Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
I'm constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe's). I don't think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It's still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted "There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism."
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky's relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious - elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior...that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It's like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I'm struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I've had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don't know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault - at least everyone involved was an adult - but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can't read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
Given the cross-section of my friends group, I would not be at all surprised if part of that Mr. and Mrs. Noah and Joan Ark crowd were selecting that answer just to be humorous, and to fuck with the results. It's a shovel-ready subject for meme aficionados.
novakant - As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It's hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There's also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault's monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can't do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet's version of the Imperial March.
russell - But which Christianity? There are a lot of them.
From the point-of-view of the christian nationalists, the answer to anyone capable of asking such a question is "clearly not yours." It's a very pluralistic, humanistic, Post-Enlightenment sort of question, and anyone who thinks that way is clearly an apostate and a victim of liberal delusions.
I think "breezy" captures a bit of the pejorative, since it is so often deployed as a collocation with "indifference."
I'm not going to bother trying to suss out the origins of Western Civilization as a concept because it is absolutely clear to me that the vast majority of the people who are acting as Western Civ chauvinists don't really mean Western Civilization when they deploy that term; it's just a bit to on-the-nose for them to say what they really mean: "Christendom."
They'll keep Judaism as a poor relation, and they have to baptize Plato and Aristotle posthumously (à la Aquinas) to keep their philosophical pretenses, but neither of those are truly in the line of succession. And if they can finally undo all that Enlightenment blather about pluralism and rationalism, they'll sure as shit go right back to calling it Christendom. Western Civ is just its nom de guerre.
Dropping by in-between belts of rain here that have been coming down so hard (accompanied by a high wind warning) that I have seen waves of water blowing down my street like snow drifting on a highway during a blizzard.
Two things, loosely linked in my overly-lateral mind...:
That Rubio speech in Munich was really alarming to me.
It's a full-throated apologia for explicitly euro-centric Christian colonialism. It's delusional in its sense of history. And Rubio is working so hard to name-check all of the European colonial powers on his way to rewriting himself as a proud Spanish-American:
Our [US] story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas – and became the legend that defined the imagination of a our pioneer nation.
Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.
Our great midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse – and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer. (Laughter.)
Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos – the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain. And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.
And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.
The part of that which jumped out at me was his reference to the "Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong." I've read enough American lit to be sensitive to invocations of the Scots-Irish as a clan to hear the rhetoric that built the resurgence of the KKK at the turn of the 20th C.. Nothing here is out of place with that Klan rhetoric except for Rubio's ethnic heritage.
The second thread that runs through Rubio's speech is the Climate Rejectionism. Rubio is so very fucking cocksure that the "climate cult" is using fear to suffocate capitalism and weaken nations.
I'm making a sideways leap here that is outside of the explicit context of Rubio's speech, but so very in line with the ethno-religious calvinism of his mytho-historical conception of civilization belonging to the West...
Fast Company has highlighted the ecofascistic streak running through the Epstein files:
“Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation,” Epstein writes. “the earths forest fire. potentially a good thing for the species.”
[screenshot of the email]
Linking the conversation back to the earlier topic of how brains function, Epstein adds: “too many people . . . [it] is the fundamental fact that everyone dies at some time. make it [impossible] to ask so why not earlier. if the brain discards unused neurons, why [should] society keep their equivalent.”
What Fast Company does not explicitly note in their analysis is how this conversation between Epstein and Joscha Bach is that it starts with Epstein musing over the genetic inferiority of blacks and the need to improve human genetics.
That whole line of thinking is right at home with the view of history that undergirds Rubio's speech, and it highlights the importance to Rubio of his being able to link his family back to Spain, and not to the indigenous population of the New World.
The whole philosophical underpinnings of these western chauvinist christian nationalists are morally repulsive.
wonkie - High Country News has a series they call "Deep Time in the West" that sounds like it's the sort of thing you would love. Here's a shorter sample of the sort of things in the series:
Looks like Brett Adcock is taking advantage of the low-key finance panic around a potential AI winter to introduce a new shiny with the promise of unrealized exponential growth. I'm betting he's hoping to secure some venture capital now before one of the big AI firms goes public and sucks up all the potential investment ahead of the inevitable sobering up period that will follow.
Humanoid robots with AI brains - it's the next big thing. It's bigger than AI. It's bigger than self-driving cars. It's bigger than Segways. It's bigger than virtual reality.
[It hasn't yet run out of low hanging fruit to discover its own intractable problems.]
