Broke Boy Eccentric @ NZ/NVTG
LightNews LightNews
banner
nearzone.bsky.social
Broke Boy Eccentric @ NZ/NVTG
@nearzone.bsky.social
930 followers 120 following 13K posts
http://www.nearzone.com
http://blog.nearzone.com

Art Style 72: Reversal of Time

I always keep my finger on the trigger, when I walk in solemn landscapes where the past and present linger

New Vanguard Theory Group Zero
Posts Replies Media Videos
nearzone.bsky.social
There are four kinds of guy etc. etc. post horsemen
Four Horsemen version with Ole, Arn, Sting, and Flair
November 20, 2025 at 3:50 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
The purpose of taxes among "regular people" is to keep you working, not explicitly to raise money. journalofcogency.com/2025/11/18/t...
Having gone through this piece, though, you should have come to the conclusion I’ll lay out here: the expropriation of the lower class isn’t reflected in the amount raised from their taxes but in their continued work in the system and the increased profits of their employers. The purpose of hardline enforcement of taxes among lower-income people is not to get the money from them, it is to ensure that they keep working. It’s their employers who “make” the higher salaries that will actually pay the most of the income tax on paper, but those employers can’t “earn” those higher salaries unless all their lower-income workers continue to work. That is how expropriation functions in the United States and most capitalist countries.
November 18, 2025 at 1:37 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
would love to send this antsy lady this video
November 13, 2025 at 9:24 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
"Why did you say that shit about flashlights and novelty pens" cause this is what their guns looked like for most of the series
Image of the "Liberator gun" from Blakes 7, which looks like a really large LEGO lightsaber or an aggressive vibrator or something
November 11, 2025 at 3:57 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
Honestly now that I'm thinking about it, this is the only protest cosplay I want to see. Weird swooshy outfits like robes and stuff with weird flashlights or novelty pens as lasers. Oh you wanna be like a handmaid in handmaids tale, fuck that, dress like Jenna who is an ace pilot
November 11, 2025 at 3:52 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
You're on the way
Arkan holding up a baby tiger, there's also a bunch of soldiers
November 8, 2025 at 3:07 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
I've probably said this before but I have this clip that's just a bunch of numbers and every time I look at it I'm like "did I put a porn video in the wrong place" then I click on it and it's this
October 30, 2025 at 10:15 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
NVTG
New Vanguard Theory Group
October 23, 2025 at 4:56 AM
nearzone.bsky.social
NVTG Question 3.3, on the need to decouple value from population size and end these dehumanizing "population races"
3.3: The question of value and population. One of the major but under-discussed (in my experience) problems of international politics is the “population race”: the demand that each country has to raise the number of people so that they can increase “productivity” etc. I am not against increases in population, but I believe it is destructive on an essential social level for states to look at their populations as breeding stock for the purpose of producing more GDP. In order to move away from these population races, we must find a way to express the value/influence held by a state (or other group) in some way other than sheer production per head.
October 22, 2025 at 8:55 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
Just felt like clipping out a different bit as well. This is probably like 50% of the post between the two screenshots. blog.nearzone.com/2025/10/20/t...
But this is not the only conceivable construction of a society. I believe that a highly horizontal society can be constructed, one in which the vast majority are in fact constituents, and the only ones who are not constituents are those who cannot make decisions for themselves, such as infants and very young children. In such a society where power and influence is actually properly divided and recirculated, the state would cease to be an oppressive construction and would by its nature become the vehicle for cooperation between people and groups. I have often said that I “caucus with communists”, and this is basically what it boils down to. I believe that communists are more likely to agree with this concept of what the future of society should be than anarchists, because even though communists also profess a stateless society, they are at least open to the idea of the state as a positive influence. Because I see anarchists as fundamentally misguided in their rejection of the state as a concept, I’ve always found it hard to sympathize theoretically with them. These ideas of mine may change in the future. Writing them down and putting them out is often the first step to a longer-term investigation. What I hope to find is that the difference in this area is largely semantic, and that anarchist thinking about a post-capitalist society will—while eschewing the terminology of “the state”—have valuable insights into creating such a society in a way that will allow it not only to sustain itself but also to thrive against the challenges which capitalism will continue to pose. So that’s where I am with it. I don’t really have more to say right now.
