#I hope all you accelerationists are happy

[messed-up-stargazer]

Political Rant Incoming

I’m not usually one to talk about my own personal politics but after today. I cant keep this inside. If you’re looking for something positive, resources to help people, this is not the place. I am angry, I’m feeling hopeless,and I need to let it out in order to be strong again.

If you are not President Biden, then you can skip this if you need to. Or stay, I don’t really care. We need to take care of our mental health to prepare, so make the right choice for yourself.

Note: nothing in this letter is threatening, secret service. Not only am I against violence in itself, but I wouldn’t be stupid enough to post my threats to the actual president on a fucking tumblr post. I’m not like the fucking rioters who posted all about them invading the capital like the fucking traitors they are. They can protest that name, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Dear President Biden:

You’ve damned us. You’ve damned this country. You made a promise to this country and you betrayed us. Your ego was more important than every single person in this country, every man, woman, genderqueer person, every single one of us. You promised us you would be a one term president. You promised us. We didn’t want you, but we sucked it up for the country because you won the primary for reasons I don’t even know at this point. you appealed to old people, and they’re the most consistent voting block, because they’ve got nothing else to fucking do. So we voted you in in order to save our country. And look what you’ve done to us.

Every trans person’s death that comes from his presidency is on your soul. Every family that dies from poverty, every woman who loses everything or even dies from the lack of abortion services, every Palestinian’s death, they’re going to stain your soul and send you down to Hell, Mr. President. You have damned this country, you have damned the world, and while I don’t believe in Hell, you fucking do and you’re fucking going there. You failed the world, Mr. President. Not just Americans, but the world. The world was watching as we just did the stupidest thing in our country’s history, and it’s all because of you.

You may be saying Star, I wasn’t even the nominee. How could I be responsible for so many deaths that he is going to cause with his disastrous policies? Let me tell you. You didn’t give the country a chance. While I liked Kamala Harris’s policies, you forced her onto the country. She needed to run her own race. It is entirely, 100% your fault that we didn’t have an actual primary because you decided to break your promise. We could’ve chosen someone who had a much better shot at winning than the Black, Indian woman. I wanted so badly for her to win, it’s about fucking time that a woman be elected president, but she was never going to convince the moderate republicans just because she’s all three of those things. They do not think women can run the country, and as much as they’re wrong, we needed them to sit out or vote for us. And you didn’t give anyone else the chance to be a better candidate for them. Because as much as we hate it, because of the goddamn electoral college, we need to get the moderates on our side, because the moderates decide elections. The people who don’t pay attention to politics, the people who don’t remember what the last administration was like, they decided the election. And you didn’t give us a chance to win those people older.

You never should’ve ran for a second term. It was your ego, your desire for power that had you thinking you could run again, after you promised you wouldn’t! You’re already the oldest president we’ve ever had, we can see you declining, we could see it for years, and you still fucking ran again! It was your choice and your choice alone. Every harm that is felt during the next administration is going to be entirely on you. I hope you feel every death, every sob of the people who are forced to become homeless, every scream as a child has to carry her rapists baby to term, every soul as despair sets in when they realize they don’t have enough money to live because of the inevitable recession he’s going to cause. Because you are the reason it will happen. There is no one else to blame but you. You stayed far too long in the race, and then to add insult to injury, right at the end, you pulled a fucking “basket of deplorables”. You tripped the country at the finish line, and every hurt that comes from the injuries that our country, that our world endures is on you. You made choice after choice, and you’ve damned us!

I won’t say I hated the Biden administration. Some of what you did was great, some of what you did was really progressive. And it’s all ruined now because he’s going to undo every single thing, just like he did with Obama. Every good thing you did for the country will now be erased and you will have no lasting positive legacy on this country. Your legacy will forever be “he gave us a second trump term.” When history books write about you, they will treat you like Neville Chamberlain. As a failure. As a weakling. Except you’ll also be labeled egoistic and maybe even narcissistic because you refused to put your ego aside and let the democratic voters choose a candidate we wanted.

