#the ideology is realized in the ideologue!!!

[hadesoftheladies]

my sister kinda cooked today. we were talking about how dumb it is that people consider (insert bigoted group here) mistaken little uwus (i call it “uwu culture” as a current response to cancel culture where people are uncritically assumed to be “misled” or uneducated or “victimized” as justification for the bigoted beliefs ) and she said:

“people keep trying to humanize villains when the villains are already human”

and i stood up and clapped for her and told her the women in my phone will greatly appreciate that statement

oppressors are already human. in general, the problem is that their humanity is validated while those of the oppressed are not. when we describe them by their inhumane treatment, that is not dehumanization. that is recognizing that the leopard is a carnivore.

nazism isn’t a cosmic accident. nazism does not exist outside of nazis. the ideology is realized in the ideologue. patriarchy is men. not something that happens to them. for them to be misogynists or nazis or racists or homophobes, they have already accepted that your humanity is forfeit to them.

stop babying bigots.

[taliabhattwrites]

Transition care is being outlawed and institutionally gatekept the world over.

Trans existence is the reactionary scapegoat du jour, a convenient symbol for regressive ideologues to rally against because we constitute a convenient effigy to burn, an existential threat to the patriarchal ideology of 'immutable', 'biological' sex upon which their 'natural order' (of male-supremacy and misogynistic exploitation) is founded.

During a cultural moment where the right's intentions to directly attack bodily autonomy and non-heterosexual, non-reproductive modes of existence are being plainly stated, where the nativist and natalist violence upon which states and their colonial orders are founded is being made most explicit, the response to this overt declaration of war on our ability to do what we will with our bodies is ... non-existent.

Feminism is being thoroughly repudiated by the left, by advocates of collectivization and queer activists alike. The "male loneliness crisis" is spoken of as our most pressing cultural issue, eliding the reactionary turn among men who are responding to deepening capitalist contradictions by demanding their patriarchal entitlement over women's labor and bodies. Trans people's existence is considered a luxury belief, established and proven healthcare is called 'experimental', and we are perceived as affluent eccentrics seeking novel forms of costuming rather than a thoroughly brutalized, impoverished, and stigmatized demographic sinking further and further into the margins.

Conservatives who rail against abortion and no-fault divorce now claim the label of "women's rights" because they also call for the eradication of transsexuality. The connections between the opposition to trans existence and the threats to women's political and economic independence are obvious, but no one is making them.

We are not organizing a robust, materialist, ideological opposition to this reactionary backlash on the basis of bodily autonomy, the emancipation of marginalized genders, or the right to exist independently from patriarchal structures such as the nuclear family.

We are arguing with each other about validity, about whether it's "biologically essentialist" to observe that society enables men to exploit women, and about whether anyone who speaks plainly about misogyny is a "TERF".

I stand here seeing things get worse for my sisters and my siblings, cis and trans and non-binary and intersex and queer and even heterosexual and more, watching us devour each other while working class men settle for dominion over their wives and families in exchange for being compliant for their bosses, and I wonder if we'll realize what must be done before it's too late.

I don't know. I don't have an answer for you.

At least, not a good one.

[vaspider]

How many of these far-right nut jobs attacking trans people believe the shit they spew and how many of them actually know that trans women, drag queens, HRT and queer education are all safe for kids and just don’t care?

I think there's a fundamental disconnect between the question that you ask and the answer.

They don't think that being gay is "safe," or that being trans is "safe," at all. Let's get that out of the way up front:

To the kind of person who spends their time attacking trans people, regardless of whether they do it for political expediency or out of a truly deeply held belief, being queer is a fail state for a person. If you are queer, these people think that you are failed. Fully. End of story. You might be a pitiable failure that they can pat on the head and feel good about patting on the head, because they're taking pity on you in your state of disgrace and failure and definitely going to hell, but they think you are a failure as a human being. Whatever else you do, you are a failed person. You could cure cancer and solve world hunger -- not that they actually want those things to happen either, because Evangelicals really believe that the world has to be a total shitheap for their messiah to return -- and you'd still be a failed person.

There is no "being trans" that is "safe," because ideologically, to them, the status of being queer in any fashion is unsafe, it is indicative of failure. You cannot have a 'safe' transition to them.

It's such an utterly broken mindset that it's really hard to convey it to anybody who hasn't lived in that culture or really had to wrestle with it. Asking 'how many of them know it is safe' is like asking 'how many fish breathe air.' By default, the answer is zero, because queerness to them is so completely anathema that there can't be a 'safe' in this situation.

How many of them are that kind of ideologue? A pretty high percentage, honestly. It's a very easy bigotry to carry; it requires pretty much no work. Thinking that another person's innate qualities make them a failure in a way that automatically makes you better than them is a very seductive mindset. "This person is trans, that is a failure, therefore, I am better than them," that kind of mindset means that even the most mediocre dude can feel good about himself simply by not being transgender. Like, seriously, think of the most mediocre transphobe you can think of, and then realize that he thinks he's better than you just because he's cis. Why would he ever challenge or question that thought, that maybe he's the failure and you're just living your best life?

