leebird-simmer

[leebird-simmer]

The psychiatrist who wrote the criteria for narcissism just made an extremely important point about what’s wrong with diagnosing Trump with mental disorders

Dr. Allen Frances says in speculating about Trump’s mental health, we are doing a disservice to those who do suffer from mental illness. In a series of tweets, he explained why he doesn’t think Trump is a narcissist — and how harmful it can be for us to keep assuming that he is.

[leebird-simmer]

so you want to stop giving EA your money but haven’t made the leap to 🏴‍☠️ sims 4 because

you don’t know how to torrent;

you don’t want to bother with a VPN;

you’re worried about viruses;

it’s too complicated;

or any similar worries❔❔

if you answered yes, this post is for YOU❕

I see posts about 🏴‍☠️ going around and it seems some people don’t know this — anadius has created an app that can install the game, add packs, and apply updates as they become available and as/when you choose. you can even repair your game if necessary like you can through the EA app. no torrents, no sketchy sites, just one simple app window.

and if you already own packs? that’s fine. the updater/dlc unlocker can apply packs and updates to legitimate copies of the game — allowing you to retain access to the gallery.

I’ve been using the updater for a while and 🏴‍☠️ing all kinds of media for even longer than that and I can vouch 100% for its safety and easiness. so if you don’t know, now you know!!!

🔗 for mac, pc, & linux

[leebird-simmer]

Oklahoma is attempting to pass a bill that would ban explicit romance novels. Authors, narrators, and sellers could all face fines of up to $100,000 and up to 10 years in jail for each instance.

If you live in OK, call your representative and tell them this bill should not be allowed to pass.

This is likely a test case. Republicans will try to pass it in OK and if it passes other states will likely try to pass similar laws.

In the meantime, get physical copies of books you like. Download those pdfs. Archive your AO3 stories and keep them on a physical hard drive. (Storing those files in the cloud could be problematic in the future as the company managing the cloud service can see what your files are)

[leebird-simmer]

btw yes it is amazing to celebrate drake's ruin and being a hater etc etc but i want everyone to come away from tonight remembering that this is about far far more than one evil man.

everything about this performance was a celebration of the black american culture that drake commodifies. kendrick went on stage in the middle of the country's largest sporting event with trump in attendance and stated, very clearly, that black culture is not going anywhere.

[leebird-simmer]

What a time to be alive.

Happy Black History Month to all and to all a good night ❤️🖤💚

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[leebird-simmer]

[leebird-simmer]

The Wizard (Rhinopalpa polynice eudoxia), male, family Nymphalidae, Perak, Malaysia 

photograph by Michael Soh

[leebird-simmer]

MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

In her unmissable 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein paints a picture of a "mirror world" of right wing and conspiratorial beliefs that are warped, false reflections of real crises:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Qanon's obsession with "child trafficking" is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about "immigrants stealing jobs" is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about "decentralization" is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.

Klein is at pains to point out that other political thinkers have described this phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, leftists called antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Socialism – the idea that working people are preyed upon by capital – is reflected in the warped mirror as "working people are preyed upon by international Jewish bankers."

The mirror world is a critical concept, because it shows that far right and conspiratorial beliefs are often uneasy neighbors with real, serious political movements. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, in other words:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

Once you understand the mirror world, you start to realize that many right wing conspiracists could have been directed into productive movements, if only they'd understood that their problems were with systems, not sinister individuals (this is why Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"):

https://mamot.fr/@Lazarou@mastodon.social/113943287435897828

This also explains why the "tropes" of right wing conspiratorialism sometimes echo left wing, radical thought. I once had a (genuinely unhinged) dialog with a self-described German "progressive" who told me that criticizing the finance industry as parasitic on the real economy was "structurally antisemitic." Nonsense like this is why Klein's "mirror world" is so important: unless you understand the mirror world, you can end up believing that "progressive" just means "defending anything the right hates."

