#Government Degenerating

[reality-detective]

[mugmegan]

YOU GUYS OH MY FUCKING HELL I AM SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW I CANT BELIEVE THIS HAPPENED

They had a movie showing at my dorm and guess what fucking movie they decided to show

V FOR VENDETTA

A BUNCH OF STUDENTS MOSTLY FROM CONSERVATIVE BACKGROUNDS GOING TO A CONSERVATIVE UNIVERCITY WATCHING A MOVIE AT A CONSERVATIVE RUN STUDENT DORM FACILITY

AND IT WAS V FOR FUCKING VENDETTA

With lesbians and gay people and criticism of goverment all uncensored and everything I am so fucking thrilled

I have heard many students here talk about gay people, I heard many talk about our government. I heard nasty things. And tonight they watched a movie that showed how a lesbian was rejected by her family for coming out and then was pulled into a facility where they tortured social rejects like her and she was honored by the movie. Her death playing as an undeserved tragedy. And all those uni students saw it. Maybe they wont think it is good. Maybe they are disgusted that a movie would show compassion for sexual deviants. But they saw it. And they will think about it. They will remember. This means so much to me holy fucking shit.

It was only a small part of the movie but IT. MATTERED. SO. MUCH.

[dearmrsawyer]

sawyer was sick over the weekend so we got some blood tests done and it turns out she is diabetic, she stayed at the vet a couple of nights, it was really strange to be alone in my room those nights. i spend more time with her than anybody. then we were supposed to pick her up thursday morning and they said to come in the evening instead because her glucose was v low. the vet asked me to find a glucose sensor to bring with me that evening, it was a public holiday so i had to find a pharmacy that was actually open. when we went to get her we waited 90 minutes and the sensor was being weird so they said come back later. finally brought her back home at 11pm and the sensor still wasn't working, had to go buy another sensor and bring her back this morning to switch them out, had to leave her there for a few hours so they could switch them and make sure the new one worked, then come back in the afternoon. i've had like no sleep at all this week, its a miracle i kept my eyes open to get training to give her insulin. she's so much better since she came home, even though she's not stabilised yet she very clearly feels heaps better ❤ it was such a relief to have her sleeping on my bed again last night. i was still up all night because i felt like i needed to keep an eye on her because i didn't have the monitor. we'll be in and out a lot over the next couple of weeks while they fine tune her dosage and monitor her levels.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Upstate New York if all the people whining about how it's such a shithole state that the liberals are running into the ground actually packed up and left like they keep threatening to do

[zahra-hydris]

starfield is very fun, but it continues the modern Bethesda tradition of mixing some truly wild game design choices with some basic ass writing

[daisyachain]

another bit of odd reporting in an otherwise average article, the CBC explicitly frames the most outspoken pro-war pro-occupation MP in the current neutral government as a ‘spokesperson for his [the Jewish] community’ while neglecting to frame the most outspoken pro-ceasefire MP as just that, an MP.

Less obvious than the usual lopsided reporting, the implication is that Housefather’s continuous, vocal, unhinged support for the found-by-the-international-court-to-be-in-violation-of-genocide-prevention actions of the Occupation Forces a) is an intrinsic part of his ethnic background, b) is a universal belief among Jewish people in Canada, c) is somehow different from the solidarity shown between Muslim/Arab Canadians like Zahid and majority Muslim/Arab Palestine. Why is she not The Voice of the Arab Community while he is The Voice of the Jewish Community? Obviously it’s stupid to dumb down a diverse group of people spread across the country into one singular opinion. Which begs the question. Why do it. ‘Emerged as a voice’ my ass. This means that he pretty much has no significance until Canada’s studiously milquetoast Liberals took the same tack they’ve taken as for every other issue that’s ever crossed their place and he decided he was going to become the Mr Ethnic Cleansing of his caucus