Since I know you’re Catholic, when you die (which I hope isn’t soon, I could never wish death on anyone truly) you believe you’ll meet God. When he shows you your lasting legacy of pain and devastation and he asks you, “why didn’t you keep your promise to the people of America and step down gracefully? Why did you run again and not give the American people a chance? You knew how dangerous he was, how dangerous his policies would be.” I doubt your answer of “I still wanted to be president.” Will be good enough for him!

Signed,

A lesbian who is absolutely terrified of what’s going to happen to her and her country

PS- And to those of you who voted for Russian plant Jill Stein (seen with fucking Putin, no regular American citizen is ever seen with him!) you did exactly as Russia wanted you to. You did exactly what we said you would. We told you if you voted for Jill Stein, the votes would go to trump, and we were right. Especially those of you who live in swing states. For all of you single issue voters who claimed that you couldn’t vote for Kamala because of Palestine, I hope you can live with what you’ve done because he’s said he wants to wipe Palestine off the map. He wants to put his hotels and golf courses on Palestinian land, and when he starts selling weapons to Israel again, as he said he would!, they’re going to give him the opportunity to do just that. And their blood will be on your hands too. I hope that moral superiority feels good now. I hope you fucking choke on it.

[whumpster-fire]

Concession Speech

My Fellow Americans,

What the fuck.

To the dumb accelerationist sacks of shit on this website: congratulations. Y'all got what you wanted. A fascist in the white house. I hope you're fucking happy. Have fun with that. I hope that as you watch this country burn to the ground and probably take several others with it, you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that you successfully refrained from sullying your conscience by supporting someone who wasn't Revolutionary enough for you.

To the "enlightened centrists" and "leftists" who did nothing but repost memes from blogs with Pepe profile pictures about Kamala being the antichrist, conspiracy theories about what the World Economic Forum was plotting, or other right wing crap all year: I'm expecting you to go mask off in the next few weeks, but don't worry, you weren't fooling anyone anyway.

To the open Trump supporters: I don't know what any of you are even doing on this blog other than looking for "delicious libtard tears" so: congratulations. I truly wish you the best as you enjoy the success of your sadistic ideology. Good job. I know nothing's going to change your minds at this point. Don't let the cork on your champagne bottle hit you in the eye. Also get off my fucking blog.

To the Non-Americans: this is your one apology, and your one preemptive warning that I'm not going to tolerate victim blaming on here. Most of us didn't fucking want him. Also if you're in a country that's been flirting with right wing lunatics itself e.g. the UK, Hungary, Poland, climb down off your high horse.

To everyone else: Oh my god I am so fucking tired. Can we catch even ONE break?

[somethingmissingthiswaycomes]

I considered not voting because of arguments about how broken the US voting system is from other angry Tumblr leftists. Ones who actually advocate for doing real good, not centrists not accelerationists not sock puppet accounts as far as I can tell. Like, I was feeling so disillusioned about it that I sorta let myself believe that letting Trump win might radicalize enough people to not let it get really bad... rather than make the system even worse and even more difficult to fight.

I don't want to blame the people who advocated for not giving the dems power to reward them for being just a little bit less evil. AGAIN. I don't want to blame them for making me want to let it all crash and burn in the hopes that the fire brigade would finally show up. I want to blame the opposite rhetoric: the insistence that the democrats are a good thing for the US and the world stage, that Harris is charming and cool and we should be excited to vote for her, that if we can just prevent Project 2025, everything will be okay.

That rhetoric is just. bullshit.

