#Douglass Mackey

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

In a December 2023 speech, JD Vance defended a notorious white nationalist convicted over 2016 election disinformation, canvassed the possibility of breaking up tech companies, attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and talked about a social media “censorship regime” that “came from the deep state on some level”.

The senator’s speech was given at the launch of a “counterrevolutionary” book – praised by the now Republican vice-presidential candidate as “great” – which was edited and mostly written by employees of the far-right Claremont Institute. In the book, Up from Conservatism, the authors advocate for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, for politicians to conduct “deep investigations into what the gay lifestyle actually does to people”, that college and childcare be defunded and that rightwing governments “promote male-dominated industries” in order to discourage female participation in the workplace. Vance’s endorsement of the book may raise further questions about his extremism, and that of his networks. The Guardian emailed Vance’s Senate staff and the Trump and Vance campaign with detailed questions about his appearance at the launch, but received no response.

‘Congratulations on such a great book’

Vance’s speech was given in the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC last 11 December, according to a version of C-Span’s subsequent broadcast of the event that is preserved at the Internet Archive. The occasion was the launch of Up from Conservatism, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In his introductory remarks on the day, Milikh said the book “maps out the right’s errors over the last generation … on immigration, on universities, on the administrative state”.

The book, however, appears more directed towards supplanting an old right – seen as too accommodating – with a “new right” focused on destroying its perceived enemies on the left.

In the book’s introduction, Milikh writes: “The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy, not merely an opposing movement, because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice … the New Right is a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.” Also in that piece, Milikh offers a vision of the new right’s triumph, which has an authoritarian ring: “We like to say that one must learn to govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule.” In his speech, Vance first offered “congratulations on such a great book, and thanks for getting such a good crew together”, and then warmed to themes similar to Milikh’s. “Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” Vance said, later adding: “Isn’t it just common sense that when we’re given power, we should actually do something with it?”

Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, a critical account of Christian nationalism and the host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, said: “Vance, many Claremont people, including some folks in this volume, and especially the ‘post-liberal’ conservative Catholics that he hangs out with, have advocated for a form of big government that will wield its power in order to set the country right.” He added: “And you may think, well, OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. But here the common good is rooting out queer people, making sure non-Christians don’t immigrate to the country and outlawing things like pornography that are currently a matter of personal choice. “You end up with this conservatism that promotes an invasive government conservatism rather than a small government.”

[...]

‘Free our minds … from the fear of being called racists’

In the book, commended by Vance, a series of authors take reactionary – or “counterrevolutionary” – positions on a number of social and economic issues. In one chapter, John Fonte writes of disrupting narratives of civil rights progress: “The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups. Thus, our history is one of liberation: first of Blacks, then of women, then of gays, and now of the transgendered.” Fonte retorts: “Not only is this narrative false; it will take us further down the path of national self-destruction … On the questions of slavery, American Indians, and racial discrimination, the progressive narrative is not a historically accurate project designed to address past wrongs, but a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization.”

Like other authors in the collection, Fonte offers policy recommendations. He proposes heavy-handed federal intervention into education: “[T]he US Congress should prohibit any federal funds in education to support projects … that promote DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) and divisive concepts such as the idea that America is ‘systemically racist.’” In his chapter, David Azerrad tells readers: “We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists.” The assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow, also claims that conservatives have been too conciliatory on race: “For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks … yet blacks continue to vote monolithically for the Democratic Party and progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism.”

Azerrad continues with white nationalist talking points on race, crime and IQ, writing: “It is not racist to notice that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes in America, no more than it is to incarcerate convicted black criminals … There is no reason to expect equal outcomes between the races … In some elite and highly technical sectors in which there are almost no qualified blacks, color-blindness will mean no blacks.” Elsewhere, Azerrad writes: “[C]onservatives will need to root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America … This is most obvious in the widespread embrace of affirmative action (the lowering of standards to advance blacks) and the general reluctance to speak certain blunt but necessary truths about the pathologies plaguing black America – in particular, violent crime, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, nihilistic alienation, and the cult of victimhood.”

[...]

‘Do not subsidize childcare’

Helen Andrews, meanwhile, offers “three things we could do right now that would put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists for the last forty years about women and careers”. Her first proposal is to “stop subsidizing college so much”, since, according to Andrews, in the 22-29 age group, “there are four women with college degrees … for every three men. That is going to lead to a lot of women with college degrees who do not end up getting married.” “Second,” Andrews continues, “the Right can do more to promote male-dominated industries. Reviving American manufacturing and cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices isn’t just an economic and national security issue; it’s a gender issue.” Her third proposal is “do not subsidize childcare” – since the fact that “many working moms are struggling” with childcare costs “might actually be good information the economy is trying to tell you”. Andrews is the print editor of the paleoconservative magazine the American Conservative and has previously written sympathetically about white supremacist minority regimes in Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe after white rule ended – and South Africa.

Scott Yenor claims in his chapter that before the 1960s, America lived under a “Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives”. Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute. He then claims: “We currently live under the Queer Constitution”, which “honors all manner of sex”, and under which “laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional”. Yenor claims: “These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.”

