#white liberals are an epidemic

[felucians]

MENA people can say the US is bad and both political parties are bad and a white liberal will hop on and say how actually one genocide is better than the other because then if the "lesser of two evils" is in power, it happens in a mythical faraway land of Agrabah but if it's the "worser of two evils" it happens in their own backyard and they can't have that *gasp of horror*

Y'all don't give a fuck about genocide being bad, y'all care when it affects you. Leave MENA folks alone when we say fuck the US and US imperialism in our homes!!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

[socialistexan]

I'm so tired y'all.

So tired of people on the left, LGB people, and so-called feminists that either don't care about trans people or actively work against us.

So tired of "anti-woke" class reductionists who think it's okay to throw trans people under the bus to try to ally themselves with "right populists" like Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley.

So tired of centrist liberals that think they can just ignore trans rights because we're "too controversial" right now and don't want to alienate exurban voters that won't even vote for them anyway.

So tired of my community, one that is extremely small - even with the supposed "social epidemic" of trans people coming out recently - being treated as the go to punching bag blamed for everything and used as a wedge issue and boggie man to scare white middle class suburbanites into voting for fascists.

I'm so tired of state after state treating us like inhuman monsters than need to be morally (and legally) mandated out of existence.

I'm. Just. So. Tired.

Being trans is emotionally exhausting and means living in near constant stress and fear, even in supposedly safe and welcoming places. But people think we do this for fun or try to force it on kids? Fuck you.

[decolonize-the-left]

Thinking about Project2025 and how it's at every level and branch of government. How entire cities are now under their thumb.

How Biden is saying "Israel has a right to defend itself" while calling Cop City protesters terrorists for not wanting a more deadly police force to be trained. But didn't stand with rail workers when they demanded better treatment when it was freezing and trains were being derailed.

How an epidemic on par with HIV ravaged the globe and Biden allowed pharma companies to exploit the world with price tags after promising it'd be public access.

Thinking about how in all this Israel and the USA are said to test tactics and weapons on Palestine.

How the USA stands with Zionists and how many people have told me, a native American, that Palestinians are in the wrong.

How the last 75 years don't matter. Only the last 2 weeks.

And real fucking talk?

For all the "progress" liberals pretend we made how are we here?

Americans and several of the Allied countries would not hesitate to conduct Manifest Destiny 2.0 and have blatantly stated as much.

Americans are saying things that my great grandmother heard about reservations and then later about native liberation. They're saying things the pilgrims told us before that. We're animals. Savages. That we are to blame. That when we die out it'll be because we didn't fight hard enough. That we don't deserve to even be here.

And you know what, I would hope this post would reach some of them but I genuinely feel as if liberals are as far gone as MAGAs are.

They will read this and just go and on and on about how bad the other guy is.

How justified they are to keep voting blue. Just like MAGA's whine until their privileged lives being "ruined" by "woke lies" justified them voting for Trump. Just like Israel is justified. Like every fucking war criminal ever has been.

BUT

I implore you to STOP trying to fucking justify everything! Nobody fucking cares about the reasons you use to support a genocidal war monger who's legacy before this was signing one of the most racially marginalizing bills in US history.

How about you try justifying taking a fucking risk, instead?

People in Palestine are being bombed every fucking day and you want to twiddle your thumbs about NOT voting for the guy who said it was okay and for what? Because your life might not be as comfortable as it is right now? That's your concern from your home with a roof?

Call me a fucking conspiracist but I haven't been wrong yet: Biden is a fucking Project2025 plant. And him and Hillary both have done nothing but make the democrats more and more conservative by catering to the "centrist" votes for decades.

Now we're here. They've compromised so much and want to look so "fair" that a genocide is being paid for on American tax dollars and what are liberals tellings us, what are they saying? ITS JUSTIFIED???? AND TO VOTE FOR BIDEN AGAIN

Y'all are so worried about everyone voting blue to avoid republican fascists that you don't even CARE how bad the people youre voting in are. You haven't even noticed the fascists you put in office yourselves.

You forgot your boundaries.

And isn't it funny how rad/fems and TERFs got mainstream around the same time? You know, the white supremacists based ideology that seeped into the mainstream because nobody was critically consuming or gatekeeping what was "empowering to women" for fear of being 'cancelled'?

Why? Cuz if you hate them you hate women. Just like if you criticize america then you're an anti-american Russian/spy/plant. Like if you support Palestine then you hate Jewish people. If support BLM then you obviously hate white people.

And that's it, isn't it. That's what it all boils down to.

White supremacists are and have been manipulating & gaslighting us en masse.

You know your friends that learned to gaslight an audience with therapy speak? The one that makes you afraid to call them out cuz they're better with words than you and could just as easily turn everyone against you if they use enough buzzwords?

That's the tactics white supremacists are using.

"I must be quiet so I don't say something wrong and look like a bigot" "if I speak, I may say the wrong things" "I may say the right thing the wrong way"

They have made you AFRAID to speak against genocide!!! Wake the fuck up!!!!

They aren't event trying to hide it! The IDF made a post that straight up says "you are an anti-Semite if you speak against Israel"

WHICH IS JUST STRAIGHT UP UNTRUE!! So may Jewish people have come forward against Israel and against Zionism and to support Palestine!

