nottoolateforthegame

[nottoolateforthegame]

The far right grows through “disaster fantasies”

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/2024/11/25/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano">https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/25/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."

The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times:

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3637295.html

Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who's devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It's an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism's mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government's feet to the fire.

Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But "vote with your wallet" turns retail therapy into a form of civics.

This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that's always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that's never you. That's why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can't win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots.

You can't recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Practically speaking, you can't even recycle. All those plastics you lovingly washed and sorted ended up in a landfill or floating in the ocean. Plastics recycling is a hoax perpetrated by the petrochemical industry, who knew all along that their products would never be recycled. These despoilers convinced us to view the systemic rot of corporate ecocide as an individual matter, chiding us about "littering" and exhorting us to sort our garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

We are bombarded by real problems that require urgent solutions that can only be resolved through collective action, which we are told is impossible. This is an objectively frightening state of affairs, and it makes people go nuts.

At the start of this century, in the weeks before 9/11, a message-board poster calling himself Gecko45 went Web 1.0 viral by earnestly bullshitting about his job as a mall security guard, doing battle with heavily armed gangs, human traffickers, and ravening monsters. Gecko45's posts were unhinged: he started out seeking advice for doubling up on body-armor to protect him while he deployed his smoke bombs and his partner assembled a high-powered rifle. Though Gecko45 was apparently sincere, he drew tongue-in-cheek replies from the other posters on GlockTalk, who soon dubbed him the "Mall Ninja":

https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

The Mall Ninja professed to patrolling a suburban shopping mall while armed with 15 firearms as he carried out his duties as "Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas." His qualifications? Mastery "of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls."

The Mall Ninja's fantasy of a single brave individual, defending the sleepy populace from violent, armed mobs is instantly recognizable as an ancestor to today's right wing fantasy of America's cities as "no-go zones" filled with "open air drug markets," patrolled by MS-13 and antifa super-soldiers. And while the Mall Ninja drew derision – even from the kinds of people who hang out on a message board called "GlockTalk" – today, his brand of fantasy wins elections.

On Jacobin, Olly Haynes interviews the political writer Richard Seymour about this phenomenon:

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/disaster-nationalism-fantasies-far-right/

Seymour's latest book is Disaster Nationalism:The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, an exploration of the strange obsessions of the right with imaginary disasters in the midst of real ones:

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3147-disaster-nationalism

You know these imaginary disasters: "FEMA death camps, 'great replacement theory,' the 'Great Reset,' fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines." As Seymour writes, these conspiracy fantasies are proliferated by authoritarian regimes and their supporters, especially as real disasters rage around them.

For example, during the Oregon wildfires, people who were threatened by blazing forests that hit 800'C refused to evacuate because they'd been convinced that the fires were set by antifa arsonists in a bid to "wipe out white conservative Christians." They barricaded themselves in their fire-threatened homes, brandishing guns and prepping for the antifa mob.

Seymour says that this "disaster nationalism" "processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening." Confronted with the helplessness of a real disaster that can only be solved through the collective action you've been told is both impossible and a Communist plot, you retreat to an individualistic disaster fantasy that you can play an outsized role in. Every crisis – the climate emergency, poverty, a toxic environment – is replaced by "bad people" and you can go get them.

For authoritarian politicians, a world of bad people at the gates who can only be stopped by "the good guys" makes for great politics. It impels proto-fascist movements to electoral victories, all over the world: in the US, of course, but Seymour also analyzes this as the phenomenon behind the electoral victories of authoritarian ethno-nationalists in India, Israel, Brazil, and all over the world.

I find Seymour's analysis bracing and clarifying. It explains the right's tendency to obsess over the imaginary at the expense of the real. Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon's child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement's fixation on "the unborn."

It's not just that these kids don't exist – it's that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump's "kids in cages" family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.

The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving "the unborn" – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the "culture of life" that would rescue hypothetical children.

Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.

Mall Ninja politics are winning.

[nottoolateforthegame]

The New Year's Day Baking Project 2025: Chapter 1, Ina Garten of Good and Evil

So, this being the year PJ is applying to colleges, it's been hard to find a lot of time for the baking project. We were late choosing our project, and today--the day after PJ finally submitted their applications--was the first chance we had to actually practice. For our final NYDBP, I decided to splurge on buying an actual cookbook. And in the spirit of having an actual cookbook, I decided to follow the instructions actually given in the recipe in the actual cookbook.