Robots in dorms? We're already forcing students to take on unsustainable levels of debts to pay for their university education and they are barely able to keep their old smartphone and cheap laptop functioning. Now they are going to bring a robobutler to campus with them? Maybe they can use it to cook them instant ramen and write their papers while they work their two part-time jobs to pay for it and all their other expenses.
At least the part time jobs that haven't already been taken by robots. (We've already got little self-guided robots delivering food for students in the dorms here, so don't even think of starting a bike delivery service as a side hustle.)
Seriously, though, how does any of this entrepreneurial hype make any sense?
I'm already sick of having to replace my phone every five years and they want me to invest in a robobutler?
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
I used to teach this science fiction short story by Paolo Bacigalupi at least once a year in my writing class, and it never failed to get my students thinking a lot more deeply about the water issues we face in the western US:
It's imagining a desertified West with a weak federal government and interstate conflict, with parts of the Southwest unsustainable for living due to water demands.
Interesting story for looking at our current situation through the eyes of a potential future.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to ride the local trails at the moment because So Cal has had rain, and will have more again at the start of next week. It's probably not enough to save the local snowpack in the Sierra, but it damn sure is going to help give us a little margin before things start to dry out and get hotter again.
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
On the Archie Bunker front, my impression from being a child when All in the Family was on TV was that kids got the correct impression of the character and "old people" were caught up in their pasts (just like that theme song). We all knew adults like Archie, but they had no cool factor. It was a decently effective inoculation against bigotry - not herd immunity effective (obviously), but it did keep bigotry isolated to pockets.
It probably looked a lot less definitive to adults, but those childhood impressions have staying power.
If we can win popular culture, we can influence a generation. Right now the RW are winning parts of that (young men and misogyny), but I don't think their grip is as firm as they wish, and people like Bad Bunny are giving them an alternative masculinity that doesn't put them in opposition with the young women whose approval they so desperately wish to receive.
wj - I’d go even further. Just strip it down to “Ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos!” Once they’ve gotten themselves that far, they can take the next step themselves.
I'd say it depends on the context. In one-on-one conversation that second flex could be seen as a bit extra (to borrow my students' turn of phrase). In a group context, however, or in a public online discussion where you have a few people expressing their disgust at these revelations, I think it's helpful to confront the marginal supporter with a choice where their own ethos is imperiled. That's how they were walked into their support in the first place, and you have to pull them back the same way.
I don't doubt it will take time to shift the conversation, or that a shift would not require constant maintenance and defense. We had shifted the conversation on race, and Archie Bunker and other sitcoms took the glamor out of bigotry, but now our social media overlords have brought that all storming back.
But we can't just cede all that ground for fear of offending the gouty toes of the people who voted for the Mandarin Menace. We have to make him look like the pathetic loser that he is, and make them feel as if supporting him makes that stink rub off on them as well. Looking at those approval ratings, this may be our best window for doing something like that.
Not "you are a loser for having been fooled by those guys," but "ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos, do you really want to give them your support?"
MAGA revels in their own victimhood and grievance. We should treat them to a taste of their own tactics and Swiftboat the hell out of their grievance narratives. Take their stories of bravery and defiance and turn them into mock epics.
Unlike the Swiftboaters, our version of things would be grounded in reality.
Then offer a different narrative (one in which every billionaire is a policy failure?) that allows individual MAGA supporters to find an alternate source of approval and restore their status, but only through active support of things that build the common good.
Yes, I know...a concept short on details, but it's better than cynicism and a sense of powerlessness as strategies for resistance.
Yep, cleek, the powerful are insulated, but someone gives them power, and someone allows them to be insulated for the sake of that power - because they have some vested interest in the story of that power and what it does.
So we have to go after those support networks with all the ruthlessness with which they have gone after their preferred targets.
The right is a pyramid scheme, and pyramids are stable because of that wide base that distributes the weight of the top across so many at the bottom. If we want to topple that structure, we have to dismantle that base.
We need to make support of pathetic patriarchies a cause for ridicule. We need to take all the ways that they tell themselves they are being strong and admired and turn them into signs of weakness and insecurity.
We need new, better myths and narratives that show the old ones to be the empty, pathetic, weak dreams that they are.
From GftNC's excerpted monologue: I got a message from Tommy Vietor, one of Barack Obama’s former staffers and now a successful podcaster with Pod Save America. He said: “If Epstein forces out Starmer and Trump survives, I will explode.” There are so many scandals in these files, yet the Trump-Bannon-Musk-Howard Lutnick crowd is getting off so lightly.
