#Cyber Like A Blogger

[ate4happycunt]

[victoryai]

10TH LORD IN THE SIGNS(Career focused)

I already wrote on 1st Lord in the signs here and 7th lord in the signs here. So I guess you understand what I mean.

10th lord in the signs is only concerned about which sign the 10th house Lord is in. It don matter here which planet is your 10th lord but rather which sign your 10th lord is placed in.

10th Lord in Aries: Your career involves "you" to a great extent. Maybe you are required to be physically present or your body is a big part of your job e.g modelling, dancing, wrestling etc that involves your physical ability and natural strength .

10th Lord in Taurus: Your job deals with money or valuables, financial security, isn't very stressful, likely to give you a comfortable life, e.g banker, store owner, jeweller etc

10th lord in Gemini: Your job brings about frequent short journeys and trips, maybe you travel often to your workplace, or work with siblings, your job is likely focused on communication and information, involves teaching or learning and multitasking too, e.g teacher, journalist, news reporter,

10th Lord in Cancer: Your job isn't really stressful, allows you to work from home sometimes, might involve lands or houses, something like real estate or house agent, might also indicate that you work with family members or you are involved in the family business.

10th lord in Leo: Your job is something fun and entertaining, involves being dramatic sometimes, maybe acting, making skits, cartoons, entertainment sector, might involve kids or working with children. Might put you in fame's way.

©victoryai

10th lord in Virgo: Your job involves routine and precision, punctuality and order, probably a job that deals with diseases or conflict, involves a due procedure and any mistake could be costly e.g doctor, nurse, lawyer, police officer.

10th lord in Libra: Your job involves working with a number of people, might be beauty focused, you might work with spouse, needs you to be diplomatic and accommodating in nature, isn't very stressful. Types of job could be a diplomat, counsellor, etc

10th lord in Scorpio: Your job probably involves valuables or belongings of other people, needs you to keep a few secrets, do underground work or deal with waste, somewhat dangerous and risky, a job most folks wouldn't take up. E. G undertaker

10th lord in Sagittarius; Your job might involve long distance journeys, teaching or learning, adventure, knowledge, philosophy, and culture. A job where you constantly have to upgrade your knowledge, work in foreign lands etc. Jobs may include translator, lecturer, professor, teacher, travel blogger, pilot, space 🤔, religious leader(is that a job 😂 sorry😭)

10th lord in Capricorn: A typical job I would say, nothing weird about it. Might put you in a place of authority as time goes by, you might be a public figure, a reputable job, you may be famous too, seems like a serious job to me( the one where you have to put on corporate wears all the mf time)

10th lord in Aquarius: Your job might be about cyber stuff, internet or social media related, maybe an influencer, might work online, programming, AI related stuff and some weird shit that only very smart people understand, unique in nature, might work together with friends too.

10th lord in Pisces: Your job might be something really unusual or special in the sense that most people can't do it. Maybe a diviner, a spiritualist, a seer, an astronaut 🚀🤔, using your intuitive gifts for work, a polygrapher or psychologist.

©victoryai

[jealousmartini]

Safety list?? Girl Idk

Remade and tweaked a little because shifttok refugees are coming over and I wanna give a welcoming post for yall!

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This blog is safe for people who openly (and the ones who secretly) shift for sex. I see you, I feel you, and I AM one of you gang. Go get that foursome girl. I'll probably post some sex-safe things to put into your script just for you guys.

This blogger is a bisexual she/her girly girl and welcomes lgbtq+ shifters, loa practitioners, and witches female, male, non binary, and trans people who want to experience love freely and be accepted for who they are. This goes for the asexual spectrum, too.

This blog is safe and supports manifesters/shifters who change their age to fit their desired realities. No, you are NOT a pedo for wanting to experience young love again and no you are NOT a weirdo for wanting to take back your childhood that this reality stole from you at the age of 3.

This blog supports Palestine and is manifesting the end of the genocide as well as the rebuild of the beautiful country. But let me be clear, this blog does NOT stand for anti Israel stuff. This blog explicitly stands for anti genocide and anti war. Racism will not be tolerated here.

This blogger has a mutual age limit of 16 and upwards. Minors younger than 16 are allowed to interact through asks and stuff like that as well as follow this blog, but dms and asking to be moots are a no-no (if you are already mutuals with me and just so happen to be younger than 16, this doesn't apply to you)

This blog is safe for people who want to experience life as animals. Girl literally me too?? Tf??

This blog is safe for people who shift as different races/ethnicities, and also those who don't necessarily agree with this. Both have their own reasons that are valid in themselves, but I don't want to see debate wars going on.

This blog is safe and welcomes permashifters and respawners. I personally do not care where you guys want to stay whether it is niche, tabboo, or basic. You guys are so real for dipping this reality, and I'm manifesting you find your way out of here as quickly and as swiftly as possible

This blog understands if you have to kill in your dr like monsters, zombies, pedos, villians or whatever it is fuck em up bae. Also that's your business not mine.

This blogger also lowkey fucks with shifters/loa babes who want to manifest their desired realities to freely use unique neo-pronouns. LIKE FYM you've got a futuristic cyber themed magical girl dr where you are a cunty cyborg babe with technical powers and your neopronouns are pixie/pixel self?? HELLO??

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[mariacallous]

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.

If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.

In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret.

In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Earlier this year, Yarvin and I had lunch in Washington, D.C., where he had come to celebrate the regime change. He was in his usual getup: bluejeans, Chelsea boots, a rumpled dress shirt under a motorcycle jacket. After taking a few bites of a cheeseburger topped with crispy onions, he pushed his plate away. Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

The injections seemed to be working. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him, accompanied by a moody black-and-white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. Even his friends and family, however, acknowledge that he has room to grow as a communicator. He talks in a halting monotone, rarely answers questions directly, and is prone to disorienting asides. In the middle of saying one thing, he is always getting distracted by something else he could be saying, like a G.P.S. that keeps suggesting faster routes.

Yarvin, for his part, was relieved at how the interview with the Times had gone. “My main goal was, how do I not damage any of my relationships?” he said. For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul. He mentioned that a businessman he knew had once complained to a journalist that Thiel had not invested enough money in his company. “That’s one strike and you’re out, and he was out,” Yarvin said, sighing theatrically. His second goal, he said, was to reach the Times audience. This seemed surprising: he has called for the government to shut down the paper. “I tend to be more interested in outreach to people who share my own cultural background,” Yarvin explained.

He likes to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Jewish Communists from Brooklyn who met at a leftist gathering in the thirties. (He has less to say about his maternal grandparents, Tarrytown Wasps with a cottage on Nantucket.) “The vibe of American communism was ‘We’ve got thirty I.Q. points on these people, and we’re going to win,’ ” he said. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. After finishing school and failing to get tenure (“too arrogant,” Yarvin said), Herbert tried his hand at writing the Great American Novel, then joined the Foreign Service as a diplomat. In the following years, the family lived in the Dominican Republic and Cyprus. Herbert was cynical about working for the government, and Yarvin seems to have inherited his disdain: he has repeatedly proposed closing America’s embassies, a prospect the State Department is now considering in parts of Europe and Africa.

Yarvin is reticent on the subject of his childhood, but friends and family suggested to me that his father could be harsh, domineering, and impossible to please. “He controlled their life with an iron fist,” someone with close knowledge of the family told me. “It was absolutely his domain.” (Yarvin vehemently rejected this view, saying that people who are controlling tend to be insecure, “and that is very much not the way of my father.” Better words to describe him, he said, would be “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.”)

Growing up, Yarvin was sometimes homeschooled by his mother, and skipped three grades. (His older brother, Norman, skipped four.) The family eventually moved to Columbia, Maryland, where Yarvin entered high school as a twelve-year-old sophomore. “When you’re much younger than your classmates, you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien,” Yarvin said, adding that he was the latter. Yarvin was selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of math prodigies. He attended the university’s Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp for gifted children, and was a Baltimore-area champion on “It’s Academic,” a television trivia show. Andrew Cone, a software engineer who currently lives in a spare room in Yarvin’s home, told me that Yarvin’s childhood seems to have left him with a lifelong feeling of inadequacy. “I think he has this sense of being not good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform,” Cone said.

