This is what it’s referring to: https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

John Bagot Glubb, AKA Glubb Pasha or Abu Hunayk, was a British military officer who served as commanding general of Transjordan’s Arab Legion between 1939 and 1956.

I feel like my relationship to the holiday changes with each passing year. For most of my life I wasn’t giving it much thought: “there was a king……… he was a bad guy……… so we (who is “we”?) got rid of 'im.” — reactionary in celebrating Seppoland, but at least celebrating a monarchist constitution and then an anti-monarchist declaration of independence within two months of each other helped me become a republican faster.

For the past few years on the other hand, I’ve been thinking: the only reason I celebrate the Fourth of July is because I’m an American born in diaspora. So doesn’t the day really commemorate, for me, all the effort my mom went through to leave Seppoland and build a new life and new family in a new country, and all the flag-waving stuff about “constitutions” and “declarations of independence” is just reactionary set dressing we can forget about? Isn’t having family across the pond something much more worth commemorating than some evil empire?

But even with that change of framing, each passing Fourth of July grows lower and lower in energy, because regardless of what I call it, I’m ultimately still just rebranding Genocide, Slavery, Imperialism and Pedophilia Day, and for most of the people celebrating the day, that’s what it remains, a reactionary holiday. If I’m calling the Fourth of July a celebration of my own family and immigrant background, then that celebration still exists in the broader Context™ of Donald Trump making a big deal out of “250” as his regime continues to kill, maim and kidnap countless people; and Native nations trying to seize the opportunity to educate the willfully ignorant about their history and plight. Every year makes the Fourth of July seem more and more unsalvageable as a date for celebrating anything.

On the plus side, every birthday commemorates getting a year closer to death, and 250 is like 82 in empire years.

7½ hours until we watch PONIES: The Anthology 7 and The Owl House. Happy Motherfuck Amerikkka Day!

Another thing: it seems difficult to find out much about the Communist Party of Togo (PCT), who are apparently Hoxhaists. Their own website apparently went offline in either 2018 or 2019; their most recent publication on ICOR’s website was in 2023 and does not talk about their own country at all, but rather presents their analysis of an “inter-imperialist rivalry in Sudan”. Nevertheless, we can still infer from their belief that Russia and China are imperialist powers, that they do not see the UNIR’s diplomacy with these countries as in any way contradicting the party’s comprador character.

I, however, do not consider Russia and China to be imperialist countries, so this answer doesn’t satisfy me. Perhaps the ruling comprador party is increasingly seeing the writing on the wall, given not just growing popular dissent towards the party, but the broader fall of neocolonialism in West Africa; and this changing tide is causing the party to pivot at least a little more towards Russia and China in a bid to hold onto power — but I don’t know enough about the nature of the region nor the nature of the diplomacy nor the nature of the world in general to really say.

Aside from the Communist Party of Togo, I also found this auto-dubbed YouTube video by a Togolese political scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUBU0yM6fL0 — the video basically argues among other things that the opposition parties, such as those led by the Olympios post-Sylvanus, serve to legitimize the F. Gnassingbé regime in sort of a way, and that it’s time for a popular revolution in Togo outside of the electoral process to remove F. Gnassingbé from power for good.

Compare this to this quote from a 2018 publication by the Communist Party of Togo:

It is in this way that our Party, -PCT-, has engaged with enthusiasm, and every day gives us proof of the universal relevance of Marx and Marxism-Leninism. Thus, when, following the popular insurrectionary movement that ignited our country in 1990-1991, the Togolese liberal bourgeoisie embarked on the path of conciliation and negotiations with autocratic power by proclaiming that the solution for democracy was the holding of a “sovereign national conference” followed by the formation of a “Transitional Government”, then the elaboration of a “democratic” constitution, and they suggested that the solution for democracy would be accompanied by the formation of a “Transitional Government”, followed by the elaboration of a “democratic” constitution, and all this without touching the authority, it was the teachings of Marx and Lenin that guided our Party, enabled it to see clearly in this situation, to avoid the quagmire of the conciliatory path and to propose the only path that met the interests of democracy and the people, that of organization and struggle.

(Machine translation corrected by myself)

Which makes it seem like the PCT would agree at least to some extent with the analysis provided by TV TOGO-POLITICS, even though TV TOGO-POLITICS doesn’t seem to be a communist by any means.

I’m afraid I have no good answers: getting other people to answer that sort of thing, or at least lead me towards the answers, is why I made this thread.

By my own understanding, Togo and the AES seems like a case of interdependence: the AES countries need Togo for sea access; Togo needs the AES countries for port traffic. Togo certainly seems like the dominant force in this contradiction, but this doesn’t mean that the AES cannot assert its own interests against Togo in turn. How or when the AES might do so, and if the AES is doing so right now, is completely beyond me; but a thought that came to me when learning about Togo’s recent diplomacy with Russia and China is whether this might be related to pressure from the AES. But I am already speaking more than my shallow investigation gives me the right to.

Edit: It’s been four hours and this comment has received no likes or replies. This may be because this comment is buried in a 20 hour old thread, or it may be because the joke just bombed. Either way I’m editing this comment to put the joke in a spoiler.