I hear a lot of friends (especially in Europe) who are despairing over this, and wondering what is wrong with the US that allows these elite rapists and sex pests to continue on without being held accountable.
The problem we have is one of passive voice.
The media - either scared of being accused of left-partisanship or being directed by elites with editorial power acting to protect themselves or their sex pest friends and associates - make sure that all of their moral dudgeon gets heaped on convenient scapegoats. They work hard not to subject themselves to any legal jeopardy or put themselves in the line of fire from the toxic firehose of hate that is our current administration. The correspondences get reported, but in a way that keeps them safely disconnected from any call-to-action.
But the real reason why none of the mighty are pulled down to face accountability is that the GOP controls all the levers of accountability, and we keep allowing the GOP supporters to duck their own culpability in keeping the rapists and sex pests in power. The DNC is still hoping to lure some of those Trumpy swingers away from the right and so cannot afford to insinuate that those swingers have been actively shielding those elite rapists from accountability by insisting that this is just the way that both sides are. Cynicism allows them to wash their own hands of the corruption that they have allowed on their own side in the name of fighting a holy crusade for the soul of America.
We must take away this cynicism dodge from them and make them feel shame for how they have enabled their elite to avoid accountability. We have to strip away the passive voice dodges and show them the active ways in which they maintain the public defenses that insulate the rapists and sex pests on their side from accountability.
And yes, we do need to flip congress and take those levers back, but we won't actually be able to effect any change until and unless we take away our collective ability to hide beneath the mask of cynicism and make justice a public imperative for anyone who wished to think themselves moral.
wj - Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol’s remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn’t.
True, but the CBP agents and the BOP personnel who are there in MN are there not as part of their departments' actions, but on assignment to ICE to make up for not having enough agents to make the surge sustainable any other way.
And then there are the bounty hunters and other contractors who are doing the legwork to find enough immigrant-y looking folks to round up and keep those quotas met. Doesn't matter if they have to release them later on, all the bonuses are tied to the front end.
lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.
Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:
Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:
The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)
In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.
Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515
So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.
hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?
And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.
Pluralism is for chumps and failed states.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
"
I'm constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe's). I don't think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It's still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.
"
If any of y'all are interested in the larger context in which Chomsky said that, it's at The Harvard Crimson:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/3/epstein-nowak-chomsky-meeting-2015/
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted "There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism."
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky's relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious - elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior...that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It's like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
"
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I'm struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I've had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don't know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault - at least everyone involved was an adult - but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can't read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
On “Take your’n and beat his’n”
Given the cross-section of my friends group, I would not be at all surprised if part of that Mr. and Mrs. Noah and Joan Ark crowd were selecting that answer just to be humorous, and to fuck with the results. It's a shovel-ready subject for meme aficionados.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
novakant - As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It's hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There's also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault's monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can't do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet's version of the Imperial March.
On “Take your’n and beat his’n”
russell - But which Christianity? There are a lot of them.
From the point-of-view of the christian nationalists, the answer to anyone capable of asking such a question is "clearly not yours." It's a very pluralistic, humanistic, Post-Enlightenment sort of question, and anyone who thinks that way is clearly an apostate and a victim of liberal delusions.
"
I think "breezy" captures a bit of the pejorative, since it is so often deployed as a collocation with "indifference."
I'm not going to bother trying to suss out the origins of Western Civilization as a concept because it is absolutely clear to me that the vast majority of the people who are acting as Western Civ chauvinists don't really mean Western Civilization when they deploy that term; it's just a bit to on-the-nose for them to say what they really mean: "Christendom."
They'll keep Judaism as a poor relation, and they have to baptize Plato and Aristotle posthumously (à la Aquinas) to keep their philosophical pretenses, but neither of those are truly in the line of succession. And if they can finally undo all that Enlightenment blather about pluralism and rationalism, they'll sure as shit go right back to calling it Christendom. Western Civ is just its nom de guerre.
On “Open Thread”
Dropping by in-between belts of rain here that have been coming down so hard (accompanied by a high wind warning) that I have seen waves of water blowing down my street like snow drifting on a highway during a blizzard.
Two things, loosely linked in my overly-lateral mind...:
That Rubio speech in Munich was really alarming to me.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference
It's a full-throated apologia for explicitly euro-centric Christian colonialism. It's delusional in its sense of history. And Rubio is working so hard to name-check all of the European colonial powers on his way to rewriting himself as a proud Spanish-American:
The part of that which jumped out at me was his reference to the "Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong." I've read enough American lit to be sensitive to invocations of the Scots-Irish as a clan to hear the rhetoric that built the resurgence of the KKK at the turn of the 20th C.. Nothing here is out of place with that Klan rhetoric except for Rubio's ethnic heritage.