Yarvin went to Brown, graduated at eighteen, and then entered a Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate. Along with posting jokes, advice, light verse, and “flames” (blistering takedowns of other users), he maintained a “kill file,” a list of members he had blocked because he found their posts uninteresting. “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me. She was drawn to Yarvin after reading one of his virtuosic flames, and the pair dated for a few years. “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people,” she warned. “They will turn that skill on you.”

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,” as Tanner put it. He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry. Tanner recalled that when she once questioned the value of affirmative action in college admissions, it was Yarvin who convinced her of its necessity.

After a year and a half of doctoral work, Yarvin left academia to seek his fortune in the tech industry. He helped design an early version of a mobile web browser for a company that came to be known as Phone.com. In 2001, he began dating Jennifer Kollmer, a playwright he met on Craigslist, whom he later married and had two children with. Phone.com had gone public, leaving him with a windfall of a million dollars. He used some of the money to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory. “I was used to getting pats on the head for being smart,” he said of his decision to leave the cursus honorum of the gifted child. “Diverging from the pat-on-the-head economy was a strange and scary choice.”

Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

“You don’t ransack your own house,” he told me one afternoon, at an open-air café in Venice Beach. I’d asked him what would stop his C.E.O.-monarch from plundering the country—or enslaving his people—for personal gain. “For Louis XIV, when he says, ‘L’état, c’est moi,’ ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.” Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

Mass political participation would cease, and the only way that people could vote would be with their feet, by moving from one SovCorp to another if they became dissatisfied with the terms of service, like switching from X to Bluesky. The irony that dissenters like Yarvin would probably be repressed in such a state appears not to concern him. In his imagined polity, he insists, there would still be freedom of speech. “You can think, say, or write whatever you want,” he has promised. “Because the state has no reason to care.”

Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

For certain people, like meth addicts or four-year-olds, Yarvin said, too much freedom could be deadly. Then, gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

Presumably, Yarvin’s monarch would act decisively to safeguard his wards. At the Venice café, Yarvin lauded the Delancey Street Foundation, a nonprofit rehab organization, whose strict program he has characterized as exerting “fascist-parent-level control.” Some of his own proposals go further. On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy. An “African country today,” he told me, has “enough smart people in the country to run it—you just don’t have enough smart people to have a democratic election in which everyone is smart.” Because of such remarks, Yarvin is sometimes identified as a white nationalist, a label he delicately resists. In a 2007 blog post titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he explained that, though he is “not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he finds both whiteness and nationalism to be unhelpful political concepts. During lunch, he told me that he feels a rueful sympathy for the bigots of the past, who had some of the right intuitions but lacked the proper science. Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.

For several hours, Yarvin shuffled through his pitches for strongman rule, like an auctioneer desperate to clinch a sale. I listened patiently, though I was often puzzled by his factual distortions and peculiar asides. “What is the right policy in a completely new-from-scratch regime for African Americans?” he wondered aloud at one point. At first, this seemed like a non sequitur: I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.” Yarvin, who is an atheist, is not particularly interested in theocratic rule, but he advocates creating different legal codes to govern different populations. (He has cited the Ottoman millet system, which granted religious communities a measure of autonomy.) To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Yarvin is not known for his discretion. He has a habit of sharing private correspondence, as I discovered when he started sending me unsolicited screenshots of text messages and e-mails he’d exchanged with his wife, his friends, a fact checker at the Times Magazine, and someone nominated to the new Administration. He seemed troubled by the thought that the wit and wisdom they contained might be lost to posterity. He was more guarded about his friendship with Thiel, but he did mention a conversation they’d privately filmed together last year and boasted about a fortieth-birthday gift he’d received from the billionaire: Francis Neilson’s “The Tragedy of Europe,” a contemporaneous commentary on the Second World War, though not the first edition that Yarvin had been hoping for.

Thiel has always had a prophetic touch. He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and created Palantir, a data-mining firm that has just received a new contract to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out deportations. Thiel supported Trump back when doing so still made one a pariah in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he donated fifteen million dollars to J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest amount given to a single candidate in congressional history. A longtime libertarian, Thiel appears to have taken a Yarvinian turn around 2009, when, in a widely quoted essay published online by the Cato Institute, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin linked to it approvingly in a blog post titled “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral.” They soon met for the first time, at Thiel’s house in San Francisco, and, according to private messages I reviewed, struck up a confiding correspondence. Yarvin’s e-mails were long and homiletic, full of precepts gleaned from pickup-artist blogs; Thiel’s were straightforward and concise. Both men seemed to take for granted that America was a communist country, that journalists acted like the Stasi, and that tech C.E.O.s were their prey.

In the fall of 2014, Thiel published “Zero to One,” a best-selling treatise on startups, with Blake Masters, his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan. Before the book tour, Thiel asked Yarvin for advice on fielding questions he might get on how to steer more women into tech. The premise appeared to strike them both as misguided, since women, in their view, were less likely to have men’s aptitude for computer science. As Yarvin put it in one e-mail, “There’s simply no way short of becoming a farce for Google, YC”—Y Combinator, the startup accelerator—“etc, etc, to ‘look like America.’ ” Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify”—that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it—and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote. Once, at a dinner, Thiel quizzed Yarvin on how one might go about taking down Gawker. (As it turned out, Thiel had already decided to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against the online publication, which eventually bankrupted it, in 2016.) In e-mails obtained by BuzzFeed, Yarvin bragged to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor, that he’d watched Trump’s first election at Thiel’s house and had been “coaching” him. “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos replied. Yarvin wrote back, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

When I recently visited Yarvin’s Craftsman home, in Berkeley, I noticed a painting that Thiel had given him: a portrait of Yarvin in the style of a role-playing-game character card, bearing the legend “Philosopher.” As I sipped tea from a novelty mug featuring an image of Yarvin with a cartoon crown, he told me that it would be “cringe” for him to broadcast his relationship with Thiel—or with Vance, for that matter, whom he met through Thiel around 2015. “Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.” “He’s a really cool guy,” Yarvin said of the Vice-President, who followed him on X earlier this year. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) Apropos of his relationships with powerful men, Yarvin paraphrased to me “a wonderful piece of advice for courtiers” that he’d picked up from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to His Son,” an eighteenth-century etiquette manual addressed to the author’s illegitimate child: “Never bug them. And never let them forget you exist.”

Yarvin has had more success as a courtier to startup founders than as a founder himself. He launched Tlon in 2013, with a twentysomething former Thiel fellow. Yarvin approached computer science the same way he approached the U.S. government—with, as he put it, “utopian megalomania.” Yarvin’s visionary goal was to build a peer-to-peer computer network, named Urbit, that would allow users to control their own data, free from scolds, spies, and monopolies. Each user on the Urbit network is identified with an N.F.T. that acts like a digital passport. Even though Urbit promotes decentralization, the system is designed around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning “planets,” “stars,” or “galaxies.”

In an early sketch of the system, Yarvin named himself its “prince,” but he struggled to attract subjects to his imaginary kingdom. Like Yarvin’s political theory, his programming language, which he wrote himself, was daring, abstruse, and sometimes mistaken for a hoax. Ever the contrarian, he reversed the meaning of zeros and ones. After decades of work and an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, Urbit seems to function less like a feudal society and more like the Usenet forums of Yarvin’s youth. (The trade publication CoinDesk has called it “a slower version of AOL Instant Messenger.”) “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” a former Urbit employee told me, describing Yarvin as “the world’s first computer-science crank.” Yarvin left the company in 2019.

No longer needing to worry about spooking investors, Yarvin threw himself into the life style of a self-described “rogue intellectual.” Under his own name, he launched a Substack newsletter, “Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.” (Today, it is the platform’s third most popular “history” publication.) He became a fixture on the right-wing podcast circuit and seemed never to turn down an invitation to party. On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.” Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the “Red Scare” podcast, are among the most prominent avatars of the scene. In 2021, Thiel helped to fund an anti-woke film festival in New York, and Yarvin read his poetry at one of its packed events. Urbit now hosts a literary magazine designed to look like The New York Review of Books. “If you are an intelligent Jewish-American urbanite who wants to play around with certain Nietzschean and eugenic themes, you aren’t going to join tiki-torch-bearing marchers chanting that ‘the Jews will not replace us,’ ” the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari observed in an essay last year. “No, you turn to the dissident right.”