Be more based if they just fucking kicked the Israeli diplomat out

Be most based if they just fucking kicked the Israeli diplomat in the nuts

They’re both good in their own ways, but I’m gonna have to go with the consensus and say Blue Monday.

15 minutes to Ellos Eatnu and Tokyo Magic Star!

1 hour and 15 minutes to Ellos Eatnu and the Tokyo Magic Star finale!

Radical Ice Lamb, a lamb made of ice that’s totally cool

7 hours and 15 minutes to Ellos Eatnu, a movie about the Alta dam protests, which were a paradigm shift for Indigenous rights in Norway. After that, the Tokyo Magic Star finale!

Yeah, that’s how it is for me too.

I’ve been coming to believe through threads like these that the leading ideology of Hexbear is “Marxism-Leninism-Gobshitism”: people with underdeveloped leftist ideas come to Hexbear; eventually become reliant on Hexbear for their social needs; and what ends up happening because of this arrangement is that “leftism” here just becomes a series of memes that people endlessly quote at each other as a signifier of group belonging, or “kulture” as I call it. I wonder if some of the people here have subconsciously convinced themselves that by merely being on Hexbear, they’re developing their understanding of the world, as if developing one’s knowledge through this site doesn’t require active will, effort, and struggle, just as developing one’s knowledge through any other means.

So, many people here make no effort at deeper understanding: trying to have the correct reaction to a headline at a glance alone, is merely a game of call and response to see who belongs here the most.

Don’t make him a mod, I want to see the Angela Anaconda threads, it’s the only way for me to feel alive again!

On Peertube, yes! I’ll post at least three versions of the cartoon, in fact:

• A regular version with closed captions;
• A version with audio description for the blind and visually impaired; and
• A version where the voice tracks are disabled and most of the on-screen text is removed, so that anybody who so desires can dub the cartoon into their own language.

I have done exactly 3½ minutes of animation over the course of the past 24 days. It’s probably the most I’ve drawn since I was a little kid, and I’ve been having a blast with it. I don’t want to oversell the quality of the animation — it is very amateurish, there’s a lot of limited and reused animation, that’s part of the point — but the animation I’ve done still represents maybe on average 2 or 3 hours of work each night, so about 60 hours of work in total (probably well over 100 hours of work when counting the work that went into the prescoring, opening and end credits, and storyboarding).

I’m hoping to have about 9 minutes of animation done by July 15, but at this rate it’s looking more likely that I’ll only get about 5 or 6 minutes done, and I’ll leave the rest as storyboards. But we’ll see.

I suspect you meant to say on Blorptube and link to blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine

Nostalgic in any case, I remember when you showed these movies in like December of '24. They were a good time.

It’s a tough question, really. Like, “love the people, hate the government” is just a reskin of “love the sinner, hate the sin” that liberals employ to smugly and thinly veil their Sinophobia etc, but there is still some truth to it, right? The “Samsung Republic”, for instance, is a reactionary hellhole because the peninsula is abounding in revolutionary potential that the bourgeois powers-that-be must continually suppress. Everywhere on Earth, there are people fighting for a better future, and every society where the people in general have fully internalized their own oppression and exploitation and reproduce it dutifully, is a society where the people in general can at any point become dignified.

For some countries, becoming dignified would mean entirely shedding the colonial identities built to obscure the true nature of bourgeois dictatorship, and obscure the construction of segregated spaces and oppressed masses of marginalized “living dead”; many people say that countries in this category are not “real countries”. Seppoland/USA, Canada, Australia, the Zionist entity etc.

For other countries, becoming dignified would mean understanding that the only reason they’ve been artificially kept separate from a larger neighbor has been to serve as a tax haven or as a strategic military outpost near a maritime chokepoint or socialist power, and again shedding their artificial identities and merging with their larger neighbor; many people say that countries in this category are also not “real countries”. Monaco, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Taiwan, the Samsung Republic etc.

But excluding these two groups, what “real countries” remain, and do any of them really deserve to be called the worst?

You can look at every country on Earth through at least two perspectives like this. Germany, for instance, is a country full of racist Hitlerites extracting wealth from the Global South and Eastern Europe. It’s also a country full of people that the racist Hitlerites are racist Hitlerites towards. It’s also the birthplace of Karl Marx, and half of Germany was once the German Democratic Republic, a country which is now an effective colony of West Germany — “robbed blind” by the metropole in a manner easily obscured by the lines on a world map and the flags on Germany’s flagpoles. The racist and extractive part of Germany is definitely up there among the “worst countries”; the communists, the marginalized people, the people who remember the good old days of the GDR, I wouldn’t say that they’re among the “worst countries”.

“German” is at the end of the day not much less of an arbitrary identity as, say, Togolese, anyways. The “German” nation had to be constructed through the imposition of a centralized identity, language, culture, symbols, and infrastructure on disparate regional groups of people.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, really. I guess I recognize that this thread is just for fun, but I still want us to remain aware of how countries are just social constructs or something.