The second thread that runs through Rubio's speech is the Climate Rejectionism. Rubio is so very fucking cocksure that the "climate cult" is using fear to suffocate capitalism and weaken nations.
I'm making a sideways leap here that is outside of the explicit context of Rubio's speech, but so very in line with the ethno-religious calvinism of his mytho-historical conception of civilization belonging to the West...
Fast Company has highlighted the ecofascistic streak running through the Epstein files:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91490280/epstein-files-how-ultra-wealthy-peddle-climate-denialism
What Fast Company does not explicitly note in their analysis is how this conversation between Epstein and Joscha Bach is that it starts with Epstein musing over the genetic inferiority of blacks and the need to improve human genetics.
That whole line of thinking is right at home with the view of history that undergirds Rubio's speech, and it highlights the importance to Rubio of his being able to link his family back to Spain, and not to the indigenous population of the New World.
The whole philosophical underpinnings of these western chauvinist christian nationalists are morally repulsive.
"
wonkie - High Country News has a series they call "Deep Time in the West" that sounds like it's the sort of thing you would love. Here's a shorter sample of the sort of things in the series:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-1/how-to-find-deep-time-in-seattle/
...and it's talking about things in your back yard.
It's a great series.
"
Looks like Brett Adcock is taking advantage of the low-key finance panic around a potential AI winter to introduce a new shiny with the promise of unrealized exponential growth. I'm betting he's hoping to secure some venture capital now before one of the big AI firms goes public and sucks up all the potential investment ahead of the inevitable sobering up period that will follow.
Humanoid robots with AI brains - it's the next big thing. It's bigger than AI. It's bigger than self-driving cars. It's bigger than Segways. It's bigger than virtual reality.
[It hasn't yet run out of low hanging fruit to discover its own intractable problems.]
Robots in dorms? We're already forcing students to take on unsustainable levels of debts to pay for their university education and they are barely able to keep their old smartphone and cheap laptop functioning. Now they are going to bring a robobutler to campus with them? Maybe they can use it to cook them instant ramen and write their papers while they work their two part-time jobs to pay for it and all their other expenses.
At least the part time jobs that haven't already been taken by robots. (We've already got little self-guided robots delivering food for students in the dorms here, so don't even think of starting a bike delivery service as a side hustle.)
Seriously, though, how does any of this entrepreneurial hype make any sense?
I'm already sick of having to replace my phone every five years and they want me to invest in a robobutler?
GTFO.
These jokers and their investors are all high AF.
"
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
I used to teach this science fiction short story by Paolo Bacigalupi at least once a year in my writing class, and it never failed to get my students thinking a lot more deeply about the water issues we face in the western US:
https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/the-tamarisk-hunter/
It's imagining a desertified West with a weak federal government and interstate conflict, with parts of the Southwest unsustainable for living due to water demands.
Interesting story for looking at our current situation through the eyes of a potential future.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to ride the local trails at the moment because So Cal has had rain, and will have more again at the start of next week. It's probably not enough to save the local snowpack in the Sierra, but it damn sure is going to help give us a little margin before things start to dry out and get hotter again.
On “The Aiken formula”
Meet the new boss/ Worse than the old boss
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
On “Separated by a common language”
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
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On the Archie Bunker front, my impression from being a child when All in the Family was on TV was that kids got the correct impression of the character and "old people" were caught up in their pasts (just like that theme song). We all knew adults like Archie, but they had no cool factor. It was a decently effective inoculation against bigotry - not herd immunity effective (obviously), but it did keep bigotry isolated to pockets.
It probably looked a lot less definitive to adults, but those childhood impressions have staying power.
If we can win popular culture, we can influence a generation. Right now the RW are winning parts of that (young men and misogyny), but I don't think their grip is as firm as they wish, and people like Bad Bunny are giving them an alternative masculinity that doesn't put them in opposition with the young women whose approval they so desperately wish to receive.
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wj - I’d go even further. Just strip it down to “Ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos!” Once they’ve gotten themselves that far, they can take the next step themselves.
I'd say it depends on the context. In one-on-one conversation that second flex could be seen as a bit extra (to borrow my students' turn of phrase). In a group context, however, or in a public online discussion where you have a few people expressing their disgust at these revelations, I think it's helpful to confront the marginal supporter with a choice where their own ethos is imperiled. That's how they were walked into their support in the first place, and you have to pull them back the same way.