Israel's government is Zionist and that is not an inherently Jewish trait! Making you you believe otherwise is part of the propaganda and manipulation so you Stop speaking up. You can support Jewish people and Palestinians both.

Israel and the USA want you to believe that it is one or the other and that's not true.

The only people who benefit from trying to make you choose between which humans get to live are the white supremacists who cheer when this rhetoric starts to normalize conversation about which people are more worthy of living than another.

You have been gaslit into supporting genocide.

Gaslit into going down a white supremacist pipeline.

Gaslit into giving your silent consent.

Snap out of it.

[larkandkatydid]

There's this thing that white women talking about sexual violence often do that is well-meaning, but fundamentally self-centered, where they start by highlighting the cultural narratives of helpless white women preyed upon by men of color and how those narratives are wrong, and don't actually address the causes of sexual violence. What they don't do, is then emphasize way that violence against women of color is ignored....they just continue to ignore it. For two examples from Erica Berry's Wolfish, about wolves and wolves as a metaphor for fear: First, Berry makes a statement that the narrative of sexual violence happens between white men, white women, and black men, on whom sexual fears are projected. A three-way relationship, where black women are nowhere to be found, even though sexual violence against black women is central to white supremacy! In another chapter, Berry reproaches herself for being fearful while walking home in a wealthy neighborhood around a college campus, comparing her fake fear to the real danger experienced by an Indigenous woman who had been murdered in that same town and the dangers faced by Indigenous women in general. But that's all. She doesn't talk this particular murdered woman, or about the epidemic of violence facing Idigineous women beyond using it as a way to downplay the relative danger that a middle-class white woman experience. Wolfish has a lot of other aspects to it, so I'm not targetting Berry in particular, but both of those felt like really illustrative examples. And also, of course, I empathize with navigating this!

And other, course, the grim, real-world example from that Jezebel piece: "Bedera also told Jezebel that in her research, she found women of color were decisively a minority at the university she observed but comprised more than half of the reporting parties. Of the Title IX office staffers Bedera spoke with, some identified as “liberals” and “feminists” who feared how “false accusations” could harm men of color; she said their “shallow understanding of racism” overlooking the harm inflicted on victims of color."

[haggishlyhagging]

If the "infertility epidemic" was the first round of fire in the pronatal campaign of the '80s, then the "birth dearth" was the second. At least the leaders of this campaign were more honest: they denounced liberated women for choosing to have fewer of no children. They didn't pretend that they were just neutrally reporting statistics; they proudly admitted that they were seeking to manipulate female behavior. "Most of this small book is a speculation and provocation," Ben Wattenberg freely concedes in his 1987 work, The Birth Dearth. "Will public attitudes change soon, thereby changing fertility behavior?" he asks. "I hope so. It is the root reason for writing this book."

Instead of hounding women into the maternity ward with now-or-never threats, the birth dearth theorists tried appealing to society's baser instincts—xenophobia, militarism, and bigotry, to name a few. If white educated middle-class women don't start reproducing, the birth-dearth men warned, paupers, fools, and foreigners would—and America would soon be out of business. Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein predicted that the genius pool would shrink by nearly 60 percent and the population with IQs under seventy would swell by a comparable amount, because the "brighter" women were neglecting their reproductive duties to chase after college degrees and careers—and insisting on using birth control. "Sex comes first, the pains and costs of pregnancy and motherhood later," he harumphed. If present trends continue, he grimly advised, "it could swamp the effects of anything else we may do about our economic standing in the world." The documentation he offered for this trend? Casual comments from some young students at Harvard who seemed "anxious" about having children, grumblings from some friends who wanted more grandchildren, and dialogue from movies like Baby Boom and Three Men and a Baby.

The birth dearth's creator and chief cheerleader was Ben Wattenberg, a syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who first introduced the birth dearth threat in 1986 in the conservative journal Public Opinion—and tirelessly promoted it in an endless round of speeches, radio talks, television appearances, and his own newspaper column.

His inflammatory tactics constituted a notable departure from the levelheaded approach he had advocated a decade earlier in his book The Real America, in which he chided population-boom theorists for spreading "souped-up scare rhetoric" and "alarmist fiction." The fertility rate, he said, was actually in slow decline, which he saw then as a "quite salutary" trend, promising more jobs and a higher living standard. The birth dearth, he enthused then, "may well prove to be the single most important agent of a massive expansion and a massive economic upgrading" for the middle class.

Just ten years later, the fifty-three-year-old father of four was sounding all the alarms about this "scary" trend. "Will the world backslide?" he gasped in The Birth Dearth. "Could the Third World culture become dominant?" According to Wattenberg's treatise—subtitled "What Happens When People in Free Countries Don't Have Enough Babies"—the United States would lose its world power status, millions would be put out of work, multiplying minorities would create "ugly turbulence," smaller tax bases would diminish the military's nuclear weapons stockpiles, and a shrinking army would not be able “to deter potential Soviet expansionism.”

When Wattenberg got around to assigning blame, the women's movement served as the prime scapegoat. For generating what he now characterized as a steep drop in the birthrate to "below replacement level," he faulted women's interest in postponing marriage and motherhood, women's desire for advancing their education and careers, women's insistence on the legalization of abortion, and "women's liberation" in general. To solve the problem, he lectures, women should be urged to put their careers off until after they have babies. Nevertheles, he actually maintains, "I believe that The Birth Dearth sets out a substantially pro-feminist view."

