Lmst

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

Louder for the people in the back 📢

"The main contradiction of liberal democracy is that it has largely been shaped through a history of various friends of illegal civil disobedience against entrenched power structures. Such civil disobedience is (retrospectively) seen as justified, and the people committing it are (retrospectively) seen as heroes... But each successive generation is asked to believe that any further civil disobedience would be unreasonable."

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

Me, at age 13, spending another summer day in the back of the Powells Books stacks, perched on a stool, grimacing and furiously scribbling down notes about how much I fucking hate these fuckers: "I should read everything they've ever written and then write a book savaging them."

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

Book.

It's coming.

Book.

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

For years now I've kept a notepad window open on my laptop with a dozen tabs, each chock to the brim with notes and quotes from countless books and articles.

It is now closed.

About 1000 comments added by the team of editors have been pruned down to 11, kept mostly for sentiment.

The three browser windows are down to one with 10 tabs.

There is a final stack of only 17 books by my bed, penciled up with notes, that I'm supposed to do a final (3rd or 4th, depending on the book) pass thru.

And that's what Trump offers: a hallucinatory political phantasmagoria where you are always the rightfully-aggrieved victim, and also always the triumphant bully, watching one repulsive enemy after another get fed into the torture machine. The pleasure of indignation and domination all at once
There's a reason they aren't hiding their concentration camps, but going on TV to do walkthrough tours of them. Whether they realize it or not, their audiences are thrilling to the idea of their social inferiors being sent into these camps to suffer.
The ICE kidnappings, concentration camp tours, it's all pornography, keeping MAGA junkies in on the hook with an endless dopamine drip. When it gets boring or they simply run out of targets they'll upgrade to new victims and more exotic cruelties, forever. We know where it ends, history tells us.

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Democrats will run a milquetoast centrist candidate who brags about being pro-cop, watch as ICE agents immediately go to lynch him on the orders of the God King, and go, "yes, yes... brown man didn't denounce the concept of 'global protest'; please let us have a turn beating his burnt corpse"

Political violence is not an incidental risk which they are merely negligent about managing and policing. It is their Schmittian central premise. Political violence against their enemies *is* the ideology itself. That's what illiberal populism is. There's no such thing as a peaceful form of it.
You can be a Burkean conservative, or market liberal, or Christian democrat, or many other right-of-center ideologies whose central premises are not bloodlust and extermination. But if your role models are Yarvin or Bannon and their crusty dog-eared copies of Schmitt, violence is the thing itself.
This is an ideology whose raison d'etre is conflict for conflict's sake, war in a very literal sense over who is legitimately part of "the people" or "the nation" versus who's excluded from it and must be, at best, forcibly subjugated. Hold that premise and social peace isn't a goal, it's the enemy.
It's not even the case that they start from a set of enemies and conclude violence is necessary to defeat them. It starts from desiring violent conflict in the abstract as virtuous and desirable, and then inventing the needed enemy classes. It will never run out of enemies no matter how successful.

It's not even the case that they start from a set of enemies and conclude violence is necessary to defeat them. It starts from desiring violent conflict in the abstract as virtuous and desirable, and then inventing the needed enemy classes. It will never run out of enemies no matter how successful.
Such violence can be more or less under state control, or most often as we see, a hybrid of the two. The distinction collapses, and it's all part of the same central project either way. They can't disavow it. At most, inconvenient cases must be reframed with lies pinning them on the opposition.
This also makes which particular ideological sub-flavor commits such acts kind of irrelevant. This one was a cult evangelical nominally re: abortion. But it can just as easily be an irreligious incel obsessed with racism, or anti-LGBT, or whatever. So long as it's directionally correct, it'll do.
It's a coalition of hatreds, collapsing all its designated enemies into an undifferentiated mass in an existential struggle for who will dominate and who will be dominated. There is no place for social peace and a pluralistic society or democratic norms of non-domination. It must have its war.

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

dont "build power" build *anti*power

cultivate habits, ties, and spaces that evade, resist, and sabotage the logistics of power

become ungovernable and illegible to power

leverage strategic placement or insight to exploit points of vulnerability

build underground market economies and guerrilla trade networks

participate in cultures of hopeful resistance and defiant joy

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

If the paleocons get pushed out of the MAGA tent, I'm really not looking forward to them hat-in-hand pleading for leftists and anarchists to take them back into some 2003-esque broad anti-war coalition after they have spent a decade so aggressively platforming neonazis and demonizing antifa.

