Tag Archives: politics

No Kings: Let’s start a boycott of social media!

In brief: the No Kings protests are meaningless political theater. Protests alone do nothing. They must signify more substantial action before anyone in power cares about them, and there have been no serious organizational efforts to expand the protests into coordinated action.

One of the greatest protests in US history was the Montgomery bus boycott. Everyone remembers Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus and her arrest, but the part that people then forget is that the boycott lasted a year and two weeks. Some of the additional context that gets lost is that in 1955, buses were far more important to the poor, Black community than they are today. It was a terrible burden on both the community and many individuals to refrain from using the bus for a year and two weeks. But it fucking worked. The Montgomery bus boycott was a significant factor that led the US Supreme Court to hear a case about racial segregation. In 1956, it ruled that racial segregation was illegal in the Browder v. Gayle case! It didn’t fix racism, obviously, but it created an enduring legal change. During the boycott, rallies and marches also took place.  I’m not saying they had no place, but not the place of pride.

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A Way Forward: the Significance of Authorial Intent in the 21st Century

I’m trying to figure out what I can do – concretely do – to help the world. While it comes down to “keep on writing,” I think a bit more is needed. I think that we need to talk about the problem leftists have with art and messaging.

Short form: leftist and liberal political institutions fucking hate art. Or, more exactly, they hate the idea of art and artists butting into political business.

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America, Los Angeles is what it looks like when the fascists are winning

What is happening in Los Angeles is what it looks like when the fascists are winning. This needs to be said, and everyone needs to hear it.

During Trump’s 2024 election campaign, he said that he would use the National Guard to enforce his immigration decrees. And here he is, doing exactly that. The protests in Los Angeles were relatively small, disorganized, and certainly had less violence than, say, the January 6th riots in Washington, where Trump didn’t bother to call in the military, but Trump leapt on the protests as an excuse to do what he told everyone he was going to do: use the military to occupy US cities.  This is straight from the fascism playbook, as are many of the moves he’s taken to get here.

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They have Come Again and Again

First, they came for the opium dealers, the first war on drugs,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Chinese.
Then, they came for the pot dealers, reefer madness,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Mexicans.
They ignored the cocaine dealers in the US.
It was okay to go after Colombians but not Wall Street coke dealers, oh, no,
And we focused on crack, saying it was a hundred times worse.
We pretended it wasn’t because crack dealers were poor and black.
They came for them, though.

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Tulsi Gabbard fires spies to the joy of Russia and China

Tulsi Gabbard fired about a hundred spies because they used a secure NSA service to make explicit, sexytimes comments to each other. She offered up the predictable reasons: they weren’t professional, it’s a danger to security, unsurprising stuff. In particular, though, the chatrooms were queer-friendly and it can be contextualized as an anti-DEI move.

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Review of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

I just finished End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. The book has a fascinating premise that I’d never heard so clearly said: social unrest arises because unhappy populations are subjected to countries with political infighting. Which, well, that’s not necessarily news. What is news is that he identifies why the political infighting occurs, which is a surplus of wannabe elites, the elite aspirants.

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Superheroism in the Decline of the American Empire

I.

I asked a question on Bluesky, and I’ll repeat it here: what happens to US superheroes when the US is obviously in imperial decline? (And, moving forward, I am only talking about mainstream superheroes, almost exclusively the ones owned by Marvel and DC. Indie comics are a wild and wonderful woolly world of weirdness and likely to remain so forever.) The response I got on Bluesky, since I used Captain America as an example, is that now and then, Cap will leave the role to someone else, such as during the Watergate Era. But my question wasn’t what would superheroes do when the US made a mistake but about American superheroes in an age of imperial decline (and despite a few instances when they do something, most of the time they are silent; Cap has yet to opine on an insurrectionist rapist being in the Oval Office currying favor with tyrants over democratically elected leaders being invaded by those tyrants… if Cap quit over a bit of light spying by Nixon, you’d think he’d quit over that, but times have changed.) I think it’s a question worth looking at, given the cache that superheroes have had on the global scene with the rise of the MCU.

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Today’s Fnord: MAGA’s Foreign Policy in Europe is Contradictory Even to MAGA

Here’s a fnord for you all: the US is positioning European nations as rivals while demanding an increase in their military budgets. Think about it. What happens when countries like Germany, in a post-NATO world, start boosting their military budgets? Is… is the US happy when China increases it’s military budget?  Does it leap for joy when Iran or North Korea spends more on missiles? Any increase in the military capacity of any country is contrary to the nationalistic and imperial interests of the Trump regime. The more European countries grow their militaries, the less powerful the US will be, contrary to the very foreign policy that the Trump regime is creating.

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Killing Conspiracy Theories is Killing Social Media

When I was a younger man, I was interested in conspiracy theories. I didn’t believe in them, but I was interested in them and the people who did believe in them. This was pre-Internet. While there were some big-name conspiracies – “who shot JFK” and “alien autopsies in Area 51” stuff – most of it was in the dark corners of the world: a few nutjobs with pirate radio stations rambling into the desert ether, mimeographed newsletters full of rambling purple prose, and badly edited and barely readable books. I was fascinated both by the horror and credulity of conspiracy theorists. They combined a totalizing belief in a nightmarish fantasy with a profound level of intentional ignorance that I found – and find – chilling.

Today’s conspiracy theorists are out in the open, often in high office. But how did it happen? How did we get here? I believe I have the answer, and the answer is social media.

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Democratic Culpability in a Trumpian World

I’m not a liberal or, really, a Democrat (though during the Trump years, I registered with the Democratic Party because I understood his unique threat to the country.) (Edit: I’m a leftist, usually identifying as a red-green.)  So, yeah, I went to Bluesky because fuck Facebook and X, and it’s very liberal over there. Given the times, there’s a lot of stress about Trump’s regime, and a lot of people are going, “How could this have happened?” They aren’t lifting a mirror to themselves, so I will.

A lot of what’s happening has been coming for a long time, and much of it has been abetted by the Democratic Party and its liberals.

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