Wattenberg's birth dearth slogan was quickly adopted by New Right leaders, conservative social theorists, and presidential candidates, who began alluding in ominous—and racist—tones to "cultural suicide" and "genetic suicide." This threat became the subject of a plank in the political platforms of both Jack Kemp and Pat Robertson, who were also quick to link the fall of the birthrate with the rise in women's rights. Allan Carlson, president of the conservative Rockford Institute, proposed that the best way to cure birth dearth was to get rid of the Equal Pay Act and federal laws banning sex discrimination in employment. At a 1985 American Enterprise Institute conference, Edward Luttwack went even further: he proposed that American policy makers might consider reactivating the pronatal initiatives of Vichy France; that Nazi-collaborationist government's attack on abortion and promotion of total motherhood might have valuable application on today's recalcitrant women. And at a seminar sponsored by Stanford University's Hoover Institution, panelists deplored "the independence of women" for lowering the birthrate and charged that women who refused to have many children lacked "values."

These men were as anxious to stop single black women from procreating as they were for married white women to start. The rate of illegitimate births to black women, especially black teenage girls, was reaching "epidemic" proportions, conservative social scientists intoned repeatedly in speeches and press interviews. The pronatalists' use of the disease metaphor is unintentionally revealing: they considered it an "epidemic" when white women didn't reproduce or when black women did. In the case of black women, their claims were simply wrong. Illegitimate births to both black women and black teenagers were actually declining in the '80s; the only increase in out-of-wedlock births was among white women.

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women

[bunnakit]

Not Me Episode 4 Music

Flares - Life in Colour

We immediately jump in with Flares as Sean is experiencing a nightmare. Stretch time but I guess if you wanted you could read this as Sean subconsciously sending up a signal flare for help.

Last Night, Last Night, Last Night - Well Then, Goodbye

This kicks in as Black is leaving Sean in the flashback; this could be a tie in with the 'Last Night' title as in it's a memory Sean is recalling that might feel like they just happened OR there could be a tie with the band name being 'Well Then, Goodbye' as Black very unceremoniously leaves Sean to his fate. (Either way, my ears don't particularly like this song, the reverb gives me ickies. Thank you misophonia.)

To Whom It May Concern - Rap Against Dictatorship (ft. Liberate P, Nazesus, and GSUS2)

The first time I saw the dance scene I got goosebumps and I could tell the show had done something big here. Allow me to infodump a bit. Rap Against Dictatorship uses their platform and their music to bring attention to the ongoing state of Thailand under military rule, especially during election time. They were founded in 2017 and released their first single in 2018. After the release of their single the members were threatened with arrest by police who later backpedaled after the music went viral and the group gained the support of the public. In 2019 they were awarded with the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent* at the Oslo Freedom Forum. During the 2020-2021 Thai protests one member was arrested with other pro-democracy activists and later charged with sedition. Their music is often censored in Thailand due to it's anti-goverment and anti-monarchy message. (I love them so much, your honor.)

*Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent is an award established in 2012 by the New York City-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF). According to HRF President Thor Halvorssen, the prize recognizes individuals "who engage in creative dissent, exhibiting courage and creativity to challenge injustice and live in truth"

Downloaded Truth - Marten Moses

As White and Todd are discussing Eugene and Todd is persuading White to reach out to her this song comes in. It could be just a neat song, it could be that White found this downloaded little piece of truth in the video on Black's phone.

Crushed by A P O L L O

I'm fairly certain this, or a remix of it, is what is playing as White is on his phone texting Eugene? I know I've heard the song before and I have it stashed somewhere, Crushed sounds very close but I can't tell if it's quite right? Sometimes they put a little filter over the song or play an arrangement that's midway through the song and it trips me up a bit. If it isn't Crushed then it's very likely another Apollo piece (though none of the ones on that album, I checked.)

As Gram and White discuss the aftermath of the fire we get a little more Downloaded Truth.

As Nuch, Gram, and White all meet in the garage a bit more of Crushed's beat plays in the background.

3 (Instrumental Version) - Bambi Haze (ft. Lu Ni)

Just as White is hugging Eugene and trying to placate her this song comes in. There are truly no connections to be made here, no leaps or stretches to be found. (Though both this and several of Marc Torch's songs are on Epidemic Sound, a host for a lot of royalty free music, so this could be where GMMTV sources a good chunk of their music.)

Closer - Morphlexis

As Eugene climbs in White's lap this song plays and it could be a nod to Eugene wanting to be closer to Black or that she is physically closer to White, again, if we want to make some big stretchies.

When Eugene wakes up we're gifted with another appearance from Tripping over Danger which also wraps up the episode.

thank you so much to everyone who reads these! i recommend checking back at some older posts as i have made some updates (sometimes i miss songs and realize it later.) i promise to make a masterpost of these once we're done and i'll put together a little list of my favorites!

[mightyflamethrower]

At the nexus of most of America’s current crises, the diversity/equity/inclusion dogma can be found.

