dipshit dilettante | og sjw | wokescold | apprentice of the cathedral | acolyte of cthulhu | partisan of the unpopular front | game theoretic moralist | free market communist | evangelist for anarchy | antistemlord aktion | mtm dysphoric | he/him/his
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Not going to stop thinking about the comment that Trump is sending Confederate armies to occupy Northern cities. How much more is there to say? That’s not a “distraction.” It’s what the white supremacists who tried to secede have wanted for over a century. It’s not a distraction to them at all.
40% of Republicans think the COVID vaccine killed more people than the COVID virus. One in four believe that QAnon is real. No matter how far they radicalize, we are told over and over again that the people being rude to them are the problem.
There are some, by the by, who *do* go all the way on excluding Irish and Germans and Jews and so on. These ppl call themselves "Legacy Americans", which is the most pathetic term I can think of to unironically call yourself. Just outright admitting they're failson relics.
In some sense, the dog whistle is dead as a rhetorical form because it requires an audience with the capacity to understand subtext.
fascism is at root a *meta*politics orthogonal to economics and material conditions
The idea that you can fend off fascism by making people richer is not just ineffective but dangerous, because it’s actively cited by liberal and progressive leaders as a reason to ignore the political and social roots of far-right politics and focus on safe-seeming issues like health care and jobs
The United States is rapidly going fascist and is the most materially prosperous large nation in human history by a huge margin. If that’s not rich enough to prevent a fascist resurgence, there simply is no amount of wealth that will stave it off and the problem is social and political.
As the regime declares war on our cities — first LA and DC, now Baltimore and Chicago — it is essential to remember how we got here: that is, by criminalizing Black and Brown life, demonizing the multiracial metropolis, and paramilitaristically policing its streets to make it safe for the 1 Percent.
These guys are all Nazis
The book, I mean. I don’t mean this in a generic “we live in a dystopia, man” sense; the specific thing where you use an airborne asset to blow up a boat, then make that into a movie for the libidinal gratification of the public, that was in 1984.
they are an elemental, ontological evil that must be exorcised and extirpated
These people worship at the alter of the antichrist and have convinced themselves it is the moral fight of the century. They will perform any half assed measure, no matter how deprived, if it means scarring an orphaned immigrant child for the rest of their life.
Should be said they want the spectacle of murder, which is what they want to bring home to the US, but they feel like they can’t do it just yet
this is going to sound stupid but it's entirely because we live in the era of postmodern fascism and because they wanted to post a video about them killing people for the base
People don’t have consistent or coherent views about ‘crime.’
Lethal force against a civilian vessel in international waters is a war crime if not in self-defense. If not in self-defense, only non-lethal actions, such as warning shots or disabling fire, are allowed. "Not yielding to pursuers" or "suspected of carrying drugs" doesn't carry a death sentence.
Everyone in that chain of command is liable for killing by their own admission eleven people without any sort of attempt at interdiction, investigation, or trial.
These are actual war crimes they’re bragging about.
Some self-described libertarians support Trump. Some self-described libertarians view Trump as the greatest threat to American liberty in our lifetimes. Here's what's causing that split. www.patreon.com/posts/two-ki...
if you have the misfortune of knowing who stefan molyneux is then i think his manic, eerie, hypnotic, and megalomaniacal rants are the closest (post)modern parallel to the hitlerian genre
"Blueskyism" is just the latest rhetorical stand-in for a certain class of political commentator to signal that principled progressivism annoys them personally. Previous stand-ins include "woke", "DEI", "critical race theory", and "political correctness"--also all used by the far-right. Curious!
Nobody who is not a nazi has every enjoyed reading Mein Kampf. Of course it's hateful and morally repulsive and all that, but it's also terrible just as a piece of writing, basically a transcribed and only loosely edited stream of consciousness rant. It's an interminable slog and really rather dull.
one of the first things I learned in my (advanced) econ 101 class, freshman year, was how minority and female employment are often leading indicators for economic growth and recession. What makes 2025 unique is that this was the intended outcome of the entire federal government.
