Today, I wrote about how if you're young and inexperienced, you have a high chance of developing negative or bitter feelings about the opposite sex based solely on content you see online--including some content not intended to be ragebait. Link in replies.
This is actually one of the smartest and most underrated political decisions in the entire series.
Tobirama didn’t appoint the Uchiha as Konoha’s police force because he liked or trusted them. He did it precisely because he deeply distrusted them.
As a cold, pragmatic, and extremely intelligent Hokage, Tobirama saw the Uchiha as an emotional, powerful, and potentially dangerous clan especially after the village was founded. Their Sharingan made them incredibly strong in combat, but their emotions and tendency toward hatred made them unstable in his eyes.
By making them the village police force, he achieved several strategic goals at once:
1. He gave them a prestigious and visible role inside the village so they wouldn’t feel completely pushed aside after Konoha’s creation.
2. He kept them occupied with internal security and law enforcement, effectively removing them from major military and political decision-making.
3. Most importantly, it allowed him to monitor and contain them under the guise of an “honor.”
It was a brilliant but ruthless containment strategy. Tobirama believed the Uchiha’s curse of hatred was a real threat to the village’s stability, so he structured the system to limit their influence while maintaining the appearance of fairness.
This decision, while understandable from his perspective, also planted the early seeds of resentment, isolation, and distrust that eventually led to the Uchiha feeling marginalized which contributed heavily to the conditions that led to the coup and the massacre years later.
Tobirama was protecting the village the only way he knew how through control and pragmatism. But his methods helped create the very problems he feared.
Black American actor Paul Robeson told a BBC interviewer in 1958 that Othello is not about jealousy — it’s about a Black man’s place in a white society. Two Shakespeare scholars backed his reading.
This is basically what philosophers and anthropologists mean when they say that the 'individual' is a relatively modern construct, and that many other cultures conceive of people in a more porous, contingent, interwoven fashion. Weird as it sounds, it's just observably true.
Born on April 16, 1965, Martin Lawrence became one of the biggest comedy stars of the 90s through his hit sitcom Martin and films like Bad Boys, Blue Streak, Life, Big Momma's House, and Nothing to Lose. 🙏🏽
Happy 61st birthday to Martin Lawrence. 🐐 🎉
The hardest thing to explain to someone inside the imperial consensus is the concept of structural violence.
They understand individual violence.
One person harms another person.
There is a perpetrator and a victim and a clear causal chain.
What they cannot see, what the entire educational and media apparatus has been carefully designed to prevent them from seeing, is the violence that happens when a system is arranged so that certain people predictably die, predictably suffer, predictably lose, not because any individual decided to harm them specifically but because the overall arrangement of power requires their subordination.
The people of the Global South do not die of poverty because individual Americans wish them dead.
They die because the international economic architecture, the terms of trade, the debt structures, the conditions attached to IMF loans, the intellectual property regimes that prevent technology transfer, the agricultural subsidies that undercut developing world farmers, is arranged, in aggregate, in a way that concentrates wealth in already wealthy countries and extracts it from already poor ones.
And that architecture was designed.
It was negotiated.
It was implemented by specific people in specific rooms making specific decisions about who would benefit and who would not.
This is violence.
It does not look like violence because no one is pulling a trigger.
But the deaths it produces are just as dead.
And when you try to explain this to someone whose entire identity rests on the belief that what they have they earned, and what others lack they failed to achieve, you are not making a political argument.
You are dismantling the story that makes their life make sense.
They will not thank you for it.
They will defend against it with everything they have.
Because the alternative, accepting that their comfort is downstream of other people's dispossession, is not a policy position.
It is an identity catastrophe.