PallasRiot

Autonomy and liberation without concession.

Transphobia is patriarchy, Marxism-Leninism is spicy liberalism, analysis is not advocacy, I have no patience for boneheaded contrarianism.

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Last Notes

2025-06-10 19:52:22

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There's no logistical support for the nat guard and probably not much for the marines. Nat guard are being set up around federal buildings that aren't even near protests seemingly just to have them posted somewhere. The ICE thugs and the rest of the immigration nazis are going hog wild but still facing a lot of push back. Local pigs seem to be trying to ride the line between "outside agitators" and "we have this ourselves", they clearly don't like this ride.
Like obviously this is horrible, please don't read any of this as me downplaying what's going on. The regime can try to get its shit together on the back end and learn too. But like, this isn't evil genius stuff, this is dumb thugs being led by a cadre of right-wing celebrities in over their heads.

2025-06-10 19:45:40

Honestly this does not look like a strong and confident regime laying out plans and traps to me. This looks like a guy who is primarily concerned with image trying to find ways to look strong and save face.

2025-06-07 16:50:25

I've seen the sentiment that "trans women have a duty to use their hypervisible position to advocate for less visible trans people", and I want to kind of set aside the moral claim there, just for a minute, because it really implies that some folks don't actually understand what that hypervisibility is.
The hypervisibility of trans women isn't this thing where trans women get all these opportunities to speak out or whatever, it's specifically that trans women are used in propaganda as the face of social illness. There aren't all these trans women getting big breaks on the news or whatever that they're selfishly using to advocate only for trans women: hypervisibility comes with being silenced, not having a bigger voice. It's a strategy for taking away the ability of trans women to advocate for anyone or anything through the purposeful cultivation of a propagandistic image. If you're suggesting that trans women are squandering opportunities to advocate for people I would suggest you've probably fallen for the propaganda.

2025-06-01 23:56:44

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Fuck it I'll cover another talking point because it frankly disturbs me.
If I decide to eat a burrito you don't get to stop me because you don't like watching people eat burritos. If a person wears a t shirt for a movie you don't like you don't get to make them change their shirt because you don't like the movie. If a person is trans and you don't like trans people, you don't get to tell them not to ever be in public because you don't want to see trans people. When other people do something that doesn't meaningfully involve you beyond the level of merely coexisting, you do not get to impose conditions on them like that, you cannot demand that they restrict themselves to only what you'll permit.
So when someone says, "I didn't consent to there being kink at pride" that's a misrepresentation of what consent is.
Your consent isn't required for someone to exist in public in a way you don't like.

2025-06-01 23:46:35

Happy Pride! Kink is queer, furries are queer, queerness is not reducable to a series of letters in an acronym because it's defined through vectors of marginalization and shared struggle. Cis, het, allo, etc, people who face repression because of how they love are queer too.
That's the true nail in the coffin of the "kink at pride" nonsense. Kink belongs at pride because pride is for queerness. Full stop.

2025-05-26 13:24:19

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@nprofile…twud That would be fun alt history for sure, how do you think that goes down?

2025-05-23 13:53:41

There's this really exhausting thing that happens where the worst right-wing hacks in the world will create messaging about something, and then supposed leftists immediately start copying that messaging.
The Handmaid's Tale is such a great example. Deranged right-wingers love saying that the show and book are cringey, iver the top, etc. Then come along "leftists" who go "oh yeah this show is so cringe because obviously this is white women minimizing what women of color go through" or some other absolutely unhinged response that amounts to endorsing the right-wing culture critique in the public eye.
This happens constantly and once you notice it you'll realize it's everywhere.

2025-05-16 16:57:21

Title IX in regards to sports has always been flawed because it does not desegregate sports. Allowing women to be segregated out of sports paved the way for the erosion of civil rights using supposed civil rights laws.

2025-05-16 11:24:04

They say that anarchy is chaos, and they call what's happening now order.

2025-05-15 15:36:39

In a sense Bobby Kennedy is the embodiment of the right-wing medical project: the rejection of medical science in favor of ideology. See, you can't be anti-abortion or anti-trans medicine without rejecting a reality based approach to medicine. And so it's always been necessary for the right to attack to very notion that facts should be a necessary part of how medicine is regulated.

2025-05-14 19:46:07

"Leftists" defending the People's Residential Schools because Bush era anti-terrorism nonsense is valid if it's about the Uygurs I guess

2025-05-13 19:52:46

Mussolini is the original "why I left the left" guy

2025-05-13 14:36:55

I make an effort to compliment strangers as often as possible, I think it makes more of a difference than people realize. There's a real tension though because while guys don't receive a lot of random compliments, there's a real risk of them taking any compliment as an excuse to get weirdly pushy. It's a tight rope walk sometimes and I'm also pretty willing to risk having to push back, but it does reinforce that as much as some guys will complain about not receiving much positive attention it's often because guys make that a fraught proposition

2025-05-12 18:07:07

Like eight months ago I was arguing to people that the return to industrial policy in the US was a significant break from US neoliberalism, and I was called a radlib. Now I have the same people arguing that industrial policy makes China socialist.