Yarvin has emerged as a veteran edgelord of this crowd, which he compared to San Francisco’s gay subculture in the seventies and to the Lost Generation of literary modernists—tight-knit communities whose members bonded over their sense of being outsiders. James Joyce, he said, sold few copies of “Ulysses,” but his friends, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “knew that what he was doing was good.” So it was with the creatives of the dissident right, whose endeavors, he felt, had been overlooked by the intolerant Cathedral. This past April, Yarvin pitched Darren Beattie, the acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, on a plan for “dissident-right art hos” to take over the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Lately, Yarvin has been trying to flip some of his newly acquired cultural capital into the real thing. Last year, he returned to Urbit as a “wartime C.E.O.,” after which several top employees resigned, and in February he raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The night before Trump’s Inauguration, I drove Yarvin to a black-tie “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by a neo-reactionary publishing house, Passage Press, which recently released Yarvin’s book “Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance,” the first of a planned four-part cycle outlining his vision for a new political regime. Its endnotes predominantly consist of QR-code links to Wikipedia pages: “Denazification,” “L’État, c’est moi,” “Presentism (historical analysis).” As I negotiated the icy streets, Yarvin explained that during the Elizabethan era the finest minds in the arts and sciences were to be found at court. When I asked if he saw a parallel with Trump’s inner circle, he burst out laughing. “Oh, no,” he said. “My God.”

Like most journalists, I had been denied entry to the ball, so I ordered a drink at a bar in the lobby. Standing next to me was a man wearing a cowboy hat and a burgundy velour suit—a Yarvin enthusiast, it turned out, named Alex Maxa. He ran a party-bus company in San Francisco, and in his free time he made memes featuring Yarvin’s likeness. He said that he was drawn to Yarvin’s work because “it makes me feel like I’ve got something that people in Washington who think they’re really smart can’t actually make a compelling argument against.” He’d wanted to go to the ball but tickets, whose price had surged to twenty thousand dollars, were now sold out. Not long afterward, I met two of Yarvin’s friends, who encouraged me, and another journalist I was with, to confidently walk into the party with them. Maxa was already inside, having taken a similar approach. “Lol I just waltzed right in by asking where the coat check was,” he texted.

Passage Press had billed the event as “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” It was not false advertising. In a banquet hall awash in pink and purple light, Anton, from the State Department, Laura Loomer, a Trump whisperer known for her anti-Muslim bigotry, and Jack Posobiec, who popularized the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, mingled with venture capitalists, crypto accelerationists, and Substack all-stars. Earlier that evening, as guests dined on seared scallops and filet mignon, Steve Bannon, the ball’s keynote speaker, called for mass deportations, the “Götterdämmerung” of the administrative state, and Mark Zuckerberg’s imprisonment.

Eight years ago, Mike Cernovich, a first-gen alt-right influencer, had co-hosted an inaugural party known as the DeploraBall, a winking reference to Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate crack about half of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” It was, by all accounts, a shambolic affair, plagued by journalists and protesters. One of Cernovich’s co-organizers, Tim Gionet, who goes by the online pseudonym Baked Alaska, was removed from his role after posting antisemitic content on Twitter. Now, at the Coronation Ball, Baked Alaska was served for dessert—a nod, it seemed, to Gionet, who was then on probation for participating in the January 6th insurrection. (He was pardoned by Trump the next day.) Cernovich pushed a baby around in a stroller and marvelled, like a proud father, at how far the movement had come. “I was one of the oldest guys in the place!” he tweeted the following afternoon. “Real right wing. High energy and high IQ.” In 2008, Yarvin, in his “Open Letter,” had called for a reactionary vanguard to form an underground political party. The Coronation Ball made it clear that this was no longer necessary. His web-addled counter-élite was now the establishment.

Yarvin was dressed in the same tuxedo, including a bright-red cummerbund, that he’d worn to a party at Thiel’s house in D.C. the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance had amiably greeted him with “You reactionary fascist!” He’d also worn the tux to his wedding last year. Yarvin’s first wife died in 2021, from a hereditary heart disease, at the age of fifty. At the ball, he was accompanied by his second wife, Kristine Militello. A former Bernie Sanders supporter and an aspiring novelist, Kristine described herself as having been “red-pilled” during the pandemic, after losing her customer-service job at an online wine retailer. She first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution, and proceeded to read everything he’d written. She sent him an admiring e-mail in 2022, seeking advice on how to break into New York’s dissident-right literary scene, and they met for drinks a few weeks later.

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.) He didn’t always express himself so quaintly. In 2011, the day after the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed sixty-nine people, many of them teen-agers, at a summer camp in Norway, Yarvin wrote, “If you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children.” He praised Breivik for targeting the right group (“communists, not Muslims”), but condemned his methods: “Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.”

Yarvin’s own recruitment efforts seemed to be working. Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who has been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. “My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,” he said.

After half an hour, I was escorted out of the party, as were other reporters throughout the evening. Security mistook Maxa, my friend from the lobby, for one of our kind, and he was ejected, too, though not before pressing through the crowd to get his photo taken with the dark elf.

Even Trump’s most pessimistic critics have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch—and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth. Elon Musk, an unelected citizen, has led a squadron of twentysomethings on a spree through the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and seizing control of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Meanwhile, the Administration has launched an assault on civil society, revoking funding at Harvard and other universities that it claims are bastions of ideological indoctrination and punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s opponents. It has expanded the machinery of immigration enforcement, deporting three U.S.-born children to Honduras, a group of Asian and Latin American immigrants to Africa, and more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they may remain until the end of their lives. U.S. citizens now find themselves with a government that claims the right to disappear them without due process: as Trump told Bukele, the President of El Salvador, during an Oval Office meeting, “Homegrowns are next.” Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas—like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy—don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies.

Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life. Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.

Some thinkers would envy the attention Yarvin is receiving. But he dismissed his influence as a “fraudulent currency” since it has yet to cash out in the revolution he desires. He poured scorn on DOGE (“so much libertarian DNA”) and Trump’s tariff plan (not mercantilist enough). In a recent essay on Substack, he criticized the decision to dispatch plainclothes ICE officers to jail college students and professors for political speech—not on moral grounds, but because the thuggish optics were likely to provoke resistance. Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.

This apparent desire for control also shows up in some of his relationships. Not long ago, I visited Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s ex-fiancée, in Berkeley. The two began dating in September, 2021, after Yarvin posted a personal ad on Substack, explaining that he’d recently lost his “widower virginity” and was looking to meet someone of “childbearing age.” Laurenson, a freelance writer and editor, replied the same day: “I have historically been a liberal but my IQ is really high, I want kids, and I’m incredibly curious to talk to you.” Yarvin went on Zoom dates with other women who answered the post—among them, Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend of the now imprisoned crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried—but he and Laurenson soon found themselves in an all-consuming romance. She told me that the ethos of her relationship with Yarvin was “ ‘We’re going to be geniuses together and have genius babies.’ I’m making fun of it a little bit, but that really was it.”

Like Yarvin, Laurenson had been a precocious child who went to college early. She’d also maintained a blog with a cult following, where, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, she wrote about sex-positive feminism, B.D.S.M., and pickup artistry. She and Yarvin fought often, sometimes about politics. Laurenson had moved away from the left, but she hadn’t fully embraced neo-reaction. When I asked her if she’d ever changed Yarvin’s mind about anything, she said she’d gotten him to stop using the N-word, at least around her. (He later told this magazine that he was not using the word in the spirit of “a Southern plantation owner.”)

The bigger source of tension, according to Laurenson, was Yarvin’s autocratic attachment style. When they fought, Laurenson said, he insisted that she provide a rational justification for ending hostilities. She felt that Yarvin’s slippery personal attacks resembled his manner in public debates. “He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul,” she told me in an e-mail, referencing the cyberattack strategy of overwhelming a server with traffic from multiple sources. James Dama, a friend of Laurenson’s who had his own falling out with Yarvin, recalled, “He would make a coarse joke about Lydia’s weight or looks, not get a laugh, and then get angry at Lydia for being too stuck up.” (Tanner, Yarvin’s first girlfriend, described a similar pattern of insults and demands.)