Historian Erik Baker is the author of a new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which has some very interesting things to say about the mirror world:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674293601

In a recent edition of the always-excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, the hosts interviewed Baker about the book, and the conversation turned to the subject of pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-the-entrepreneurial-ethic/

MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").

The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).

Rank-and-file members of the Amway cult lived in dire poverty, convinced that their financial predicament was their own fault for not faithfully following the "sure-fire" Amway method for building a business. Andrea Pitzer's gripping memoir of growing up in an Amway household offers a glimpse of the human cost of the cult:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amway-america/681479/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZxYkntna5M_rYEv4707Zqqs

Amway – and MLMs like it – don't just bleed out their members by convincing them to buy mountains of useless crap they're supposed to sell to their families, while enriching the people at the top of the pyramid who sell it to them. The "toxic positivity" of multi-level marketing cults forces members deep into debt to pay for seminars and retreats where they are supposed to learn how to repair the personal defects that keep them from being "successful entrepreneurs." The topline of the cult isn't just getting rich selling stuff – they're making bank by selling false hope, literally, in Hilton ballrooms and convention centers across the country, where hearing an MLM scammer berate you for being a "bad entrepreneur" costs thousands of dollars.

Amway destroyed so many lives that Richard Nixon's FTC decided to investigate it. The investigation wasn't going well for Amway, which was facing an existential crisis that they were rescued from by Nixon's resignation. You see, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was the former Congressman of Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel, who was also the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbyist in America.

At Ford's direction, the FTC exonerated Amway of all wrongdoing. But it's even worse than that: Ford's FTC actually crafted a rule that differentiated legal pyramid schemes from illegal ones, based on Amway's destructive business practices. Under this new rule, any pyramid scheme that had the same structure as Amway was presumptively legal. Every MLM operating in America today is built on the Amway model, taking advantage of the FTC's Amway rule to operate in the open, without fear of legal repercussions.

MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same.

Which brings me back to the mirror world, and Erik Baker's conversation with the Know Your Enemy podcast. Baker starts to talk about who gets big into Amway: "people who already effectively lead by the force of their charisma and personality many other people in their lives. Right? Because you're able to sell to those people, and you're able to recruit those people. What are we talking about? Well, they're effectively recruiting organizers, people who have a natural capacity for organizing and then sending them out in the world to organize on behalf of Christian capitalism."

Listening to this, I was thunderstruck: MLM recruiters are the mirror world version of union organizers. In her memoir of growing up in Amway, Andrea Pitzer talks about how her mom would approach strangers and try to lead them through a kind of structured discussion:

Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

This kind of person, having this kind of dialog, is exactly how union organizers work. In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey's classic book on labor organizing, she describes how she would seek out the charismatic, outgoing workers in a job-site, the natural leaders, and recruit them to help bring the other workers onboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Organizer training focuses on how to have a "structured organizing conversation," which McAlevey described in a 2019 Jacobin article:

“If you had a magic wand and could change three things about life in America [or her town or city or school], what would you change?” The rest of your conversation needs to be anchored to her answers to that question.

https://jacobin.com/2019/11/thanksgiving-organizing-activism-friends-family-conversation-presidential-election

The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.

The MLM movement doesn't just make men like Rich De Vos and Jay Van Andel into billionaires. MLM bosses are heavy funders of the right, a blank check for the Heritage Foundation. Trump is the MLM president, a grifter who grew up on the gospel of Norman Vincent Peale – a key figure in MLM cult dynamics – who tells his followers that wealth is a sign of virtue. Trump boasts about all the people he's ripped off, boasting about how getting away with cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

The corollary is that being cheated means you're stupid. Caveat emptor, the motto of the cryptocurrency industry ("not your wallet, not your coins") that spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Tech has its own mirror world. The people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and make delightful and wonderful things are mirrored by the people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and call for fascism, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps.