2025-05-08 13:57:11

I think folks in the US need to recognize that it's no longer sufficient to appeal to supposed bedrock values because for right-wing yankees everything is on the table. You can't argue that something is bad because it's segregationist: that is a fairly popular position again, one that can be asserted openly. You can't argue that something is authoritarian: they want a doctator. You can't argue that something will infringe on free expression: right-wing yankees don't think there should be free expression. If your goal is to try to chip off some of the softer right-wing aligned folks, you need to argue why these things matter kind of from first principles.
I think this is some of the success of the Democratic messaging around Kilmar Garcia: they made this an unpopular issue for Trump by hammering how a lack of due process hurts everyone, not just by appealing to due process itself.

2025-05-07 13:52:35

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@nprofile…twud Klein is a political commentator and consultant class ghoul, he's been spearheading a push among the consultants and donors to pressure the Democrats to adopt what he calls the "abundance agenda", which is corporate corruption and deregulation

2025-05-07 13:21:50

Damn I don't know if it's totally intentional but Sinners pretty brutally condemns Irish Americans specifically for their bullshit huh?
Like yeah your ancestors suffered too and to you that's apparently just an excuse to be a monster rather than to build any authentic solidarity

2025-05-06 18:12:04

CUFI claims more members than the entire Jewish population of the USA, you can't say that Zionism is Jewish

2025-05-03 17:23:15

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The more you understand conservative voters in basically every country the less evidence you find of the narratives around economic anxiety or whatever. Yes, the misery of neoliberal austerity and breakdown of material conditions fosters more conservatism, but fundamentally this describes the soil in which conservatism is most fertile. What animates right-wingers is bigotry and fear, it's racial anxiety and hatres of women and gleeful spite. People with right-wing sentiment aren't sympathetic lost souls, they're stupid, incurious, and evil, and they love that about themselves and their fellows. The more you actually understand them on their own terms and in fact, the less believable the liberal narratives about them are.

2025-05-03 17:19:36

People often call for sympathizing with conservative voters or for understanding them, and as someone who puts a lot of effort into understanding them I'm going to suggest you can probably only do one of those things

2025-04-22 11:53:37

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The court essentially just wrote legislation defining gender as gender assigned at birth, and in a legal sense they invented that wholecloth and inserted it into law. That did not exist in the law they were "interpreting", and was counter to how those who studied the law and it's history understood the law. Simply put, there is no reasonable way to believe that this remarkably specific piece of far right rhetoric that makes no sense under scrutiny was something existing within this law, and the court invented the idea that it could be assumed.

2025-04-22 11:34:13

People in the UK discovering that "interpreting" law and "changing" law are not actually different things if the unaccountable politicians that make up your courts decide they want the law changed

2025-04-21 11:07:57

Did Satan send JD Vance to kill the Pope? I'm just asking questions

2025-04-16 14:48:38

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By the way, everyone who has paid for Harry Potter stuff bankrolled this decision. JK Rowling's hate group "For Women Scotland" is the group that lobbied this horrific decision, and Rowling's money has deeply corrupted broader UK institutions. The billionaire has bankrolled a variety of hate efforts and her oligarchic influence over UK politics can't be ignored at this point.
So thank you for that I hope your generic shovelware video game and cash grab movies were worth it. You paid to legally erase nonbinary people, make it a matter of law that trans women are not entitled to equal protection under the law, and made it a matter of UK law that women are defined by their capacity to give birth.

2025-04-16 10:43:51

Holy shit, the UK Supreme Court's ruled that trans women aren't really women under the law, and it did so in a manner that enshrines the idea that discrimination against women is rooted in the capacity to become pregnant. This is the insane consequence of transphobia, this ruling is an attack on every feminist victory in the UK throughout history, attempting to erase the truth that gender discrimination is founded in social hierarchies that go beyond biological capacity. This necessarily raises questions about whether women who can't become pregnant for other reasons are full women in the eyes of the law in the UK. This reinforces rhe most insane retrograde theocratic beliefs about women.
In perhaps the darkest way, this ruling shows the horror that transphobia inflicts on all women. The UK courts have spoken: women are defined solely by their serviceability as birthing vessels.