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

emotional state right now:

the tree of liberty thirsts for the blood of transphobic cisgender tyrants

emotional state right now:

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

I made this for liberals randomly showing up to comment under anarchists talking to anarchists on social media:

clippy: "Hi! It looks like you're trying to insert yourself in an internal discussion within an ideological community (anarchists) you have absolutely no context for or understanding of.

@rechelon ive seen you explain your sense of "reductionist" by analogy to compression in computer science, so how do you feel about the term *compressionism* as an alternative to "reductionism" to preempt the latter's tendentiousness and connotations of inherent lossyness and vulgarized stripping of complexity?

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the entire rightwing intelligentsia has become ignatius j reilly meets patrick bateman (as portrayed by flopsweaty christian bale)

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

"What is the use of language when so often it functions as simply an artifice of brute power?"

"The official language associated with police violence is notoriously tortured. The phrase “officer-involved shooting” ubiquitously deforms a straightforward locution featuring a subject, a transitive verb, and an object (A cop shot someone!) into an agentless gerund, as if a crankish Victorian ethnographer has translated a foreign expression as proof of some exotic, alien system of thought (An-officer-proximate-to-a-weapon-discharging-has-been!)."

"Coptalk is defined by what at first seem to be paradoxes. On the one hand, it is saturated with anodyne, technical language—the exhaustive precision demanded by official reports and internal reviews. On the other, it is fundamentally evasive. This might seem contradictory, but in fact reveals a kind of systematic cunning: Every i must be dotted and every t crossed expressly to allow officers to enjoy the maximum latitude to do as they will."

"Coptalk, in any case, is defined by one paradox above all: a total monopoly on deciding what counts as rationality, alongside the police’s conversation-ending deference to their own invocations of that most irrational of affects, fear. ... To be in fear for their lives is the police’s criterion for deploying deadly force, while your own terror can be precisely what cops cite as proof that they had no choice but to kill you."

"Words, like handcuffs, nightsticks, and guns, were just tools on a cop’s belt, to be used at their discretion to control and brutalize."

https://newrepublic.com/article/156802/coptalk-policing-english-language

"What is the use of language when so often it functions as simply an artifice of brute power?"

"The official language associated with police violence is notoriously tortured. The phrase “officer-involved shooting” ubiquitously deforms a straightforward locution featuring a subject, a transitive verb, and an object (A cop shot someone!) into an agentless gerund, as if a crankish Victorian ethnographer has translated a foreign expression as proof of some exotic, alien system of thought (An-officer-proximate-to-a-weapon-discharging-has-been!)."

"Coptalk is defined by what at first seem to be paradoxes. On the one hand, it is saturated with anodyne, technical language—the exhaustive precision demanded by official reports and internal reviews. On the other, it is fundamentally evasive. This might seem contradictory, but in fact reveals a kind of systematic cunning: Every i must be dotted and every t crossed expressly to allow officers to enjoy the maximum latitude to do as they will."

"Coptalk, in any case, is defined by one paradox above all: a total monopoly on deciding what counts as rationality, alongside the police’s conversation-ending deference to their own invocations of that most irrational of affects, fear. ... To be in fear for their lives is the police’s criterion for deploying deadly force, while your own terror can be precisely what cops cite as proof that they had no choice but to kill you."

"Words, like handcuffs, nightsticks, and guns, were just tools on a cop’s belt, to be used at their discretion to control and brutalize."

https://newrepublic.com/article/156802/coptalk-policing-english-language

what makes neofascism so obscene and galling is that, whereas classical fascism grew out of the calamities of war, disease, immiseration and revolution, neofascism comes out of an era of unprecedented peace, abundance, freedom, and security

many fascists experienced world-historic hardship and trauma; neofascists are the softest, most cosseted, privilege-saturated children of first world comfort zones

fascists went through the crucible of the trenches; neofascists went through the crucible of gamergate

ben chambers 🏴 boosted:

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