Yenor says the state should intervene in citizens’ sex lives: “In the states, new obscenity laws for a more obscene world should be adopted. Pornography companies and websites should be investigated for their myriad public ills like sex trafficking, addictions, and ruined lives. The justice of anti-discrimination must be revisited.” In a separate essay co-written with Milikh, the editor, Yenor advocates in effect destroying the current education system and starting again. The essay includes a recommendation for school curriculums: “Students could start building obstacle courses at an early age, learning how to construct a wall and how to adapt the wall for climbing … Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals.”

The Guardian reports that Trump VP pick and Ohio Senator JD Vance promoted far-right extremist views from Arthur Milkh’s Up From Conservatism essay book.

[mojave-pete]

F hitlary clint00n and people who support it!

[vomitdodger]

T he meme that Mackey was convicted of disseminating was directed at Hillary Clinton voters, but other memes, also instructing people to vote for president via text, were distributed by social media users telling people to cast their vote for Trump via text. Mackey was convicted while no one else was even charged.

Going to jail…for a meme. But when the commie Dems do the exact same meme it’s ok.

Total fucking criminal empire and police state.

[aressida]

Memes-related incarceration?

Wow.

->

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Sweet Jesus, the hits keep coming. 💔

"Douglass Mackey, (AKA Ricky Vaughn), gets sentenced to 10 years and Kristina Wong as near as I can tell hasn't even been investigated for virtually the same thing. Has anyone seen any reason why this is,(other than the obvious "we live in a two tiered justice system")?"

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Link at top.  THIS IS BIG!

[bracketsoffear]

Web Leitner Reading List

The full list of submissions for the Web Leitner bracket. Bold titles are ones which were accepted to appear in the bracket. Synopses and propaganda can be found below the cut. Be warned, however, that these may contain spoilers!

Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Attanasio, A. A.: In Other Worlds Austen, Jane: Emma Awad, Mona: Bunny

Burlew, Rich: The Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family

Chainani, Soman: The School for Good and Evil Christie, Agatha: Curtain Christie, Agatha: The ABC Murders Christie, Agatha: The Moving Finger Clark, Mary Higgins and Alafair Burke: The Cinderella Murder Collodi, Carlo: The Adventures of Pinocchio  

de Burgh Miller, Jon: Dying in the Sun Douglass, Ryan: The Taking of Jake Livingston

Fink, Joseph and Jeffery Cranor: The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home Frost, Robert: Design

Gaiman, Neil: American Gods Gran, Sara: Come Closer

Hale, Shannon & Dean Hale: Ever After High: The Legend of Shadow High Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 Howitt, Mary: The Spider and the Fly

Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House

James, E.L.: 50 Shades of Gray James, M.R.: The Ash-Tree Jones, Diana Wynne: Black Maria

Katsu, Alma: The Fervor King, Stephen: Misery

Lermontov, Mikhail: A Hero of Our Time (Last Chapter) Lewis, Richard: The Spiders

Machiavelli, Niccolò: The Prince Maugham, Somerset: The Magician Muir, Tamsyn: Gideon the Ninth

Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Pinborough, Sarah: Breeding Ground & Feeding Ground Pinkwater, Daniel: Young Adult Novel Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author Pratchett, Terry: Witches Abroad Pratchett, Terry and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens Punko: Stagtown

Shakespeare, William: Macbeth Sophocles: Oedipus Rex

White, E.B.: Charlotte's Web Wong, David: This Book is Full of Spiders

Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

"The fundamental interconnectedness of all things" is an extremely Webby concept.

Attanasio, A. A.: In Other Worlds

It's about a species of brain-earing alien spiders called Zotl who take over and control people by attaching to the back of their skulls and burrowing into the pain centre of their brains.

Austen, Jane: Emma

The story centers around Emma Woodhouse, a would-be matchmaker who delights in meddling with the lives of those around her -- with dire results.

Awad, Mona: Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Burlew, Rich: The Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family

The Order heads to the Western Continent in search of Girard's Gate, only to get entangled with the Empire of Blood, a tyrannical draconian state--literally, it's ruled by a dragon. But the real power behind the throne is General Tarquin, who turns out to be the bard Elan's dad. Tarquin, being a diabolical mastermind who’s just as genre savvy as Elan, has figured out that ruling openly will only lead to being overthrown, and thus has engineered a grand scheme with his partners to take over the entire continent using their puppet states. He doesn't even mind that Elan wants to overthrow him for being an enslaving dictator--if he wins, he rules as a king, and if he loses, he goes down in history as a LEGEND. Tarquin follows the Order as they try to reach the Gate, using it as a test for his other son Nale--a scheming villain like him, who has continually dissapointed Tarquin. When the Gate is blown up, he meets up with Elan and Nale, finds out that Nale killed his best friend, confirms that Nale wants nothing more from him...and stabs his son dead right in front of Elan because he's an inconvenience. Then he decides to kill Elan's good friend Roy so Elan can be the leader of the party.

Tarquin is essentially a railroading DM in charge of a nation. He's an old white guy with self-centered, old-fashioned, and implicitly misogynistic and racist ideas of how the story is "supposed" to go--he's the Big Bad, Elan is the Hero, and they're destined to have a big epic showdown. But Tarquin isn't the main villain, Elan wants to be a support player, and Roy is the leader; so when Tarquin's plans are defied, he does everything in his power to steer things back on the rails by force, to the point of threatening to kill everyone Elan loves and chop off his hand just to properly motivate him.