We got a choice between people actively committing a genocide and people very intently planning on continuing that genocide BUT ALSO doing some other genocides. 🙃 I really don't think we should pretend the US presidential election is going to result in anything good. I really don't think we should be telling people it's going to "save democracy" if Trump doesn't win. US democracy is... kind of fake??? The fact that we don't have more than one viable choice against Project 2025 should be radicalizing, I think. It shouldn't feel good. It should feel bad and you shouldn't be happy that the best thing to do is vote for those committing one genocide to keep those planning on committing that same genocide and also other genocides from doing the extra genociding.

I have Voted™. Spent a few hours yesterday looking up all the names on the ballot so I could at least have some idea of what else there is to hope for aside from not-the-greater-evil. Agonized over putting it together correctly. Mailed it out.

Also on the ballet for my state was whether insurance that covers reproductive healthcare should cover ALL of it, whether millionaires should be taxed more, whether voting interference by officials should be penalized, and whether to put more funding into firefighting.

It's not just the presidency!

Most important part of this is to not declare victory. I'm not able to do a lot but I'm hoping I'll be more capable of making a difference in the world in small ways in the coming years as my life gets more stable. I know there are ways I can support community efforts both local and online. I can share information. I can back fundraisers every now and then — hopefully much more often in the future.

I might be able to participate in local politics directly at some point, but I'm not living in the US anymore so that's not part of the follow-up to the US election. I hope a lot of people living over there do get involved. Attend meetings. Sign petitions. Contact people. Support workers and minorities and people in poverty. Volunteer if you can. Vote in more elections than just the presidency. Unionize. Talk your neighbors into unionizing.

Look... into... anti-fascist actions you can do that I don't vaguely know enough about to allude to.

[arcticdementor]

Debt is a huge issue, a big part of what’s wrong with the fabric of modernity, a big factor of what’s driving modern civilization into collapse. And yet it has remained largely underdiscussed in these circles. Moldbug, who to the end still remained something of a libertarian, did have a keen interest in finance, and after the great crisis of 2008 made a series of long posts on financial crises and how to design a properly sound banking system. His “favorite topic” he even called it. Well it’s certainly not my favorite topic, nor I’m sure it’s Mr. Land’s, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating issue, and more importantly, a critical one.

Again, my approach to all intellectual issues is to think about its history, and the one thing that strikes one when thinking about debt is how easy-going the ancients were about them. Sovereign bankruptcies were routine, and nothing really happened. But most importantly, debt jubilees were *very* common. Mr. Land here seems to think it’s a horrible idea, and he may be right, but I can’t be faulted for liking something that Chinese emperors did every few years as part of general amnesties. New emperor? Cancel the people’s debt. Emperor has a change of mood and sets a new regnal era? Cancel the debt. Cute imperial baby is born? Out with the debt. Some Emperors had general amnesties almost every year. It’s interesting to note that the Song Dynasty, famous for its fabulous wealth, commercial mindset and urban culture, and thus a polity which you would expect to have more care about enforcing contracts, had over 200 debt jubilees over its 318 year history. That’s one every eighteen months.

Again, you could say that the one thing that ensured the Great Divergence, the Rise of the West, the Industrial Revolutions and basically everything that’s nice and productive about the modern world (and there’s plenty of that, I do like fast transport, air conditioning and modern hygiene, thank you very much), was the establishment of the Sanctity of Contracts as an important part of Western culture. There’s certainly something to that. A non-negligible part of reactionary authors will spit on Libertarianism a dozen times a day, but they will stay give you a 2 hour speech in praise of the Joint Stock Corporation as the fundamental basis of the modern economy and Western Civilization as we know it. By that line of reasoning, the only reason we ever got away of the Malthusian trap was when we stopped forgiving damn debtors and we used state authority to enforce commercial contracts.