The southern border has been destroyed because the Democratic Party wanted the poor of the southern hemisphere to be counted in the census, to vote if possible in poorly audited mail-in elections, and to build upon constituencies that demand government help. Opposition to such cynicism and the de facto destruction of enforcement of U.S. immigration law is written off as “racism,” “nativism,” and “xenophobia.”

The military is short more than 40,000 soldiers. The Pentagon may fault youth gangs, drug use, or a tight labor market. But the real shortfall is mostly due inordinately to reluctant white males who have been smeared by some of the military elite as suspected “white supremacists,” despite dying at twice their demographics in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are now passing on joining up despite their families’ often multigenerational combat service.

The nexus between critical race theory and critical legal theory has been, inter alia, defunding the police, Soros-funded district attorneys exempting criminals from punishment, the legitimization of mass looting, squatters’ rights, and general lawlessness across big-city America.

The recent epidemic of anti-Semitism was in part birthed by woke/DEI faculty and students on elite campuses, who declared Hamas a victim of “white settler” victimizing Israel and thus contextualized their Jewish hatred by claiming that as “victims,” they cannot be bigots.

There is a historic, malevolent role of states adjudicating political purity, substituting racial, sex, class, and tribal criteria for meritocracy. They define success or failure not based on actual outcomes but on the degree of orthodox zealotry. Once governments enter that realm of the surreal, the result is always an utter disaster.

After a series of disastrous military catastrophes in 1941 and 1942, Soviet strongman and arch-communist Joseph Stalin ended the Soviet commissar system in October 1942. He reversed course to give absolute tactical authority to his ground commanders rather than to the communist overseers, as was customary.

Stalin really had no choice since Marxist-Leninist ideology overriding military logic and efficacy had ensured that the Soviet Union was surprised by a massive Nazi invasion in June 1941. The Russians in the first 12 months of war subsequently lost nearly 5 million in vast encirclements—largely because foolhardy, ideologically driven directives curtailed the generals’ operational control of the army. After the commissars were disbanded and commanders given greater autonomy, the landmark victory at Stalingrad followed, and with it, the rebound of the Red Army.

One reason why the dictator Napoleon ran wild in Europe for nearly 18 years was that his marshals of France were neither selected only by the old Bourbon standards of aristocratic birth and wealth nor by new ideological revolutionary criteria, but by more meritocratic means than those of his rival nations.

Mao’s decade-long cultural revolution (1966–76) ruined China. It was predicated on Maoist revolutionary dogma overruling economic, social, cultural, and military realities. An entire meritocracy was deemed corrupted by the West and reactionary—and thus either liquidated or rendered inert.

In their place, incompetent zealots competed to destroy all prior standards as “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary.” It is no surprise that the current “people’s liberation army,” for all its talk of communist dogma, does not function entirely on Mao’s principles.

Muammar Gaddafi wrecked Libya by reordering an once oil-rich nation on Gaddafi’s crackpot rules of his “Green Book.” At times, the unhinged ideologue, in lunatic fashion, required all Libyans to raise chickens or to destroy all the violins in the nation. I once asked a Libyan why the oil-rich country appeared to me utterly wrecked, and he answered, “We first hire our first cousins—and usually the worst.”

There were many reasons why the King-Cotton, slave-owning Old South lagged far behind the North in population, productivity, and infrastructure. But the chief factor was the capital and effort invested in the amoral as well as uneconomic institution of slavery.

After the Civil War, persistent segregationist ideology demanded vast amounts of time, labor, and money in defining race down to the “one drop” rule—while establishing a labyrinth of segregation laws and refusing to draw on the talents of millions of black citizens.

Yet here we are in 2024, ignoring the baleful past as the woke diversity/equity/inclusion commissars war on merit. Institutions from United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration to the Pentagon and elite universities have been reformulated in the post-George Floyd woke hysteria. And to the delight of competitors and enemies abroad, they are now using criteria other than merit to hire, promote, evaluate, and retain.

The greatest problem historically with hiring and promoting based on DEI-like dogma is that anti-meritocratic criteria mark the beginning, not the end, of eroding vital standards. If one does not qualify for a position or slot by accepted standards, then a series of further remedial interventions are needed to sustain the woke project, from providing exceptions and exemptions, changing rules and requirements, and misleading the nation that a more “diverse” math, or more “inclusive” engineering, or more “equity” in chemistry can supplant mastery of critical knowledge that transcends gender, race, or ideology.

But planes either fly or crash due to proper operation, not the appearance or politics of the operator. All soldiers either hit or miss targets, and engineers either make bridges that stand or collapse on the basis of mastering ancient scientific canons and acquired skills, training, and aptitude that have nothing to do with superficial appearance, or tribal affinities, or religion, or doctrine.

The common denominator of critical theories, from critical legal theory to critical social theory, is toxic nihilism, which claims there are no absolute standards, only arbitrary rules and regulations set up by a privileged, powerful class to exploit “the other.” Yet, not punishing looting has nothing to do with race or class, but everything with corroding timeless deterrence that always has and always will prevent the bullying strong from preying on the weak and vulnerable.

Defunding the police sent a message to any criminally minded that in a cost-to-benefit risk assessment, the odds were now on the side of the criminal not being caught for his crimes—and so crime soared and the vulnerable of the inner city became easy prey.