Sure, use that phrasing when talking about the government’s response to antisemitic threats/attacks in Montreal and Toronto. Those are things that are happening in Canada to people who live here. Putting that frame on this story in this place paints Housefather as pro-genocide by reason of inherent ethnocultural disposition, not by reason of dumb fucking pea brain. It’s a dissonant choice and whatever the reason it comes off as Bad to say that advocating against genocide prevention is somehowwwwww tied to your ethnicity

[overexciteddragon]

Punk is whatever the state fucking hates so I'm sorry to announce to the functionally conservative but contemporary punk isn't leather jackets and punk rock from the 2000s, it's hyperfemininity, it's transsexualism, it's kinky leather harnesses, it's polyamory, it's Black female rappers, it's reading books from the library, it's pirating media, it's sharing your Netflix and Prime and Spotify passwords, it's patching up your thrifted clothes with cute embroidery until they're in tatters, it's "borrowing" groceries from corporations that make up inflation that doesn't exist, it's supporting small weird freaky artists on Etsy instead of buying the newest Official™️ boring low effort promotional image enamel pins, it's drawing and writing the raunchiest most disgusting and freaky porn you could possibly fathom, it's showing off your tits or top surgery scars in public, it's cis women packing and cis men tucking, it's dykefags and fagdykes and boylesbians and girlgays, it's paying for OnlyFans of trans people fisting themselves, it's making up new genders and sexualities and romantic orientations and editing whole new flags for them, it's refusing to label yourself for the gratification of a government that wants to know under what misspelled drafty legislation they should legally kill you

Punk is being/supporting whatever the state currently fucking despises and wants to burn off the face of the earth, not whatever you think is Punk Aesthetic. If you wanna be punk just to look like you were born in the 80s instead of actually BEING PUNK by supporting the degenerates and the freaks and the sex workers and the BIPOC and the transsexuals and the faggots and the dykes, burn your fucking $800 corp bought leather jacket because you're not Hobie Brown you're just a fucking poser.

Punk is fighting the system beside the ones the system is fighting against, Punk isn't a Pinterest moodboard.

[selamat-linting]

begging every '98 ex PRD activists to stop embarrassing the indo left or i'll kill them with hammers.

[mesetacadre]

So, like, have any of you actually ever had a conversation with a fascist offline about what they believe? I have.

To be clear, this wasn't a sit-down-let's-talk conversation. He (the only one) tried to start shit, and we (me + 2 comrades) confronted him in the act and regrettably got into a 30-minute "conversation".

Fascists, individually, are very mentally feeble. They are cowards who always seek to start conflict while trying to make themselves out to be the victims. This is, of course, until they gain enough popularity and canon fodder to throw 20 unstable fascists at anyone they don't like. But until this exaltation occurs¹ and their organizations enter a relatively stable cycle (in contemporary liberal democracies, they last between 2 and 7 years before disintegrating), there remains a contradiction between their aggressive desire to seek confrontation and their individual and collective insecurities. Fascist ideology is mostly not rooted in reality (more on this later), and it also has an important component of self-hate. They are an inferior specimen, unable to achieve what the fascist martyrs before them achieved (in Spain, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera usually occupies this position), and to add injury to insult, it's those who they perceive as weak and undeserving who rule over them. They ignore this perceived inferiority by joking about being chads, the superior race, or non-degenerates. But behind their rhetoric and "humor" there is usually a tinge of insecurity and hate against anyone who doesn't fit their increasingly narrow standard, including themselves.

This fascist we talked with kept referring to Jewish conspiracies, to the freemasons in every position of power, to old Falangists, to fascist "theorists", to some kind of esoteric spiritualism within the bounds of Christianity, somehow, and hyperborea. He talked about communists, how they were already in the government (referring to the social-democratic PSOE), how we were degenerates, how the day will come, etc. He attempted to scare us by saying that he was an ex-member of this more notorious fascist party and that they were looking for him to beat him up, which isn't something you admit to people you're trying to start conflicts with. After a while of his ramblings, one of my comrades couldn't help but laugh at him. It was all very ridiculous; I don't remember exactly what he said that made my comrade laugh. He got slightly more agitated, and the conversation ended in ~5 minutes.