…

Why did the kings and emperors of yore issue decree debt jubilees so often? Why at all? Not just to get debt out of their own shoulders, obviously, they had the power to do that and just that, and do not relieve the commoners from their own debt obligations. And yet they did that, all the time: have commoners be free of paying back their debts. Again this sounds outrageous to our modern sensibilities, and yet it was routinely done for millennia, and everybody thought it perfectly natural. Part of that is because anything the Sovereign did was perfectly natural. The whole point of being king is that you get to do things like issue debt jubilees and screw the merchants royally. Pun intended. There’s such a thing as different sorts of power, and economic power, the power that arises from having massive amounts of wealth, is very real. And yet, all that power is good for nothing in front of the King’s authority, who on a whim can wipe out all your claims of debt collection. The merchants cry, and the indebted peasants rejoice. That’s just good politics for the king: gains him popular favor, and signals his power.

But was that all? Just the King, sticking it to the merchants because he can? The whole frequency of the measure seems to hint there’s something more going on. Maybe debt jubilees were an actual tool of governance. A good tool, a necessary tool, in order to achieve some positive outcome. Surely in terms of political stability, the most immediate concern of kings. And maybe something more. Maybe debt relief just actually fixes something in society, corrects some imbalances which lead to not just more safety for the king, but actually a better society, in terms of economics, natality and just general happiness and prosperity.

If you have read Peter Turchin’s book War and Peace and War, and if you haven’t you should stop right here and just go read it right now (if you have time for my blog you really should be going and read that book), you might recall Chapter 10, which Turchin titled “The Matthew Principle”. That’s a rather forced coinage from a quote of the evangelist. The idea is basically that the rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer. That’s a historical reality and there’s plenty of evidence for it in premodern times, those very times I’m referring to as having frequent amnesties and debt jubilees, canceling everybody’s debt and starting over, screwing with creditors every few years.

…

Turchin, who may be right or wrong but is nonetheless a great writer, describes his argument with a very easy example. In any competition, he notes, the poor are at a disadvantage against the rich, having fewer resources, and so overtime tend to lose ground. Think of land, the almost only source of wealth in civilized societies until very recently. Assume an initially completely equal distribution of land. And that’s, by the way, not an absurdity. There’s actually a very good example in China’s Tang Dynasty, which adopted an “equal-field” system. All land was owned by the state, which allotted equal sized fields to individual peasant families.

What happened afterwards? Concentration. Little by little, some peasants were thriftier, others more prone to spend. Some were luckier, some more unfortunate with weather, or disease, or family issues. Some peasants started mortgaging away their fields to other peasants who again, due to thrift or luck had money available to spend. Those latter peasants then ended up with more land. Rince and repeat the process for several decades, and you get some very rich guys and a lot of landless vagrants. Keep the process going for even longer and you’d get even more inequality.

…

But that seldom happened, as eventually some ambitious man always found a way of organizing those landless vagrants into a rebel army and started a big fat war. Chinese dynasties tended to all last exactly 250 years, with a big rebellion in the middle. Two secular cycles. And the Chinese historians always agree in the culprit. 土地兼并, land concentration. Every single time. Europe had less obvious closure but also plenty of wars to stir things up. And eventually, of course, the Age of Revolutions.

Things are of course different now in our incredibly diversified economies; even landless peasants or the equivalent today can work their way up some corporate ladder or find some new economic niche and start a successful business. But the fact that poor people, on average, are at a disadvantage in resource competition against the rich. The rich just have less to lose. As Half Sigma, unsuccessful candid Jew always says, talk of “risk-taking entrepreneurs” is just bullshit. Rich people have enough money stashed away to live comfortably all their lives. They are investing their spare wealth, and yes, there’s always a risk there. But big deal. They’re covered.

…

Back to the beginning of the post, you can now see what debt jubilees were meant to achieve. Interestingly, Turchin’s book doesn’t mention the word “jubilee” even once. He probably didn’t think them important, as economic inequality historically did grow anyway. But surely periodic legal debt relief made the process slower. Eased societal contradictions to a more manageable level for the court. But it was never enough, it was barely a stopgap to the inexorable trend. But at least it served to lower the gas boiling the frog.