With what results, you shall see.

So the cookbook is Ina Garten's Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You CAN Make At Home. Ina Garten, also known as the Barefoot Contessa, is a cooking celebrity and my parents own many of her cookbooks. While visiting them in October, I flipped through this one and found the recipe for profiteroles, which inspired our choice of project. As our project announcement chronicles, this cookbook then mysteriously disappeared from my parents' kitchen. I hope they have since located it; I will have to remember to ask them about it next time I talk to them. At any rate, I ordered a copy through our local independent bookstore because fuck Jeff Bezos AND Elon Musk.

After thanking me for my order, my local independent bookstore told me it was on backorder and who knew when they would be able to fill my order.

Why, I asked the universe, does this cookbook always disappear just as I am on the point of grasping it? Is it being erased from existence? Did it fall through a portal into a different universe? Has some sort of temporal pollution occurred which is slowly blotting out evidence of the existence of Ina Garten?

Apparently not, since I got a notice a few days later that the book was in. In walking down to our local independent bookstore to pick it up, I somehow strained my driving foot, and have spent the past two days trying to rest it in preparation for the Thanksgiving related journey ahead. But I could not afford to pass up the opportunity to begin our profiteroles journey today. PJ doesn't have school, and Mrs. P was going to be at work in meetings all day. So I went down to our local produce store and found everything I needed EXCEPT for...eggs.

The egg shortage is real, friends. They're not just expensive. At this store, at any rate, they were GONE.

This is potentially a problem since eggs are a very important ingredient for pate a choux, which is what the pastry part of profiteroles is made from. But since I dimly recalled that we had at least one carton of eggs at home, I bought the other items and returned. Joy! We have TWO cartons of eggs! LARGE eggs! LIQUID GOLD! I'm gonna SELL the extras on the BLACK MARKET!

[NARRATOR: Plaidder would not sell the eggs on the black market. For Plaidder, as she well knows, is the worst fucking black marketeer in the history of capitalism.]

Oh, by the way--bird flu, which is the cause of the egg shortage, has now been detected in raw milk being sold in California. You know who is a big booster of raw milk? Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Buttercup's nominee for head of Health and Human Services. Friends, if this appointment goes through, then between 2024 and 2028 we are gonna have pandemics that will cause us to look back on COVID 2020 with a sigh of nostalgia. But I digress.

Anyhow, so we set up Ina Garten's beautiful cookbook on the cookbook stand with its glass protector, and I thought: this is the life. All the other NYDBPs we've been cobbling together the recipes and the instructions from half a dozen Internet sources and juggling a bunch of nearly illegible, brittle, stained printouts. How nice it is to just have one book to deal with, with one simple set of instructions, in one place, which is pleasant to look at and delightful to handle. This is the life.

So I followed Ina Garten's instructions for making the pate a choux. Well, I mostly followed them. The stage where you're basically cooking the steam out of the dough so it can absorb more egg, according to Ina Garten, should take about 2 minutes; but from experience I knew it was more like 5. So PJ and I took turns babysitting the pate a choux and stirring it vigorously. Then, as Ina Garten told me to do, I used the food processor to add the eggs instead of the stand mixer with the paddle attachment. That worked out fine, though a lot of dough got stuck under the blade and was hard to get to. I followed her instructions about making little 1 1/2-inch diameter circles on parchment paper and piping the dough onto them. PJ handled most of the piping. PJ was disappointed by the size of them. PJ had imagined more gigantic puffs. I said, we've got extra dough, let's make some bigger ones. So we did about 3 puffs that were 3 inches in diameter and threw them into the oven.

Now.

Ina Garten calls for you to bake the puffs for 20 minutes in a preheated 425 degree oven, then turn the heat off and leave them in the oven for another 10 minutes, then take them out and slit them to let out the steam. So I put them in the preheated 425 degree oven for 20 minutes, turned the heat off and left them in there for another 10 minutes, and then took them out.

And we looked upon them and we said unto them:

Overbaked doesn't begin to describe it. They were dark brown, dessicated shells of what a creampuff should be. The 3 inch puffs were LESS burnt...but still burnt.