for years britain's apex sex predator was flamboyant englishman jimmy savile and the country has long been ruled by a grooming gang known as the royal family
"The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people."—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 11: Race and People
Small potatoes next to the pain it inflicts on other people if its let, but one of the tragedies of fascism is the way it eats people's brains - the friends and family members and loved ones lost to a politics of despair and sadism, diminished terribly by its spectral resentments and paranoias
maga: *aggrieved white male screeching*
on my second read through of gillis' science wars and wanted to revisit my fivefold definition of science: 1. science as an institution--labs, professional networks, organizational culture, political economic structure, science as knowledge factory and scientists as knowledge workers;
2. method(s)--rules, practices, norms, procedures, techniques, heuristics; 3. body of knowledge--facts, theories, laws, experimental results, tacit knowledge; 4. ideology--scientism, technocracy, high modernism, instrumental rationality;
5. orientation--radical inquiry, boundless curiosity, universalist and egalitarian ethos, rootless cosmopolitan perspective
bsky.app/profile/tznk...
I wish people would stop blaming COVID mitigation policies for the acceleration of right wing extremism, and instead acknowledge the fact that we endured a mass casualty and mass disabling event that was mismanaged by narcissistic authoritarians who shifted the blame to marginalized communities
whiteness is, among other things, a cross-class multiethnic coalition that bootstraps itself atop a black undercaste and indigenous erasure
Perfect description of the creep in the White House
Years of dealing with racists has taught me that all racists are also misogynists, so when they say “protect our women and girls”, they are only speaking half the sentence out loud. The full sentence is “protect our women and girls because they are OUR prey”.
This is "the one big trick" that the right has mastered. They present their movement as just "the authentic voice of the volk outraged by Democratic overreach," when really what they're doing is just old fashioned political mobilization. Organize a passle of pissed off people & call it a movement.
fuck the nationalist troglodytes, embrace rootless cosmopolitan supremacy
Honestly, I think a lot of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic got psyoped into viewing salt of the earth bigots as more authentic and worthy than them and thinking therefore they must ritually cleanse their sin of education by rolling in the gutter.
Hard agree! sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/07/comp...
5. orientation--radical inquiry, boundless curiosity, universalist and egalitarian ethos, rootless cosmopolitan perspective
2. method(s)--rules, practices, norms, procedures, techniques, heuristics; 3. body of knowledge--facts, theories, laws, experimental results, tacit knowledge; 4. ideology--scientism, technocracy, high modernism, instrumental rationality;
on my second read through of gillis' science wars and wanted to revisit my fivefold definition of science: 1. science as an institution--labs, professional networks, organizational culture, political economic structure, science as knowledge factory and scientists as knowledge workers;
at their core, trans rights, abortion rights, and vaccine rights are actually all the same issue: they’re all about bodily autonomy, and the willingness to concede any of them puts the others at risk.
Anti-cosmopolitanism has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken people to the evils of rootSS
i shamelessly stole this so if youre looking to speak to the meme manager its not me
I dunno how to convey just how wrong folks were about nearly every aspect of fascism right up until the moment the movement stormed back onto the world stage and started goose-stepping all over our faces.
This is honestly the best fucking news I've heard in months. Even when he's trying to force the jackboots to roll over the entire nation, he's stiffing them like a contractor at one of his dingy hotels. This is fucking great. This is actual fucking hope.
Griffin’s definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism—specifically a reactionary nostalgia for a lost history of the nation that never existed—remains undefeated. A nostalgia for a type of bread that is ubiquitous, created in the 20th century, and rage towards bread as old as civilisation
the "faccts & logick" repertoire is a superficial salvo against those who dont know how to counter it eg normies and college freshmen faced w anyone who calls their bluffs and can rebut their pseudoscience, reactionaries will always retreat to core commitments to extreme relativism and antirealism
Oh there's a ton of people on the left. The genealogy of this is a little convoluted but importantly stems from Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of instrumental rationality gaining steam along with Arendt's popularization of "totalitarianism" and then going thru games of telephone multiple times.
Leftists deciding to rhetorically reject science when reactionaries use the *aesthetic* of science to disguise their bigotry instead of just, you know, destroying the bunk science which underpins the reactionary argument is one of the defining failures of the modern left
One of the most devastatingly self-destructive things to emerge in the second half of the 20th century was the widespread belief in the Left that the nazis were the apex expression of science and rationality.
Good to see @rechelon.bsky.social’s book, Did the Science Wars Take Place?, in print. Helped out a bit w/ comments on a draft. Gillis provides a nuanced reading of the ‘Science Wars’ and makes a compelling case for science, anarchism, and scientific realism store.c4ss.org/index.php/pr...