Individually, fascists are also not the brightest people you'll encounter. For somebody to internalize fascist beliefs, they have to be unconsciously willing to never dig deeper about their beliefs, to contrast them with one another, or to contrast them with other fascists. They'll read a text (they may be stupid, but a lot of them do read more than you'd expect) about, say, the concept of race, and never really address the fact that it contradicts their own beliefs, or a fellow fascist's beliefs about the nation or about Europe.

And a really interesting thing is that fascism is far from a monolith. It's more akin to an entelechy². The specific contradictions of fascism manifest themselves much more between individual fascists than within a single individual. Like I mentioned before, there are contradictions when it comes to race (racialists like the nazis vs anti-racists like Falange Auténtica), to Europe (the idea of a Great Europe vs every idea of Nationality/Empire, which generally coexist poorly), to the nation (its intersection with race and/or Europe and how it interacts with these), to the reaction against progress (a conception of fascism as progressive, reactionary, or neither³), to science (a realist position based on scientificism such as race science and Kameradschaftrecht (nazi feminism) vs metaphysical conceptions, such as esotericism or the Thule society, reliant on aesthetics and mysticism), or to the economic policy (bourgeois positions, corporatism, vs workerist positions such as Strasser or Bombacci).

These contradictions aren't unique to the contemporary fascist situation of fragmentation and the peculiarities of social media either. Back in the 30s and 40s, there was a lot of disagreement on who counted as fascists. On one end, during the rise of the NSDAP, there was a small cadre of orthodox fascists who narrowed fascism "a la Italiana", and did not consider nazi-fascism to be fascism because of its differences on the scientificist conceptions of race. The Nazi party repressed this small wing. On the other end, it was a prevailing position in the USSR to not consider fascism to start with Italy's fascii di combatimento, but rather in Russia's Black Hundreds, having a broader conception of fascism.

This fascist we talked with considers himself a Carlist⁴, while another member of his groupuscule considers himself a national-socialist, while being Moroccan, and a third is a run-of-the-mill reactionary concerned with the 2030 agenda, globalism, immigrant invasions, the great replacement, that sort of thing. When fascist groups are relatively small and lack any form of inertia and/or formalized structure, their activity is extremely sporadic. There is no discipline to be found, no real planning or broad strategy, they are, rather, a group of similarly-enough-minded friends who sometimes like to do some vandalism or threaten/agitate leftists of any stripe. Their only method of growth is to generate controversies, fights, have a provocative tweet go semi-viral, to generate noise. When it comes to agitation for the fascist, concrete ideology is not relevant. They appeal to both rage and the satisfaction of, for example, seeing x annoying leftist org get their posters ripped off. Discussions of fascist theory rarely, if ever, influence their pragmatic activity, sometimes it's more similar to a circlejerk to see who has the most esoteric, exaggerated and offensive positions.

This is not to say fascist infighting is irrelevant, far from it. Fascists have their own petty disputes between groups, periods of extreme fractionarism, inter-fascist and intra-fascist violence. But when it comes to the philosophy of action, to how they apply all these beliefs, you'll be pressed to find meaningful, material differences. Some might be more or less aggressive, more or less esoteric, more or less contrarian, more or less effective. But they all rely on building that momentum, that controversy -> confrontation -> growth -> controversy cycle. The moment fascist groups lose that momentum, or one too many campaigns fall flat and fail to garner attention, they'll start to turn against themselves, to deteriorate their own structures in the permanent search for conflict that their beliefs demand. There is no way to hold the belief that, for example, race is a scientific category that makes the white/national/aryan/european/whatever race constantly threatened to disappear without exhorting you to seek conflict, whether it's against immigrants or other fascists who don't place as much importance on race.

