Michael Parenti, born on this day in 1933, is a Marxist American political scientist and cultural critic. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences.

Michael Parenti was raised by an Italian-American working-class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. After graduating from high school, Parenti worked for several years. Upon returning to school, he received a BA from the City College of New York, an MA from Brown University and a PhD in political science from Yale University.

For many years Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning. Eventually he devoted himself full-time to writing, public speaking, and political activism. He is the author of 20 books and over 300 articles.

Parenti’s writings cover a wide range of subjects: U.S. politics, culture, ideology, political economy, imperialism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, free-market orthodoxies, conservative judicial activism, religion, ancient history, modern history, historiography, repression in academia, news and entertainment media, technology, environmentalism, sexism, racism, Venezuela, the wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia, ethnicity, and his own early life.

His book Democracy for the Few, now in its ninth edition, is a critical analysis of U.S. society, economy, and political institutions and a college-level political science textbook published by Wadsworth Publishing. His book Blackshirts and Reds defended the Soviet Union and socialist states of the 20th century from criticism, arguing that they were morally superior compared to capitalist states, that the problems of the Soviet Union were caused by the Russian Civil War and capitalist interference, and that “Left anti-Communist” and “pure socialist” critics have failed to offer any alternatives to the Soviet Union’s “siege socialism”

In 1974, Parenti ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Vermont as the candidate of the democratic socialist Liberty Union Party; he came in third place, with 7.1% of the vote. Parenti was once a friend of Bernie Sanders, but he later split with Sanders over Sanders’s support for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

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    • dumpster_dove [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      In D&D I think it’s that souls provide energy that the Hells need to keep running, and devils can get promoted for collecting souls. In Christianity maybe it’s about proving Satan’s point about humans or something, and one more soul in hell is one less in heaven, but couldn’t there be a similar case of “get souls -> get promoted”?

      • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        In 2nd edition DnD souls are like a reality altering power. The more souls that believe in a god or an ideal the more power that god has. When a person dies on the prime material plane their soul goes to a realm of the astral plane based on their alignment. The more souls in each part of the astral realm the more power they have to fight the other alignments.

        Devils and demons use souls as soldiers in the blood war to fight each other.

        IMO the Planescape books were some of the coolest ideas to come out of TSR.

      • punk_punk [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        there are demons and devils, both are soul-powered. A soul sold to devils gets turned into a maggot-like thing, which powers some engines, feeds some creatures or can be promoted into actual devils. Demons afaik eat or assimilitate/corrupt soulstuff afaik, but are less systematic about it