Chainani, Soman: The School for Good and Evil

The first kidnappings happened two hundred years before. Some years it was two boys taken, some years two girls, sometimes one of each. But if at first the choices seemed random, soon the pattern became clear. One was always beautiful and good, the child every parent wanted as their own. The other was homely and odd, an outcast from birth. An opposing pair, plucked from youth and spirited away.

This year, best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to discover where all the lost children go: the fabled School for Good & Evil, where ordinary boys and girls are trained to be fairy tale heroes and villains. As the most beautiful girl in Gavaldon, Sophie has dreamed of being kidnapped into an enchanted world her whole life. With her pink dresses, glass slippers, and devotion to good deeds, she knows she’ll earn top marks at the School for Good and graduate a storybook princess. Meanwhile Agatha, with her shapeless black frocks, wicked pet cat, and dislike of nearly everyone, seems a natural fit for the School for Evil.

I think this series is extremely web-like because it presents a world where people have extremely predestined paths in life with either being a good or bad story character. And they are stuck on the path that is chosen for them even when trying to rebel. Also, there is the connection with children's stories(cough Mr Spider cough) and the series villains are very potting and manipulative.

Christie, Agatha: Curtain

Curtain has a serial killer known only as X before their identity is revealed. X has never actually killed anyone themselves — instead, they're a master of manipulation, preying on the fears of others and driving them into a state in which they decide to kill, but are completely unaware that they're being manipulated to do so.

Christie, Agatha: The ABC Murders

When Alice Asher is murdered in Andover, Hercule Poirot is already looking into the clues. Alphabetically speaking, it's one letter down, twenty-five to go. There's a serial killer on the loose. His macabre calling card is to leave the ABC Railway Guide beside each victim's body. But if A is for Alice Asher, bludgeoned to death in Andover, and B is for Betty Bernard, strangled with her belt on the beach at Bexhill, who will then be Victim C? More importantly, why is this happening?

Spoilers: the true murderer, Franklin Clarke tricks a mentally unstable man, Alexander Bonaparte Cust, into thinking he is a murderer. Making Cust feel trapped and controlled by his illness. Clarke also manipulates the entire country into thinking there is some out-of-control serial killer when he was just trying to cover up inheritance murder. So schemes, mass manipulation and control. Very Web book.

Christie, Agatha: The Moving Finger

Ok so the pollrunner themself has said that Miss Marple was their personal fave for the Web Avatar bracket, and this is definitely one of the webbiest Marple mysteries. It's about a bunch of poison-pen letters in a small village that drive the residents to suspect and accuse one another of committing the crime -- or guessing at what might have been in their neighbor's letter. Soon, accusations turn to blackmail and deaths as the culprit weaves their web around the peaceful village of Lymstock...

Clark, Mary Higgins and Alafair Burke: The Cinderella Murder

Actress Madison Meyer is obsessed with fame, to the point it's rumoured she helped cover up her friend's murder or even killed her herself to get her role, and she still has the nerve to act like a diva on Under Suspicion's set even though she hasn't had any significant roles in a decade and is supposed appearing on the show to solve her friend's murder. Actor Keith Ratner was a playboy with a drinking problem when he started out, though he's genuinely managed to clean up his act, albeit by getting involved with a shifty megachurch, and some people still think he murdered his girlfriend. Televangelist Martin Collins is a money-hungry Control Freak who rules his congregation with an iron fist and uses their donations to fund personal luxuries, and that's the least of his misdeeds. Frank Parker is known for being a demanding director who mostly gets involved in Under Suspicion because he doesn't want people to boycott his movies thinking he murdered a 19-year-old college student, although he did prevent his wife from starring in a sleazy movie that left the replacement actress humiliated and has stayed married for ten years (quite a record for Hollywood). And at the centre of it all is the so-called Cinderella Murder, with a young aspiring actress on her way to an audition ending up strangled to death and the crime going unsolved for twenty years, with all kinds of salacious rumours surrounding the case.

Collodi, Carlo: The Adventures of Pinocchio  

This is the story of Pinocchio, filled with harrowing yet inspiring adventures. Carved by a poor man named Geppetto, Pinocchio is a wooden puppet that comes to life. He soon leaves his maker and commences a journey of misadventures.

Pinocchio has a good heart, but he is disobedient and lazy and often has poor judgment. And when he lies, Pinocchio's nose grows longer! Follow this mischievous puppet as he goes to the "Field of Miracles", where he plants gold coins to try to make his wealth grow. Thrill as he is pursued by assassins. And marvel as he becomes the unwitting star of a circus show and lives a life of ease in the "Land of Boobies," where boys can play all day and never have to go to school. Of course, Pinocchio gets into trouble along the way.

From the villainous Cat and Fox, who try to steal his gold coins, to the gigantic Dogfish, a terrifying sea monster that swallows him, Pinocchio encounters menacing characters who often lead him to trouble. But Pinocchio also befriends a good Fairy who loves him and wants to help him escape his misfortunes. She even promises the puppet that if he learns to be good, to study, and to work hard, he will become a real boy. Can Pinocchio turn his life around? And will he ever see his "papa," Geppetto again?

de Burgh Miller, Jon: Dying in the Sun

Synopsis: "It was the city of angels, and the angels were screaming...