If you find yourself in the context of a few small fascist groups festering and seeking conflict, it is a strategic error to confront them outright. Unless you're willing to downright kill them or injure them severely enough (with the bigger threat of legal repercussions that entails), fascists will be able to turn your explicit opposition against them into ammunition to attract more reactionaries to their own ranks. The best you, as an organized communist, can do in the period before exaltation, is to quietly collect information about them, study their patterns, and exert as much opposition as is possible without letting them turn it into a visible confrontation. If you're going to cover up their symbols and posters, do it when they can't film you or try to start a fight. If they're threatening someone to provoke them to then cry and hue about the rabid leftists, use the fact that they have low numbers, record them, and intimidate them without physical violence. Even if you can leave them writhing on the floor in a fight, they can use that as ammunition, but they can't use a video of them putting their tails between their legs and running off. You can't debate with fascists, this much is clear. You also can't just use violence to scare them away, because they'll use that violence to gain momentum, and then you can end up with an actually decently-sized and consistent fascist organization.

This is how we have been opposing these small groups of fascists attempting to grow through controversy. We opposed them non-visibly, effectively and professionally. When this group of about 15 fascists total (they never appear with more than 4 at a time because of their inconsistency) encountered this, they were at one point scared enough to stop all activity for about 2 months, and after that have yet to appear again. Meanwhile, other, more infantile orgs, overreacted by opposing them with full force and very publicly, which only encouraged the fascists to keep going and wasted energy in a futile back-and-forth, as well as putting their members in unnecessary risk by engaging in unplanned situations.

¹ Throughout this entire post, all analysis of the behavior of fascists offline assumes this exaltation has not occured

² Entelechy here means an impossible ideal, built entirely in the imagination, or with an unstable and shoddy manifestation.

³ Fascism often positions itself as a revolutionary movement, while other times it places more importance on the opposition against progress.

⁴ Carlism is a Spanish political current originating in the rejection of Isabel II as a legitimate heir to Fernando VII, it became very intertwined with Franco's dictatorship and the Falange during the Civil War

[beatrixstonehill2]

"God guys, I'm not sure how much longer I can do this..... although it is fun while it lasts. As you know, I work at a pretty big chain of gyms/fitness centers that got bought out by a new company last year. The new focus of the company is no longer on fit people who're serious about the gym, catering to others like us. Now it's all about getting the incels and dumpy guys out of the house and getting them fit. Only a few men are on staff, known as 'Senior Alphas' and they basically just exist to encourage dudes and build them up even if they're doing stuff all wrong and barely able to walk on a treadmill on the lowest setting for five minutes.

Most of the workers are now girls. Can you guess where this is headed? Our boss is making us take hella fertility drugs and boob growth pills. I've gone from a lead fitness coordinator to a glorified fluffer and cum dump. All of us have to walk around the gym like maids, offering drinks, and our bodies. They removed tons of equipment to bring in literal beds and lounging areas for us girls to tit fuck and suck the guys off. It's a gym, and two thirds of it is a lounge with beanbag chairs, hammocks, and queen-sized beds. Some men come in, sit down and just start jerking off to porn on their phones.

We're not allowed to say no to anything, no matter how demeaning. If the guys want to face fuck us till we puke? We have to. If they want to grab and slap and pull our breasts? We have to smile and thank them. We can even be put on harnesses, flipped upside down and have our breasts used as punching bags. Thank god most of the guys are so weak it barely hurts but my boobs are still bruised to hell most days, which just makes these degenerate weirdos even hornier. We have to encourage them to fuck us and refer to it as the best full-body work out we offer. .... Most guys last less than thirty seconds and hardly move.