However, we'd already made the chocolate sauce, so I said, let's try putting ice cream and sauce on these things and see how that combination goes. The chocolate sauce is easy--or would have been, had PJ not done that thing where you open the bag of chocolate chips and it resists you so you wind up pulling it apart with such force that when you finally get it open, there's an explosion, and half the bag of chips rain down upon your kitchen floor, and you have to sweep them up quick before the dog poisons himself. Fortunately we had some extra semisweet chocolate on hand that we could use to replace the "floor chips," as PJ calls them because of that one DVD of Barbie Princess Charm School we used to watch when they were a babe and the Dumb Barbie Charm School Princess, who I believe was named Portia, picked up a cupcake that had landed frosting down on the floor and said "Mmm...floor cakes." Anyway, Ina Garten's recipe calls for coffee and honey to be added to this ganache, and I have to say that even made with Mrs. P's nasty instant coffee--

<digression mode>

Mrs. P has started drinking instant coffee since her mom died. Her parents drank instant coffee when Mrs. P was growing up and making it makes her feel closer to them. Mrs. P is also pleased to be saving the money she would otherwise be spending on coffee that, you know, tastes good. Anyway, this comes in handy now because it makes it much easier for me to make a single cup of coffee for the purposes of adding it to this chocolate sauce.

</digression mode>

--the coffee and honey are a nice touch.

So we opened up a couple of the big puffs--PJ noted that they look a lot like popovers--and put in some Haagen Dazs vanilla and doused them with chocolate sauce. And PJ said, and I agree, that this would have been pretty good if we hadn't burned the puffs. So although we could certainly call this a critical failure, I do feel like it was worth it, for Science. We now know that the end product will be good, if we can just get the baking right.

How will we do that? Well, step one is clearly to stop listening to Ina Garten regarding the proper cooking time and temperature for pate a choux. I would not willingly call this lovely woman a liar; but clearly, those cooking instructions are insane, at least in the context of our oven. In fact, looking back, I see that our first bake had exactly the same problem, probably for the same reasons: the starting temperature was given as 425F, and we should have known--indeed, did once know--that this was too high.

PJ and I are in agreement: We're gonna have to go back to Helen Rennie for the cooking instructions. We forget this every year, and we have to relearn it every year. As the immortal Inigo might have summarized it for the immortal Fezzik: Fool, fool, start with Helen Rennie is the rule.

A bientot!

[nottoolateforthegame]

Did you see that Great British Bake-Off did croquembouche for their quarterfinals signature challenge? I immediately thought of you and your own efforts, and wondered what commentary (if any) you might have on the ep.

No, I didn't see it because we're not following GBBO since Mary Berry and Sue and Mel left. But I am all on fire to know how that worked out!

[nottoolateforthegame]

the kind of backsliding I'm imagining for Buck also includes Buck and Kim going on a date in the most disastrous way because of their combined unhinged thought process

buck on his knees in eddie's empty house: i-i love you....

kim wearing a mustache: say it. say my name

[nottoolateforthegame]

Do you have any tips for learning to accept nice things?

no but mrs le guin has you covered

[nottoolateforthegame]

9-1-1 Eddie Diaz and Brad Torrence -> 8x08 Wannabes

[nottoolateforthegame]

[nottoolateforthegame]

well I *need* to know what "colour theory for the emotionally impaired" is about

- @ oshaskell (hi!!)

hi hi hi <3 thank you for the ask :)

so tbqh i don't know if this is going to end up going anywhere, but i really wanted to write something about eddie learning to be in tune with his body, really listening to it - feeling his feelings, learning to identify what's going on in his body when those feelings happen, and i wanted to tie in him experiencing like, actual sexual attraction to someone for the first time since shannon (so, buck), and it turned into him associating different emotions with colours. here's an example for ya. i've kind of stalled out on this one, so i'm not sure if it'll ever get finished.

Guilt had come first, olive. The color of nausea. Rotting vegetables, the stench of it creeping through every vein, every bone, every corner of his mind. Invasive vines wrapping around him and tightening until he can't breathe, gasping for oxygen. Wanting. Craving. Needing, and falling short. He could be green. He could unfurl, stretch, and bloom, stretching toward the sun. But he has no sun, so he isn't green. He's slowly withering away. 

