Kaputnik [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • COTW: Just saw the Chilean movie Los Colonos (The Settlers) last night. It was really good if disturbing western about the Selk’nam genocide in Tierra del Fuego during the settlement of Patagonia. If you’re a fan of old westerns like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly I would definitely recommend the movie it has beautiful cinematography and soundtrack and really feels like it was made in a classic Revisionist Western style. I will give a CW that the movie is far more brutal than I expected it to be going in, so CW for SV/SA, depictions of genocide, child abuse/murder, and racism.

    The movie really depicted how the genocide in Tierra del Fuego was carried out directly by capitalist interests like Jose Menendez in order to clear the land for agriculture and development. In a way that I think could be expanded to analyze the United States western frontier. The genocide of the Selk’nam people resulted in the population of the people declining from about 4000 in the mid 1800s to just 100 in the early 1900s. It also has a really interesting analysis of how different national attitudes affected colonization in the Americas. The main characters are a Mestizo worker, a British veteran of the Boer war, and an American settler from Texas, these three are tasked with carrying out part of the genocide. I think the attitudes of these different characters is meant as a representation of their “national character”, the British character being pompous and detached in his brutality, the American being paranoid and violent in his fear of the ever expanding frontier, and later we see the idea of a “post-colonial” nationalist who wants to forget the horrors of colonization in order to build a nation. Definitely recommend the movie.




  • In the spirit of the country of the week discussion, I’ll talk a bit about Italian Libya.

    Generally when people think about Italian colonialism in Africa they think about the Italian-Ethiopian Wars and the occupation of Ethiopia, but the Italian occupation of Libya lasted much longer, starting in 1911 after Italy defeated the Ottoman Empire and gained control over the area. Something I hear often in revisionist history is that a defining feature of Fascism is not the ethnic cleansing of an out group because Italy wasn’t involved in the Holocaust until Germany pushed it. Which obviously is bullshit on its own, but it completely ignores Italy’s colonial crimes because those don’t count according to liberals.

    Under the fascist government, Italy pursued mass scale ethnic cleansing in Libya. This including expelling over 100,000 people in Cyrenaica from their lands to move in Italian settlers and moving these displaced Libyan people into concentration camps between 1930 and 1931, notably this happened before beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Out of the 100,000 Libyans moved to concentration camps, 40,000 of them would be dead by 1933. The Italian government would also undertake large pacification campaigns against the Indigenous Libyan population, one of these included the mass killing of civilians in the Cyrenaica province that led to the deaths of over one quarter of the entire population.

    Overall this is a similar story to many colonial ventures in Africa but one that is rarely talked about. After WW2 the colony would be passed to British and French administration and these crimes would never be addressed. Most likely because addressing these crimes would also implicate the British and French governments genocides in their own occupations of Africa.






  • I love sekiro because it doesn’t work like other souls games. You have to approach every boss like a puzzle, you learn their patterns and know when you see their hand go left that you’ll need to parry 3 times and then attack twice. I get why that’s not everyone’s thing but I think it’s so fun. Every boss can be approached that way basically except for;

    spoiler

    Demon of hatred, fuck that guy

    If you’re having trouble with a specific boss I’d recommend looking up video guides on YouTube where they can slow down the animations to show you the tells




  • Okay we’re in a thread talking about how Native Hawaiians feel about the American government. I actually want to know why you are arguing this point and what you feel it accomplishes, in genuine good faith. Like are you Native Hawaiian, do you like in Hawaii, do you just like the idea of being able to visit Hawaii without a passport, or is there some other reason?

    For me, I’m arguing this because I believe Indigenous people around the world have a right to self governance and freedom from colonial occupiers. So what’s your reason?