2025-04-05 00:47:00

Right, so Medicaid will get blown up, social security is being systematically made as inaccessible as possible, 401ks are being devalued, and the cost of everything is going to go up.
People realize this is how the US's elderly get turned out onto the streets to die, right? Or rather, in a lot of states their family becomes legally liable for every aspect of their medical care and life, so whole families will be destroyed. This is a recipe for straight up murdering the elderly.

2025-04-03 17:29:02

Dawg stop calling attempts to build mass action "performative" we know, they're literally a performance, snd that performance is part of how you get people to actually do mass action

2025-04-02 18:16:57

Cory Booker's politics suck ass.
He spent 25 hours repeatedly telling the people of the United States that there had to be mass mobilization and that the people are more powerful than the agents of the state, he repeatedly said that the US has been seized by oligarchy and there is no guarantee that future elections will be free or fair, and he spent much of his time reading letters from those directly effected by the regime. By the end of his speech he had hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people watching across multiple platforms
That's popular politics, that's political communication, that's a heck of a lot better than I would expect from most Dems. Between folks like AOC holding rallies, Chris Murphy holding town hall events in red districts, and this, I think we're actually seeing some level of embrace of politics that embraces the populace. Cory Booker is pretty awful in a lot of ways, but he did a pretty good thing here.

2025-04-01 18:03:04

If transphobes actually believed that gender was a rigid binary then no one could "lose their man card". No one could lose their femininity by cutting their hair short. No one could have their masculinity questioned for crying. It would mean that gender would simply *be*, it by definition couldn't have sets of qualities that can increase or decrease or be judged insufficient. If someone's gender is something they can be more or less of or do right or wrong it's on a spectrum.
What transphobes actually believe is that they have the right to determine the gender of those around them. They aren't making honest claims about what they believe to be literally true, they're trying to enforce an order of control and domination.
The anti-trans hysteria isn't about whether or not gender is binary or biological or whatever, it's about who gets to do the gendering.

2025-03-31 17:32:17

In my mind there is one sign we should be looking for to see if Democrats Get It, basically one sign above all others. It's the sign that they understand themselves as the formal electoral wing of a dissident movement.
"We would never celebrate violence but..."
Any variation of that. That's the politics of formal insurgency. It's the role of the formal agents of politics to legitimize direct action and one of the hallmark ways of doing that is some variation of "I don't approve of their methods but we can all understand how they were pushed to this. The only way for this to stop is to address the real issues here." This is the politics of legitimizing and building upon direct action through formal political outlets. This, by the way, is something Republicans are doing with their terror network all the time.

2025-03-31 00:43:51

The hyper online reactionary obsession with femboys seems pretty directly related to chasers finding trans femmes increasingly problematic in a political environment where even objectifying trans femmes requires some degree of engagement with the political

2025-03-30 14:12:10

No one believes the entirety of their religion, no one follows every bit of their holy text. All religion is a series of attempts to find some sort of sum total of meaning derived by weighing different teachings differently, deciding which teachings don't matter and which do, and interpreting some sort of greater significance to the parts emphasized. No religion has a body of teachings so small and so closely held that there is a singular voice, singular message, and uncomplicated non-contradicting set of teachings.

2025-03-29 14:15:31

US neoliberals are working on establishing their next round of elite consensus, this time branded as "abundance". This is the term they've chosen for their latest version of Clintonian deregulation and technocratic authoritarianism, building off of the YIMBY movement for some reason. The propaganda position they're staking out is that there is a vast potential in the US that has to be unleashed through cutting red tape, with ideas like getting rid of all sorts of zoning laws, trying to cut back on regulations that slow down business development, and similar neoliberal nonsense. Their audience isn't the people(it never is), they're trying to convince the consultant class, the donors, and the technocratic insiders. When you see this Abundance stuff, understand that there's a pretty dark agenda at work, being dressed up in new disguises.

2025-03-29 12:40:26

In trouble with the besties because I forgot to spoiler the Signal chat with a reminder that the information was top secret

2025-03-28 11:44:24

The window to destroy MAGA has closed, even if US democracy survives Trump and Republicans lose power, Trumpism will survive past Trump and be a defining feature of yankee politics for decades. If Trump had been defeated basically any time before his second term it's very possible, even likely, that the Republicans would have morphed into some other (terrible) thing and Trumpism would have slowly died over a couple of election cycles. That definitely won't happen now.
What we've seen is the birth and rise of the equivalent of the Nazi party, and I mean that in every sense. Trumpism will outlive Trump and there will be Trumpists in the US for probably a century or more if the US lasts that long. The particular conspiracies and grievances of Trumpism will get rehashed over and over and smuggled into new packaging, and if we are *very* fortunate and *very* strong in our collective action against Trumpism, you will see Qanon shit being repackaged in thirty and fifty years like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are repackaged constantly today.