We're not allowed to take birth control. The company is all about 'traditional values' so we walk around in sundress or skirts and tank tops. Our asses are always hanging out, our skirts/dresses can't reach more than an inch below our pubic area. Our shifts are basically just getting gang raped by fat sweaty nerds whose only impressions of women come from porn and hentai. We have to get pregnant. I just gave birth two months ago to quintuplets in front of the whole crowded gym. It was so humiliating. My breasts are gigantic and leak milk constantly. I'm two months pregnant again already and can hardly stomach the thought that my tits will be twice this size by the time I give birth again. I'm basically a glorified walking womb with a huge set of tits that are too big to nurse actual babies; I'd just suffocate them. My breasts literally only exist for male pleasure, to be grabbed and fucked and beaten up to make guys' cocks hard.

I'm thinking about quitting but I think I might've signed a waver that said if I leave or get terminated I subject myself to be sold to a government-run hucow farm. So it'd be much of the same. Not like I can do much else. Might as well stay here and service all these poor horny nerds instead of becoming cattle and getting fucked by rich people and politicians. They'd probably just sell me to some drug lord in Columbia like my friend, Sarah, after her company got bought out a couple years ago. Oh well, I have no choice but to put up with it and grow out these breasts until I can't even walk, which seems like it'll definitely be sooner, rather than later.....

[loving-n0t-heyting]

if you want an illustration of the extent to which the anc in south africa has degenerated from its heroic period: for the last 3mo it has, to hold onto power, governed thru a coalition including not just the generically white Democratic Alliance but the inkatha freedom party and freedom front plus. the former is a conservative black party with deep historical ties to the bantustan system and with which the anc was engaged in literal open warfare during the 90s, to the point mandela would use association with them to tar the previously hegemonic and apartheid-based national party(!!); the latter is a far right whiteafrikaner nationalist party to emerge from racist elements of the apartheid-era military during the transition to full political democracy; both parties earned <4% of the vote share in this years elections each. all of this compromise with the remnants of the prior regime to suppress the influence of left-wing parties like the eff and mkp favouring large scale economic redistribution in the most unequal country in the entire world. (of individually owned land, the black supermajority of the populations owns a whopping four percent.) whatever one thinks about either party or its leaders, its hard to argue they are either of them less aligned with the founding spirit of the african natl congress than the ifp or ff+, the heirs to the military and paramilitary factions that made it their business to drown the anc in blood during its foundational struggle

this might seem bleak, but in reality it points a novel way forward for one of the most prominent and distinctive political problems in contemporary south africa, that of so called "load shedding" or (less euphemistically) rolling blackouts by eskom, the state-owned power company responsible for most electricity generation and distribution in the country. simply hook up a rotor between eskoms generators and nelson mandelas grave and soon enough you should have enough power 24/7 to blind any astronauts looking down at the southern tip of the continent

[artbyblastweave]

🔥 government-sanctioned superheroes

So for a long time, in many spaces in which I was in, the reflexive intellectual contrarian position on superheroes as a broad concept- often framed in liberal terms, liberal in an American context, because this was frequently regarding the Superhuman Registration Act from Marvel specifically- was that superheroes are unaccountable, and if they were real the correct, or at least inevitable thing would be some form of nationalization or licensing system. After all, these people are untrained irregulars, appointed by no one and answerable to no one except whoever's powerful enough to bring them down in a fight- would we really want them running around with no oversight from our good friend The Government? Who watches the Watchmen?

And, you know, a lot of these premises are basically correct. But about four years ago, as a very ancillary point to, uh, everything else going on at the time, it was quietly cemented for me that there had always been a version of this argument being made from a position of ridiculously unwarranted faith in proceduralism, in the goodwill of the government and law enforcement in particular. Versions of this argument being made by people who've never had a bad encounter with the cops. Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Spider-Man usually isn't on speaking terms with the NYPD, actually! Maybe you very much don't want him to be!