Another danger of DEI is the subordination of the individual to the collective. We are currently witnessing an epidemic of DEI racism in which commissars talk nonstop of white supremacy/rage/privilege without any notion of enormous differences among 230 million individual Polish-, Greek-, Dutch-, Basque-, or Armenian-Americans, or the class, political, and cultural abyss that separates those in Martha’s Vineyard from their antitheses in East Palestine, Ohio.

Moreover, what is “whiteness” in an increasingly intermarried and multiracial society? Oddly, something akin to the old one-drop rules of the South is now updated to determine victims and victimizers—to the point of absurdity. Who is white—someone one half-Irish, one half Mexican—who is black—someone one quarter Jamaican, three-quarters German? To find answers, DEI czars must look to paradigms of the racist past for answers.

Moreover, once any group is exempted and not held to collective standards by virtue of its superficial appearance, then the nation naturally witnesses an increase in racism and bigotry—on the theory that it is not racist to racially stigmatize a supposedly “racist” collective. And we are already seeing an uptake in racially motivated interracial violence as criminals interpret the trickle-down theory of reparatory justice as providing exemption for opportunistic violence.

Throughout history, it has always been the most mediocre and opportunistic would-be commissars that appear to come forth when meritocracy vanishes. If there was not a Harvard President and plagiarist like Claudine Gay to trumpet and leverage her DEI credentials, she would have to be invented. If there was not a brilliant, non-DEI economist like Roland Fryer to be hounded and punished by her, he would have to be invented.

The DEI conglomerate has little idea of the landmines it is planting daily by reducing differences in talent, character, and morality into a boring blueprint of racial stereotypes. Punctuality is now “white time” and supposedly pernicious. The SAT, designed to give the less privileged a meritocratic pathway to college admissions, is deemed racist and either discarded or warped.

In its absence, universities are quietly now “reimaging” their curriculum to make it more “relevant to today’s students” and, of course, “more inclusive and more diverse.” Translated from the language of Oceania, that means after admitting tens of thousands to the nation’s elite schools who did not meet the universities’ own prior standards that they themselves once established and apprehensive about terminating such students, higher education is now euphemistically lowering the work load in classes, introducing new less rigorous classes, and inflating grades. In their virtue-signaling, they have little clue that inevitably their once prized and supposedly prestigious degrees will be rendered less valued as employers discover a Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton BA or BS is not a guarantee of academic excellence or mastery of vital skill sets.

Toxic tribalism is also, unfortunately, like nuclear proliferation. Once one group goes full tribal, others may as well, if for no reason than their own self-survival in a balkanized, Hobbesian world of bellum omnium contra omnes. If our popular culture is to be defined by the racist hosts of The View, or the racist anchorwoman Joy Reid, or members of the Congressman “Squad,” or entire studies departments in our universities that constantly bleat out the racialist mantra, then logically one of two developments will follow.

One, so-called whites in minority-majority states like California will copy the tribal affinities of others that transcend their class and cultural differences, again in response to other blocs that do the same for careerist advantage and perceived survival. Or two, racism will be redefined empirically so that any careerist elites who espouse ad nauseam racial chauvinism—on the assurance they cannot be deemed racists—will be discredited and exposed for what they’ve become, and thus the content of our character will triumph over the color of our skin.

Finally, do we ever ask how a country of immigrants like the United States—vastly smaller than India and China, less materially rich than the vast expanse of Russia, without the strategic geography of the Middle East, or without the long investment and infrastructure of Europe—emerged out of nowhere to dominate the world economically, financially, militarily, and educationally for nearly two centuries?

The answer is easy: it was the most meritocratic land of opportunity in the world, where millions emigrated (legally) on the assurance that their class, politics, religion, ethnicity, and yes, race, would be far less a drawback than anywhere else in the world.

The degree to which the U.S. survives DEI depends on either how quickly it is discarded or whether America’s existential enemies in the Middle East, China, Russia, and Iran have even worse DEI-anti-meritocratic criteria of their own in hiring, promotion, and admissions—whether defined by institutionalized hatred of the West, or loyalty oaths to the communist party, or demonstrable obsequiousness to the Putin regime, or lethal religious intolerance.

Unfortunately, our illiberal enemies, China especially, at least in matters of money and arms, are now emulating the meritocracy of the old America. Meanwhile, we are hellbent on following their former destructive habits of using politics instead of merit to staff our universities, government, corporations, and military.

Our future hinges on how quickly we discard DEI orthodoxy and simply make empirical decisions to stop printing money, deter enemies abroad, enforce our laws, punish criminals, secure the border, reboot the military, regain energy independence, and judge citizens on their character and talent and not their appearance and politics—at least if it is not already too late.

[ahaura]

to preface i cannot and do not claim to speak for every native in the US but personally speaking: corporations and orgs like google and nasa will 'acknowledge' american indian heritage month meanwhile courts ruled that the diné do not have the right to clean water, white christians are fighting for the right in court to steal native children and overturn legislation put in place to protect native children from state-backed forced assimilation practices, and the epidemic of MMIW in canada and the US still ravages native communities.

i don't know how else to say it but at the very least i find every single so-called proclamation of support for indigenous people utterly hollow and nothing more than dead air if you do not support indigenous people EVERYWHERE. if u do not oppose colonization and imperialism EVERYWHERE. you do not care about or are an actual ally to indigenous people and to victims of colonialism and imperialism if you do not stand with palestinians and advocate for their liberation.