In Picks and Shovels, my next novel (Feb 17), I introduce readers to a fictitious 1980s religious computer sales cult called Fidelity Computing, run by an orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Mormon rabbi:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Fidelity is a faith scam, a pyramid scheme that is parasitic upon the bonds of faith and fellowship. Martin Hench, the hero of the story – a hard-fighting high tech forensic accountant – goes to work for a competing business, Computing Freedom, run by three Fidelity ex-employees who have left their faiths and their employers to pursue a vision of computers that is about liberation, rather than control.

The women of Computing Freedom – a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family, a Mormon woman who's renounced the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's left her order to throw in with the Liberation Theology movement – are all charismatic, energetic, inspirational organizers.

Because of course they are – that's why they were so good at selling computers for the Reverend Sirs who sit at the top of Fidelity Computing's pyramid scheme.

Hearing Baker's interview and reading Pitzer's memoir last week made it all click together for me. Not just that MLMs destroy social bonds, but that within every person who gets sucked into an MLM, there's a community organizer who could be building the bonds that MLMs destroy.

[leebird-simmer]

nothing funnier than the shock on someone's face when they try to be condescending to you about your autism & fail miserably. i was in a course and the instructor said something so extremely bigoted it was a genuine safety risk so i raised my hand and when he called on me i very calmly took him to task about it and then a few classmates backed me up and he backpedaled so all in all it worked out.

later one of my colleagues approached me in private and said, "hi. i know you've said that sometimes with your autism it can be difficult to read a room and know when it's appropriate to have certain discussions so i just wanted to tell you that the issue you brought up in class earlier, well, it wasn't the time. you could have waited to talk to the instructor after class or emailed him. it sorta caused a scene, and i know you don't mean to. : )"

i laughed and said, "yes i did. i confronted him about it in front of everyone because what he said needed to be challenged in front of everyone. it would've been dangerous for people to leave today believing what he said with no other points of view."

and my colleague looked SO shocked. he said, "oh! well, huh. okay!"

he really heard an autistic person calmly and succinctly articulate an argument about human rights and thought, "well that must be a mistake."

💀💀💀

[leebird-simmer]

i love how kendrick lamar was like i fucking hate this one dude and the rest of the industry was like fuck man we do too give this guy 5 grammys

[leebird-simmer]

if you want to know what the situation is for gay people in portland oregon my friend got comradezoned last week

[leebird-simmer]

one thing I really like about my relationship with my boyfriend is that we can express negative feelings about each other's actions without assigning blame or requiring apology. I mean like for morally neutral things like "it drives me crazy when you leave a wet towel on the floor instead of hanging it up"

cause now like instead of "oh I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to drive you crazy, I'm terrible and unsocialized" or "um well that's dumb, who cares" it's like

"it does? I didn't know that. how come?"

"because it will mildew and I keep tripping over it and I don't know whether you intend to reuse that towel or whether it needs to go in the wash"

"okay so usually if I intend to reuse it I hang it up, and if it needs to go in the wash I drop it on the floor. I guess because I thought I shouldn't put it in the hamper because it would get all the other dirty clothes wet and then THEY might mildew before we do the laundry."

"that's valid. what if we have a specific place to hang wet towels that need to be washed? how about this one hook here"

"perfect!"

no hurt feelings, nobody being made to feel shitty and sloppy on one hand or uptight and bitchy in the other hand. just, we're partners right? let's workshop this

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[leebird-simmer]

im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search

[leebird-simmer]

I feel bad for being a hater sometimes like I'll read an interview and some actor or director will talk about all the care and love they put into their work and how much it meant to them and I'm always like oh king that's so lovely 🥺 the movie does still suck though like it is still bad

[leebird-simmer]

When you have OCD, these disturbing thoughts about harming your pets or your family or children are actually indicators that you care deeply for their wellbeing and don’t want anything bad to happen to them (which does not take away from how distressing they are; that’s why they are sometimes called “ego dystonic” thoughts)

Most people can name actions they are SO strongly opposed to that they don’t even want to entertain the hypothetical possibility that they *could* do such a thing, but being very aware of the potential for harm/danger contributes to cautious behavior so you don’t accidentally or carelessly make mistakes. basically OCD results from your brain having good intentions but executing them in the least helpful way.