#stancil

[sesiondemadrugada]

Maëva Stancil.

[ravenkings]

[alanfromrochester]

I see that a lot - leftist gets mad at Dems for not doing enough, but the D's tried to do something but were stopped by the Supreme Court (or didn't try because it was obvious this would happen)

The response to that may be to expand the Court, but that runs into a similar issue with the legislature instead of the judiciary. Not codifying Roe v. Wade is another prominent example. Even when Democrats have a nominal (super)majority, relatively conservative Dems won't them do anything radical with it. Joe Manchin is the obvious example there (and he's about as liberal as we're gonna get from West Virginia, leftists could stand to be more reasonable about winning in red states/districts)

Republicans don't seem to have so much restraint. So I wonder whether to take the high road or fight fire with fire. (For instance, New York State Dems passed a fair congressional redistricting rather than a left-wing gerrymander)

Stancil is generally like this, a rational view of liberal politics. And he's running for a state legislature seat so he's going beyond just talking trash on Twitter

[arcticdementor]

[inhotwater-clips]

IHW-#992 - Celebrating Geno's 22nd Anniversary moving to New York with Jim Stancil.

[stancilmedia]

New fashion film shot by miles stancil media

[discountdyke]

when i was 11 we had a lockdown (before lockdown drills were common) and no one knew what was happening, and my teacher got us to the back of the room to crawl under the computer desks, and she scooted in the back so she was behind all of us and she said, clearly, "get in front of me cause im not getting shot. im going home today." which is insane but in the classroom next door a girl was having a panic attack and the substitute teacher made her stand in the hall as punishment, during an active lockdown. shoutout to the us public school systems

[ciochinaflorin]

76 I 2023. STÂNCILE ASCUNSE SAU OAMENII CARE SE FURIȘEAZĂ [Iuda 1.4, 12 I 2 Timotei 3.4-6 I Ioan 18.19–20]

76 I 2023. STÂNCILE ASCUNSE SAU OAMENII CARE SE FURIȘEAZĂ I Podcast I Pasaje Biblice : Iuda 1 : 4, 12 I II Timotei 3 : 4 – 6 I Ioan 18 : 19 – 20 I Meditaţii din Cuvânt I Cezareea I Reşiţa I 17 Martie 2023 I Creștinul adevărat lucrează pe față și nu are nimic de ascuns. Un credincios care se furișează, care se ascunde trebuie să fie un avertisment viu pentru adevărații creștini. El face parte din…

[thewebcomicsreview]

so what's your take on the recent "stonetoss is a much better comic than haus of decline because it has fewer words" over on twitter?

I really wanted to reply with a snarky dismissive one-liner. I had one written and everything, but then I wanted to make sure I understood the context and looked into this and ugh. Now I have to explain Twitter drama, this sucks.

Okay. Christ.

Haus of Decline makes this comic

The comic pops up again, and a person named Basil sees it and has a take that it has too many words.

As arguably the most prominent Webcomic Critic out there (which is the say, the only one still doing it), I kind of prefer the wordless version as well, but it's a matter of taste, more than an "objectively correct" take.

Basil then follows up on that take with a rather spicier one

It's worth noting here that Basil is saying Hans Kristian Graebener is "better" in the sense that they believe it's more effective propaganda, not in their own personal opinion of quality. And that's....arguable? For one, Haus of Decline isn't really trying to be left-wing propaganda, it's just shitposting, and for two I think Hans Kristian Graebener's effectiveness is way more complicated and sophisticated than just "brevity". And for three, saying Hans Kristian Graebener is "better comics" is really ill-advised, especially given some context I'll reveal shortly.

Haus sees this, calls Basil a moron, and it turns into a dumb stupid internet argument where both people look bad. And being, again, the top Webcomic Critic, I can confirm that sometimes when you call a webcomic bad the creator will get mad at you over it and that's just something you have to expect and live with and try not to beclown yourself in response to. I don't think Basil responded well here, and "just learn to take criticism" is a pretty common and loaded phrase in Webcomics Discourse. Still, whatever. A questionable take led to a short slap fight. That would be the end of it.

Except. The context.

Seven or eight months ago, Basil made this tweet.

Which is a far better tweet, and is now a meme used by liberals in intra-left twitter discord fights to dunk on the anti-voting Trump-curious twitter left. This tweet also came around the time Will Stancil was whipping a lot of normie liberals to push back against the anti-Biden narrative and obviously the election itself has led a notable shift in the vibes where you're seeing a lot more "Biden's not that bad" takes and even a bit of "Actually, Biden is good and I'm tired of pretending he's not" in leftist spaces. And if you follow my personal account you'll know that my vibes have also shifted in that direction a lot. Basil obviously didn't cause the shift, even Stancil didn't, it was the election, but it's their name on the top of the tweet that's used as an anti-anti-voting meme that the left still doesn't has a great response to, so a lot of leftists fucking hate Basil. The kind of passionate hatred you only feel when you're getting clowned on by Matthew fucking Yglesias. So there's a huge hate mob against Basil in the way that hate mobs tend to occur.