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I don't doubt it will take time to shift the conversation, or that a shift would not require constant maintenance and defense. We had shifted the conversation on race, and Archie Bunker and other sitcoms took the glamor out of bigotry, but now our social media overlords have brought that all storming back.
But we can't just cede all that ground for fear of offending the gouty toes of the people who voted for the Mandarin Menace. We have to make him look like the pathetic loser that he is, and make them feel as if supporting him makes that stink rub off on them as well. Looking at those approval ratings, this may be our best window for doing something like that.
Not "you are a loser for having been fooled by those guys," but "ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos, do you really want to give them your support?"
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MAGA revels in their own victimhood and grievance. We should treat them to a taste of their own tactics and Swiftboat the hell out of their grievance narratives. Take their stories of bravery and defiance and turn them into mock epics.
Unlike the Swiftboaters, our version of things would be grounded in reality.
Then offer a different narrative (one in which every billionaire is a policy failure?) that allows individual MAGA supporters to find an alternate source of approval and restore their status, but only through active support of things that build the common good.
Yes, I know...a concept short on details, but it's better than cynicism and a sense of powerlessness as strategies for resistance.
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Yep, cleek, the powerful are insulated, but someone gives them power, and someone allows them to be insulated for the sake of that power - because they have some vested interest in the story of that power and what it does.
So we have to go after those support networks with all the ruthlessness with which they have gone after their preferred targets.
The right is a pyramid scheme, and pyramids are stable because of that wide base that distributes the weight of the top across so many at the bottom. If we want to topple that structure, we have to dismantle that base.
We need to make support of pathetic patriarchies a cause for ridicule. We need to take all the ways that they tell themselves they are being strong and admired and turn them into signs of weakness and insecurity.
We need new, better myths and narratives that show the old ones to be the empty, pathetic, weak dreams that they are.
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From GftNC's excerpted monologue: I got a message from Tommy Vietor, one of Barack Obama’s former staffers and now a successful podcaster with Pod Save America. He said: “If Epstein forces out Starmer and Trump survives, I will explode.” There are so many scandals in these files, yet the Trump-Bannon-Musk-Howard Lutnick crowd is getting off so lightly.
I hear a lot of friends (especially in Europe) who are despairing over this, and wondering what is wrong with the US that allows these elite rapists and sex pests to continue on without being held accountable.
The problem we have is one of passive voice.
The media - either scared of being accused of left-partisanship or being directed by elites with editorial power acting to protect themselves or their sex pest friends and associates - make sure that all of their moral dudgeon gets heaped on convenient scapegoats. They work hard not to subject themselves to any legal jeopardy or put themselves in the line of fire from the toxic firehose of hate that is our current administration. The correspondences get reported, but in a way that keeps them safely disconnected from any call-to-action.
But the real reason why none of the mighty are pulled down to face accountability is that the GOP controls all the levers of accountability, and we keep allowing the GOP supporters to duck their own culpability in keeping the rapists and sex pests in power. The DNC is still hoping to lure some of those Trumpy swingers away from the right and so cannot afford to insinuate that those swingers have been actively shielding those elite rapists from accountability by insisting that this is just the way that both sides are. Cynicism allows them to wash their own hands of the corruption that they have allowed on their own side in the name of fighting a holy crusade for the soul of America.
We must take away this cynicism dodge from them and make them feel shame for how they have enabled their elite to avoid accountability. We have to strip away the passive voice dodges and show them the active ways in which they maintain the public defenses that insulate the rapists and sex pests on their side from accountability.
And yes, we do need to flip congress and take those levers back, but we won't actually be able to effect any change until and unless we take away our collective ability to hide beneath the mask of cynicism and make justice a public imperative for anyone who wished to think themselves moral.
On “It is never “Simple as that””
That's "Farging ICEholes."
On “Moral insanity”
wj - Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol’s remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn’t.
True, but the CBP agents and the BOP personnel who are there in MN are there not as part of their departments' actions, but on assignment to ICE to make up for not having enough agents to make the surge sustainable any other way.
And then there are the bounty hunters and other contractors who are doing the legwork to find enough immigrant-y looking folks to round up and keep those quotas met. Doesn't matter if they have to release them later on, all the bonuses are tied to the front end.
It's a peckerwood banquet.
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lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.
Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:
https://www.pogo.org/investigates/hundreds-of-oath-keepers-have-worked-for-dhs-leaked-list-shows
Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:
The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)
In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.
Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515
So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.
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hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?
And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.
Pluralism is for chumps and failed states.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.