Laurenson and Yarvin broke up in the summer of 2022, while Laurenson was pregnant. He told me that his desire for closeness might have struck Laurenson as “overbearing and stifling,” and that he had a bad habit of making “a joke that’s sort of a barb,” but he denied that he was ever purposefully cruel during the relationship. (He added that, after the relationship ended, “my natural instinct was, I’m going to cut her down to size every time I can”—something, he noted, he was “very good at.”) A few weeks after their son was born, that December, Yarvin sued for partial custody, which he received. An ongoing family-court case remains acrimonious. “The parents are in disagreement about nearly every issue,” their mediator observed last year.

Now that they share a toddler, Laurenson spends a lot of time thinking about Yarvin’s own childhood. “He has this class-clown thing going on, where he very much craves attention,” she said. To her, it seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of “repetition compulsion,” a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality. She wondered if he’d first adopted “the monarchist thing” as a kind of intellectual sport, a bit from Usenet, and then, like the parallel world in the Borges story, it had slowly taken on a reality of its own. “Is it just like you found this place where people admire you and allow you to troll as much as you want, and then you just live in that world?” she asked.

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. “The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. “He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.”

It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it. He claims that the transition to his regime will be peaceful, even joyous, but fantasies of violence flicker throughout his work. “Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,” he wrote in a Substack post in March. “You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?”

Yarvin’s strong opinions on how the world ought to work extended to this profile. Some of his suggestions were intriguing: he floated the idea of staging a debate with one of his ex-girlfriends, and invited me to follow him to Doha for a meeting with Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Others were officious. At one point, he sent me nine texts objecting to my use of the word “extreme”—“a hostile pejorative,” he explained, which my article would be better off without. (He’d previously boasted several times in our taped conversations that he was more “extreme” than anyone in the current Administration.) A few days after the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel, he wrote to The New Yorker to complain that I’d walked in without his publisher’s permission; he said that he hoped the incident would not turn into “Watergate 2,” and referred to himself as “certainly the most media-friendly person in the scene!” (Jonathan Keeperman, his publisher at Passage Press and the host of the ball, once suggested that the Republican Party should “lamppost”—that is, lynch—“the journos,” so this was not a particularly high bar to clear.)

One morning this winter, I woke up to twenty-eight texts from Yarvin expressing concerns about my reporting technique. “The problem is that your process is slack and I can feel it generating low-quality content—because it’s not adversarial enough,” he wrote. “When the process is not adversarial, I don’t know what I am contending against.” He briefly considered whether I was “too dumb to understand the ideas,” or whether I’d succumbed to the mental self-censorship that Orwell called “crimestop.” He urged me to watch “The Lives of Others,” an Oscar-winning film that depicts the relationship between an East German playwright and a Stasi agent who is tasked with surveilling him. The Stasi agent, he wrote, “can actually write up the ideas of the playwright, *without even thinking them* It is not even that he is ‘opposed’ to the dissident ideas. It is that he does not even let them touch his brain.” In the film, the Stasi agent eventually “cracks,” after he comes to sympathize with the playwright’s views. Yarvin, presumably, was the playwright.

He said that he was coming to see me, on the other hand, as an “NPC,” or non-player character. He proposed giving me a Voight-Kampff test, the fictional exam in “Blade Runner” used to distinguish androids from humans. His version would involve the two of us debating “the ‘blank slate theory’ versus ‘racism’ ” and recording the conversation. (“By ‘racism’ I mean of course human biodiversity,” he elaborated.) When I explained that my reporting process did not include submitting to on-demand tests, Yarvin sent me a screenshot of “August 1968,” W. H. Auden’s poem about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring:

The Ogre does what ogres can Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech

He went on to say that although he’d agreed to participate in this story because “no publicity is bad publicity,” he would now try to kill it if he could.

I was struck by the contrast between his messages and the coolheaded tone he’d recommended that Thiel and other friends deploy when handling the media. After the 2013 TechCrunch article identifying Yarvin came out, Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur, proposed in an e-mail “to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them.” Yarvin dissuaded him. “What would Heartiste say?” Yarvin asked, referring to the white-nationalist pickup-artist blog “Chateau Heartiste.” “Almost always, the right alpha answer is ‘nothing.’ Say nothing. Do nothing.”

On a balmy afternoon in late February, Yarvin and his wife, Kristine, were driving down a country road in the South of France. They were accompanied by the documentarians, Brun and Díaz. “Where are we going, Kristine?” Brun asked from the passenger seat, turning the camera around to film her in the back beside me.

She said that she had only the vaguest notion. “Honestly, he just tells me everything last minute,” she explained. “It’s kind of like being a dog. You just know that you’re going in the car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna go to the dog park, or you’re gonna go to the vet, and you’ll find out when you get there.”

“Spontaneity,” Yarvin chimed in.

“That’s a word for it,” Kristine teased.

We were on our way to meet Renaud Camus, a seventy-eight-year-old novelist and pamphleteer, who, in 2011, published “The Great Replacement,” an incendiary manifesto that argued that liberal élites were behind a conspiracy to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The title phrase has since become a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world, from Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, marchers chanted, “You will not replace us,” to Christchurch, New Zealand, where, two years later, a man who’d published a manifesto with the same title as Camus’s killed fifty-one Muslims.

As we crested a hill, the walls of Camus’s castle, Château de Plieux, loomed into view. “Does anyone know if he’s related to Albert Camus?” Yarvin asked. “I think he’s not related to Albert, but he’s a lovely, old, gay, literary Frenchman.”

Brun, who is Venezuelan, wondered what he would do if Camus “has a sign that says ‘No Foreigners Allowed.’ ”

“Well, are you here to replace us?” Kristine joked. Nobody replied.

Yarvin rang an impressive metal bell beside the door, and we were soon ushered inside by Pierre Jolibert, Camus’s partner. Upstairs, Camus was waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. With his manicured white beard and brown corduroy jacket, complete with a bow tie and gold pocket-watch chain, he looked like a nineteenth-century man of letters. Speaking perfect English, with an English accent, he made it sound as though he’d had no choice but to buy the castle, which dated from the early thirteen-hundreds, after his library grew too large for his small Parisian flat. That was thirty-five years ago. Now, acknowledging the stacks of books that were overtaking his cavernous study, he said that he was running into the same problem here.

Over several glasses of champagne, Yarvin fired a series of questions at Camus, though he rarely waited long enough for his host to give a full answer. What did Camus think of Philippe Pétain? Charles de Gaulle? Napoleon III? Napoleon I? Ernst Jünger? Ernst von Salomon? Ezra Pound? Basil Bunting? More than an interaction, Yarvin, the former trivia champion, seemed to want a pat on the head for his display of learning.

After we headed downstairs for lunch—strips of sizzling duck, a quiche Lorraine, red wine—Yarvin resumed his cross-examination. Did Camus rate Thomas Carlyle? Michel Houellebecq? Louis XIV? What would he say to Charles Maurras if he were alive today? What would Dostoyevsky have thought about the Covid lab-leak theory?

Camus let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Yarvin asked a particularly odd question, but he was baffled by his guest’s repeated inquiries about Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, who Yarvin suspected was actually a man. “We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,” Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. “What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?”

Brun asked the men to move to a window so that he could shoot them from outside. As Yarvin gazed at the patchwork of neatly tended fields below, he spoke about the Great Replacement as “one of the greatest crimes” in history. “Is it greater than the Holocaust? I don’t know. . . . We haven’t seen it play out yet.” He’d been drinking since his arrival and seemed to be in an emotional state. “I have three children,” he told Camus. “Will they be basically lined up and marched into mass graves?” They had been discussing Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), which depicts an invasion of Indian migrants destroying European nations. Sobbing now, he continued, “I want my children to die in the twenty-second century. I don’t want them to experience some kind of insane post-colonial Holocaust.”