This all attracts the attention of Hans Kristian Graebener, who pops out a comic taking a shot at Haus over this. Which is, honestly, a much better example of why Hans Kristian Graebener is effective propaganda than the brevity thing, because god damn did that pour gasoline on the fire, and....well....tldr:

My take is that this whole fight is incredibly stupid, no one involved looks good, and the only one benefiting from it is the literal fucking Nazi.

[tanadrin]

I think Democratic complaints about the media are in some sense correct. Even the Democratic media ran endless stories casting every positive economic indicator under Biden in a negative light, and I think that helped fuel discourse about how the economy was Bad, Actually, which helped fuel anti-Biden sentiment, even long after the economy started to improve in a substantial way for most people. I think the “liberal” media has been harangued for decades into doing this weird both-sidesism that, even while they explicitly endorse and support Democrats on their editorial pages, forces them to try to symmetrically cover people like Harris and Trump, though they are not symmetric candidates (e.g. “sanewashing”). It is indeed possible to report on somebody like Trump in ways which are substantively not totally incorrect but which are tonally deeply misleading, you know?

And yet I don’t know about the viability of trying to build Liberal Fox News to counter this; the liberal/Democratic coalition in the US just isn’t constructed in the same way as the conservative one. Fearmongering and paranoia, which have made conservative media commercially successful, are inherently activating of conservative politics, not liberal politics. Democratic messaging just doesn’t function in the same way as Republican messaging, especially these days. There may be things the Democrats can do to improve their media game—and I think Stancil is right that they have not sufficiently grappled with the implications of the fragmented media environment and social media in particular!—but it can’t be to try to make a mirror image of conservative media. I’m not sure that will work.

[centrally-unplanned]

That post has me fully entering the Matt Darling/Will Stancil level of hell as the number of reblogs with "60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck don't you know" is dealing untold psychic damage to my brain and it is not letting up.

[tomorrowusa]

Silicon Valley has its own variety of racism. And you'll never guess who is the leading figure in spreading this poisonous ideology. [CLUE: He left South Africa at age 18 when the country had just begun the process of eliminating apartheid and moving to majority black rule.]

Racist pseudo-science is making a comeback thanks to Elon Musk. Recently, the tech billionaire has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X (formally known as Twitter), spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers—a dynamic my colleague Garrison Hayes analyzes in his latest video for Mother Jones. X, and before it Twitter, has a long-held reputation for being a breeding ground for white supremacy. [ ... ] Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, via X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.) “People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, told Garrison in a video interview. He added: “This is the most basic statistical error in the book: Correlation does not equal causation.”

Racist pseudo-science simply sprays cologne on the smelly bullshit of plain old irrational bigotry. Warped theology, which was used to justify slavery, passed the baton of officially sanctioned race prejudice to pseudo-science in the late 19th and early 20th century.

DNA and other real science not only undermine the pseudo-science of racism but has revealed that "race" is not even a valid scientific concept among humans. What is widely regarded as race is defined by rather generalized phenotypes.

There has always been petty bigotry. But racial pseudo-science has been used to justify exploitation, colonialism, and territorial expansion by the powerful and ignorant. Elon Musk certainly qualifies as both powerful and ignorant.

In 2022, just one week after Musk purchased Twitter, the Center for Countering Digital Hate —an online civil rights group— found that racial slurs against Black people had increased three times the year’s average, with homophobic and transphobic epithets also seeing a significant uptick, according to the Associated Press. More than a year later, Musk made headlines once again for tweeting racist dog whistles in a potential attempt to “woo” a recently fired Tucker Carlson. But, his new shift into sharing tech-bro-friendly bigotry carries its own unique set of consequences.

If you are still on Twitter/X then you are indirectly supporting the propagation of pseudo-scientific racism – as well as just plain hate. Like quitting alcohol and tobacco, ditching Twitter/X can be difficult. But after doing so, you'll eventually notice how much better you feel.

[phaeton-flier]

My actual take is the Stancil one, I think this was a failure to go out into the media landscape and scream about everything Dems did right and Trump did wrong; in hindsight vibecession shit never went away and not going "This was Trump's fault" every 30 seconds meant the blame defaulted to Biden.

[mariacallous]

this was a response to Stancil's tweet:

this is the type of person who's going to vote for Trump-Vance

[whilereadingandwalking]

The Dark Library by Cyrille Martinez, translated from the French by Joseph Patrick Stancil, is an interesting and funny satire of how capitalism and corporate interests risk destroying the use of reading and public libraries. The beginning was too long, and almost lost me (was the narrator of that part really all that necessary?), but it turned back around to dive into an ironic satire as a corporate approach to the library begins to lose it readers, and then in turn, they hire readers to make the whole thing digital, only for the hired readers to become enchanted with books. It's a small parable about the power of reading and the true nature of good libraries; despite it being a bit too long, bookworms, especially library lovers/workers, will enjoy this one and find it highly quotable.

[catherine-white]

Woodfired bowl from our recent firing.

Stancill’s clay natural ash glaze.