Los Angeles, 1947: multi-millionaire movie producer Harold Reitman has been murdered and the LAPD are convinced that drug dealer Robert Chate is the killer. Detective William Fletcher isn't so sure — he believes that the man who calls himself the Doctor has a stronger connection to the crime than he's letting on.

While the Doctor assists the police with their enquiries, Star Light Pictures are preparing to release their most eagerly anticipated movie yet, Dying in the Sun, a film that rumours say will change the motion-picture industry for ever. Suspecting that the film holds secrets more terrifying then anyone could ever have imagined, the Doctor decides to do everything in his power to stop it from being released. In Hollywood, however, it is the movie studios that hold all the power... "

Why it's Web: Well, we already know that TV and film are pretty Web-aligned (Lagorio, that one line from Annabelle), so that's a start. The villains of the series create film stars by chemically enhancing their charisma to the point where they can hypnotize people into doing unspeakable things just by asking them -- but the stars, in turn, are under the sway of their alien masters. It's a pretty good metaphor for Hollywood, and a pretty good plot for the Web.

Douglass, Ryan: The Taking of Jake Livingston

Jake Livingston is one of the only Black kids at St. Clair Prep, one of the others being his infinitely more popular older brother. It’s hard enough fitting in but to make matters worse and definitely more complicated, Jake can see the dead. In fact he sees the dead around him all the time. Most are harmless. Stuck in their death loops as they relive their deaths over and over again, they don’t interact often with people. But then Jake meets Sawyer. A troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school last year before taking his own life. Now a powerful, vengeful ghost, he has plans for his afterlife–plans that include Jake. Suddenly, everything Jake knows about ghosts and the rules to life itself go out the window as Sawyer begins haunting him and bodies turn up in his neighborhood. High school soon becomes a survival game–one Jake is not sure he’s going to win.

Fink, Joseph and Jeffery Cranor: The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home

It's framed like a biography that the Faceleed Old Woman is telling Craig, the descendant of the man who killed her. After she dies, as a sort of ghost, she haunts and attempts to kill her murderer, but she fails. She then spends the rest of time manipulating and killing all of his descendants. She is constantly doing things that they don't notice to get them to have kids, etc, and then when they get old enough, causes an accident so the first born son always dies. The villain, and TFOW murderer is also a manipulator. He gets her on a wild goose chase for years to find out who killed her father, and managed to trick her into a situation where he could kill her.

Frost, Robert: Design

"What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small."

Link: https://poets.org/poem/design

Gaiman, Neil: American Gods

When a man named Shadow Moon gets out of prison, he finds that everything he planned to do as a free man has been destroyed. His wife and best friend are dead and he has no job prospects. Because of this, he is forced to accept work from a strange and enigmatic man named Mr. Wednesday.

Shadow soon learns of a brewing war in American between the old (religious and mythological) gods and the new (technological) gods. Both sides want him for their own.

Throughout the novel, Shadow is pulled along by different forces rather than through his own agency, and near the end he finds that the web he is caught in was spun before his birth.

Gran, Sara: Come Closer

A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda - a successful architect in a happy marriage - finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea. The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she simply insane?

Hale, Shannon & Dean Hale: Ever After High: The Legend of Shadow High

Now, Ever After High itself is very Web. The children of famous fairytales being destiny-bound to relive their stories or go 'poof' is the driving force behind all the books' conflicts.

However, Shadow High takes it to another level. The narrators, who were present throughout the series, are more influential within the story. Even the straight-laced narrator parents who believe only in observing stories leave 'plop devices' to coerce characters in or out of making decisions. The titular Shadow High is a school for narrators run by antagonist Ms. Direction after a narrator schism between those who observe stories and those who control them. Ms. Direction uses 'unmaking lava' that turns characters and props into the words that compose them, destroying them so that they can be made again in her vision. She also uses narration to compel characters into doing her bidding. The narrator of the book, Brooke Page, is the daughter of the other books' narrators and has frequent arguments with her parents between chapters about why she can't intervene in the story to help the characters. Brooke ultimately does this in the book's climax by climbing the Fourth Wall and asking the reader for help, turning the book into a choose-your-own-adventure and having the reader write in how Ms. Direction is ultimately defeated.

Also, it's a crossover with Monster High so Frankie Stein and Draculaura are there.

Heller, Joseph: Catch-22

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

Howitt, Mary: The Spider and the Fly

The poem itself was referenced in the podcast with regard to the Web on multiple occasions. Also, the illustrations? Fucking hell. This is the irl 'A Guest for Mr. Spider'.

Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House

A Doll's House (Norwegian: Et dukkehjem; also translated as A Doll House) is a three-act play in prose by Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. The play is significant for its critical attitude toward 19th century marriage norms. It aroused great controversy at the time, as it concludes with the protagonist, Nora, leaving her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Ibsen was inspired by the belief that "a woman cannot be herself in modern society," since it is "an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint." Its ideas can also be seen as having a wider application: Michael Meyer argued that the play's theme is not women's rights, but rather "the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person." In a speech given to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1898, Ibsen insisted that he "must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement," since he wrote "without any conscious thought of making propaganda," his task having been "the description of humanity."