After dessert, coffee, and a rum from Guadeloupe, it was time for an evening stroll. Carrying a wooden cane, Camus led Yarvin through the small town of Plieux. Spring had arrived early: a cherry tree was blossoming with little flowers. As they passed the local church, Yarvin took out his phone to show Camus a photo of the toddler he shares with Laurenson. “The mother of that child was not my wife,” he said confidingly. A moment later, he was reading a poem by C. P. Cavafy, in tears once again.

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine said, “You can’t just ask people that!”

Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?” 

[jointhefediverse]

💫 Join the Fediverse! 💫

Greetings, fellow bloggers! We welcome you to join us in discovering, honoring, and promoting the potential future of social networking—commonly referred to as the "Fediverse."

The Fediverse, or Federation Universe, refers to a collective of online platforms that utilize the web protocol known as ActivityPub, which has set a standard of excellence in regards to both protecting and respecting users' online privacies.

There's a good chance in the past few years that you've caught wind of the fedi family's critically acclaimed Mastodon; however, there are many other unique platforms worth your consideration...

✨ Where To Begin?

Conveniently enough, from the minds of brilliant independent developers, there already likely exists a Fediverse equivalent to your favorite socials. Whether it's an opinion from the critics, or from the community alike—the following popular websites are commonly associated with one another:

Friendica 🐰 = Facebook Mastodon 🐘 = Twitter Pixelfed 🐼 = Instagram PeerTube 🐙 = YouTube Lemmy 🐭 = Reddit

It's worth mentioning, too, a few other sites and forks thereof that are worthy counterparts, which be: Pleroma 🦊 & Misskey 🐱, microblogs also similar to Twitter/Mastodon. Funkwhale 🐋 is a self-hosting audio streamer, which pays homage to the once-popular GrooveShark. For power users, Hubzilla 🐨 makes a great choice (alongside Friendica) when choosing macroblogging alternatives.

✨ To Be Clear...

To address the technicalities: aside from the "definitive" Fediverse clients, we will also be incorporating any platforms that utilize ActivityPub-adjacent protocols as well. These include, but are not limited to: diaspora*; AT Protocol (Bluesky 🦋); Nostr; OStatus; Matrix; Zot; etc. We will NOT be incorporating any decentralized sites that are either questionably or proven to be unethical. (AKA: Gab has been exiled.)

✨ Why Your Privacy Matters

You may ask yourself, as we once did, "Why does protecting my online privacy truly matter?" While it may seem innocent enough on the surface, would it change your mind that it's been officially shared by former corporate media employees that data is more valuable than money to these companies? Outside of the ethical concerns surrounding these concepts, there are many other reasons why protecting your data is critical, be it: security breaches which jeopardize your financial info and risk identity theft; continuing to feed algorithms which use psychological manipulation in attempts to sell you products; the risk of spyware hacking your webcams and microphones when you least expect it; amongst countless other possibilities that can and do happen to individuals on a constant basis. We wish it could all just be written off as a conspiracy... but, with a little research, you'll swiftly realize the validity of these claims are not to be ignored any longer. The solution? Taking the decentralized route.

✨ Our Mission For This Blog

Our mission for establishing this blog includes 3 core elements:

To serve as a hub which anybody can access in order to assist themselves in either: becoming a part of the Fediverse, gaining the resources/knowledge to convince others to do the very same, and providing updates on anything Fedi-related.

We are determined to do anything within our power to prevent what the future of the Internet could become if active social users continue tossing away their data, all while technologies are advancing at faster rates with each passing year. Basically we'd prefer not to live in a cyber-Dystopia at all costs.

Tumblr (Automattic) has expressed interest in switching their servers over to ActivityPub after Musk's acquisition of then-Twitter, and are officially in the transitional process of making this happen for all of us. We're hoping our collective efforts may at some point be recognized by @staff, which in turn will encourage their efforts and stand by their decision.

With that being stated, we hope you decide to follow us here, and decide to make the shift—as it is merely the beginning. We encourage you to send us any questions you may have, any personal suggestions, or corrections on any misinformation you may come across.

From the Tender Hearts of, ✨💞 @disease & @faggotfungus 💞✨

[sister-daniels-confession-booth]

sister am i guilty for repeating history

long story short, i was crushing on this relatively popular and iconic-in-my-area-of-interests blogger and stalked their social media before reaching out to them with a simple proposition of some fanart

half a year later we became such good friends (apparently?) that we made a video together and this summer i’m traveling through half my country to visit them in person

i feel like i’ve seen this before/sarc

and i don’t know what to make of it

Darling this is the dream all people should strive for.

Cyber-stalk your crush until they notice you then become an inseparable couple/duo. Fall in love and have such a special relationship that the internet is obsessed with the two of you.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/27/2024

every fucking time i step outside the apartment i get smacked in the face with a wet blanket of heat and humidity. this is my second summer in the swamp WHY am i so startled every single time

listening

both off my spotify recommended list: 2 Mello's dead leaves, a funky little instrumental that sounds like driving somewhere with fitful AC when it is so hot the leaves are dropping off the trees.

TV Girl's Taking What's Not Yours is not a song i wholeheartedly enjoy, but the sample of Nixon saying "I am not a crook!" has been stuck in my head all week. and stickiness in the head is the main criteria for a tuesdaysong. i don't know anything about this band but my brother said "you WOULD be the typical TV Girl listener". so that information is now available to everyone.

indie pop with indie frontman voice (get well soon). actually. no. this singer reminds me of shelby the worm from adventure time. plus distinct funk overtones. 70% of the song by volume is a hip-hop-ified sample of an anti-pirating PSA. i think i would probably like this when i am less depressed.

-

reading

really great breakdown of what the fuck is happening with Telegram and why conservatives are so riled up about it.

The quick version of how Telegram became a part of the culture war goes something like this. In April, Uri Berliner, who was then a senior business editor at NPR, alleged a widespread culture of woke at NPR in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. This led to weeks of discussion about NPR on Twitter and in the right-wing blogosphere. During this saga, several right-wing bloggers attacked NPR’s current CEO and President Katherine Maher, who was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that has been repeatedly attacked by conservatives, Elon Musk, etc. for allegedly having a liberal bias. Maher is also a member of the Signal Foundation’s board of directors. 

this fascinated me as an engineering/infrastructure disaster in process. thanks longreads

Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.

-

watching

i have watched about a movie a day this week and nothing has like. hit.

The Sisters Brothers (2018, dir. Audiard) was simply not the vibe i was looking for. somewhere between coen brothers and peckinpah. not that i am expecting all movies to have an easily portable moral message delivered to me fortune-cookie style in a silent-film dialogue screen right before the credits play, but what was this About. what was the Story being conveyed to me. this was like an episode of the twilight zone where rod serling goes "damn well that was fucked up" except i went in expecting like. a drama. it's a beautiful movie with great acting except they forgot to put a feature-length-movie plot in it.

Omega Doom (1996, dir. Pyun) is such a strange thing. a cyber-Yojimbo with Rutger Hauer. takes place almost completely within one blasted, snowy little town plaza. Rutger Hauer got "shot in the program" during the great human/robot war and it turned him good.

i think it was marketed very poorly, bc it is NOT an epic science fiction thriller. it was made for about five dollars and is a very talky, meandering, weird little cyber-western. as is the case for all movies with female robots, a lot of weird anxieties about women. i think it would have been way more interesting with a completely genderflipped cast? like push that concept all the way! watching mr hauer mow down a lot of fembots was not the most pleasant experience for me as an alleged woman.

not as good as A Fistful of Dollars but compels me more.

-

playing

hello this is very important. the fallout classic collection will be free on epic starting thursday. thank you for your time.

new major genshin patch this week so i will not shut up about that for a bit. as of time of drafting this i am down to TWENTY SEVEN map markers and fully half of them are card game opponents i haven't beaten.

i want to be a point and click adventure game girl so bad but i am afraid i do not have the point and click adventure game temperament. i am having fun with The Silent Age, a little postapoc thing with a time travel mechanic, but only through heavy reference to a walkthrough. this was free on epic last march and i kind of get why? it was published in 2012, wasn't part of a series and didn't have ongoing monetization, and reviewed well but doesn't have a ton of replayability. probably a great windfall for the studio of like $10k, im curious how many people actually downloaded it during its free week. the kind of self-contained game i personally am glad exists in the world but don't want to pay money for.

some good graph humor.

some good osha humor.