That said, I think there are certainly risks of swinging too far in the other direction here, beetlejuicing into the conversation a particularly annoying kind of cape fan who treats superheroes as leftist, anarchist or at least antiauthoritarian by default- they aren't, you have to work to characterize them that way, and it's often extremely visible that you're doing that work. As you may have been able to tell from some of my recent bitter doomposting, my own stance has ultimately settled at a glum median "I hope they bite each other's dicks off" kind of position. I think it's possible to do a cape thing that's meaningfully anti-state or anti-police in the way people badly want them to be, but as always you're now left holding the bag of trying to explain how your grassroots outside-the-system vigilante culture isn't going to degenerate into cops 2, the sequel to cops. It requires actual thought! It's likely on some level what that story would be about.

[headspace-hotel]

The thing is, I don't think most things (rightly) criticized as ecofascism are actually fascism. The main characteristics of fascism are authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, preoccupation with the military, and anxiety about corruption of culture and moral degeneration brought on by cultural "others."

Sentiments like "people using up resources is killing the planet, so we need to reduce the human population," while they WILL be co-opted by fascism, are not fascist themselves.

Colonialist? Absolutely. Genocidal? Ultimately yes. Bioessentialist and racist? Totally. An excellent companion to fascism? Certainly. Consider how indigenous people have been removed from their lands and denied the ability to use the animals and plants as they always have because conservation efforts by colonial governments wish to "protect" those lands from human influence. Consider how the population idea means the responsibility for climate change is placed on countries with the highest fertility rates, never mind that the countries using the most resources most have fertility rates at or below replacement. Consider how overconsumption is framed as a matter of personal choice, rather than a matter of companies with godlike power enforcing dependency on cars, restricting access to low-impact foods, and utilizing planned obsolescence.

But "humans are bad and nature is better with less humans" isn't fascism by itself, it's just anti-human and blaming the oppressed for their oppression.

Basically it's bad to hate "humans" as a species and it's a great companion to fascism because "humans are bad" can be enforced selectively against the members of the human species labeled "Least valuable"

[transmutationisms]

hi! i was wondering if you’ve ever talked about your thoughts on yoga?

um. no but i have a friend who writes about it in relation to early 20th century degeneracy theory in india—yoga was part of the whole physical and spiritual practice meant to counter degeneration and strengthen the race and nation, analogous in some respects to the emphasis on gymnastics in french medicine in the nineteenth century. also some overlap between this genre of degeneracy theorist and some of the major figures in the creation/popularisation of modern ayurveda (predictably predominantly hindu, upper-caste, some gaining positions in colonial government and synthesising eg sanskrit medical texts w/ anthroposophist ideas, etc). wish i could link his stuff but he hasn't published yet and doesn't blog

[just-antithings]

I need many people to realize a strong contribution to the purity discourse in media we see among young people is due to radfems & gender criticals poisoning the water supply on sites like this one (tumblr) or other social media since 2014

Seeing teens and young 20-somethings using "porn addicted", "porn-brained", "degenerate", all unironically, those are words you find in alt-right & anti-LGBTQ+ message boards.

It wasn't JUST GCs alone, but many people have been around to see them influence a generation of kids with arguments you see today like

“X in fiction causes abuse"

“x is fetishization"

"Unless you've personally gone through trauma you shouldn't write about it"

“If you HAVE gone through trauma, you can't sexually explore it"

"If you like abuse in fiction you're an abuser in real life”

Hearing kids call random (usually queer!) shippers in fandom "groomers" and "pedophiles" for ships that have been established in fandom for decades, or because of a "power imbalance" between adult characters isn't a coincidence. Hmm, I wonder what other groups use those words?