James, E.L.: 50 Shades of Gray

okay not to get too blue, but BDSM is kinda web-coded, and that goes double for the deeply coercive and unsafe dynamics shown here.

James, M.R.: The Ash-Tree

Spiders with baby heads eat a dude.

Jones, Diana Wynne: Black Maria

On the surface, Aunt Maria seems like a cuddly old lady, all chit-chat and lace doilies and unadulterated NICEness!

When Mig and her family go for a short visit, they soon learn that Aunt Maria rules the place with a rod of sweetness that’s tougher than iron and deadlier than poison. Life revolves around tea parties, while the men are all grey-suited zombies who fade into the background, and the other children seem like clones.

The short visit becomes a long stay, and when all talk of going home ceases, Mig despairs! Things go from bad to worse when Mig’s brother Chris tries to rebel, but is changed into a wolf.

Mig is convinced that Aunt Maria must be a witch – but who will believe her? It’s up to Mig to figure out what’s going on. Maybe the ghost who haunts the downstairs bedroom holds the key?

Katsu, Alma: The Fervor

A psychological and supernatural twist on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II.

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko's husband's enlistment as an air force pilot in the Pacific months prior, Meiko and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the West. It didn’t matter that Aiko was American-born: They were Japanese, and therefore considered a threat by the American government.

Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. What starts as a minor cold quickly becomes spontaneous fits of violence and aggression, even death. And when a disconcerting team of doctors arrive, nearly more threatening than the illness itself, Meiko and her daughter team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate, and it becomes clear to them that something more sinister is afoot, a demon from the stories of Meiko’s childhood, hell-bent on infiltrating their already strange world.

Inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon, The Fervor explores a supernatural threat beyond what anyone saw coming; the danger of demonization, a mysterious contagion, and the search to stop its spread before it’s too late.

King, Stephen: Misery

Paul Sheldon, author of a series of historical romances, wakes up in a secluded farmhouse in Colorado with broken legs and Annie Wilkes, a disappointed fan, hovering over him with drugs, ax, and blowtorch and demanding he bring his heroine back to life

Lermontov, Mikhail: A Hero of Our Time (Last Chapter)

The last chapter of A Hero of Our Time is titled The Fatalist - someone who holds the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable. The characters in it are debating whether or not Fatalism is a valid worldview, and Lieutenant Vulic decides to test it. He states that everything is predetermined and our actions do not matter, loads the gun, points it at his forehead and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Later that same night Vulic gets killed by a drunk Cossack.

In high school we had to write multiple essays on this chapter and argue whether or not we think free will exists and is Fatalism valid. It caused me a huge existential crisis. I recommend reading this chapter if you are in mood for a crisis, as it is short, free and available online here https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/myl/hero.htm

Lewis, Richard: The Spiders

Imagine a spider as big as a Goliath bird-eater with masticating jaws, venom that first paralyzes and then kills, a hard crabshell-like exoskeleton, and two evil eyes that you can see looking at you. Now imagine that's just the drone in a social system similar to an ant or bee colony — its job is to find food and bring it back to the hive, which consists of some even larger spiders and an enormous queen. This is what the protagonists of the book have to deal with in order to save England, where the spiders are slowly advancing from the country into the cities.

Machiavelli, Niccolò: The Prince

The single most famous political treatise and the first entirely secular work of The Renaissance. At the time it was first published, The Prince was seen as extremely scandalous for its endorsement of ruthlessness and amorality. Nevertheless, it quickly became popular with politicians and remains highly influential in Western politics today. While best known for the quote "And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved," he also emphasized the importance of inspiring love and respect, or at least not inspiring hatred. It is not a guide to how to most effectively be an asshole; it is simply a treatise in exercising political pragmatism. The fact that people like to connect those two ideas, that is what makes this Webby.

Maugham, Somerset: The Magician

The Magician is about a soon-to-be-married couple, Margaret and Arthur, crossing paths with the titular magician, Oliver Haddo, and getting their lives turned upside down. Oliver uses his knowledge of arcane magic to seduce Margaret, get her to run away with him, and to completely suppress her free will. Her friends find her and help her escape but she is almost catatonic until one night she feels Oliver's call and runs away again, unable to resist. Throughout the novel Oliver Haddo is often described as weaving webs of lies and manipulation, and his charisma allows him to effectively manipulate any crowd.

Muir, Tamsyn: Gideon the Ninth

(Keeping it vague bc spoilers) one of the characters is not what they seem and has been pulling strings and manipulating people the whole time to get what they want. All the twists and turns in the book also feel very web adjacent.

Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita

Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.

Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

It tells the story of Winston Smith, a citizen of the miserable society of Oceania, who is trying to rebel against the Party and its omnipresent symbol, Big Brother.

 The Party desires absolute control over the citizens to the point where they try to change the language to make sure the people cannot even think of rebellion. That is extremely Web.