2025-03-27 16:31:59

I think people ought to consider that the Trump regime might actually be able to keep prices for a lot of consumer goods sorta kinda under control through a combination of child labor and prisoner slave labor. The economic arguments to allow immigration have always had the potential unintended consequence of creating room for really dire solutions to the problems that arise from immigration crackdowns.

2025-03-25 20:03:44

The regime is using Signal because they don't want to create records, they're not complying with record keeping laws to avoid those records ever being seen.
They're doing that because they think they can still be stopped and they're afraid of what happens then.

2025-03-25 18:04:32

Really interesting seeing anti-Sanders/AOC sentiment flow out of Twitter under progressive guises, especially after Elon started freaking out about the rallies. Strongly suspect there's some manipulation going on intended to push the usual "whatever you're doing isn't left enough and you're stupid and evil for doing it" kind of messages

2025-03-25 13:04:56

Reporters should be asking Hegseth what he was drinking the night of the Signal leak. It would be swell if there actually was true pro-democracy partisan media.

2025-03-24 22:11:02

Congratulations, your local anarchist book club has more opsec than the US DoD

2025-03-24 12:23:07

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Off the top of your head what do you know about the Warren Court?
Because groups like the John Birch Society and Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation trace their lineage back to right-wing organizing against the Warren Court and they're still mad about it.

2025-03-24 12:21:33

It's always remarkable to me how yankee leftists will declare that a strategy can't work because it hasn't paid off immediately, while we are living in the consequences of the yankee right actively waging the same strategy for 70 years to get where they are now.

2025-03-24 00:54:35

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The regime legitimately doesn't understand what it's doing well enough to realize it's selling off parts it probably wants. The various news organizations that the US funds across the world are pretty vital for US soft power, and for better or worse they also have generally legitimately offered information that authoritarians would rather their populaces not have. The total abandonment of the US international aid system is similarly dire. But even more concerning is things like shuttering the department of net assessment, which means that Hegseth's neo-crusader army is going to have a *lot* less information about enemy capabilities. This is the sort of thing that leads to Russia's Three Day Special Military Operation, like these steps are how you produce a state that can only do geopolitics through military force, and also its' military is really rotted out from the inside.
The idea of this happening with the shattered remains of history's most dangerous military is...bad.

2025-03-24 00:47:23

I think the US is basically done as a super power, I think there is legitimately no coming back from this for decades at least and more likely not at all. I think that's also going to be a lot worse for the whole world than anyone who might cheer on the end oof empire realizes, because how the empire ends matters.

2025-03-21 11:43:56

The people who deported innocent men to a torture prison in El Salvador didn't get hired yesterday. The people rounding up parents and kids who have been in the US for decades didn't get hired yesterday. The people who have seized multiple European tourists and put them through hell didn't get hired yesterday.
The Musk-Trump administration hasn't had the time to entirely turn over the ranks of yankee law enforcement, they didn't fire all the good cops and replace then with klansmen. The people doing this were by and large already there, they are the same people. They were always ready and willing, even enthusiastic, to do this.
The next time there is a social movement dedicated to taking power back for communities from law enforcement, remember this. Remember this is always who they were, this is always what these institutions were. When we entrust the power and safety of our communities to an elevated warrior class, that class of people becomes separate from our communities and develops a taste for power.

2025-03-18 17:38:26

People like Roberts and Vought are going to try to save Trump from himself through trying to guide him into making a more durable, legalistic, normal-seeming authoritarianism. I suspect there's a pretty high chance that they instead get taken along for the ride, and they have to decide if they're going to do what they can to paper over things on the back end as Trump performs his massive, open power grabs.
Roberts and Vought will ultimately abandon what "principles" they had. Like all that came before them they bet they could control Trump and ride him to their own ends, and they'll learn that doesn't work.

2025-03-18 17:05:16

Hey so sending gang members to a foreign concentration camp for hard labor is actually unhinged and evil by itself but also ICE isn't even claiming these people committed crimes and also why do we trust that the administration that didn't realize it was firing nuclear safety officers literally has any idea who it black bagged?

2025-03-17 19:28:41

The sharper the hierarchies of capitalism become, the larger the divides, the more clear it is that the capitalists are profoundly unfit to lead.
Sure, Musk is on everyone's brain, and obviously he's a total moron. But also look at folks like Bill Gates who tried to revolutionize education and was literally so arrogant and stupid he destroyed education for a whole generation around the world. Peter Thiel is a man who literally struggles to understand Lord of the Rings and has been mesmerized by the least interesting dork on most forums. These are all incredibly destructive, useless people. Why?
Capitalists are self-selected to be the kind of people who lack the moral competence to not rob other people, lack the work ethic to explore anything productive, lack the self-reflection to question whether they really know more than others, and lack the intellect to ever recognize any of this. A person who was moral, clever, insightful, trustworthy, and intelligent would by definition struggle to do what one needs to do in order to achieve the great heights of the robber barons.