So like... when you realize that homophobia and transphobia are an easy key to feeling better about a shitty life, and that queer people make a handy political cudgel, it's pretty clear that the answer is that 'all of them believe it,' it's just a question of whether they believe it because of religion, or because of political expediency, or because it's the only thing that gives a sense of superiority within a life otherwise devoid of achievement.

But yeah, they think that being queer at all is a fail state for a person, rather than one of the myriad manifestations of human diversity and beauty, so.

[rametarin]

Japan is seeing the hypocrisy.

I can only hope that some English speaking Japanese are telling the ones that cannot about this phenomenon. Because, it's not what it first appears to be.

It's easy to see the ridiculousness of it and assume the source of the hypocrisy is just black supremacism, or "America-centrism," which gets used to brush off why the group may be myopic and misunderstanding what discrimination actually is.

It is so easy to not understand what their ideology is and the absurd logic they use to justify why it's okay to darken the skin of native Japanese characters and go, "This is okay because it's good, but lightening darker characters is bigotry :^)"

I feel so terrible for the Japanese artists who are experiencing this and completely taken blindsided by not understanding what's going on. They don't deserve to be raked over the coals like this.

But I can tell the brewing conversation that has to be said is also one that this movement would rather not have, because they prefer to operate in broadbrush, positive sounding platitudes. Like, "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion." Where what that looks like in the micro or granular, is declaring Japanese in Japan are "oppressor majority" in Japan, so the "oppressed and minority" get to argue darkening characters up arbitrarily is acceptable, while erasure of Japanese identity and race is acceptable.

To someone that doesn't understand the ideology driving these people is class struggle theory in operation and praxis, it just seems like a simple racist supremacist preference. So they do what anybody does that tries to make them see reason; assume that the ideologue just doesn't understand the complete ramifications of discrimination in one direction, and they just need to understand race-swapping anybody and denying their identity and race is all discriminatory, in whatever direction it is, under those pretenses.

But the little asterisk thing here is, "Black people are more oppressed than Asians, so you're considered Oppressors to black people." And also another asterisk: "Asians are oppressors of Black people, whether in Asian dominant or white dominant spaces. Sorry, but you're also working against us, even when we're allies against white supremacy."

These are the sorts of granular lessons that you only learn when you're down the proverbial rabbithole and you get to see, "I'm against racism" becomes, "Racism is white supremacy and therefore black people cannot, under any circumstance, be bigoted towards white people." And you learn their platitudes only sound like neutral positive things until you realize they also believe culture is only valid when it's from a group arbitrarily declared to be 'oppressed minority,' according to Marxism.

Because that is the crux of what is arguing for its own validity, here. Marxism demanding to be the judge and criteria for how things are interpreted and delineated.

Asia is learning exactly where this ideology places Asians in the narrative. While it was attractive to hear, "white people and capitalism are the ultimate sources of oppression on earth and to non-European people," and they can kind of see some realistic and historical examples of it, that is not at all the reality they're using when they say this shit. They're saying this divorced from history and reality and living purely in on-paper theoretical concepts, and reality only kinda-sorta even being sympathetically similar is a coincidence. Like when your body confuses lead for calcium and builds a weak, painful bone.

By all rights, according to these peoples own Diversity, Equity, Inclusion ideas, "People should only voice characters of the same race," then the vast majority of characters in anime would require exclusively Japanese voice actors to dub them. And they would not allow black people or Latinos to voice the Asians.

But they won't do that, because the unspoken rule is, "black people are the most oppressed minority, so nobody else but black people are allowed to voice black characters, but black voice actors and writers may write or voice for anybody else. Because they're oppressed." The Progressives would consider it an absolute crime akin to a Minstel Show for whites to voice black characters, but as they do not consider white people or western culture to exist on its own or for whites to have their own distinct, separate identity and culture, they argue black writers and voice actors need not be white to interact with them- those characters and their stories have no integrity or meaning and can be switched out for a character with "actual culture" at a whim.

And it is a mistake to think this is at all about empowering black people or black supremacy. That's merely black people being weaponized and privileged as a shield and spear tip, while the people and motivating ideology hides behind it, operating and moving people and things in the background. Addressing black supremacism will not address this issue, because the root is not black supremacism. It is the red herring. It is the hard surface. It is the net to be captured by and make you look like an asshole for engaging it.

If I spoke Japanese, I'd try and convey this. But I don't. And I can't.

And it is incredibly frustrating knowing this.