It's not solely kids alone, it is a combination of:

Online radicalization and disinformation

No spaces for kids

No internet safety/literacy

Steeping censorship in activist language,

lack of education (If you don't know red flags you can't avoid them)

COVID did NOT help

This is why ignoring it will never help, because while thankfully some people grow out of it, it usually happens to people who had some support system or breakthrough in cognitive dissonance. There are plenty of people who are becoming adults and who keep infantilizing themselves

“My brain isn't done until I'm 25, you're all predators" and they're talking to a 30 y/o

That argument is literally being used by UK government officials to block access to gender-affirming healthcare. Infantilizing adults only serves the purpose of stripping agency and rights

They're not being safe. They're not gaining skills. They're participating in a fear-fueled climate of faulty medical misinformation, keeping themselves in a perpetual childish-victim state no matter how old they get and nothing about this is healthy

How do you think a person goes through this world when they've been wholly convinced that you can tell someone is safe because they like "safe" or “wholesome" things, & people who make them uncomfortable via hobbies or interests (not IRL actions) are probably actual criminals?

[ohnoitstbskyen]

What’s the difference between Ascended, Aspects, Freljordian demigods, Aurelian Sol, and whatever Soraka’s got going on? Are they all just different varieties of League gods?

Hoo boy, okay, so. First of all, Riot have been pretty adamant that there are no gods in Runeterra, every god-like being that exists in that universe is actually a spirit or just a very powerful being of some kind, but definitely no real gods, no matter how much it seems like they are definitely writing these characters to be actual literal gods.

I don't 100% know why they are so insistent on this, but I imagine it has something to do with censorship and ratings agencies, or maybe they just don't want to have to establish any actual theology on Runeterra. Volibear isn't the god of storms for real, he's just a super powerful spirit that can create storms in the Freljord, but not all of them, so please don't ask us whether every single thunderstorm in the Freljord was something he did deliberately. That sort of vibe.

To go through them point by point:

Celestials & Aspects

The Celestials are beings like Aurelion Sol and Bard, which exist as cosmic entities operating on levels of power and motivation beyond human understanding. They came into existence with the universe itself, and tend to busy themselves governing various parts of its operation. They are, again not gods (Riot is very insistent on this), but Aurelion Sol literally made every star in the galaxy, he's functionally the progenitor god of Creation.

Some of them, though, like to interfere in the mortal world of Runetera in various ways, and they tend to use mortal vessels to do it. That's where we get Aspects: Aspects are mortals who are chosen by the Celestials that live on Mount Targon to contain their power and be their avatars in the mortal world.

Leona is the Aspect of a Sun celestial, Diana of the Moon celestial, Pantheon is the Aspect of War (or he was, until Aatrox killed it, but he retains access to many of its powers), and Zoe is the Aspect of Twilight, and so on.

Soraka is another Celestial in mortal form, but she is NOT an Ascended. Rather than possess a mortal, she created a mortal body for herself and poured the whole of her being into it, which is causing her body to permanently burn up from the inside while she regenerates it with her magic. She lives on Runeterra and acts as a mysterious mystical wise guide and mentor to mortals who need it.

Ascended & Darkin

Ascended are somewhat similar in kind to the Aspects, but usually lesser in power. The Ascended are also human beings infused with Celestial magic and power, specifically with the power of the Sun, although as far as I know, that power is drawn not from the Celestial of the Sun who empowers Leona, but directly from the physical Sun itself. This means the Ascended aren't possessed by Celestials and retain full free will, at the cost (or let's be real: benefit) of being transformed into furries, which extremely coincidentally just so happen to closely resemble the gods of the Egyptian pantheon. but again, they are definitely not gods, please don't put it in the newspaper that they are gods.

I don't know exactly how canon Riot considers this anymore, but the lore was that the Aspects of Mount Targon gifted the power of Ascension to Shurima in order to produce Ascended that could serve as shock-troops in the war against the Void, which is a swarm of extradimensional horrors that are constantly trying to eat the world. Whatever the case, the Ascended DID fight the Void, and it traumatized and corrupted them so badly that they degenerated into body-horror blood monsters called the Darkin.