2025-03-17 15:08:38

So if it turns out that democracy in the US is over, the thing that I think future historians will point to as the moment it happened was this last Saturday when the Trump administration defied court orders not to deport those people

2025-03-17 00:22:58

At lot of trans discourse is solved by simply understanding that trans women are in fact women and trans men are in fact men

2025-03-16 17:27:50

Let's be explicit: content creators like Hakim and Second Thought exist to prey on people who are just starting to delve into politics. Their role is to peel people away from liberatory political thought, inoculate them against that thought when they encounter it, and to steer them towards predatory authoritarian orgs that will use and abuse them.
I don't reject the notion of left unity, I reject the notion that authoritarianism can be leftist. Marxist-Leninists are anti-communists.

2025-03-16 17:27:50

2025-03-14 13:56:51

I'm a life long blue collar worker, I'm proud of the different kinds of work I've done, I take pride in doing practical things that make people's lives better in the most direct, material sense. If I didn't have to work I might still do what I currently do, just on my own terms.
But I'm real suspicious of a lot of the pro blue collar rhetoric out there in the US.
All this talk about needing more apprenticeships and less college degrees, how the trades are better than student debt, etc, seems like part of a long term strategy to discourage working class yankees from seeking education. It seems like a strategy to make more of us feel good about education falling apart and more and more of us doing all kinds of awful menial labor. It feels like there's a lot of long con going on here to be honest.
I want a world where people aren't defined by labor, but in the shorter term I'd like a world where plumbers and delivery drivers and coders and ER nurses all could get educated in philosophy, or economics, or history, or whatever else if they want to, and that all those people feel like they have a right to that knowledge. Capitalism robs us of self-development, it forces us to mold ourselves to whatever advantages us in selling our labor.

2025-03-11 13:01:56

A society doesn't collapse through a series of disasters, it collapses as it loses the ability to respond to and recover from disasters.

2025-03-11 11:14:48

A "Red Wave" is what happens when the entire stock market is freefalling in the red lmao

2025-03-10 17:38:51

In a capitalist society the wealthy have two potential broad strategies for increasing their own position. They can work to increase their own wealth in absolute terms or they can work to make everyone else poorer and themselves richer in relative terms. The richer someone is the less they gain from increasing their wealth in absolute terms, making it more and more attractive to immiserate everyone else in order to increase relative standing.
In other words, if everyone is getting silver and you're getting a bunch of gold then you're very well off, but if everyone is squatting in mud shacks and you have clean clothing you have a level of power that the difference between gold and silver can't begin to approach. Even if the oligarchs lose wealth in real terms, as long as the difference between what they have and what everyone else has increases they're winning.

2025-03-06 13:59:09

The "crisis of lonely men" is good actually. Fundamentally it's a sign that women and other folks of marginalized genders are no longer being forcibly made so reliant on men that repugnant, vicious, vapid, and frankly antisocial men find themselves without the means to force their presence on others. The fact that a number of these guys have turned to shooting school children or becoming fascist militants seems like a great argument that it's reasonable they would die alone and unloved.

2025-03-03 20:12:38

Please let yankee Republicans know that now that the woke DEI park rangers have been fired for their nonbinary crimes no one can stop you from petting the buffalo, as is your Christian birthright

2025-03-03 16:40:50

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@nprofile…twud This is happening through hundreds of thousands of deaths of severe wasting and AIDS across the globe, and it signals a change of footing in the US to an all-hard-power approach

2025-03-03 02:33:35

Every so often we get a lot of discourse about whether or not to accept people who regret supporting Trump, what they should need to do to be welcome, etc.
At this point my question is why does this discussion keep happening? I haven't seen any mass outpouring of regrets, not now and not any time in the past decade, not really. Trumpists in real life don't seem to be lining up around the block seeking redemption. Maybe if your shitty uncle apologizes to you go ahead and figure that out, but in the mean time this stuff seems to be pure imagination.

2025-03-03 00:48:29

So like, the US interest in Ukraine hasn't been minerals. It should be fairly obvious that the Musk-Trump administration made a half-hearted grab for minerals because Musk would benefit. The US interest in Ukraine has been food security for Europe, this focus on mineral wealth isn't actually some long-standing US imperialist plot, it's not even something Trump I was very interested in.