Pinborough, Sarah: Breeding Ground & Feeding Ground

The world is changing. Women everywhere are giving birth to a new life form — hideous spidery nightmares that live to kill — and feed. As England becomes a series of web-shrouded ghost towns, those left alive must band together in order to survive and find a way to fight back . . . In a sleepy English village Matt Edge and those he has gathered together head for a secret government facility in the hope of finding refuge and answers there, only to find some of their problems are just beginning. In London, a group of schoolboys must take on a crazed drugs lord, determined to create an empire from the wreckage of the city, in order to escape . . . . . . and everywhere, for each of them, the Widows are waiting . . .’

Pinkwater, Daniel: Young Adult Novel

The Wild Dada Ducks members cause all sorts of mischief around their junior high school, but although the boys are not bad, they like to pretend that they are true dadaists with unintentional and irrational behavior. This story centers around their ongoing story of Kevin Shapiro, a character they invented to explore nihilism and tragedy. When they discover that a student actually named Kevin Shapiro attends their school, they make it their mission to make him popular and succeed beyond their wildest dreams as Kevin becomes a dictator.

Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author

First performed in 1923, this intellectual comedy introduces six individuals to a stage where a company of actors has assembled for a rehearsal. Claiming to be the incomplete, unused creations of an author's imagination, they demand lines for a story that will explain the details of their lives. In ensuing scenes, these "real-life characters," all professing to be part of an extended family, produce a drama of sorts — punctuated by disagreements, interruptions, and arguments. In the end they are dismissed by the irate manager, their dilemma unsolved and the "truth" a matter of individual viewpoints.

A tour de force exploring the many faces of reality, this classic is now available in an inexpensive edition that will be welcomed by amateur theatrical groups as well as students of drama.

Pratchett, Terry: Witches Abroad

The villain rules her fairy-tale kingdom with an iron fist, using coercive magic and the force of law alike to ensure that everyone follows out the narrative threads she has assigned them. Toymakers must be cheerful and whistling, wolves must be lurking in the woods to assault guileless travelers, and cinder-sweeping girls must marry the prince -- whether they want to or not.

***

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother named Desiderata who had a good heart, a wise head, and poor planning skills—which unfortunately left the Princess Emberella in the care of her other (not quite so good and wise) godmother when DEATH came for Desiderata. So now it's up to Magrat Garlick, Granny Weatherwax, and Nanny Ogg to hop on broomsticks and make for far-distant Genua to ensure the servant girl doesn't marry the Prince.

But the road to Genua is bumpy, and along the way the trio of witches encounters the occasional vampire, werewolf, and falling house (well this is a fairy tale, after all). The trouble really begins once these reluctant foster-godmothers arrive in Genua and must outwit their power-hungry counterpart who'll stop at nothing to achieve a proper "happy ending"—even if it means destroying a kingdom.

 What the bad guy in this book is trying to do, that is molding an entire kingdom into perfect fairy-tale roles, is imo extremely Web plan.

Pratchett, Terry and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens

The book is filled with references to double agents and Cold War era spying. Both sides of the angelic war are trying to manipulate the other, and everything is being predicted by a rare book passed down for generations. There's also continuous talk of G-d's ineffible plan, which is never fully explained but might be pulling some strings.

Punko: Stagtown

The goop below makes me do shit

Shakespeare, William: Macbeth

The play takes place in the Scottish Highlands. Fresh from putting down a rebellion against King Duncan, Lord Macbeth meets three witches who hail him as the future king. His scheming and ambitious wife convinces him to make the prophecy come true by killing Duncan.

 Well, it's a play so we already get Web theatre motives. And like is Macbeth in control of his life is he not controlled by witches, by fate, by his wife I think this is a Web story.

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex

The whole point of the tragedy is that no one can fight fate. No matter the lengths everyone goes through to avoid the prophecy, it still comes true.

White, E.B.: Charlotte's Web

Okay, so it's not the scariest book. However, the plot is ultimately about a spider using cunning words and showmanship to persuade a bunch of humans to do her bidding. That's statement material for sure.

***

The titular Charlotte saves Wilbur, a runt pig from slaughter by writing words in her web and making him famous. At the end of the novel, Wilbur wins a special prize at the country fair thanks to Charlotte, and she dies, leaving her spider eggs to Wilbur.

It's not just that Charlotte's a spider, she is actually a genuinely good web avatar. She manipulates a whole farm, and then a town into thinking Wilbur is something special so he doesn't get killed. She literally weaves a web. She is very dedicated to Wilbur's success, so much so that when she dies, it's sort implied that she kept herself alive until Wilbur was confirmed to be survive and the farm wouldn't kill her

Wong, David: This Book is Full of Spiders

It's all there in the title! The book is full of spiders that attack and control people, spreading through the population like a zombie plague.

[1americanconservative]

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1723107083346739692?s=20

Tucker Carlson

@TuckerCarlson

·

Nov 9

Ep. 38 The First Amendment is done. Douglass Mackey is about to go to prison for mocking Hillary Clinton on the internet. We talked to him right before his sentencing. Remember as you watch that this could be you.

[antidrumpfs]

Donald Trump Jr. interviewed antisemitic white nationalist Douglass Mackey — who was recently convicted of election interference during the 2016 presidential election — on the December 7 episode of his Rumble podcast, Triggered with Donald Trump Jr., and said that Mackey’s suspended “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account “may be my favorite Twitter account of all time.” Trump Jr. also suggested that he may have been in contact with Mackey in 2016.

