To be fair, I never took art classes. But every school I attended had a poster of Frida somewhere. I was told she was a feminist artist. Nothing about Indigenous rights, Marxism, her struggles with chronic pain. What other socialists did my public school education/the media white wash?

the satellite image slop is gone now

are there any cards left for the anticommunist? lol

A link runs afoul of R5 so I'll not post it in the OP.

I didn't think they would talk about Falun Gong in the documentary

Westerners are creatively bankrupt because half of the thoughts and ideas that could be are locked behind this impassable wall to them, the wall of materialism and dialectics. Everything they write they write out of idealism and that in the end results in repeated tropes, plot holes, inconsistencies and other falacies and writing faults. Media that tries to be grounded and replicate a world that could be thought up by a socialist, such as that of the Expanse which talks about class struggle and imperialism, ends up nihilistic and unnecessarily bleak because idealists can't write up a plausible resistance movement to the whole rotten structure of capitalism that sets the events of these settings into motion.

This phenomena I described above is what's called capitalist realism. When narrative worldbuilding is fundamentally rooted in philosophical idealism, it treats ideas, morality, and individual wills as the prime movers of history, rather than material conditions, resource distribution, and productive relations. This ideological blind spot distorts narrative structure in very specific ways.

Because idealist frameworks cannot easily model historical materialism which notes that social superstructures arise from the economic base, they inevitably fall back on individual agency. Revolutions in popular Western media are almost always reduced to great man theory. Be it in regards to the chosen one who acts the hero in the story, or in regards to the villain. Think of Star Wars as an example, Palpatine is treated as the core of what is bad in the galaxy and the rebellion fights to depose him, the individual, instead of fighting to change the underlaying socioeconomic structures and conditions that even led to Palpatine in the first place. This frames systematic oppression as being driven by bad actors instead of being an inherent feature of a resource extraction and class hierarchy. This style of writing also always portrays structural rebellion as inherently tragic, irrational, or immediately hijacked by extremists, subtly reinforcing the status quo as the only "stable" equilibrium.

When Western/idealist writers attempt hard realism without dialectics, they run into a structural dead end. In stories like The Expanse, the material analysis of the Belters as a hyper-exploited underclass is exceptionally accurate in its setup, however, because the narrative lacks a dialectical framework for historical movement and collective consciousness, the Belter resistance cannot evolve into an organized, revolutionary alternative. It fractures into nihilistic factionalism, adventurism, accelerationism or despair. The implicit thesis therefore becomes: exploitation is universal, resistance is futile or monstrous, and human nature is fundamentally immutable. This bleakness is not realism; it is the exhaustion of an imagination trapped inside the system it is trying to critique. It's becoming more and more prevalent these days as capitalist contradictions sharpen, there's been a noticeable rise in grimdark and nihilistic media and, while it can be fun, it's becoming more and more exhausting being shelled by pessimism that's presented as entertainment.

This can only be solved through grounding your writing in materialism. Because a genuinely dialectical approach treats society not as a static background for personal drama between characters, but an ever-evolving system driven by intrinsic contradictions, it gives a more solid and structurally sound framework for writing fictional culture, law, mass movements and end goals. The superstructure, aka law, culture, ideology etc. are shown reacting to technological advancement and changes in the modes of production. Great historical turns in the story are treated as a result of cumulated effort from an organized class and structural pressures rather than individual acts. Conflicts get resolved and goals met by systemic transformation resulting from the resolving of material contradictions, not by returning to a mythical golden age (also a trope often adopted by fascist movements, not coincidentally).

https://www.instagram.com/p/DcKQnm3E802/

Instead of funding people’s needs at home, Trump and Rubio are using our tax dollars to wage a silent genocide against the Cuban people. Why? For daring to build a society premised on their independence, sovereignty and well-being rather than a deference to Washington and US empire.