-

making

i love to acquire a container. this tiny little pearlescent blue avon bath oil holder (i thought was a vase in texas thrift but that explains why it was horrifyingly sticky) now holds my double pointed needles and other knitting bits and bobs so they're not buried at the bottom of the vase with the regular needles

[despazito]

Unfortunately Russia absolutely does use bots and crap to try to destabilize american society (to limited success imo) just like how the CIA runs influence ops on their enemy states. most countries in the world are actively all spying on each other doing this kind of stuff on the down low.

However I do believe that staff found this convenient situation where they discovered a few bots, maybe even as few as one, and used this (I think intentionally, but I'm also willing to believe staff may just be that fucking stupid and inept) as an excuse to also quietly remove real black bloggers from the site who they didn't like.

Idk I'm concerned about the implication that these kinds of cyber ops don't exist because they are out there on many popular websites and it's not paranoia or 21st century McCarthyism to say that. I think the real story of what staff was up to in March 2018 is more complex and I think both staff's racism and bot presence can easily both be true at once. I think it was an excuse with a grain of truth inside that they exploited.

[therealmofadisneyfangirl]

Kim Possible

Tick-Tick-Tick Episode #1

Hi! My name is Deanna Winchester mulitfandom (more then one fandom) blogger I decided to

create my very first blog post review of Disney’s Kim Possible.

My author block delayed this long running pop culture review.

This is actually the first episode to ever aired but of course it aired out of order on the Disney Channel.

It first aired on the Disney channel USA on June 14, 2002. Toon Disney premiere: April 11, 2005.

Kim Possible was and is my childhood show it amazing to review all episodes. This is a fun rewatch that I actually enjoyed.

Kim Possible is one of my favorite Disney animated character, it exciting to watch this show and revisit it.

I rewatch this show i never thought though to do an episode review. This is a good idea this is also my comforting show when adulting goes too far.

The episode Disney plus synopsis is I insert a screenshot down below

We first introduced to Kim Possible our heroine, the main character but also a spy.

She also has normal life as a high schooler but has no alter ego. She is a cheerleader.

She describes as she can do anything!

Anyway let begin the first episode!

The episode start with Kim Possible anxiously being late as she rush past several people as she went to her locker as she waiting for her assignment to be printed. She is anxiously like come on print please.

Only you think it her assignment to her confusion no it just her best friend Ron Stoppable printing cheat codes for a video game. Kim rightfully so is overwhelmed she has 30 seconds to print her History assignment she is annoyed by Ron. Ron was a comedian in this episode. Ron was so entertaining.

Course as the real paper was about to print there is a paper jam, Ron is nothing to fear Rufus. The viewers are like who the hell is Rufus, it turned out Rufus is Ron’s pet naked mole rat. Kim had doubts until Rufus did his magic, the paper was saved. Yay! Kim is excited and happy that her paper is saved.

Until Kim’s luck was put to test. Kim is stressed and is under lot of pressure she can’t afford to be late.

Unfortunately she rush into the school grumpy staff member Mr Barkin.

It turned out revealed by the audience Kim has been not late for third time she is also on this guy bad side a recipe for disaster. Kim much to her dismay, is ordered detention.

Cut to the badass theme song opening. Christina is such a good singer.

Meanwhile at Possible house we are introduced to Kim family. Her younger mischievous geniuses twin brothers Jim and Tim are introduced her parents are introduced Kim herself revealed the facts her parents are brain surgeon and rocket scientist. Kim told her parents the truth she is not happy she got detention what she is good at. Kim you are good at being a spy badass!

One of her catchphrase no big was introduced

We are introduced to the first time of Wade and the communicator.

Wade assign her to her mission in South America much to her parents dissatisfaction however she gave her puppy dog eyes which be a running gag for the series

She can go yay!

New details are revealed the villain characters Shego all in the first episode.

Kim is not aware who she is yet like who is that she is good.

Kim and Ron visit the professor lab I assume it was emergency. 🚨

Kim ask what was stolen even the professor does not know

Something is fishy. Kim and Ron will solve it. Kim suddenly has an idea she saw on the footage of Shego stealing the device.

The device project is revealed to be the Tick. Course Ron screamed it brought back bad case of summer camp memories which you believe it or not will be foreshadowing for later Season one episode.

That camp and Ron are connected my dear readers. Camp Wannaweep and Ron are sinisterly connected.

The tick was not alive according to the professor it was a digital blue print it was a cyber genetic Tick will be in comparison to the real thing. The professor created a robotic tick. Ron ask why

Professor say he have lot on his time fair enough.

Who will need a robot tick? The key to your question Kim is your arch nemesis villain DR. Drakken

Cut to his evil lair

Shego fell from a trap door. Cut to Shego and Drakken dialogue which is the best banter ever.

Kim say she has wrap up the conversation soon due to detention. Wade keep teasing her until Kim say to Wade can we continue the mission. Wade was like okay.

Then Wade revealed more information about Shego to Kim i forgot to add

Drakken is furious that he reveal his evil plan to Shego to build a robotic tick.

Course Kim was interrupt by Barkin. Kim found herself in detention shenanigan ensures.

Funniest moment in this episode the clock is messed up, Kim had good dialogue herself.

Course leads Rufus to the rescue who causes a distraction. Kim managed to escaped.

She thanks Ron for rescuing her with the best plan out letting Rufus out! Course he gave credit to Rufus who was the hero,

Wade access more information about Drakken and Shego that lair is in the Caribbean. Wade say myth say the island is haunted. Much to poor Rufus who hide in the soda cup. Ron was excited about new gadgets. Ron get blasted by the gadget that disguise as lipstick for being nosy. Rightfully so.

Banter between Kim and Ron, Ron is now scared of spy gadget. Kim assures him it just regular makeup

Cut to Drakken lair. Shego shouts intruder alert course Drakken is in his own world.

Kim and Ron get captured course Drakken heard of the teen heroine Kim Possible,

Not Ron. Poor Ron. Chum is friend it least they know you and Kim are team Ron. Course Kim literally does not know who these guys are. Now it started to rang a bell. Kim say you something that does not belong to you

Course cut to Kim and Ron threatened by villains threats to be shark food. Course Ron is a comic relief he has good one liners. Kim saved the day and use the spy gadget on the shark. Kim escaped much to the villains dismay.

Shego does not know what nano technology is.

Course Shego found out they escaped cut to her and Kim fight sequence, Kim saved the day by using her spy tech the lair exploded, she and Ron jump. Mission Impossible vibes. Kim is in her cheerleading uniform. Once again Kim speak to the professor, the professor thank her. She say no problem course Barkin is not stupid another round of detention. Kim is not pleased. The nano tick somehow appeared on Kim nose. Kim escaped because it emergency

Course Drakken is on her trail, Barkin is on her trail. They leave on Ron’s scooter who is not fast. It chaotic sequence. Kim saved Barkin because Drakken is trying to get her with this evil genius ray. It a mess.

They end up at Bueno nacho. Kim has the best sarcastic dialogue at Ron who is focused on food.

Ron plus food who is shocked. Course Drakken and Shego argued like a married couple.

Course Shego and Kim have their first real fight, Wade trying to get nano robot off Kim.

Kim got the upper hand Shego end up on Barkin.

Stakes are high. It intense. Kim nose will blown. Wade is problem solving except Ron has an idea. Diablo sauce he put on Kim nose which finally is off her nose. She threw tick at Drakken device which go Boom!

Which lead to Drakken iconic villain phrase quote. The police capture Drakken and unconscious Shego long story got knocked out by Kim detention associates.

Kim is back at detention which lead to most iconic moments tough but fair call back from early scene go.

Funny moment assures , Kim is getting her detention associates now friends a manicure and Barkin get outnumber. Ron say Kim factor is not a rule for detention. The episode end cut to iconic end credits of the closingcredits.

The episode was really fun I enjoy it i rate it 10 out of 10.

💯💯💯

The cartoon Kim Possible rules!

Seen you all next time for episode two review.