[intergalacticmangoe]

pluto and soft power

if you are an astrologer and trying to understand the influence of pluto. the best place to look is at the Kar-Jenner empire and how those who lean into Pluto through sex and sexual prowess, can gain an immense amount of wealth. the rise of the Kardashians and their fall both took place under pluto in capricorn. which is about physical wealth, the power of family and unity as well as the tangible displays of wealth. stunt on them culture, girlboss culture, even the bbl epidemic all screams the unseen hand of pluto. 

as under capricorn energy, individuality is a sin and in order to attain power (through being an influencer) you must do what the top ones are doing. its giving conform or be forgotten, be mainstream or be irrelevant. But that era is coming to a close; and so is the power that whiteness has tbh. a lot of astrologers theorise pluto to be some kind of harsh power. but i think given its scorpionic influences and how at home it feels in the 8h, Pluto’s influence is a lot cooler, more subliminal and less in your face. that is why she affords so much wealth to those she favours. and that is why she is so volatile, how do you control influence. how do you hold onto the subliminal, how to you lead it to serve you. you cant. and thats why we witnessed the rise and the fall of of a family as pluto moved through capricorn.  now that she is on her way into aquarius, expect modesty to come back. An almost Global shift into Islam and ideals of modesty, respect, and community identities will form more. this could be polarising initially but i see it bringing about a lot of fulfilment for a post-pandemic society. 

we also should expect a revolt and revolution happening within womens rights. its very likely that all women will have their rights stripped at the beginning of this pluto transit. but that’s a good thing, when pluto strips something down first, she allows room for things to be rebuilt. so yes, the first 10 years of this transit will feel like the patriarchy being shoved down our throats, but trust and believe an newer and more relevant wave of women’s liberation will take place and accomplish the feats feminism has and even more. so, dont be too disheartened. we will pull through 

as for the internet, influencer culture, and those things. expect a return of celebrity and celebrity status. bc everyone can be an influencer, there isnt much heft to a public image status. aquarius likes exclusivity, so expect the new wave of public figures to be really good at a craft, and really unique as well. they wont be in easily replicatable fast fashion trends. so yayyy no more bbl fashion (or heroin chic fashon) instead, expect styles that the general public wouldnt want to wear--bc they’re so uniquely celeb ? idk 

[jasmancer]

I think something I appreciate abt gregg araki's work in particular is that he explicitly links homphobia with misogyny. like there's this really unfortunate issue within the community for gay men to pretty blatantly perpetuate really harmful misogynistic behavior and attitudes. which like alienates their sisters within the community first and foremost but also sort of denies that a huge component of homophobia is misogyny. particularly transmisogyny but the garden variety stuff too.

like saying sexist piggish stuff but pretending it's ok bc it's about "straight women" is pretty vile on its own but especially when violent homophobes are overwhelmingly likely to also be violent misogynists. on par with white cishet boys dogging on "white women" when they're really just adding an adjective to get away with blatant misogyny. like think of a homophobic person you've encountered. do u think that they're particularly kind to straight women or do they treat them like shit too.

idk if I'm really communicating this well but the way gregg araki's nonsensical little worlds that devolve into horrific violence like. treat the realities of things like gay bashing as going hand in hand with sexual violence against women (and American fanaticism, nationalism, capitalism, white supremacy, etc.) is very apt. very potent. would I recommend his stuff to everyone? absolutely not because of these exact elements. they're really brutal to watch. stomach turning. but i think his use of them is effective, especially coming from a gay man of color who came of age during the time of women's and gay liberation and whose entire twenties was colored by the mass death of the AIDS epidemic.

[godborn]

                  @lovesigned   /   prompted .

    a reverence for life is often misconstrued as a   blind hatred   for substances that threaten its potential ,   but giorno could never afford to offer his detractors even a scrap of his regard ,   lest he allow an interference in his   blossoming dream .   it’s the   wilting potential   itself that he abhors ,   &   the devils that knowingly place the lives of the flowering youth on the   sacrificial altar ,   their burgeoning identities up for slaughter for the sake of soulless profit .   he’d seen the toxicity of this dynamic at play in napoli   &   across italy   ━━━━   he first had to   know the monster   before he could exorcize it with a force that dwindled a   rampant epidemic   to naught but   fearful whispers .

    with all the   heartsick empathy   he’d endured ;   the weight of a   golden heart   that forged this passion ,   giorno had never thought the object of his crusade would deal such a   personal casualty   (   but isn’t that the nature of war ??   for the   beast   to strike close to home ,   &   when he’d least expect it   ??   ) .   since he’d met his dear brother ,   the possibility loomed above his head like a   rain - bearing cloud ,   but giorno refused to manifest that tragedy in his thoughts ,   too superstitious that he’d unwittingly pave an   avenue to reality .   besides ,   ungalo holds sobriety tenderly in his hands ,   valuing the liberation ,   the   clarity   with which it endows him   ━━━━   &   giorno upraised him through his best days   &   solaced him through the rest ,   extending an understanding ,   an empathy ,   a   love   that ungalo had so long lacked through the   figures   &   institutions   that routinely failed him .