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Mackey had a Twitter account under the name “Ricky Vaughn.” HuffPost revealed his real name in 2018 and reported that the account was known for spreading “anti-Semitism and white nationalism,” such as using the antisemitic “echo” and tweeting that Jews had “control of the media” and were broadcasting “antiwhite messaging” in the mid-1900s. HuffPost also reported that Mackey had appeared on “numerous white supremacist podcasts.” Mackey has also reportedly spoken of his support for creating all-white communities and said he shuns interracial marriages “to maintain our unique culture and racial heritage,” and he has promoted Islamaphobic and anti-migrant content.

In October, Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison for “spreading falsehoods via Twitter … in an effort to suppress Democratic turnout in the 2016 presidential election,” specifically by falsely posting that it was possible to vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton by texting or posting on social media. (Trump Jr. indicated on his podcast that Mackey is appealing the decision.)

During the December 7 interview, Trump Jr. described Mackey as an “original MAGA meme lord” and misleadingly claimed that Mackey’s prosecution and conviction was “literally over a meme from 2016” (a claim other right-wing media figures have also made; in reality, the Department of Justice said that thousands of people tried to vote by texting to the number he distributed).

[mariacallous]

ATTENDING THE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONFERENCE in Munich over the weekend, J.D. Vance continued his criticism of Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia (“there’s no clear end point,” Vance said). Fully embracing his role as a MAGAer-than-thou Republican, the junior senator from Ohio has repeatedly made headlines in recent months for his militant opposition to military aid for Ukraine—and, in particular, for a blatantly misleading memo he sent to every Senate Republican last week asserting that the Ukraine aid bill contained a provision that could lead to a new Trump impeachment in 2025 for trying to negotiate peace. Vance also earned plaudits from Sputnik, the Russian propaganda network, for telling Tucker Carlson that Ukraine needed to be defunded for its own good, since Democrats “want to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian drop of blood.”

Given his stance and his prominence on U.S. policy toward Ukraine, it’s worth taking a moment to look back on a Vance tweet from February 9 riffing on Carlson’s much-hyped interview with Vladimir Putin:

If you read this tweet and come away bewildered because you’ve never heard of “Duglas Makki” and because Vance appears to be criticizing the Putin regime and Carlson, you’re not the crazy one. The tweet is a troll job. And if you dig into what it means, you’ll better understand why this MAGA senator is parroting vile Kremlin talking points about Ukraine.

THERE IS NO “DUGLAS MAKKI.” The reference is to Douglass Mackey, whose alter ego “Ricky Vaughn” was a notorious alt-right social media figure during the 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration, Mackey was prosecuted for election interference. The charges stemmed from posts on Twitter—where he had 58,000 followers and was rated a major election “influencer” by MIT Media Labs—urging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote by text message. (There is, of course, no such option.) What’s more, the tweets were specifically geared to black and Latino voters. In March of last year, Mackey was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn.

Why does Vance know or care about Mackey? Because he’s a cause célèbre on the right.The narrative pushed by Carlson, erstwhile presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and many others is that Mackey’s prosecution was not only a dangerous assault on free speech but an outrageous demonstration of double standards. He was punished, his defenders say, for mocking Clinton supporters by inviting them to vote by text message and implying that they’re stupid enough to fall for such a scheme—while a left-wing Chinese-American comedian, Christina Wong, got away with the exact same joke mocking Trump supporters.

But in fact, it wasn’t even close to “the exact same joke.” Wong’s tweet, with a clearly humorous video clip in which she claimed to be “coming out” as a Trump supporter, did tell Trump voters to “skip poll lines” and “TEXT in your vote,” but gave no number to which votes could supposedly be texted. By contrast, Mackey clearly went to some trouble to make the memes he posted look like real campaign ads—complete with the Hillary for America campaign logo and “Paid for by Hillary for President 2016” fine print—and urged people to text “Hillary” to a specific number. Carlson asserted last March that “of course, in real life, no one did believe” that they could text their vote. But in fact, according to the Justice Department, nearly 5,000 people did text “Hillary” or some variation to the number in the fake ad, though we don’t know how many were actually tricked out of voting. Lastly, there was strong evidence that Mackey discussed strategies to suppress the black vote in private Twitter groups and mocked black people as dumb and “gullible.” (It’s also worth mentioning that Mackey’s “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account was overtly white nationalist and filled with racist and antisemitic vitriol, and Mackey admitted at the trial that those were his genuine opinions at the time; in his later interview with Carlson, he described his content as merely “pro-Trump memes [and] jokes.”)

Obviously, Mackey’s repulsive speech is protected under the First Amendment. There are also some legitimate differences of opinion about his election interference case; UCLA law professor and First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh has expressed some reservations about it, partly because the federal statute under which Mackey was convicted (unlike some similar state laws) mentions violence, threats, and intimidation but not deception. For what it’s worth, Mackey’s First Amendment defense was considered by the federal court which heard the case, and was rejected in a carefully argued 56-page opinion.

One may have misgivings about Mackey’s conviction. But it’s abundantly clear that Vance’s summary of the story is extremely misleading. To say that Mackey was arrested for “making memes” is like saying that a person prosecuted for terroristic threats made by phone was arrested for making phone calls. And if Mackey is an “independent journalist,” then Alex Jones is Walter Cronkite.