Enjoy! I hope you all have a great afternoon.

[ben-marco]

Can I ask your opinion on the tiktok Cyber did in defense of Legion's Gaza derail? I don't have a horse in this race as my abuse was solely at the hands of one person and I've never encountered any traffiking rings in my time as a survival sex worker, so I'm woefully uneducated on how bad or multinational OEA can get. Thanks in advance for reading this even if you don't plan to answer, and again for all you do to source DID information.

Does anyone have a link to Cyber's video? I'm admittedly not the best at using TikTok myself.

For the remainder of this post I'll be addressing Legion's video, found here, unless they delete it of course: https://www.tiktok.com/@legion.sys/video/7376743310095846689

It's no secret that human trafficking can happen during wars or other conflicts. It is happening now with the Russia-Ukraine War (https://rovienna.iom.int/news/human-trafficking-times-conflict-case-ukraine ; https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-trafficking-in-persons-report/ukraine/). However, during times of war it is incredibly difficult to maintain accurate records for things like this, especially when most of the "outside" world is trying to peer into a country like Russia that has been isolating itself over the past decades.

Furthermore, the types of human trafficking happening in Ukraine differ from what Legion alleges is happening in Israel. The two primary types of human trafficking happening in Ukraine are:

Refugees being trafficked to other countries by opportunistic brokers that do not function as an arm of any government (https://www.unhcr.org/news/news-releases/statement-risks-trafficking-and-exploitation-facing-refugees-ukraine-attributed). Most of these refugees are trafficked into other countries in Europe, though some are trafficked into the United Arab Emirates (https://nycfpa.org/08/09/vulnerable-ukrainian-women-and-children-are-at-great-risk-of-being-trafficked-claims-new-report/).

Russia's government trafficking Ukrainian children out of Ukraine and into Russia. I hate to cite Wikipedia, but this is so prevalent that there is a Wikipedia article about it with no shortage of references to other sources as well, including the UN and ICC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War ; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64985009).

I'll stop here and make the disclaimer that, as a blogger on the Internet, I am not an expert on international geopolitical relations or military conflicts. But even for the experts, it can be incredibly challenging to verify facts and keep records during times of war.

My main problems with Legion's accusations are as follows:

Legion cites no sources other than "testimonies that have been told to [them]"

Legion alleges that Israel's government is orchestrating "a multinational network of human trafficking rings based in the West Bank...involved with organ trafficking, skin trafficking, and general sex trafficking", calling the organization an "Israeli Zionist human trafficking project"

Legion alleges that this "Israeli Zionist human trafficking project" is a global operation

Legion alleges that "there are people in our community who are direct survivors" of this "project", and

Legion alleges that this "project" directly affects the US and the UK in addition to Gaza.

There is already immense fog of war surrounding what's happening in Gaza, so much so that it has been difficult to even establish casualty numbers. By throwing out this kind of information without a source, Legion is only adding to that fog. I don't expect anything else from someone who rarely cites sources in general, but if the genocide of Palestinians is really this important to you, don't you think you should back up what you're saying? If ANYTHING was important enough to need a source attached, wouldn't it be this? I've heard rumors about the skin bank and organ bank before, but I think it's very different to make those claims than it is to claim that Israel's government is conducting global human trafficking and RAMCOA / OEA.

Furthermore, this alleged global "Israeli Zionist human trafficking project" sounds a lot like antisemitic propaganda that the RAMCOA / OEA community has been hearing for decades from figures like Fritz Springmeier, Svali, and Unwelcome Ozian. How is this any different? What is Legion's motive in saying this?

The reason I mentioned the trafficking in Ukraine due to the Ukraine-Russia War is to also point out that in conflicts like these, it is far more likely and far more common for brokers and individuals to be taking advantage of those who want to flee the country, than it is for that country's government to set up "a multinational network of human trafficking rings". By spouting unfounded and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Israel's government allegedly trafficking people around the world, you are completely ignoring the very real stories of people who think they're escaping Gaza only to end up being sold into human trafficking by a broker.

The other problem is that by hearing something about Gaza and turning it into "well, there are people in the RAMCOA community who are directly affected by this", Legion is decentering the men, women, and children who are being murdered in Gaza right now while you are reading this. And the statement that Israel's "multinational" trafficking ring somehow affects people in the US and UK is one of the most tone-deaf things I have ever heard.

Let me put it more bluntly. Teenagers and young adults in the US and UK who claim to have been through RAMCOA or OEA are not who we need to be centering in our conversations about Gaza. But in Legion's video about Gaza, that's exactly what they're doing.

[rabid-dog-steve-horn]

My neice designed this Rigby fan art from Regular Show and put it on a bag a few years back. She's actually pretty good artist in drawing, wish she'd do it more often and seriously pursue it.

She didn't want the bag anymore, she had no need to use it so I kept it as a keepsake & a momento cause she's my sister's only child. And I only have one sister. Only sibling I have too, also, and as well.

I also really like her artwork.

I also like Regular Show.

And I'm not just saying that because she's my neice, I really do think she is very good at artwork.

I decided to post some of it online to see if others like it as well.

Not everyone is gonna like every piece of someone's art, it happens. But don't be a dick and voice negative opinions on my posts. I don't come on your posts and blogger pages and humiliate or berate anyone so if you don't like it scroll on by or block & delete my ass but don't be a dickhead about things. I'm not a wimp or a wuss and neither is my niece. (Or any member of my family for that matter) But we treat others the way they treat us.

Show some courtesy and respect as we, (especially me since this is my page), show you.

YOU may resort to immature, demented, pointless, obnoxious insults and berating humiliation and deranged cyber bullying hazing and gaslighting tactics, but I don't treat anyone like that in any way, shape or form MYSELF. I don't condone that kind of shit. Unlike people who take it up on themselves to do that kind of crap I actually have (or try to have) some respect and courtesy for others. I often wish others did too, but a guy can only dream I guess.

Well anyway I hope you enjoy my niece's artwork as I do. There will be more as I find or receive it in future blogs and posts.

[jennyurquizasblog]

Blog Post 8 week 11

How has social media changed how information on protests is spread throughout the world? 

With technology becoming more advanced and many countries having access to social media, it has become one of many platforms that help spread the word regarding movements and protests that are being ignored. For example, as mentioned in Fuchs' reading, they talk about how the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring have changed how social change and political activism can be easier and more accessible. (Fuchs) Both of these movements helped show how citizens used different social media platforms, such as Facebook, to organize their protests and use the platform to spread awareness of what they are protesting against. This brings out citizen journalists, nonprofessional journalists, or bloggers who spread the word of protest through websites, blogs, or social media. These journalists don't hold back with information; they post about what is happening, not just how big the crowds are. 

How is hacktivism related to cyberwar?

Hacktivism is defined as politically influenced actions presented by people who want to express their disapproval or advocate for a cause. In some cases, hacktivism can be taken too far. Cyberwar is a sustained engagement that can be an example of espionage or sabotage.(Vegh 67-92) When hacktivism escalates to a state-level engagement and is part of a sustained conflict, it can fall under the category of cyber war. Basically when hacktivism goes way to far it can lead it to being deemed s cyberwar. 

How is social media important when it comes to testimonies? 

The using of social media has made a great impact when it comes to speaking about personal experiences. In Lee’s reading she talks about how people would use platforms such as Twitter to talk about their personal experience when it comes to movements such as hashtags like #HandsUpDontShoot. (Lee) This hashtag was used to challenge narratives of police violence bringing to the attention of others experience when it came to how people felt racially profieled by police. In a way they broke the barrier since many voices go unheard when it comes to these situations there experiences are ignored but with the use of social media they are able to spread their voices and bring together others who have gone through the same thing. 

How did the #NoDAPL movement change from the help of social media? 

During the year 2016 the #NoDAPL movement gained a lot of visibility from the help of the Water Protectors who camped outside Cannonball, North Dakota in protest of the pipelines that would cross from North Dakota to Illinois passing through lands of two different native tribes and damage their water supply. With the creation of the hashtag it helped spread out word and information about what was going on with the movement. It had a live stream going on to show others who could not be there see what was going on in person as mentioned in Deschine Parkhurst’s article (Deschine Parkhurst) It helped with showing what they were doing and showed everything while news outlets would put out what they wanted to show like how big the crowds were and not asking why they were protesting against the DAPL. 