    he’s conquered the odds stacked a   mountain high   against him .   so why has it ended this way ??

    distance rendered the relapse harder to identify .   giorno’s life is tethered to napoli   &   the majority of italy under his thumb ,   &   ungalo is comfortable in florida   ━━━━   he’d made that   resoundingly clear   each of the countless times giorno nigh on   begged him   to cross the mediterranean   &   reside where he can better protect him ,   at least temporarily .   now ,   giorno can only wonder   how long this has gone on ;   how long he had been so   foolishly blind   to it    ━━━━   if he could have done something ,   anything ,   to change this wretched result ,   to spare his brother’s precious life .

    yearning to alter what’s already been done is   useless .   yet ,   giorno cannot stop himself ,   even as a   thirst for closure   drives the pearl - handled dagger deeper into his heart ,   the ache of grief tearing through his core   &   numbing all that it connects .

    the laid ground is still fresh ,   the funeral less than twenty - four hours into the past .   lowering to one knee ,   giorno   does not mind   the dirt that blemishes the otherwise   pristine   leg of his pants ,   their   sable hue   hardly allowing the stain to catch the early morning light .   he’s too focused on the   permanence   of the epitaph etched into the   polished blue granite   he himself had paid for ,   delicate hands trembling in their objective to place a dozen lilies ,   immaculately white ,   at the headstone’s base .

    “   i don’t know if you thought i would be upset with you ,   ”    he mutters ,   voice ringing through the   silent serenity   of the cemetery ;   even the whistling of the wind between the trees seems to   halt   for him ,   “   but i can’t imagine why else you didn’t tell me you were struggling .   ungalo   …   this wasn’t your fault ,   &   i would never think of you with disdain .   i hope ,   wherever you are now ,   you know that .   ”

    his   dainty cadence   becomes watery ,   an   unbearable pressure   building in the sockets of his eyes .   more than just his hands are shaking ,   now ,   but the   whole of his frame   from his shoulders to the knee that props him up .   “   why wouldn’t you let me help you ??   ”   giorno whispers the words ,   though it fails to mitigate the way his voice tears with sorrow ,   distress .    as he bows his head ,   a single tear   scalds   a pale cheek ,   prior to spilling out onto the   tightly packed dirt .

        “   why ,   why ,   why ,   ungalo ??   ”

[songsofprotestpeacerevolution]

The Project, featuring Steven Potaczek: Flags

My original concept was to have the lyrics on one side of the screen with the names and ages of the victims of mass shootings scrolling on the other side of the screen. I quickly found out that it would be impossible. There were too many victims. I then decided simply to list mass shootings in the United States. Again, I could not make it work. There were too many mass shootings. Finally, I decided only to list the mass shootings not related to family disputes (there are numerous examples of these) since Columbine. It took me three days and the list ran to six pages. It took us a few days to put together the video. When we finished it up last Thursday, Owen turned to me and said, “You know, this will go out of date quickly…” Then, on the weekend, came the latest mass shooting in Odessa, Texas.

We can argue about Second Amendment rights. We can argue about the definition of what constitutes an “assault rifle”. We can argue about the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. We can argue about the NRA… and money… and politics. What it is harder to argue about are the victims. They range in age from infants to the elderly. They were elementary school children at Sandy Hook. They were high school students at Parkland. They were college students at Virginia Tech. They were Black, White, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. They were men and women, boys and girls. They were gay, straight and transgender. They were conservative and liberal. They were Christians, Jews and Muslims. They were Sikhs and Buddhists. They were of varied faiths and of no faith at all. Most of all, they were men and women created in the image of God whose lives were cut short owing to this national epidemic of gun violence.

This, of course, is not even to speak of those who have not died, but have sustained terrible and life altering injuries – physical, emotional and psychological. Then there are the families and friends of the victims and, indeed, the shooters, who will carry the loss (and/or guilt) throughout the rest of their lives. Like a stone thrown in a pond, the circle of ripples expand until they touch all of us.

While I could offer thoughts on what might be done, they would be of little real consequence and, most likely, would be quickly dismissed by anyone on the other side of the issue. I do think, however, that there is need for a national conversation not based in politics, but in simple humanity. Maybe part of that conversation begins by us simply asking the question in the song, “Why anyone has to die…”

Source

[brookheimer]

ok im about. one week late and its 4 am. but finding out that twitter users have romangirls in their dnis now is so funny to me. bc like do they genuinely think liking shiv is more Ethically Justifiable than liking roman. saying this as someone who likes both. the only reason she doesnt like mencken is bc hes bad for her personal standing & bc his overt fascism makes her feel Icky, as evidenced by the fact that shes willing to mess with him literally one episode later once it suits her. but shes very comfortable with matsson who is like. literally the most typical kind of european fascist (most obvious ‘example’ other than his whole shtick being fascist meritocracy would be him viewing non-white immigrants in france as an epidemic. it was sometime in 4x05, it wasnt those words precisely but it was still very overtly racist and nationalist. if the ‘anarcho-capitalist’ thing didnt prove that to you as well, lol). if anything i am more concerned by people not being able to recognize that matsson is equally as ideologically fascist as mencken than people like, being kind of annoying about roman