October 20, 2025 at 11:18 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
"The State Is Not A Cockroach" blog.nearzone.com/2025/10/20/t...
It would be easy to read this as an admission of a kind of necessary oppression in human relations. We need to have something on top of us forcing us to do this and that. But this isn’t what I’m suggesting. In my view, anarchists and Marxists understand the state as a cockroach, or a nest or tribe of cockroaches: a discrete entity separate from all others and which somehow resists all attempts to stamp it out, which seems to survive no matter what, but which can, at some point, be snuffed out. This is not what the state is. It is not even the same kind of thing. It cannot be thought of as a creature or even, properly, an entity. Let us say that a society is like a house, and different societies are like different houses. We can recognize principles of architecture in each house, principles which each house has to adhere to in order to stay upright and to provide shelter etc., even when these principles are arrived at by entirely different means, with different materials, and so on. The state is like the construction of a house. It is not that a state is imposed upon a society. The state is what we recognize as the functional machinery that allows the state-society to act in a concerted manner.
October 20, 2025 at 11:12 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
That Dark Universe cast photo with Russel Crowe, Javier Bardem, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, and Sofia Boutella (left-to-right); everybody is comped into the image
October 13, 2025 at 3:30 AM
nearzone.bsky.social
(Screenshot for full context)
This is why "giving them more votes" will never work. It doesn't matter if liberals etc. have all the support in the world when *they don't want to fight*. Kimmel is Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries. They will never ever "wake up"
@queerthing.bsky.social: lol it's so funny he got this once in a lifetime chance to be a cultural martyr figure for one of the biggest media consumer bases (white suburban libs) and he instantly was like 'well no I'd love to talk to hitler actually' Quoting a Page Six article: Jimmy Kimmel wants to get Donald Trump on late-night show after years-long feud: 'I'll ask him'
October 9, 2025 at 4:23 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
October 9, 2025 at 2:52 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
Here's the end of the blog, with the no good very bad ending line. Like I said: I'm sorry. blog.nearzone.com/2025/10/05/w...
But more even than that. Like I said, pro wrestlers are best at pro wrestling. If we are talking about putting on a show that shows all the most positive positives about those being featured, the thing we are going to tell them to do is wrestle. That’s the thing that draws, that’s the thing that pro wrestlers are meant to be doing. Building shows around promos and badly acted angles is a misuse of the type of talent that you have. Mitch Hedberg has the joke about being a comedian in Hollywood and being asked to do a bunch of comedian-adjacent things being like someone saying “Hey, so you’re a realy good cook! But can you farm?” Why are we making all of our wrestlers farm? Why can’t we – and I realized that I was going to end on this line halfway through the last sentence, I didn’t mean for this to happen but I’m here now, I’m not going to revise the last paragraph, I’m so sorry, but – why can’t we just let them cook?
October 6, 2025 at 12:22 AM
nearzone.bsky.social
Reposting a recent theory blog, "Value and Control of the Military", exploring the concept of civilian control of the military; probably also applicable to civilian control/oversight of police blog.nearzone.com/2025/08/18/v...
I think the answer to the question of civilian control of the military is double-sided. I strongly disagree with what seems to be the orthodox position, which is that civilian control is its own good and that the military must simply accept it as an ethos that they should not intervene in politics. Not only is this a needlessly restrictive way to think, it is also falsifiable; at times, a military takeover has been the method which ended a period of instability (this often has terrible costs but the fact of it cannot be ignored). I do believe that civilian control is a virtue, but not in and of itself; that is to say, I don’t think the fact that we can recognize civilian control as good means that we have established a theoretical basis for it, and lacking this basis restricts our ability to change how things work.