I just realized that I started this post with the intention of arguing in favor of debt relief, of learning from the ancients how to pacify society. But given the limited power it historically had, and given the trends we are seeing now, the complete obliteration of Western Civilization down the road to becoming Brazil, then South Africa and ultimately Haiti, maybe the proper accelerationist position is to make the fire stronger and make the damned frog jump from the pot once and for all. No jubilee. No peace. Let’s just observe the coming of the age of the oligarchs, and hope it breaks down fast.

[surly01]

It Can’t Happen Here

The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on June 2, 2020

"I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me." –Langston Hughes

I'm old enough to remember when White America was outraged– OUTRAGED, I say– when H. Rap Brown offered America the simple truth that "Violence is an American as cherry pie" in July of 1967 at a press conference in Washington, D.C. That was long before the Chicago police and the FBI murdered a sleeping Fred Hampton in December of 1969.

I'm old enough to remember WMD. Remember those?  "Yellowcake," the excuse for a Republican administration lying us into the wrong war, with Fox News and Hate Radio accusing those opposed of treason. Remember The Great Recession?  Presided over by a Republican president who having pissed away the Clinton budget surplus on tax cuts (and more tax cuts) for a war based on lies?  The effects of which then exacerbated by Republicans in Congress determined to sabotage whatever Obama might have tried to ease the suffering of millions?

Memory: the liberal superpower. But the long history of this country is written in blood, built on the bones of the indigenous, the slave, the immigrant laborer, and other "conditional citizens," whose rights to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" are conditioned upon not being locked on by a police searchlight or targeted by police weapons.

There has been an open season on black American males with no bag limit. Cops are able to summarily execute black Americans with minimal, if any, consequence. Hence the long overdue rising which has bubbled over this week In response to the on-video murders of George Floyd, and before him Ahmaud Arbery. But a list of the dead would be a roll call of ignominy: Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile…

In late stage capitalism, where everything has been commoditized, where almost all speech is marketing, no one should be surprised that police are the occupation army of capital. Occupation armies treat the citizenry as hostile. Expect no less on America's streets.

Yet the brutality and direct targeting of journalists is new for this country, another milestone in the march to fascism.

Trump has sown hatred of the press for years, borrowing techniques more often seen in third world dictatorships, Now journalists are under assault from police and protesters alike.

On Friday, while reporting on live TV, CNN's Omar Jimenez and his crew was arrested as the crew covered George Floyd protests.  CNN reported that the arresting officers were from the Minnesota State Patrol. The reason for their arrests was not immediately clear, but was later attributed to orders issued by Gov. Tim Walz to clear the area.

CNN's Josh Campbell, also reporting from the area but not standing with the on-air crew, said he, too, was approached by police, but was allowed to remain. Jimenez is black and Latino, while Campbell is white. For his part, Walz apologized to CNN, saying there was "absolutely no reason" for the arrests and that he took "full responsibility."

Elsewhere around the country, journalists were harassed and targeted by police.

In Louisville, a police officer fired pepper balls at a local TV reporter, Kaitlin Rust. In Denver, police fired paintballs and tear gas, hitting a news photographer and his camera. Bellingcat has documented at least 50 separate incidents where journalists have been attacked by law enforcement.

Those who say that Trump's rhetoric is just harmless bloviating are kidding themselves. We are watching a real time devolution to fascism, American-style. Steve Bannon may be gone from the White House grounds, but his message lives on. The press is the enemy, says Bannon.

The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

But they're going to understand it good and hard. Bannon's advice is to “flood the zone with shit,” overwhelming the media with disinformation, distraction, and denial. After three and a half years, the American press finds itself having gone from being called names to becoming targets of police suppression. Late Tuesday, Trump emerged from his bunker for a photo op and a message of repression.

"At this point we should probably just be called the states of america."