THERE ARE A FEW THINGS that stand out about Vance’s “Duglas Makki” tweet.

For starters, it shows how deeply the senator is embedded in the far-right fringe. The Mackey case is so obscure outside MAGA and MAGA-adjacent circles that many of Vance’s own followers didn’t get the joke and took the story at face value.

But the context of Carlson’s trip to Russia and interview with Putin makes Vance’s reference to the Mackey case particularly repellent.

The tweet was presumably a sarcastic rejoinder to those who criticized Carlson for failing to bring up Russian political prisoners, including journalists, during his two-hour interview with Putin. See, Vance is saying, here’s a case of a journalist being persecuted for speech in an outrageous way that you’d think happens only under a dictatorship like the one in Russia—but actually, it’s right here in the USA, he’s being persecuted by the “Biden regime,” and none of the journalists dismissing Carlson as not being a “real journalist” are interested.

But to see how despicable the moral equivalency is, one need only look at some of the real cases of people persecuted and imprisoned in Russia for speech critical of the war against Ukraine or of the Putin regime.

Exactly a year ago, Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist and mother of two in Barnaul, Siberia, was convicted of spreading “fake news”—that is, posting the truth about the Russian bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater in the spring of 2022, in which hundreds of people sheltering inside, including children, were killed. Ponomarenko’s sentence was six and a half years in a penal colony. Years, not months. Contrast to Mackey’s seven-month sentence for “memes” that evidence showed, and the jury believed, were intended to keep at least some black and Latino voters out of the voting booth.

And just four days after Vance’s tweet, Russian academic and magazine editor Boris Kagarlitsky was given a five-year sentence for a video in which he discussed Ukrainian strikes at the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea and suggested that the bridge was a legitimate military target. Convicted of “justifying terrorism,” Kagarlitsky had been initially sentenced to a 609,000-ruble fine (about $6,700) with no prison time, but the prosecution appealed the sentence as unduly lenient, which the Russian legal system allows. The court obliged. Such harsh sentences for social media posts and other expressions of dissent are no longer the exception but the rule in Putin’s Russia.

Another victim of these draconian repressions is an American journalist—a dual Russian-American citizen, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty editor Alsu Kurmasheva. She was arrested in October for failing to register as a “foreign agent,” a designation she and RFE/RL dispute. In December, the authorities filed additional charges of spreading “false news” about the Russian military. Kurmasheva, whose offense was the distribution of a book about Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine, may face as much as fifteen years in prison. While Carlson brought up the case of the other detained American journalist, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, during his interview with Putin—and even, for once, pushed back on Putin’s evasive replies—he did not say a word about Kurmasheva. But that doesn’t seem to bother Vance, who clearly thinks this issue is a good occasion to troll “the libs.”

Back in the late Cold War, obnoxious leftists used to respond to critiques of the Soviet regime and its gulag with claims that the United States, too, had “political prisoners”—offering as examples the likes of Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist serving a life sentence for the 1975 murder of two FBI agents, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, the black activist and journalist sentenced to life without parole for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. But now we have seen a stunning role reversal: It’s the MAGA right, including a sitting senator, that excuses and defends the Kremlin’s political repressions by trotting out faux “political prisoners” in America, be it Mackey or the January 6th rioters. The America-hating shoe is solidly on the other foot.

[pscottm]

Eastern District of New York | Social Media Influencer Douglass Mackey Sentenced after Conviction for Election Interference in 2016 Presidential Race | United States Department of Justice

[vomitdodger]

Great article. Mackey is going to jail FOR SHARING A MEME. A meme which produced no victims (not that it matters beyond that first point). And the commies did the EXACT same to Trump without consequence.

[gusty-wind]

Tucker's Tweets@TuckerCarlsonTweets

3h··⚠Tucker Highlights⚠

Ep. 38 The First Amendment is done. Douglass Mackey is about to go to prison for mocking Hillary Clinton on the internet. We talked to him right before his sentencing. Remember as you watch that this could be you.

TIMESTAMPS: (3:12) The Hillary Clinton meme (4:20) Hillary’s reaction (6:38) FBI raid

Mackey is currently raising funds for his appeal. http://memedefensefund.com

[foreverlogical]

A social media influencer was convicted Friday in connection with a plot to undermine Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Department of Justice said.

Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted of conspiracy against rights for a “scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” the agency said.

Mackey faces up to 10 years in prison.

“Mackey has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of attempting to deprive individuals from exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2016 Presidential Election,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a news release.

“Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote.”

Mackey amassed some 58,000 Twitter followers and was ranked as the 107th most important influencer ahead of the presidential election in February, 2016, by the MIT Media Lab.

Prosecutors alleged that Mackey in the months leading up to the 2016 election conspired with other influential Twitter users, among others, to spread disinformation encouraging Clinton supporters to cast invalid votes via text message or social media, the DOJ said.

In the days leading up to the election, Mackey sent tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” tweeting an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign.

The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.”

The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”

The tweet included the “#ImWithHer” hashtag.

At least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some variant of the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Flynn’s “Digital Army”.