2025-02-26 12:45:47

As the Musk-Trump administration embraces gun control I hope at least some liberals will realize that gun control has literally always been an authoritarian venture. The administration is talking about using the civil commitment process as a way to take people's guns without due process: this would mean that red states would be empowered to disarm those they consider mentally ill and/or sexually deviant. Put that in the context of what red states are doing to queer people and the widespread criminalizing and pathologizing of queeress, as an example.
The father of US gun control is Ronald Reagan, and gun control stems from that same ideology of state control and the persecution of the marginalized. The push by Yankee liberals for gun control has always been a project of technocratic authoritarianism that was in turn always going to be helpful for Republican fascism. The Democrats alienated a huge voter base forever in order to make sure they could screw over more minorities over guns.

2025-02-25 12:31:40

I don't understand why a bunch of people think that the US and Russia are capable of putting an end to the Russo-Ukrainian war. Ukrainians built tire fortresses and occupied their own cities to fight back against a Ukrainian government they didn't support, what makes anyone think that an enforced "peace" deal wouldn't just be years of insurgency?
There are still Chechen seperatist attacks on Russian and Russian-aligned military targets in Chechnya. That conflict formally ended in 2000, and the seperatist movement was declared disabled in 2009. And if you want examples more familiar to English speakers, one only has to look to the history of Ireland for a greater wealth of examples of how long insurgency can hold against occupation.

2025-02-19 18:27:14

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@nprofile…twud There's actually a pretty strong argument that the Bible doesn't either and the thing being prohibited is much more specific

2025-02-19 18:23:53

There's an argument by Bible scholars that the passage that forbid "a man to lie with a man as he does a woman" are actually prohibitions on being the guy doing the penetration, which in turn means there is a Biblical argument that femboy nuns are in fact Biblically supported as long as they're stroctly bottoms

2025-02-17 13:15:07

If you were into left-tube you might remember BadMouse. If you still like video essay content you should check out their recent works, they're on something of a redemption arc and have been really drilling down on Marxism-Leninism in interesting and thoughtful ways from the perspective of someone who embraced Marxism-Leninism.
I think there are probably some good meditations in there on why it's so important to be cautious about organizing with ML orgs and I think this is particularly relevant in the US where the political ambulance-chasers will be out in full force for the next few years at least.

2025-02-17 02:25:38

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Especially since 9/11, American Christian extremists have idolized a fantasy version of Islamic paramilitary terrorism. They have spoken in hopeful, dreaming terms of raising a generation of suicide bombers for Christ. They want a Global Crusade to counter and overcome the supposed Global Jihad. This has melded quite readily with Orban style war against democracy.

2025-02-16 18:02:29

For those who are hopeful that there might be a silver lining to the destruction of USAID in the form of American imperialism being reigned in, you should know that basically one guy is fully in charge of essentially the entire State department apparatus for foreign aid and USAID right now. Peter Marocco is a return figure from Trump 1, and he is now basically the sole decision maker of US foreign policy. His MO during Trump 1 was to meet with Christian terrorist and paramilitary groups, even those opposed to US interests, to try to figure out how use US foreign policy assets to help them overthrow democratic governments. The Balkans are a particular interest of his, where he secretly and without permission met with anti-democracy Christian extremists.
The empire isn't being unwound per se: everything that isn't the global Crusade is being cut so that the Crusade can be fueled everywhere.

2025-02-15 23:41:33

I'm increasingly feeling like the anti-nuclear activists were right actually and maybe it's just not justifiable to do things that could result in hundred thousand year problems if like a couple particularly moronic people happen to get all the power like one time

2025-02-14 11:36:15

I think the period of Republican crisis is fully over. For about a decade there were a lot of opportunities for the party to be decisively diminished and my sense is that their previous vulnerabilities are now fully gone. America will probably have this Trumpist incarnation of the party for decades and I think we missed a wide window to set our own battlefield for the next couple decades. Trump will be the Reagan of kids born ten years from now: the party defining figure that every intractable disaster traces back to.

2025-02-13 12:28:36

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@nprofile…twud Yeah, Trump's victory is a huge boon to international fascism and will help to fuel fascists literally across the globe.
People seem to forget that fascist leaders are generally pretty internationalist and work to boost each other, because liberty anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere

2025-02-12 20:26:56

White boys think that the fights over race and gender aren't class struggle because they can more easily imagine working with white fascists than with Black radicals or feminists

2025-02-11 19:17:28

Does anyone have an old school gps device that they like? I think I want to get more google stuff off my phone but I'm just not that great at navigation

2025-02-11 16:49:43

It must be very weird being the Pope and having to respond to theological arguments made by converts whose understanding of Catholicism comes primarily from Warhammer 40k memes