Fuchs, Christian. Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 2014, pp. 83–88, doi:10.4135/9781446270066.

Lee, Latoya. “Black Twitter: A Response to Bias in Mainstream Media.” Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 1, 5 Mar. 2017, p. 26, doi:10.3390/socsci6010026.

Parkhurst, Nicholet A. “2. from #Mniwiconi to #standwithstandingrock: How the #NoDAPL Movement Disrupted Physical and Virtual Spaces and Brought Indigenous Liberation to the Forefront of People’s Minds.” Indigenous Peoples Rise Up, 13 Aug. 2021, pp. 32–47, doi:10.36019/9781978808812-003.

Vegh, Sandor. “Classifying Forms of Online Activism The Case of Cyberprotests against the World Bank.” Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, Routledge, 2003, pp. 67–92. 

[humanrightsupdates]

Urgent Action: BLOGGER ARBITRARILY DETAINED DESPITE BAIL (Bangladesh 54.24)

Selim Khan is an atheist blogger from Bangladesh. He was part of a private Facebook group for like-minded atheists where he expressed his views privately. Another member photographed his comment and shared it publicly, causing public agitation. A ruling party member then filed a case against him “under the newly enacted Cyber Security Act and the Penal Code”. Selim was arrested on November 4, 2023 and was refused bail repeatedly even though these were bailable offenses. He was finally granted bail on March 13, 2024 but he remains in jail due to procedural delays. Selim must be released immediately and unconditionally.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE UNTIL: August 5, 2024

TAKE ACTION:

Write a letter in your own words or using the sample below as a guide to one or both government officials listed. You can also email, fax, call or Tweet them.

Click here to let us know the actions you took on Urgent Action 54.24. It’s important to report because we share the total number with the officials we are trying to persuade and the people we are trying to help.

[wpwebsitefix]

The Significance of Regular Maintenance for Your WordPress Site

WordPress stands as one of the leading content management platforms, driving millions of websites across the globe. Its flexibility, scalability, and ease of use make it a go-to platform for businesses, bloggers, and eCommerce stores. Much like a car needs routine maintenance to run smoothly, your WordPress site demands regular care to maintain peak performance, strong security, and a seamless user experience.

Why Regular Maintenance Matters

Improved Website Security

Frequent updates to the WordPress core, plugins, and themes safeguard your site against security risks. Neglecting updates can leave your site exposed to hackers, malware, and data breaches.

Enhanced Performance and Speed

A sluggish website can deter visitors and harm your visibility in search engine results Regular maintenance involves optimizing your site’s performance by clearing cache, minimizing scripts, and addressing server-related issues. These steps ensure a seamless and fast browsing experience for visitors.

Better SEO Rankings

Search engines like Google prioritize websites that are fast, secure, and free of errors. Maintenance activities such as fixing broken links, updating content, and optimizing images can improve your site's SEO, helping you rank higher in search results.

User Experience (UX) Improvement

Old themes, malfunctioning links, and sluggish pages can annoy visitors and increase bounce rates. Consistent upkeep guarantees your site remains user-friendly, with operational features, seamless navigation, and compelling content.

Key Aspects of WordPress Maintenance

WordPress consistently publishes updates to enhance performance and address security vulnerabilities. Maintaining up-to-date core, plugins, and themes is vital for reducing risks and ensuring flawless compatibility.

Backups: Your Safety Net

A dependable backup system allows you to swiftly recover your site in the event of accidental data loss, failed updates, or cyber threats. Implement regular backups to safeguard your information and reduce the chance of downtime."

Database Optimization

Over time, your WordPress database may gather clutter like spam comments, redundant post revisions, and obsolete records. Streamlining your database boosts site performance and frees up valuable storage space.

Security Checks

Use security plugins to monitor your site for malware, unauthorized logins, and other potential threats. Regular scans and firewall settings can safeguard your site from harmful attacks.

Broken Link Fixes

Broken links harm user experience and SEO. Conduct regular checks to identify and fix these issues, ensuring a smooth browsing journey for your visitors.

Content Review and Update

Consistently evaluate your content for relevance, correctness, and audience interaction.. Refreshing outdated blog posts or removing irrelevant information ensures your site remains current and beneficial to visitors."

Performance Testing

Test your site’s speed and responsiveness across different devices and browsers. Platforms like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix offer valuable insights to pinpoint opportunities for optimization.

Consequences of Skipping Maintenance

Failing to maintain your WordPress site can lead to serious repercussions:

Increased Downtime: Neglected sites are more prone to crashes, especially after updates.

Loss of Traffic and Revenue: Security breaches or slow loading times can deter visitors, affecting both traffic and sales.

SEO Penalties: Issues like broken links or outdated content can harm your search engine rankings.

Higher Repair Costs: Fixing a neglected site can be more expensive than regular upkeep.

DIY vs. Professional Maintenance

Tips for Regular WordPress Maintenance

Schedule weekly or monthly maintenance tasks.

Use reliable tools and plugins for backups, security, and performance optimization.

Monitor your site's uptime and analytics to identify potential issues early.

Optimize your WordPress site with image compression, responsive design, lazy loading, modern formats, and metadata cleanup. Get expert help at wpwebsitefix.com.

[mariacallous]

Use of the Pegasus spyware by the previous Polish government appears to be much wider than initially suspected, according to officials in the run-up to the launch on February 19 of a parliamentary commission set up to investigate the use of such surveillance technology.

Among the many new suspected cases are journalists, one of the commission officials said.

Based on revelations by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Polish media and a Senate commission looking into this matter, the Polish public is aware of around 10-15 cases of spying with Pegasus, some better documented and proven than others. The Senate has confirmed 14 such cases.

Among the documented cases are those of key politicians in the liberal camp, for example parliamentarian Krzysztof Brejza, who was spied on while heading the election campaign for Civic Platform, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party.

Poland is one of dozens of countries whose governments are believed to have purchased the powerful spyware from the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group and used it to spy illegally on its citizens, including opposition politicians and journalists. An international investigation led by a non-profit media organisation, Forbidden Stories, established in 2021 that it had been used against more than 50,000 phone numbers in more than 20 countries around the world.

On Monday, Tusk said during a meeting of the government with President Andrzej Duda that “the list of the victims of those practices is unfortunately very, very long”. The prime minister said he would send Duda “complete documents” about the issue.

No such list has been made public so far, and Gazeta Wyborcza reported that, based on sources in Tusk’s party, only the prime minister and a few people in his inner circle could be in possession of such a document.

In an interview with Wirtualna Polska on Wednesday, Marcin Bosacki, a Civic Platform MP and vice president of the new Sejm commission, who also headed the previous Senate one, was pressed to specify how many victims of Pegasus he was aware of in Poland.

Bosacki denied being in possession of any full list, but said that, based on his knowledge of the matter, it could include hundreds of people, out of which “over a hundred” were likely surveilled “without grounds”. The list included journalists too, Bosacki added. So far, among the known victims of Pegasus in Poland, there is only one blogger.

Bosacki explained that there were ongoing investigations about the use of Pegasus by the national prosecutor’s office as well as internally at the various intelligence agencies. Bosacki stated that the goals of these inquiries were to determine whether Pegasus was used legally at all in Poland – something he said is unlikely – as well as to identify the victims so they can be informed.

“PiS politicians I speak to on the Sejm corridors are expressing fears that Pegasus was bought, among others, to collect ‘hooks’ [to use for blackmail later] on politicians from the PiS camp itself,” Bosacki said in the interview with Wirtualna Polska.

Further new information presented by Tusk on Monday concerned the purchase of the Pegasus software, which the prime minister said was signed off on by the previous justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, himself.

It has already been established that the Anti-Corruption Agency purchased the spyware in 2017 for 25 million zloty (about 5.5 million euros) using money from the Solidarity Fund, which was established by the Ministry of Justice to support victims of violence but was later proven to be used widely to illegally channel funds to allies of the previous nationalist-populist government.

[dxbcircleout]

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