–Sarah Silverman

Trust in the government has steadily eroded ever since the Warren Commission report. Vietnam, death tolls. Pentagon Papers. Iran-Contra and that lying lout Oliver North. Pardons all around. Yellowcake. Cooked intel. War in Iraq after 9-11. Concealment, deception and outright lies have characterized U.S. national security policy for decades. So little surprise that some people are willing to dismiss appeals to authority and evidence-based claims.

Others are as eager and willing as ever to turn over their legal rights to a legally spurious junta making it up as they go along.

Far-Right extremists Are showing up, hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a new civil war. They show up in cars with license plates removed, and often dress in "antifa" drag, wearing the black goodies associated with "black bloc" anarchists. Plus it appears that Agents provocateur may now be part of the standard policing playbook for dealing with protest. For those interested, the blog Just Security has published an analysis of these infiltration tactics, particularly those of "accelerationists," an extreme subset of white nationalism whose goal is to bring about chaos and destruction via a Charles Mansonesque race war.

Many reports from Minnesota of cars without license plates. When approached by police the occupants scatter on foot. Here is one.

During Occupy I told anyone who would listen to assume that anyone exhorting you to violence is a cop or a spy. Now you can add infiltrator to the mix.

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s. Marvelous deflection from the over 100,000 deaths Trump has caused by his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. All the better to drive Whites into the arms of the assorted fascists, grifters and neo-Confederates that comprise the Trump regime.

And we learn that "antifa," that all purpose blamesicle beloved of the alt-right, (and which is not an organized group), is to be designated as "terrorist organization." As with so many Trump pronunciamentos, the government has no existing legal authority to label any domestic group in the manner it currently designates foreign terrorist organizations.

Antifa just means "anti-fascist;" It's not a club holding monthly meetings.  But for the fuzzy thinkers of the right, antifa is some centrally controlled, George Soros-funded Monolith of The Resistance. Within the cult of perpetual victimhood that defines the drooling right in this country, antifa is a made-to-order whipping boy.

Why does he get away with it? The complicit beltway media and their apparatchik bosses whose fat livings depend on Republicans returning their phone calls. And whose stock in trade is "bothsiderism" punctuated by "whataboutism." A.J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." And the bookers and producers understand that and follow their assigned scripts, all of which support the existing system and the preservation of capital.

This week we learned that the only way to protest correctly is show up armed with guns at a state capitol.

10 steps to closing societies and to totalitarianism.

Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy. Create secret prisons where torture takes place. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens. Set up an internal surveillance system. Infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. Engage in arbitrary detention and release. Target key individuals. Control the press. Cast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason. Subvert the rule of law.

–Naomi Wolf

We should have undone the so-called PATRIOT Act and other pernicious laws before now. Indefinite detention, anyone? Trump and Barr will exploit the far corners of American law to hound their opponents. So for the second or third time in a decade, I awaken to learn I've been labeled a terrorist by my own government for believing that the government is abusive. So now I find myself an enemy of the state. It's not even Wednesday yet.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

–Attributed to Sinclair Lewis

So why don't we just bring civil charges Or otherwise attempt to bring rogue cops to some sort of justice?

But when Goerge Floyd’s family goes to court to hold the officers liable for their actions, a judge in Minnesota may very well dismiss their claims. All because of a legal doctrine called "qualified immunity" that specifically shields government officials, including poilice, from most such claims. Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.' They're right.

The Supreme Court created qualified immunity in 1982. With that novel invention, the court granted all government officials immunity for violating constitutional and civil rights unless the victims of those violations can show that the rights were “clearly established.”Although innocuous sounding, the clearly established test is a legal obstacle that’s nearly impossible to overcome. It requires a victim to identify an earlier decision by the Supreme Court or a federal appeals court in the same jurisdiction holding that precisely the same conduct under the same circumstances is illegal or unconstitutional. If none exists, the official is immune. Whether the official’s actions are unconstitutional, intentional, or malicious is irrelevant to the test.