September 30, 2025 at 2:52 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
Click the retweet button, you know you want to, also go read it too: blog.nearzone.com/2025/09/29/n...
I think one reason that people disdain academia and “intellectual thought” is that they believe that it’s all a big exercise in noticing. They think that all academia is good for is describing things that are already there in ways that are just too complicated to be practically useful. This is a ridiculous overstatement, an example of self-flagellation.
September 30, 2025 at 2:22 AM
nearzone.bsky.social
Democratic Tea Party, but not like that. blog.nearzone.com/2025/08/12/t...
I’m going to bring up the Tea Party here, but not exactly how I see them generally evoked. What I see a lot of people usually saying is that we need a “Democratic Tea Party” or something like that. We need to mimic their style and their tactics because they worked. That’s not why I’m bringing them up. I bring them up because I think **they also refused to see the Republican Party as its own political project which they had to adapt to but a strategic position which they could conquer.** And they did. It’s in that sense that I think we may want to take more cues from the Tea Party rather than from other countries where the idea of supporting a new group is not so foreign.
September 16, 2025 at 8:54 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
This is the kind of critique that I would call "head in the sand." While I agree sometimes we need to talk about policy in terms of failure, this is one where we should straightforwardly recognize Dem donors as our enemies who succeeded, not as allies who failed. We gotta move past this failure talk
Atrios: All because dem donors were going insane because their kids were deciding genocide was bad QT of Kat Tenbarge: This was such a massive failure at the congressional level. The misguided and widely criticized attempts to ban TikTok only empowered Trump and his conservative media allies in the end—like many critics of the ban legislation feared it would
September 16, 2025 at 8:39 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
Your muted words martha in text & tags
August 29, 2025 at 4:13 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
I saw this dumb shit and now I'm making you see it, too.
Some idiot's tweet: "I don't like rap cause it's mostly MAGA BS all about money and nothing else. At least Metal stands for a cause. Rap will sell you out if you give them so much as a nickel."
August 27, 2025 at 11:50 AM
nearzone.bsky.social
An interesting note from Geoff Ingham that seems relevant
Highlighted words: Potential creditors were deterred by the monarch's immunity from legal action for default and their successors' insistence that they could not be held liable for any debts that a dynasty might have accumulated.
August 21, 2025 at 10:51 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
For once I did a summary paragraph that actually summarizes the argument instead of just being like "Ok I want to stop writing now" blog.nearzone.com/2025/08/21/t...
If supporting Israel was not in the material interest of the American ruling class, Christian Zionism would not be a bedrock belief for so many Christians in this country. It does not appear to be decisive in other countries, either, except to the extent that some individuals agree with the American evangelical message. While I do think that the religious aspect is serious, I am still not convinced that attempting to deal with this on those terms is the best way forward. I believe we still need to focus on the political sphere. If the source of value changes its priorities, the way that value is distributed in society can be shifted, and evils such as Christian Zionism will have to wither away.
August 21, 2025 at 8:57 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
This is basically what the article revolves around. CW: discussion of war rape (not in the screenshot but in the article) journalofcogency.com/2025/08/20/p...
The conversation to be had about Palestinian political developments is necessarily a conversation with two roads that must somehow be walked at the same time. On one hand, it has to be acknowledged that every issue here stems from the Israeli occupation. There is no essential “rightness” on the Israeli side except for their own cynical exploitation of their citizens to marshal the European world’s public opinion against Palestine. On the other hand, as Khalidi’s book appears dedicated to, there are serious deficiencies on the pro-Palestinian side that have ripped opportunities to secure their position away. It’s this part which I did not know existed and which this book was so illuminating about.
August 20, 2025 at 5:15 PM
nearzone.bsky.social
D,,O,,P JOHNNY O'BEID (from the end of the music video for "YOU GOTTA LOVE THIS CITY BABE" by R.A.E.D)
August 16, 2025 at 9:10 PM