wait you’re joking people don’t actually have romangirls DNI in their bios right… right…….?? i don’t know whether to laugh or cry . why are these people even watching this show go watch i don’t know west wing or something

more seriously though — people are dumb as fucking bricks when it comes to recognizing fascism if it is not donned in MAGA hats and confederate flags (which is ridiculous because fascism very much exists outside america and outside american politics) — ever since trump, like 87% of americans have seemingly lost any and all intelligent thought they might have had regarding fascism. the word ‘fascism’ has become fully equated with the american alt-right of 2022 which is so bafflingly stupid for so many reasons… it’s similar to ‘liberal’ becoming synonymous with ‘woke’ even though liberalism is a longstanding political and philosophical tradition with a very set meaning that has nothing to do with, like, antiracism. as an english (obsessed with words) and polisci (obsessed with political theory) double major there are few things more mindnumbingly frustrating than seeing entire masses of people collectively forget that a word actually has a meaning and can’t be repurposed as an epithet for anything they want it to refer to, especially when said words are as deeply entrenched in long important histories integral to the understanding of the present day. like, the collective stupidity around fascism (= american anti-wokeness!) and liberalism (= american wokeness!) is seriously so concerning because it’s exactly these newfound gaps between words and their meanings that allows for propaganda to take root and flourish — it’s exactly these gaps that make it impossible to have actual discussions with one another that lead somewhere because we’re starting from entirely different places, and neither of us realize it. obviously words in general take on new meanings and connotations over time but it’s just very different when the words in question are long-standing political theories that have defined the sociopolitical sphere for years upon years! we can’t stop the encroaching of fascism if we are incapable of recognizing its existence when it isn’t wearing a shirt that says “I LOVE WHITE AMERICA AND WANT TO ENSLAVE EVERY WOMAN” !!!!!! and typically, it isn’t!!! it’s as terrifying as it is maddening, seriously. and this is very much not just a succession fandom thing lol but the immediate black and white moralizing and straight up misappropriation of terminology plaguing the politics plot line commentary is, as you said, veeeerry much indicative of a larger issue regarding widespread (typically american) inability to recognize fascism when it doesn’t look like trump

[pigeonriot]

we're not making out because i have a mortal fear of being known and because i NEED to know if you and the other anon are down for. a polyamorous marriage.

(pls stop making me miss not me, i hardly do a good job of not thinking about them all the time)

lmaoo fair, also def down for polyamory and all that BUT if u are a marriage lover dont look at the next paragraphs bc i'm sorry to disappoint but i actually hate marriages sfm and i acidentally wrote an anti marriage rant down here.

they r a system which has historically been used to secure money and status between the wealthiest families and used as an opressive tool of the patriachy & classicm and that pertains till today, like finances/taxes/being able to take charge of medical decisions of ur partner if they are sick are still very much tied to marriage and thats so fucked up lol

& the main reason why marriage equality became such a big thing in the queer community was bc so many things are tied to marriage. with the AIDS epidemic, when your partner was dying in a hospital, suddenly e.g. their homophobic family who they didnt have contact to in years could decide over medical questions. So THATS when the call for marriage equality became big in the queer community and it still pertains today overshadowing approaches of actual radical change when marriage is a heteronormative system with still way too much weight in society.

marriage equality is literally peak liberal politics, mainly helping the white cis gay elite on like their ✨last step✨ on being integrated in the majority society meanwhile everyone else is left scrambeling.

so i'm actually deeply against the institution of marriage and all that jazz bc love is only an afterthought and used to cover up everything wrong w it lol

this was a simple ask lmao & i managed to completely derail it, sorry ahdhjajdkak (also if i have to miss not me *everybody* must miss not me dont let me suffer alone)

[cbd]

How We Killed The Green Screen from Michael Plescia on Vimeo.

But, green screen is a great tool, right? Not for one filmmaker.

Watch the story of why and how @MichaelPlescia tried to reinvent filmmaking, visual effects and co-found a company in order to make his feature film even a possibility.

See how the story vision for The Mop Liberator lead to the creation of a technology that is allowing the filmmakers to photograph an imagined cyberpunk world in-camera without any post-production using ARwall, a visual effects compositing technology that combines new mixed-reality screens along with the oldest (and maybe best) trick in the filmmaking book.

This piece delves into the inception, development process, and shows the production test footage of the first ever real-time, in-camera, real-light, real-lens, perspective-adapting, mixed-reality, rear-screen, compositing technique.

Music:

“Morningstar” Written and Performed by Palmersmedic soundcloud.com/palmers-medic

“Ahimsa” Written and Performed by Calm Shores Available On Epidemic Sound

“They Will Hunt You” Written and Performed by Niklas Johansson Available On Epidemic Sound

“White Rooftops” Written and Performed by Niklas Johansson Available On Epidemic Sound

"The Essence Of Beauty 4" Written and Performed by Peter Sandberg Available On Epidemic Sound

“Escape From Katal-hyuk” Written and Performed by Michael Plescia soundcloud.com/rinjen

“From Within” Written and Performed by Daniel Nielsen Available on West One Music