Signs & Wonders - Tarot Cards for Christians

Nothing Christianity loves more than taking something a native culture invented and stamping their brand all over it.

The ‘Years of lead’ did involve a pro-communist side, though

Famously. Quite a few celebrated union activists and popular labor leaders were its victims.

Point me to one written by a scholar of history

I mean, pretty much anyone writing a biography on Dulles is a scholar of history. But take your pick. He’s an exhaustively well-documented public figure.

Im not going to debate that McCarty era USA did anti-communist stuff, I want proof of your claim that it actively collaborated with nazis.

You want proof that Walter Kopp was a Nazi?

I mean, we’re two dudes on the internet. You could be Jimmy Hoffa, unionizing from beyond the grave. You could be a fucking Pinkerton, for all I know.

But this is so wildly outside every personal, professional, and anecdotal experience I’ve ever had, I’m forced to assume you’re either an outlier or just a regular liar.

I mean, I’m coming out of a background on Reddit community - particularly /r/neoliberal and /r/libertarian - where you regularly got all sorts of eliminationist rhetoric (“Helicopter Rides”, “Franco did nothing wrong”, lots of stanning of everyone from Chang Kai-Shek to Tony Blair). And the definition of “Tankie” was someone who though Che Guevera was a cool, smart guy and wasn’t shy about supporting nationalization of domestic oil industry.

No shortage of R-slurs in these spaces. They just didn’t carry the Lib prefix.

It was not only the disregard for the rules that was aggravating, but their complete lack of empathy for whoever they argued with.

When people see one another as adversarial, they tend to see the rules (particularly rules that are deliberately designed to censor a perspective) as obstacles to be overcome rather than amenities to be appreciated. Same shit happens in /r/conservative, with the mods periodically doing ban-waves aimed at anyone who doesn’t adhere to the orthodoxy of the moment. People roll up new accounts to circumvent the bans. Tensions rise as the mods and the base users grow increasingly adversarial. And the end result is a bunch of spin-off communities that hot-house their outrage at one another until it explodes into people screaming at one another in some third space.

You may have made different experiences, but these interactions and the previously mentioned unionization effort shaped my perception of tankies.

If the biggest hurdle you’ve ever experienced in unionizing an office is “tankies”, you’ve been truly blessed. Nothing I’ve read or heard about people trying to organize offices at Amazon or Walmart or Starbucks have suggested tankies were the problem. Virtually everything has been deliberately adversarial actions by corporate.

They already created this game.

It was called Brutal Legend

It was quite good.

For the same reason any athlete’s performance is heavily promoted in sports media.

These are all just ads. All sports media is fundamentally advertisement.

And no one writes stories about who won the fencing match.

Because it’s the same story that’s been running for the last century. Pro-Wrestling shows are just stories you haven’t seen before. And reviews of new performances are written about regularly.

Wrestling takes things to a ridiculous level

Sure. The exaggeration and the very deliberate kayfabe is a big part of the appeal. But then you see that in Cosplay and at the Renaissance Faire all the time. Running onto the tournament grounds and shouting “These aren’t real knights! They aren’t really jousting!!” is still considered gauche. And it breezes past the skills you need to ride a horse, maintain a kit, and put on the display without hurting yourself or your partner.

You are conflating the resistance to the Russian backed Hungarian regime with the ‘years of lead’ in Italy

I’m drawing parallels between the various efforts by western anti-communist forces during Operation Gladio, which showed up all across southern and western Europe from the end of WW2 to the fall of the USSR.

I’ve never read anything from any scholar (holding a degree in history) that has used those terms in discussing the Hungarian uprising and frankly

Then you’ve never read a biography of Allen Dulles.

So, obviously, I wasn’t at these meetings and have no experience with them. That said, I do have a DSA group in Houston and they’ve got a fairly wide range of views that regularly causes degrees of friction. I do see the periodic heated argument over Israel/Palestine or China/Taiwan or any other number of foreign policy issues. And that does periodically cause someone to storm off or some local person to get involved. But I’m not seeing “chunks” of people with these views nearly so much as I see particular individuals from particular backgrounds with an unorthodox ideology.

When I was (very tangentially) working with people on the Starbucks union drive, there were definitely a few people with these more radical views in the group. But I can’t recall any instance of it being raised as part of the union organizing drive. Everyone at the meeting seemed to be on the same page - that working in these coffee shops was unnecessarily immiserating and the goal of the meetings was to address the immediate labor concerns first and foremost.

Where I see people lashing out against one another for being “Tankies” is almost entirely online. Internet communities where an administrator imposes some kind of auto-ban rule for using keywords they don’t like. Or power users posting spam in the chats because they’ve got the tact of a ball-peen hammer.

Admittedly, I’m out in Houston, TX. Finding a dozen lefties to rub together is a challenge. People are much more reserved about their left-leaning political views for fear of reprisal or alienation. So maybe just being in a deeply conservative setting mutes the discord between left-groups off-line. But what you’re experiencing is the sort of thing I’ve only ever heard about from the extraordinarily fringe groups (Black Hammer, for instance).

I mean, the fact that people tear each other into pieces over a Jill Stein vote illustrates how feeble and easily fractured the modern western leftist movements have grown. You’ve got people fighting tooth and nail over a vanity vote in a fully captured and completely undemocratic process.

