You’re asking what our thoughts are on the high fantasy works that defined high fantasy? You’ll need to be a little more specific 😂
My thought on Andy Serkins’ reading is that it is the best audiobook ever made in the history of audiobooks. Regardless of whether one even likes the books, it’s still arguably the best reading of a work.
Again, fantasy.
Who calculated the GPD of a command-driven, non-capitalist state, and how did they do it? It’s incomparable using such a metric: apples & oranges.
And regardless, GDP is a garbage metric. All sorts of unproductive income is included, things that are not part of the real economy.
Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover
Today’s national income and GDP accounting formats are compiled in keeping with this anticlassical reaction depicting the FIRE [Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate] sector and its allied rent-seeking sectors as an addition to national income, not a subtrahend. Interest, rents, and monopoly prices all are counted as earnings—as if all income is earned as intrinsic parts of industrial capitalism, not predatory extraction as overhead property and financial claims.
When the socialist states privatized what had been public—which was nearly everything—and sold them at fire sale prices to the neocolonial capitalists of the imperial core, that would have been included in the GPD as well. What did that get them but a new class of local oligarchs? Just bonkers.
If you compare the GDP of suddenly collapsed, suddenly capitalist states—that were being actively pillaged by the Global North—to their GDP 30 years later, of course line go up. But that’s a very different comparison to their situations pre-collapse.
If there are communists who think communism can be attained in our lifetimes, I don’t know them. We’re not going to sell people a fantasy, some overnight utopia. Some places are now socialist, and more may become so in our lifetimes. But, as socialist states themselves will tell you, communism has not yet been attained anywhere.
And all Eastern European countries experience explosive growth post communism?
You live in a world of pure fantasy.
China is not “extremely” capitalist; its capitalism is intentionally limited. To paraphrase Grover Norquist, the Chinese government keeps capitalism to the size where it can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. It may appear massive & dominant to you, because 1) you see almost nothing but products by Chinese capitalist companies and 2) you’re not accounting for the full scope and size of China’s population and their production and consumption.
😂 You know who defines the metrics for democracy indexes? Liberals who wouldn’t know democracy if it bit them in the ass. People who believe in bourgeois democracy.
Economist Intelligence Unit is by venerable rag of the bourgeoisie, The Economist. Karl Marx himself called it, “the tribune of the aristocracy of finance.”
The US score is 7.8, even though it is not a democracy and never was.
Most in China Call Their Nation A Democracy, Most in U.S. Say America Isn't
The 10k can pay dividends in PR alone, and will attract more developers to apply for job openings.
This isn’t Reddit. You’re not going to get 1,000 updoots, or even 100. There only about twenty Lemmy users, each with about three alt accounts.
The discussion is about why progress has gone backwards on societal acceptance.
A primary reason that progress is going backwards in many capitalist states is because fascism is on the rise in those states.
Why is fascism on the rise? Is it a meme that just randomly started spreading throughout the imperial core, for no particular reason? No, there is a material basis for it: it is because capitalism is in decay in those states. And fascism doesn’t simply run on vibes: fascist movements are funded by the wealthy, by billionaire oligarchs like Elon Musk and by people who own car dealerships & restaurant franchises. Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs
Specifically in the US, there is also the ratchet effect, which has been causing politics on the whole to lurch ever more rightward.
And it doesn’t take a Marxist to see what’s going on. Chris Hedges is a liberal who saw it coming 14 years ago in Death of the Liberal Class, long before Trump entered politics.
In any case your answer to the question was, “good intentioned politicians making deals with homophobic devils so to speak in order to save other people.” I don’t think that is a very good answer at all.
There is no “which” or “whom”.
So there is a disembodied conversation going on between two non-entities, or groups of non-entities?
That’s implied in the main inquiry.
What is implied in what inquiry?
I’ve actually run into you before, in another post, and you didn’t make sense that time, either.
The irony of who telling which LGBT people and subsequently going to “homophobic” states and saying the same thing to whom?
If someone understands what you’re trying to say, perhaps they can translate for me.
I’ve read all of those (yes, even The Silmarillion). They’re the only high fantasy works I’ve read, so I’m not in a position to compare it to others in the genre. I’m not interested in the genre in general, but AFAIK these are unique in terms of the depth and breadth of world building that he sets them in. ~20,000 years of astoundingly detailed history of an area the size of Europe, a sumptuous attention to languages, and a whole cosmology laid out from the beginning of time.
The Silmarillion is for masochists only. I only read it because I was trapped somewhere once with no internet and nothing to do for a long time. A lot of it reads like the Old Testament (I think: hell if I’m ever going to pore through the Bible).
The work is racist and reactionary; divine rights of kings and such. From an ML-perspective it’s hot garbage. But whatever, it’s not like it’ll give you liberal cooties.