straigalex

[straigalex]

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.

[straigalex]

the vibe me and bro bring to the function 🧙‍♂️🔫

pew pew pew

[straigalex]

California-compliant Glock.

[straigalex]

Part of the harm of invisibility for transmen is being bombarded with a million "emergency HRT" resources by a hundred different well meaning groups and absolutely zero of them mention testosterone. If they do it's basically a footnote. Testosterone is necessary HRT medication too, believe it or not. It is harder to synthesize and it is federally restricted and I think that's EVEN MORE REASON TO RESEARCH AND LINK EMERGENCY TESTOSTERONE HRT‼️

[straigalex]

ayo this pretty cool

[id: active style manual wheelchair with frame made of rectangle wood planks screwed together. end id]

as we know active type wheelchair very expensive, & repair need buy from specific medical manufacturer n take very long time. someone (who wheelchair user themself of near 40 years) made open source active manual wheelchair where most (if not all?) material from commercial easy get materials! wood, plastic, pvc pipe, & those commercial aluminum square pipe things. n they put guide made them yourself in link for anyone want try make

this video from their instagram show their wood frame wheelchair actually pretty durable, include clip from everyday use & even drop wheelchair all over place (basically imagine what airline do to them…) - n wheelchair stay in tact! n even if some part break - it easy change because wood planks all screwed together so you just buy wood plank & unscrew & rescrew.

not great for people w advanced seating positioning needs probably (think if only problem is easy butt pressure sore, maybe can still use this + supportive cushion but think beyond that it get hard). but if like you don’t need those things then maybe fun project?

have not use for self so can’t actually talk about experience but it look pretty cool

[straigalex]

[straigalex]

[straigalex]

i could not be trusted to make this game because my immediate thought is that the game advertises and markets itself as what op intended but steadily and then rapidly becomes very clear that instead of a cozy cute cottagecore "mystery" the story SHOULD be about the blatant corruption, cruelty, systemic oppression, and persecution and bigotry of her neighbors, but the main character is desperately clinging to the original genre of omg cozy cute and cottagecore because she feels overwhelmed by the potential responsibility to enact meaningful change rather than feel-good aesthetic positivity, thus becoming actively complicit in the town's crimes through her not mere inaction but in fact conscious choice to decide that she will be the protagonist of a cozy cute genre game rather than a story which might challenge her preconceptions of the world and the state of her own community.

[straigalex]

he's back at it, yet another serious death threat has hit car hammer explosion man

[straigalex]

Unfinished UI and art aside... I made a scene display controller + a dialogue state controller. They take conditions too (not shown). It's very rough but I think this works. My favorite part somehow always ends up being UI/UX. I love making snappy and fast UI interactions (not so much thinking about media rules for mobile though, haaaaa... But that's for later.)

[straigalex]

Ars Goetia 2.0: An Interactive Demon Index

A cross-referenced index of the spirits/demons listed in the Ars Goetia / Lesser Key of Solomon. List demons by ability/power, zodiac sign, symbols, animals and more. There is no back button, try refreshing if you get "stuck." Updated editions possible in the future. Built with Twine by Felix Warren, published to the Internet Archive under Public Domain license.

Want to see all the demons that can control the weather? Want to know all the disciplines that goetic demons can teach? Want to find out which demon has his own personal band? Want to do that by skimming an extremely brief, cross-referenced index of demons in the Ars Goetia? Then have at.

I downloaded this myself to test it. I found the best luck by downloading the zip file, then opening the HTML file inside with my browser. Opening the HTML file directly from Internet Archive causes a weird code error.

Enjoy the book! 📖

[straigalex]

Sometimes college professors like to hop on my posts lamenting the sorry state of syllabi these days and joke about how they haven't thought that far ahead in the course themselves, or talk about how they struggle to complete a schedule for their students.

With all due respect, that's your job. If you can't do your job, you should have a different job. If you need help, ask your colleagues or your department chair or *someone* because I know that professors aren't given a hell of a lot of education on how to educate, so you probably *need* help.