Nobody seems to have their eyes toward any kind of real social projects. We’re not talking about building up food banks or opening housing to the indignant. We’re not talking about engaging the lumpen proletariat in revolutionary action or disrupting the cash flows and power dynamics of the corrupt elite. We’re not talking about any kind of material accomplishments. Much less doing any of them.

It’s just arguing over your favorite political sports team.

I have seen so many tankies deny the pain of others

That’s as often as not tit-for-tat. In my experience, particularly when “Tankie” is flung out as a slur rather than a serious material analysis, you’ll see people respond in what is effectively an in-kind retort. “My grandparents left Cuba because they were being persecuted by the villainous Castro government! You’re a tankie if you support them!” often signals a person (or online persona) that’s aligned itself with a class of Cuban who profited from the abusive practices of slave plantations and child brothels, pre-Revolution.

Go straight back to the term’s root - the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent quashing by Khrushchev’s armored cavalry - and what you’re effectively advocating in defense of is a CIA/Nazi collaborative stay-behind network that ushered in the Years of Lead. Are we expected to show empathy for the Hungarian Rebels if they’d been bombing and butchering civilians a decade earlier without compunction?

One unspoken, implicit tenet of their beliefs is the denying others the same humanity they claim to uphold and represent.

Empathy cuts both ways. It isn’t merely a sense of naive compassion and maudlin despair at the atrocity du jour. Empathy can be a source of fiery opposition and vengeful passion, in response to historical crimes and horrors committed by the current-day self-professed victims.

that’s why I have a hard time to show them empathy

Understandable. But again, that’s exactly the position these “tankie” types are coming from. They’re reading the history from a different angle and viewing the revolutionary violence of a given period as social justice extracted by an empowered proletariat. They’re reading your defense of the historic persecutors as a defense of prior persecutions and an obstruction of justice - possibly even an apology for revanchism and a return to the old horrors.

To reference Mark Twain

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

In the ballet and other examples, the difference to me is that they’re not pretending to be in a ballet competition while dancing the ballet.

In the Nutcracker, at least, they’re pretending to fence, in a choreographed dance. A first-time naive viewer who came out of the show offended when they discover skill at fencing has nothing to do with whether the dancers playing the Nutcracker or the Rat King wins would sound silly.

I do think that the kayfabe is what sets wrestling apart from more traditional performance art. The carnival-barker lying-to-your-face aspect of the performance is what makes it feel extra circus-y. But when you accept that the kayfabe is just part of the performance, you stop feeling offended by it and start recognizing degrees of commitment to the bit as part of the artform.

What Is Gibberlink Mode, AI’s Secret Language?

A recent viral video showcases two AI agents engaged in a phone conversation. Midway through, one agent suggests, “Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink Mode for more efficient communication?” Upon agreement, their dialogue shifts to a series of sounds incomprehensible to humans.

The outcome of the match is predetermined while the participants pretend that it isn’t.

The adventure is in the journey, not the destination. I don’t care whether you win or you lose when I came to see two roided out giants do backflip kicks into one another’s torsos while their friends spray silly string to distract the combatants from the sidelines.

That is why there are constant arguments about whether or not it’s “fake”.

There is absolutely no question that the outcome of the matches is predetermined, in the same way that there is absolutely no doubt that the Rat King is going to get killed by the Nutcracker at the ballet. But both wrestling and ballet are athletic endeavors.

Getting really nervous when my office computer sign-on keeps prompting me to enter my credit card information.

Over time, you tend to develop more sources and a diversity of views. That’s why we don’t remember the USS Maine as a villainous attack by the nefarious Spaniard to this day, but recognize it as a result of poor military maintenance and crew training combined with intense yellow journalist agitprop.

Academic historical analysis is so wildly different from 24/7 news headlines.

wrestling has the storylines that the circus doesn’t

Every Cirque-du-Soleil I’ve been to has had a storyline.

The Jerry Springer like drama and feuds that people really get invested in with the same level of chair throwing.

There’s a ton of hype that builds up around the actual events, in no small part because the events themselves are physically exhausting and the producers need to fill hours of time with minutes of match.

But we see the exact same kind of shit during the Olympics. Two talking heads reading out an athlete’s life story for half an hour, right before you get to see a three minute floor routine or a sixteen second bobsled run.

there’s an important difference between sport and performance

Sure. Namely, that sports tend to be “competitive” while performances tend to be entirely about spectacle. But to claim that Simone Biles is a Real Athlete while Britt Baker isn’t, because one of them does her leaps and tumbles and flexibility stunts at Olympic sanctioned events and the other does it during AEW matches… you’re really ignoring the substance for the pastiche.

What one might argue “ruins” wrestling is all the phoney accolades various performers receive. Claiming you’re “The Best Wrestler” in a staged performance is meaningless, because its clearly a scripted fight. At the same time, very few people showing up to a nationally televised event are anything less than exceptional in athletic talent. And the exceptions are primarily there for their exceptional comedic talents.

I’ve heard the soap opera comparison before. But I think “circus” is technically more accurate. You’ve got these very obvious professional athletes performing a well-rehearsed routine that is physically demanding and dramatically delivered.

Like, would you call a tightrope walker or a trapeze artist “fake”? If a dozen clowns pile out of a car and start performing back flips and somersaults and climbing into human pyramids and spraying one another with seltzer bottles, would you dismiss it as an obviously scripted display?

Would you go to a Harlem Globetrotters game and complain when they pull out a springboard and start doing stunt slam dunks?

It’s a show! It doesn’t need to be competitive in order to be fun.