The Darkin fell into civil war and it got so bad that The Aspect of Twilight (not Zoe but her predecessor in the role) decided to use some magical trickery to imprison them all in their weapons, which is where they've stayed for a few thousand years, getting even more traumatized and mentally destabilized by the total sensory deprivation and solitary confinement. If any mortal touches a Darkin weapon, it immediately assimilates them and uses their flesh as a new host, and then goes on a killing rampage about it. That's where you get your Aatrox, your Varus and (eventually, once he devours Kayn) your Rhaast.

Gods, Spirits & Demons

This is the category for Ornn, Anivia, Volibear, The Seal Sister and so on. The Freljordian people worship them as gods, but they are, technically, only extremely powerful nature spirits, manifestations of the nature of the Freljord itself, which draw power from the land and to a lesser extent from their worshipers. There are many, many lesser nature spirits, which might be worshiped as gods by particular tribes or hold power over particular areas, but Ornn, Anivia, Volibear, The Seal Sister and the Iron Boar are the most powerful and most widely revered.

On a similar note, Ionia is absolutely choked to the gills with spirits, because those lands are soaked in magic. They are usually not worshiped as gods specifically, but take the shape of everything from dragons to living trees to sprites and will-o-wisps and which roam fairly freely in Ionia. This includes characters like Lillia, who is the daughter of a magical tree of dreams on whose branches the dreams of mortals grow and mature, and it includes Ivern, who is an extremely powerful and ancient nature spirit formed from the soul of a magical tree.

Demons are distinct from spirits, in that rather than drawing on the power of the land or fountains of magic, they draw on the emotions of living things for their powers. The most powerful demons are known as The Ten, who get their power from the most primal emotions that living things feel. Fiddlesticks is the demon of Fear, and Nilah somehow draws her strength from Ashlesh, the Demon of Joy, whom her order has imprisoned. We don't know who the rest of the Ten are yet, but Riot seems to have that worked out somewhere in their internal deep lore.

Swain has a lesser (but still powerful) demon of secrets called Raum bound in his arm through some sort of deal, Evelynn is a demon of anguish and pain, Tahm Kench is a demon of addiction, and Nocturne is a demon of nightmares.

Besides those, there are an untold number of lesser demons, who feed on more and more specific feelings, and thus are less and less powerful because there's simply less of that stuff around to feed on. They are often called Azakana, and may be demons that feed on feelings as niche as, like, noblemen's fear of their extramarital affairs with handsome commoners being discovered. Yone hunts the Azakana and collects their mask, although even he doesn't know quite what for.

Death

This is where we place the Kindred. Technically they are merely Spirits of Death, but more than perhaps any other category of creature, Riot keeps writing them as Literal Gods of death and I don't think it makes sense to think of them any other way.

The Kindred take on many different shapes all across Runeterra, seemingly influenced in large part by the expectations of the people or creatures who are dying, but their most popular visage is that of a Lamb and a Wolf, hunting together. Lamb's merciful arrow ends your life if you accept that your time is up and go gently into that good night, but Wolf hunts you down and rips you to shreds if you resist and fight to your last breath, destiny be damned.

The Kindred are there for every death on Runeterra, they are the mediators (as far as we know) of all forms of death everywhere, and by far the most classically "anthropomorphic embodiment of universal existence" style god in the lore that we know of. Where a god like Anivia only really has power in the Freljord, the Kindred have power everywhere there is life. Only the undead escape them, and even then, only temporarily.

In Conclusion

YES Runeterra has tons of gods, it obviously has gods, you can't walk five feet in that universe without tripping on a god, but they tend to be gods with hard limitations on their power and influence, and rarely have powers on the level of bending reality itself.

Even Aurelion Sol, who literally makes stars, can't snap his fingers and undo causality, for example, or suspend the laws of physics wholesale.

Riot's weird insistence on "no gods in Runeterra" is more of an affectation, a bit of a put-on, than an actual narrative principle, and most of the gods of Runeterra can be understood very comfortably through the lens of various non-Christian religions like Norse or Greek mythology, or the hero/god characters of something like Polynesian myth.