But every single time I make one of those posts I get anywhere from ten to thirty messages, replies, reblogs, and asks say "oh man, that's exactly why I had to drop out of school; I couldn't keep up with the assignments because I didn't know when they were due until the week they were due."

I have been a college student in three separate decades, and "not having a schedule of assignments in the syllabus" is new to my experience. That shit didn't fly in the 2000s or 2010s and I think it likely has to do with professors being overly reliant on apps.

AT A MINIMUM your syllabus should have:

Contact information (including preferred method of contact) for the professor

Office Hours

Grading Policy

Assignment schedule.

Your assignment schedule doesn't necessarily need to have the exact page numbers of every reading or a full assignment sheet for each project, but it should have things like:

December 1st - Major Project 3 second draft due December 9th - Quiz 10 December 12th - Major Project 3 final draft due December 15th - Final Exam

If you end up presenting a more thorough schedule with readings and homework later, that is acceptable to present a week or two into the semester but it is absolutely insane to me that students these days don't know what homework they're going to have to get done over Thanksgiving break during the first couple weeks of class.

If I had three professors at once who didn't give me a schedule, how on earth would I know if I was going to have to read three chapters of a novel, take a midterm and turn in two stats homework assignments, and complete a history research paper the same week that I'm planning to travel to see family? If I'm aware of this from the beginning of the semester I can make sure not to pick up extra shifts, or I can plan to leave a day later to accommodate the midterm, or I can start working on the paper early to complete it before the due date but if I don't know what's going to be due when, I'm going to have a big problem.

If you don't give your students a schedule you are communicating that you don't care about their schedule, and that you think it's their responsibility to contort their life (and their job, and their other classes) around your class, and honestly my advice to students in that situation is "drop in the first week and pick up another class". That's actually part of why I recommend signing up for one more class than you can really manage - if you get a professor whose class looks like it's going to be a disaster because they don't have a schedule, you can bail before the withdrawal period and get a refund for the class.

I'm only in one class this semester but the professor's response has fully dropped me into "Fuck it, I guess I'll fail" mode and I don't even know if I can pull myself out of my current D grade because I don't know how many assignments we have left in the semester.

This is a shitty way to run a class. If you can't do better than this, you shouldn't be running a class.

[straigalex]

Dude, kids literally want to go outside and do stuff sooooo bad, and I think anyone who says otherwise should stop and take a second to think about why they view the younger generations as unable to separate from technology. Spoiler alert: it's not their fault. There is nowhere to go.

A skatepark recently opened up near my house, and that place is always FILLED to the BRIM with kids on the ramps and hanging out. I'm not even sure how some of them are able to get there, but they must, because I see them every day.

I'm 16 and I don't have a job. The main hangout places for my friend group are the mall and getting ice cream somewhere, which is good and fun, but I don't always want to spend money. Hell, we sometimes meet at the local pharmacy to buy candy and stuff.

Again, kids want to go outside and do stuff, but when everything is either far away or costs money, they don't have much of a choice.

[straigalex]

the thing is people think that the primary force behind stuff like sexually objectifying women is cishet men's own sexual arousal. but misogyny is really just catching a ride on feelings of sexual attraction and can still function perfectly fine without it.

as an example. a friend of my family (white cis gay upperclass gay man) was at a party at my aunt's house. at one point she was bending over a railing to take a photo, and he jokingly kept staring at her ass and going "still gay!" now whether or not my aunt was fine with this, idk. but I think it serves as an example of how cis gay men can participate in sexual objectification even without personally sexually benefitting from it. the function of sexually objectifying a woman is to gain patriarchal credit, and anyone can do that– including cis women! the point is re-affirming the roles of women and men (women are objects that sexual things are done to by men and this is funny because they are also people who can be humiliated).

my point here is partially to show how anyone can participate in misogyny but it's also that the idea that misogyny naturally stems from male sexuality is wrong and harmful. the patriarchy may cater to cishet men's desires in some ways, but its not RUN on cishet men's desires. i think also of a study (which i still can't find) that found that non-consensual sex was less pleasurable for the perpetrators than sex with someone fully willing and into it. the demonization of desire and arousal especially as it relates to people perceived as male is unnecessary.

[straigalex]

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[straigalex]