Yellow is love. Yellow is family. “Eddito,” in his abuela's fond voice. A hug from Hen. Chris's smile. The snap of Chim's gum as he cracks a ridiculous joke. Bobby's advice, soothing and calm. Buck's solid presence and his steady blue eyes. It feels like the first bit of warmth after you've been cold for hours on end, pushing the shivers out with a tingling ripple under his skin.

[nottoolateforthegame]

I respect your defense of bisexual woman and all but I just don’t want to put my mouth somewhere I know a dick has been

Yall out here acting like these girls’ pussies be haunted by the ghosts of penises past, this ain’t a Dickmas Carol, be so fucking for real

[nottoolateforthegame]

⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️

39 for ⚡️:

---

But he’s certainly feeling his own form of misery in the waiting. 

“Leave him be,” Bobby says. “It’s just first time jitters. We all go through it. Chim, you sure did.”

Yeah! Chim was totally freaked out to move back in with Maddie! 

“Thank you, Bobby,” Buck says. 

Hen smirks at Bobby. 

“What?” He asks. 

“Oh, nothing,” Hen shrugs. “Just… Maybe someone else has first time grandparent jitters, too. Feeling a little eager, Bobby?”

Bobby blushes just a tiny bit. “It’s not wrong to be excited!” 

Buck feels warm. 

“Again, thank you, Bobby,” he says. 

“Wait, now,” Eddie shakes his head. “You have been beyond excited, Buck. You’ve been paranoid.”

“Only a tiny bit,” Buck mumbles. 

“Uh huh,” Eddie frowns. 

Bobby pats him on the back. “Yeah, welcome to the rest of your life.”

🗲🗲🗲

On the 20th, when they still haven’t heard anything, Buck goes over to Bobby’s after dinner. Sometimes, he just needs Bobby’s advice. Eddie gets it, never complains. Actually, he thinks Eddie is glad in this case. Buck trying to take his mind off of it at the house usually ends with organizing and reorganizing the bag of clothes they’re going to take to the hospital, or recleaning some part of an already clean nursery. Probably best to get out of the house. 

“Not that I don’t entirely sympathize,” Bobby says. “But I think Eddie might be right that you need to breathe a little.”

“Ugh,” Buck groans. “I know.”

[nottoolateforthegame]

[nottoolateforthegame]

A lute in the shape of Godzilla.

[nottoolateforthegame]

WIP Wednesday Game Fills

It’s that time again! All sentences fill asks made in the WIP Wednesday Game community. This first batch is from devil don’t take a break. The asks were from @quietly-sleeping @zyrafowe-sny @balthazarusrex @nightwings-neighbor and @kalira. Thanks for making me write!

~

Stiles is noticeably quiet on the drive to a part of town John rarely sees at night. It’s industrial, but it’s new enough it hasn’t picked up a reputation of being a good spot for crime. Other than teens getting bored and tagging up every wall in sight, that is. He sends a look in Stiles’ direction. He’s always suspected his son might have a bent in that direction if something pushed him just right.

When John sees Stiles is anxiously chewing on his hoodie string and jiggling his leg so fast it looks like it hurts, he wishes some light vandalism was the worst thing he had to face with Stiles.

“We’re almost there,” John tells Stiles, trying to project a calm he doesn’t feel.

Stiles just nods and worries the string with his teeth.

“It had to have been the Argents, but the MO is wrong,” Stiles says suddenly.

“What do you mean?” John asks, curious how much Stiles knows about the famous hunting family.

“Chris favors crossbows,” Stiles says. “That’s what he shot Scott with and Allison is some sort of champion archer. Why would he suddenly use a sniper rifle?”

“The Argents are arms dealers, albeit legal ones,” John tells Stiles, hopping he doesn’t end up regretting it. “Chris is probably trained in all kinds of weapons. You can’t assume you know what he’ll use in a given scenario.”

[nottoolateforthegame]

Going from the flirty, "what're you looking at, Eddie?" to, "everythings fine. Don't let him see you're devastated. Be supportive." was major emotional whiplash.

The way Buck WAITED for Eddie to turn around before he let himself actually feel sad. AND he made sure his face stayed supportive until Eddie was focused on the coffee and then it just dropped... I am deeply hurt and now waiting very impatiently for 8b

[nottoolateforthegame]

thought of this and wanted to know the fandom thoughts.

no nuance, you must choose who you think are the worst parents.