I have been saying this for something like 15 years and I am so tired, folks: the tactics. Of the right. Don't work. For the left. Because their politics are divisive and anti-community. Ours aren't. They win when politics is toxic and vicious. We win by building solidarity.
Like, the point here is that the libs see the Trump-as-Big-Brother poster and think "fuck it, game over, we lose" instead of "challenge accepted, fucko". And the people behind Trump KNOW this and know that enough big talk and scary faces will get you to off yourself. bsky.app/profile/sky....
The obvious answer is Wilhelm Reich's that fascist memes speak to the hindbrain rather than liberal or socialist appeals to rational self-interest and/or morality. But when libs/socialists try to appeal to the hindbrain, you get shit like the Dirtbag Left, a pale imitation of the fascists
I simply do not agree with this, because I think a "Fox News style hack factory" that would win votes for the center or the left is a simple contradiction in terms. Hack material and slop has an essential authoritarian, anti-social bias. If you feed hack material to a Dem audience they just give up.
There's one exception. There's one joke which goes to the heart of the human condition, which you have to understand to be able to function in today's world. Brian: "You don't have to do this! You don't have to follow orders!" Roman: "I *like* orders."
There's no "Only Punish Trump Voters In Red States" button, but there was a "Doom Millions in Developing Countries to Death" button, which Trump & Musk pressed, & I find it hard to get squeamish about innocent Americans getting caught in the crossfire of the war to stop future atrocities like that
given that i keep saying mean things about openai i have to add that this is, in fact, a first amendment issue, and many of the remedies proposed are blatantly unconstitutional and/or totalitarian in character
This is also how we got the anti vaccer movement: everybody dismissed those malignant fucks and didn't notice it was metastasizing when they should have been like "CHECK OUT THESE FUCKING MORONS THAT LOVE GETTING AWFUL DISEASES!!" The worst part about a "polite" society is how easy it is to subvert.
The entire reason yarvin exists is because there wasn't a very clear "this guy is a fucking dumbass" for price discovery. All the "this is uncouth" morons are best viewed as pump and dumpers.
"the marketplace of ideas" includes ideas like "you should assume this guy is lying or wrong because he is usually lying or wrong"
yarvin's factual claims about how awesome monarchy is is flat earth shit and so get dismissed by anyone remotely serious. but hey this up and coming general interest blogger writing to an audience who largely has a a tech background is willing to engage with him!
a pet theory i have for why yarvin's trajectory played out the way it did is that every serious academic he tried to bait into argument (if you go back into the UR archives you can find him going after rando academics on their blogs) dismissed him while scott did a 100,000 writeup while sympathetic
he's the one who's ungrateful, a wretched product of cosmopolitan society's unfortunate tendency for self-flagellatory affirmative action for mediocre conservatives who now aims to destroy that entire society to make everyone live through the childhood he hated
going back to the founders it would have been recognized as an act of gratitude and patriotism to dedicate one's life to service of their adopted country, but Vance rejects the fundamental ideal of America in favor of crude blood-and-soil Nazism that he learned on the internet five years ago
The concept of “gratitude” in American politics is an insidious one that implies a caste system where betters confer largess upon lessers and where those lessers must consistently pay homage to their betters. And there is always an implied threat that without proper homage the largess will stop.
Protesters also chased away military personnel.
The answer is clearly "Yes." Every one of us ought to have a line where a set of political views are sufficiently depraved that they end up on the wrong side of it. Maybe that's a line we can't imagine a family member approaching, but there clearly is one for pretty much everyone.
one of the great conservative moves over the past decade has been to make themselves so unpleasant that their own family members are forced to cut them off, and then use that fact to argue that *liberals* are too uncivil
this quackery is ascendent bc of pop misunderstanding of how the immune system & infectious disease work: 1) the imm sys isnt a muscle that gets stronger by fighting off dis but weaker; 2) more infections means more chances for bacteria+viruses to evolve & overtake built up immunity to prior strains
there're more studies on related splits that map pretty neatly onto this one, like how conservatives have a high disgust reaction which they conflate with moral conscience eg "queer people make me feel icky therefore they are objectively gross and immoral"
Fascism represents the apex expression of the sort of thought and identification that clings to arbitrary parochialisms, it knows these are unsustainable, and so becomes thought-against-thought, walling itself off, violently slicing the world, to preserve these crude static particularities.