One imagines that if police were subject to civil liability for their actions, including loss of pension oif convicted, we might quickly see a change in the amount of abusive behavior on the part of police.

As I got ready to post this, events have swarmed these scribblings. Moments after threatening to unleash the military against the American people, styling them "antifa," or "professional anarchists” – for the crime of seeking racial justice, #BunkerBoyTrump had military police teargas and shoot rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd. This display of supposed "toughness" was so a reality TV "president" he could hold a pointless photo op, clutching a Bible in front of a church. Thus making Sinclair Lewis a prophet:  Fascism has come to America.

I'm old enough to remember a different America. One where the cop on the beat or street was a potential source of aid and safety. Where people didn't cower in fear or snarl in loathing at their neighbors for their political beliefs. And one in which every yahoo with a grievance didn't brandish an AK-47 (or a hunting bow) at a public demonstration. Or where the President at least pretended to care about the welfare of his fellow citizens. But those days are long gone, as the American public learns what foreign governments have already learned through the last three and a half years: America is no longer to be trusted or counted upon.

Surly1 was an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary. Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.

[chorusfm]

Charlie Wagner of Slow Code

Seattle, WA, leftist punk band Slow Code will be releasing their new LP Wastelayernext month. I recently spoke to vocalist Charlie Wagner about the politics of the record and a shared respect for Mark Fisher. “Semiascetic” seems to be a response to Mark Fisher’s essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” Could you explain a little bit about how that one came to be? A good chunk of our songs are about the creeping dissolution and disengagement felt as societal separation unravels our daily lives, and we resonated intensely with Fisher’s ability to articulate those fears. More of our music seems to gestate in group conversations rather than jam sessions, and these are the topics we gravitate toward and feel the urge to explore as a band. I wanted to ask about “Shit Praxis” too, because I was curious what was going through your head when you wrote that one. Most of the other songs are about different facets of life in capitalist America, from over-commercialization to imperialism, but that one seems to tackle a lot of things at once. Life presents you with so many dichotomies that you can feel pulled in way too many directions at once, your sense of meaning can get lost in the mix. It’s about attempting to recenter yourself and a restorative vision of the world amidst the messiness of contemporary life while avoiding the urges toward retribution. It seems like the album begins at its most hopeless and then ends at its most optimistic. Was that intentional when you were laying out the tracklisting? It’s not something we intentionally did, but we’re happy to hear there’s an emotional resolution to the record. We explore some dark terrain and it can’t all be doom-and-gloom. Who or what is the titular Wastelayer? “Wastes” was a term of derision for the lower-class “unwashed masses” used by business magnates during the industrial revolution in the early 1900’s. The title ultimately reflects two ideas simultaneously, empire’s ability to lay waste both materially and existentially, as well as our collective ability to use our energy to upend those dominant structures. What’s the image on the cover, and why’d you choose it? It looks like computer circuits, and I think it captures pretty well the confusion and mechanization that are the source of a lot of the lyrics on the album. We felt a sort of psychedelic take on a high rise apartment complex reflected a pair concepts we obsess over, both an accelerationism anxiety caused by the boxing in and mechanization of our living spaces and the cities that surround them, and the washed out hauntological nostalgia for a future that never came to be. Seeing it as circuitry mirrors the concept nicely. What are Slow Code’s plans for the rest of the year? Mostly we’re being hugely relieved to have this documentation of our last few years of work recorded and seeing the light of day. We’ll be touring domestically in both fits and starts as well as a longer run this fall. What do you want people to take away from Wastelayer? We like to think that punk can still be a vehicle for nuanced takes on modern rage and sorrow if it can reckon with the inherently accelerationist structure it exists within. Shit in the world really is as weird as we collectively perceive it to be, and we hope the listener can relate to the catharsis we feel playing. --- Please consider supporting us so we can keep bringing you stories like this one. ◎ https://chorus.fm/interviews/charlie-wagner-of-slow-code/