2025-02-10 13:15:13

You can't just say that now is the time for solidarity and hope the importance of the moment convinces people. The folks who didn't think solidarity was important before are probably only going to be more convinced they should do whatever is best for them now. When the going gets tough switching becomes a survival strategy.
To be quite honest this is the thing that has disturbed me the most about a lot of the crude anti-liberalism thats flourished over the past couple years. There's sophisticated leftist anti-liberalism in which we can acknowledge that it is preferable to live in a liberal democracy and that obviously the groups most preyed upon under liberalism are the first targets of fascism, and then there's this crude anti-liberalism that insists that fascism and liberalism are functionally identical except liberalism is solely responsible for fascism and therefor if anything it's most important to never do anything that might benefit liberals. This crude anti-liberalism has resulted in a sort of hierarchy of moral value of "solidarity", in which whatever group is determined to be most marginalized is a sort of trump card to be played against the obvious disparity in outcomes. I don't think there's good reason to trust that people who are willing to sacrifice queer kids in the US are very likely to actually engage in any kind of real, meaningful solidarity, I don't think those people are actually likely to be trustworthy when trust is worth more than gold. I think those are the kinds of people who are very likely to make excuses as to why whatever they were already going to do was the most moral choice post hoc.

2025-02-07 19:37:06

I've literally already had a tankie tell me that they feel bad about all the AIDS deaths that will happen but it's still a win that Trump is dismantling USAID

2025-01-24 18:36:16

Preparedness question: I'm interested in water filtration systems that would be helpful in the event that deregulation leads to worse water quality, where should I start?

2025-01-24 01:45:25

Before you start spreading ICE alerts, try to get connected with local groups that do this stuff. Look for immigrant rights orgs, the more local the better. Try to get connected with them and ask what they need. Well meaning false reports can be a serious problem that can clog the systems people rely on. Think of how people have successfully shut down snitch lines for trans bathroom laws, and you can get the idea of how too much false information becomes an issue. Groups that already do this are likely to have better vetting processes and instructions for how to help.
If you do need to pass on information, be specific. Confirm that what you're looking at is ICE, try to figure out what they're doing, etc. Folks have been spreading the SALUTE model of military intel and that's solid. Don't just tell people you saw ICE: unfortunately these fucking jackboots are just part of society, and they could be shooting the shit and swilling coffee. People can't live in panic mode all the time, so be vigilant while also being discerning.

2025-01-22 21:19:46

Both-parties-are-the-same motherfuckers are now having horrified reactions to the rollback of Democrat policies they previously said didn't matter, and yet somehow this won't change a single one of their minds about how false equivalence is bad analysis

2025-01-22 16:50:52

Elon Musk is like if Henry Ford was a Nazi

2025-01-21 13:54:04

During the Green Scare, Americans were imprisoned for committing terrorism for things like running websites that hosted information that was argued to have caused economic loss for big corporations

2025-01-21 01:06:26

Hey man maybe if the ADL is defending Nazi salutes they're not actually opposed to antisemitism

2025-01-20 21:42:39

I'm so exhausted of smug lefties self-congratulatory prattle about "resistance libs"
It's all hands on deck, shut up, get to work, and maybe try not to be the most alienting fuckheads around. Or enjoy feeling superior with the two other people you think are radical enough.

2025-01-20 05:56:18

When some tradwife says that feminist harpies want to keep women out of the home you can respond that feminism is about women being able ro make rheir own choices, that's a fair answer. Personally a feminist response I'd like to see more is that feminism recognizes that tradwives are doing (or cosplaying) work.
Women who stay at home are making sacrifices for their partner, effectively putting in huge amounts of labor which allows their partner to have more time and energy for work, education, advancement, etc. Taking care of children is work, which we recognize when nannies and daycare workers do it. Cleaning a home is work, which we recognize when maids and cleaners do it. Cooking is work, which we recognize when chefs do it. Etc. And of course, a woman who stays at home is losing out on career advancement and work experience, so if she does ever need or want to get into a profession she'll be years behind where she would have been. All of this *is* a choice that women (and other folks) can make and do make all the time, but that doesn't mean they aren't doing a lot of labor and making a lot of sacrifice for their partner.
In a sense the tradwife propaganda says "doesn't this look wonderful?" and at least one feminist response is "sure, but like anything good it's a lot of work and that deserves recognition". It's the tradwives who are arguing that their vision of feminine labor is without value, not the feminists.

2025-01-18 16:58:36

I need liberals to stop believing that Hitler was very cool and smart

2025-01-18 07:04:25

Every rich fuck is just some flavor of stupid con artist. There's the lady with the fake blood tests, the moronic guy that's dosing himself with whatever he thinks might somehow make hime younger, there's like several dudes whose whole thing is they managed to do enclosure on some part of the early internet because their parents were rich, etc. The amazing thing is how much energy our society puts into *insisting* any of these people are smart or useful.

