the victims become the perpetrators themselves. This is not something Olivia is incapable of understanding since she pointed out the systemic violence found in European societies that inflict violence on its victims in every area imaginable in her video about insignificance in which she uses the example of sleeping on public transport as something a European wouldn’t know to miss because it’s so far beyond their imagination.
In a society in which feeling endangered is the modus operandi, it is natural to assume the worst of everyone else and thus be in the defensive or, worse, be in preventive offensive mode. In this society littered with pain everywhere you look, in which you have no control over it either, you seek ways in which to inflict pain on yourself that you control so that you at least maintain the illusion of being in control. In this sense, Nietzsche’s “internalizing of man” whereby the self is attacked makes sense: it’s a preventive offensive. You attack yourself before anything attacks you so that you are accustomed at your own pace in ways that you control. This most likely sounds crazy to do, but I assure you no one is doing this consciously. It’s a simplistic, reactionary solution to a wider societal problem.
This is not to meant to disagree with her point. I simply disagree with where she spots the origin of this urge to hurt. It’s not something inherent to humans, otherwise every single culture would exhibit these tendencies which it doesn’t. It’s important to analyze the social order in cultures that do exhibit these tendencies and compare them with cultures who don’t. In that case, I assume it would be easy to spot that violence committed against others will always somehow bite one back.
In a thread about the possibility of humans choosing to live under state rule, HeavenlyPossum discusses many instances of colonial settlers choosing to stay as “hostages” in indigenous communities after experiencing life in a society based on a gift economy and no social hierarchy. They felt immensely freer despite technically being held hostage by those indigenous tribes. These early settlers recognized the inherent violence plastered everywhere one looks in colonial societies that is often not directly perpetrated against them, but still harms them in one way or another. So as long as they had the choice, they picked being free over being eternally miserable for no good reason.
With that in mind, one can only wonder why anyone would choose to feel pain that way, unless the infliction of pain is about nothing more than having control over it. It just so happens that Olivia (indirectly quoting Nietzsche) reaches the same conclusion outlined above but from a different point of view, namely that of classist perceptions of good and bad, where good is aristocratic and bad is the common people from the aristocracy’s perspective whereas the common people view it exactly in the inverse. Using that logic, a common person may desire pain so as to be perceived as good by their equals. As a result, it is this desire to be perceived good and the systemic violence in colonial societies that drive humans to crave pain.
On a different note and going back to the video’s main topic which is sad art, the desire and craving for it don’t exist in a vacuum: sad art is praised for being deep, intellectual, and authentic, whereas happy art is considered shallow, performative, and meaningless. This bases itself on the “troubled artist” trope which makes being mentally ill a requirement for creativity.
I personally believe that the connection between intelligence and creativity with depression and being troubled is another product of our fucked up modern societies. Knowing more shouldn’t make one feel sad, but the reality is different when you know there is a scientific solution to a catastrophic problem that systemic failures (or successes depending on how you view these systems) bar from being solved – like climate change for example. So naturally, someone with that knowledge and awareness might lose seeing any point in life, but still keep on chugging along and producing more art.
Saturday, February 1, 2025 →
finding purpose in our insignificant existence by OlivSUNia: The running example in this video is of riding a Japanese bus as a foreigner. Olivia discusses all of the tiny subtleties that, as a foreigner, one would notice, wonder what they mean, and then be faced with two options: either they research it or ignore it. If they go about researching the tiny details, they may have to get exposed to a different culture and thus begin seeing things differently than they did before.
They may notice that people sleep on the bus and then wonder why and why this isn’t the case in their home countries. They may realize that a ton of information and history that have created a common cultural experience – ranging from poverty to various forms of institutional violence – is condensed to “don’t, it’s dangerous!” Thus, less people sleep on public transport where they come from.
If they hadn’t been exposed to this different culture, they would have never thought about the possibility of sleeping in public and never even missed the opportunity to do so. They had been conditioned to a society in which they were simply not safe and so since they didn’t know otherwise, they couldn’t even begin to conceptualize an alternative.
And so based on this simple detail to which we assign value or meaning, our perspective shifts a little bit, just enough for us to see things for the first time that have always been there, but we just took for granted.