I basically think that there is one basic moral fact -- what the buddhists call anatman, utilitarians the expanding circle of care, what Sagan would see as humanism -- that everything turns on and is the dividing line between life and the living death of fascism. humaniterations.net/2017/06/14/y...
"He was a traitor to his country, to humanity, and to humanity's God."--W.E.B. Du Bois, obituary for Robert E. Lee we need more righteous polemics like this against these fascist degenerates
More or less universally a country seeking to limit foreigners studying in that country is a sign of a society, culture, great power in severe decline.
This is a really key point in all of this. Conspiracism, pseudoscience, fascism, and violent extremism are all inextricably bound up with one another—and they actively render themselves invisible, unable to be spoken of and addressed even as they actively reorient all of our lives toward the grave.
I think part of this “dont call em fascist nah mate theyre not really fascists” is wanting to tell yourself that there isnt a major mainstream wave of fascism normalised in your country
people arent good at grasping the moral and ethical cores that motivate political ideologies also, a mass shooting is the perfect prefigurative instantiation of the neofascist project of collapsing the circle of care down to no one what is a better negation of empathy than flippant murder?
we can already conceptualize trolling as discursive terrorism as well as mind rape--the violent penetration of your intimate spaces for sadistic power enforcement that leaves you discombobulated and traumatized mass shooters then can be seen as the final evolution of the troll
I’ve seen a lot of explanations for this but I think the stupidest, pettiest one is correct - college kids being rude really has been the most pressing problem facing the opinion column set turning “someone protested me” into a national crisis because it’s the only time they experience negativity
“Soldiers wear camouflage to conceal themselves from the enemy they want to kill. Safety vests are what municipal workers put on so you can see them at work,” @chrislhayes.bsky.social on the “comically absurd” spectacle of Trump’s army of garbage collectors in DC.
i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.
camp of the saints is genocide pornography, frankly its worse than the turner diaries or mein kampf because of its unrelenting salaciousness, febrile atmosphere, and eerie gravitas, like its trying to hypnotize the reader into a murderous frenzy less sexy murder poet more lecherous death squad poet
corey robin made a point years ago that stuck with me which is that the conservative positions himself against the very category of intellectual which he sees as a product of the enlightenment and agent of liberalism whose work of demystification and democratization the reactionary seeks to undo
trump is the ur-patriarch, the primitive accumulation monster dad trump ii is a family annihilation and household liquidation of the whole country as retribution for being spurned in 2020
you dont get to smear your shit on the walls of liberal modernity and urban cosmopolitan civilization and still get to enjoy its fruits if conservatives and the right want to retvrn to tradition then we should give it to them good and hard
we can already conceptualize trolling as discursive terrorism as well as mind rape--the violent penetration of your intimate spaces for sadistic power enforcement that leaves you discombobulated and traumatized mass shooters then can be seen as the final evolution of the troll
people arent good at grasping the moral and ethical cores that motivate political ideologies also, a mass shooting is the perfect prefigurative instantiation of the neofascist project of collapsing the circle of care down to no one what is a better negation of empathy than flippant murder?
It bothers me so fucking much when people call this shit "incoherent" -- it's steadfastly coherent. It's a highly representative plumbline of a well established political ideology. That you can't see how these figures fit together is a brag about your ignorance of fascism.
what is a more perfect negation of empathy than a mass shooting?
yes! brings to mind @patblanchfield.bsky.social's hierarchy of disposability also, a fundamental divide is expanding vs shrinking the circle of care, and the neofascist project is to contract it down to no one, and a mass shooting perfectly embodies that ethos
Regardless of shooter ideology (though shooters often share a stated ideology that gets overlooked by initial reporting), mass shootings have an ideological form, which is that agency belongs to those willing to do violence, that the dead deserve their fates, that this is the point of gun power.
They openly reject empiricism and view the Enlightenment as a fundamental historical mistake that must be reversed. This is why the Yarvin idiots love people like RFK Jr. and Trump. Rejecting scientific evidence is viewed as a positive. trait.
My Aristotle jab was only half-joking. Part of the Yarvin Dark Enlightenment project is a return to the pre-Enlightenment Aristotelian belief that all truth can be derived from first principles (because they are morons).
Sam Menefee-Libey 