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performing the "u-turn of blowjobs" because i do a little bit and run away and also it does bug type damage

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btw the katy perry/bezos' girlfriend/other four irrelevant billionaires 10 minute space stunt was not the first all female expedition no matter how much they try to market it as such. the first all female mission was in 1963 with soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova, Irina Solovyova and Valentina Ponomaryova - all three of which were working class and had to pass incredibly hard exams to be chosen from 400 potential candidates. just in case we started falling for the propaganda machine again

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If you genuinely believe that the fall of the American empire is impossible, then remember that a hundred years ago the British empire ruled over a quarter of the world's population and now controls less than one percent. Even if the "United States of America" as a nation doesn't go away, the collapse of an empire is entirely possible.

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My mom spent like four months embroidering this on and off. She asked me to post it for her here! It's her first time making fanart, and also kind of her first time embroidering anything? I'll read any comments I get out to her.

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What they don’t tell you about getting into bird watching is that once you get into it, you do not get to decide when you bird watch. You can be on the beach of some distant tropical country with nothing planned except relaxing. But then you see a Common Fluttering Nut Buster and you’re like fuckkkkkkkk holy shit guys the Common Fluttering Nut Buster is not supposed to life this far west holy shitttttttttt

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Michael, you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime.

Super inspired by @weevildead 's michael painting! I hesitate to post this bc it was super experimental, and i hate the hair and how unblended the edges are w the obvious layers and weird blurring and stray marks...but idc im posting it.

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drake?

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I downloaded the book Unhumans: The secret history of communist revolutions (and how to stop them) by Jack Posobiec. (Thanks oceanofpdf.) This is the book that the current USA Vice President wrote a blurb for, so I expected it to have its finger on the pulse of the current fascist ideology in USA.

The thesis is like this: Communists, leftists, progressives, and revolutionaries in general are "unhumans:" zombie-like, hollow shells of people with rabies-style senseless violence and hatred toward civilization and order.

The book proposes essentially that leftist ideology is worthless to engage with, because it does not exist. The Left is purely driven by hatred and jealousy of people it characterizes as oppressors, and this manifests in a completely nihilistic urge to kill and destroy.

The book opens with this melodramatic meditation on Darkness and Light, the opposing forces of beauty, truth and goodness versus ugliness, lies and badness. These "good" and "bad" forces are eternal, and the "bad" force is kept in check by "civilization."

"Communism" is a manifestation of the "bad" force. Key to the book's argument is an apparent presumption that human society is meritocratic. Though the book acknowledges that yes, Russian peasants had miserable lives and good reason to be resentful towards the tsar, it seems to show that people who revolt against "oppressors" or the more powerful are acting according to the "bad" force, by seizing power through violence rather than "earning" it.

I don't think the author is saying that all human societies have had merit-based systems of upward social mobility; I think he just thinks that seizing power or property through revolt and societal upheaval is always bad because it isn't "earned," regardless of whether a mechanism to "earn" exists.

Which is where we get to the weird part. Much of the book is a retelling of history, specifically various revolutionary movements including the French, Russian, and Haitian revolutions and the end of apartheid in South Africa.

The author seems to characterize revolutionary movements as generally bad. "Well, how was the American Revolution different?" one wonders. The book doesn't answer this at length. In fact, it doesn't have a chapter or subchapter dedicated to the American Revolution the way it does with other revolutions.

Here is a quote from page 31:

...this ubiquitous belief that no one culture or society is better than another so can’t we all just get along. And yet no country or people on earth lived in such a way naturally for all of history. When mass migration dilutes and unbalances a shared culture, there is one force alone powerful enough to hold it all together: an all-powerful state at the center. Only great empires have maintained multiple ethnic groups living within their borders simultaneously, keeping everyone in line with the overwhelming power of the emperor’s unyielding hand. These were not republics with civil liberties and equal standing for all classes. It is unlikely a republic could exist in such a condition.

From here, he explains that white Americans share a common culture because they all assimilated into an American culture derived from "western civilization", and then swerves into talking about how George Floyd died from a drug overdose actually and bringing in illegal immigrants is a communist plot to tear America apart.

He does not appropriately deal with the shocking meaning of his argument: that a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural nation cannot exist without authoritarian tyranny. This is an amazing departure from the fundamental narrative of the USA's values (whether that narrative is true or not).

By his own admission, either the USA must cease to be a democracy and become an authoritarian autocracy, or the USA must get rid of everyone who isn't a single race, ethnicity and culture, and both of those things are fundamentally contradictory to the Constitution and arguably to the conception of the USA.

The book's proposals for "what to do" to defeat the "unhumans" are pretty anemic and in line with what conservatives are already doing. Unhumans is nothing new in terms of racism and white supremacist ideology; it keeps these things implied in its warped idea of history and the core concept of total dehumanization of anyone and everyone left of hunting the homeless for sport. The book explicitly states that it does not advocate violence, and also explicitly states that this is to prevent "leftists" from using that as a criticism against the book.

I think the author genuinely could be against violence, or at least any violence that isn't directly carried out by the state, but he is also overwhelmingly clear that being a "leftist" is essentially rabies: "leftists" have ceased to be human, they hate all that is human and all that is good, and they systematically work toward destruction as an end in itself.

Unhumans has simple ideas and simple writing, almost to the point of being condescending. It reads like children's books written by adults who are out of touch with children's intelligence and ability to think for themselves. Its worship of Elon Musk as one of the "great men" of history leads to some hysterically funny lines. But I'm afraid it would seem like a great book to someone who doesn't read books.

The first chapter, in particular, is perfectly formulated to appear grounded in wisdom, history and fact to someone who hasn't read anything since high school. It uses a lot of famous quotes on government and democracy, and cites Aristotle and other "big names" in Western thought.

But it doesn't want to introduce its readers to new ideas: it repeatedly urges readers to listen to their automatic and instinctive reactions to the text, saying "You're right" or "You're onto something." It reassures readers of what they "already know," telling them that their gut feelings are correct and any information that might have caused them discomfort or dissonance is part of the communist plot.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from all of this. I'll have to think about it more.

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Piggie disciples at the last supper

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the spirit is unwilling and the flesh it feels not so good also

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nintendogs.mp4

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i make myself laugh

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discussion about right wing radicalisation focuses near-exclusively on men becoming white nationalists but i wonder how it might manifest elsewhere. like, imagine a heavily online subculture of mostly women and they're dedicated to rooting out degeneracy, maintaining a rigid social order, refusing to acknowledge scientific consensus, being violently paranoid of a dehumanised other, adhering to exclusively eurocentric standards of beauty and politically dedicated to exterminating a minority group (possibly one that was already historically targeted for genocide). that'd be fuckin crazy lol

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I only hate certain types of fic the same way I hate mosquitos and ticks. Like get these nasty little buggers away from me but also I respect their place in the ecosystem.

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I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)