2025-01-18 05:08:35

The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is slightly above 40, and the youngest troops are exempt from front line combat. Ukraine has attempted to preserve the young, in defiance of the normal course that states take in spending the blood of the young to satiate the whims of rich old men.
Reportedly the Trump team plans to try to coerce Ukraine to conscript 18 year olds.

2025-01-17 20:54:34

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By the by, this is why I think explicitly anarchist critiques of capitalism are necessary. Capitalism is a system of hierarchies and power concentration, whereby capital holders are in a more powerful position. The flow of wealth is contextualized within that hierarchical system, but the hierarchies themselves are the bones of the structures, not the flow of capital. Those who have hierarchical power by other means can often turn it into capital.

2025-01-17 17:43:13

Literally hundreds of thousands of pages of psychosexual analysis of fascism have been rendered unnecessarily redundant by American fascists adopting "daddy's coming home" as their slogan

2025-01-17 15:44:09

Biden teeing up Trump to save TikTok is just such a galaxy brained move, this administration is literally finding new ways to suppress Democratic turnout for years to come while they have only days left this level of innovation is astounding

2025-01-17 12:09:18

An omnimax god is not compatible with a reality that contains LinkedIn. A maximally just God must either lack knowledge of LinkedIn or the power to stop it. A maximally knowledgeable God must either lack the power to stop LinkedIn or it must allow that evil to persist. A maximally powerful God either doesn't know about LinkedIn or approves of it and can't be just.

2025-01-17 12:01:52

Collectively we're probably going to have to find responses to bad people producing art that means a lot to some folks other than "well basically the art sucks actually and we all figure it out ten minutes ago" and "well basically they didn't create anything, it was all either just plagiarism or somehow they weren't really involved"
These arguments can be true some of the time but they can't be true all of the time

2025-01-16 11:56:09

Did you know that today's US Green Party was founded in the late 90s by gutting the network of Associated State Green Parties and decentralized Committees of Correspondence that had been the organizing structure of the US Greens prior to that? A big impetus for this was to shift focus away from trying to build local level politics in order to put more focus towards moonshot presidential campaigns.

2025-01-15 19:07:19

It's still too early to call but I may have been too hasty in saying the Dems would crumple on trans rights, a bunch of them literally responded to the "sports" ban bill by calling it the GOP Child Predator Empowerment Act lmao

2025-01-13 23:04:03

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There's something deep and primal we're being robbed of. Every possible moment veing invaded by some marketing team's ideas of how to manipulate you into buying something. We don't even think about it every much, but who gave some rich men the right to plant an ugly banner across the lush green hillside you drive by heading into the city? Who told those rich men that they could insert themselves into storytelling and music and learning every two minutes until you can hit "skip ad"? When did you decide that you were happy to give up a few peaceful minutes if it meant that some half-baked new reality tv show could try to get you to watch while you wait for a bus or for your gas to pump? Is any of this what we all really want? Does anyone think this is good?

2025-01-13 22:52:50

I feel like advertising should be a more common point of radicalization. Like every gas pump screams ads at you, every scenic vista is plastered with gaudy billboards, and every interaction on the web is choked with ads to the point that some sites basically don't even work. There's a real sense of aesthetic injury that I think speaks to a perverse way in which we are constantly re-asserted as consumers against our will.

2025-01-11 18:36:49

While I'm talking about US 3rd parties, pretty wild watching the Mises Caucus steadily work to take over the Libertarian Party, huh?
After Republicans blamed the Libertarians for losing them the 2020 election, Republican aligned efforts towards a hostile takeover went full force, resulting in the pretty openly fashy Mises Caucus coming to prominence and leading to party leadership changes. The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is a particularly interesting hotbed of very openly Republican Party aligned "Libertarians" that work to align American libertarianism steadily more closely with Trumpist authoritarianism.

2025-01-09 20:06:30

In the run-up to the US election I told people that if Harris lost we would likely see Democrats abandon trans people. I believe it's very likely we're going to see that play out in full force in the next couple weeks. House Republicans will be moving forward on a "sports" bill that will define gender as a person's AGAB; while this bill wouldn't explicitly apply that definition outside of an extremely broad concept of sports (like so broad it's already a huge deal), the implications of that language getting into federal law is obviously very bad and gives a lot of opportunities for Republicans to push further. I expect it to pass the House on a party line vote, but I suspect it may also pass the Senate with support from some Democrats.

2025-01-08 17:21:45

After the latest round of bad moderation decisions from Kolektiva I've decided to move, welcome to the new spot 🖤