[the-rainbow-lesbian]

This is about that marxist and islamist tiktok. At first I was like "yeah right red scare blah blah" but then I started connecting the dots and remembering all the ppl who had some sort of soviet obsession and how they were all about these "leftist principles" but when topic came to islam it all went *poof*. I've even seen marxist feminists act like being against islam is opressive but with christianity it is sometimes okay and especially in this last year I noticed how they would act when it came to israeli women. I just felt the need to write this bc I realized looking at their behaviour and words I believe that that woman is right. Who knows the ideology and its goals better than the ideologues, and they, like any group of people, will tell on themselves. All people will let things slide but it is really interesting when those things are womens rights and dignity.

what gets me is, groups like the IRGC, hezbollah, the houthis (for fuck's sake they have curse the jews on their flag) and hamas are incredibly honest and transparent about their goals, their materials and interviews are easily accessible and helpfully translated to english, a lot of exmuslims are outspoken too but I guess all of us are wrong and white mcfuckin whities knows best than we do about where we came from and what we grew up with? the same thing happened in iran when a lot of feminists did not want the IRGC to take over because of the mandatory hijab laws but they were told they need to sacrifice for the greater good and look where that got them now.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

the bunker :: @FinancialReview

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 16, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 17, 2025

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[breha]

[T]hose maligning [Jewish] non- or anti-Zionists are not saying they are not Jews; it’s even worse than that. These critics argue that those who diverge from the Zionist platform are essentially anti-Jews, or counter-Jews, because for these enforcers, Zionism – meaning support for the state of Israel as a Jewish state – has become a more essential marker of Jewish identity than Jewish practice, or any other criteria.  [...]

[W]hat happens if we take the argument that anti-Zionism is antithetical to Jewishness seriously – in fact, more seriously than some of these Zionist or pro-Israel enforcers do? The problem with this argument is that it’s easily contradicted by Zionist history itself. Some well-known early Zionists would have enthusiastically agreed that they themselves were out of step with any notion of normative Jewishness.  Take, for example, the radical Zionist Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski who identified himself as the “last Jew and the first Hebrew.” Or the Canaanites, a small but influential artistic and ideological movement in Palestine and then Israel in the 1940s and ’50s, founded by poet Yonatan Ratosh, who openly repudiated Judaism and Jewishness in favor of a new Hebrew nation – one that was explicitly not “Jewish.” To those familiar with the history of Zionism, it is well-known that many of these early Zionist ideologues viewed Zionism as the replacement for Judaism – not a complement or extension of it, nor a faction within it. Zionism as a political movement was, in effect, Judaism’s fulfillment, in the sense of completion; returning to the land of Israel was meant to make the Jewish religion superfluous. Even the most conventional Zionists of that era were devoted to the creation of a Hebrew – not necessarily Jewish – nation. Debates about Judaism as a religion, and Jewishness as an identity, were central to early Zionist thought. For example, the foundational Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’Am argued for cultural Zionism, the idea that Israel should become a “spiritual center” for world Jewry, in parallel with the continued Jewish diaspora. On the other hand, one of the tenets of early Zionism, exemplified in its extreme by Berdyczewski and the Canaanite movement, but present in most Zionist ideology, was the “negation of exile” (or the “negation of the diaspora”) – the erasure of exilic existence (and its supposed ills) through the foundation of a state in the Jewish homeland. As one can see, the relationship of early Zionists to Judaism was often quite tortured and complex. Today’s “heresy hunting” ignores, dismisses, or perhaps is simply unaware of the utterly radical, and revolutionary, nature of Zionism itself. It elides how Zionism often claimed to replace Judaism, which some viewed derisively as essentially a product of exile. It ignores recent Jewish history and culture, before most of American Jewry had become Zionist, and before statist Zionism was the dominant form of the Jewish national project. These simplistic thinkers who attack non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews don’t realize that the Zionism they take as coextensive with Judaism today was, for many of its architects, meant to be the alternative to Judaism. 

On Jews, un-Jews, and anti-Jews from The Necessity of Exile: Essays From A Distance by Shaul Magid

[critical-skeptic]

Why I Call Out Idiots, Ridicule Them, and Still Put in the Intellectual Effort

Let’s get one thing clear right out of the gate: engaging with the intellectually bankrupt isn't about convincing them. It’s not about changing the mind of the conspiracy nut, the QMAGA cultist, the religious zealot, or the Dunning-Kruger poster child who thinks they know more than any expert because they once watched a YouTube video. Most of these people are beyond reasoning. They've willingly turned off the critical thinking switch in their heads and committed to their insulated worldview. Trying to talk them out of it is like trying to teach a fish how to ride a bike—it’s pointless, exhausting, and ultimately a waste of time.

But here's the thing: I’m not talking to them. When I call out their bullshit, ridicule their arguments, and put the intellectual or academic effort into tearing down their fallacies, it's not for their benefit. They’re lost causes. It’s for the one person in the crowd—the bystander, the lurker, the person who hasn’t yet fully bought into the echo chamber of ignorance—who might be open to listening. That person? They’re worth the effort.

There's a popular conception that if you engage with these kinds of people, you should do so respectfully, patiently, and with empathy. Frankly, that’s nonsense. These ideologues don’t deserve respect because they have no respect for truth. They don't deserve empathy because their entire shtick is designed to perpetuate ignorance, division, and sometimes outright harm. When someone uses their platform to spread blatant lies or dangerous fallacies, they should be called out—and if it takes ridicule to do that, so be it.

Critics might say, "But you're not going to convince them if you're dismissive or rude." Guess what? I don’t give a damn. I’m not interested in convincing someone who thinks the Earth is flat, that vaccines are mind control devices, or that an invisible deity is pulling the strings of the universe. What I care about is the other people watching, the ones who are still on the fence. The ones who might be swayed if they see someone actually pushing back against the tide of misinformation. If one person out of a hundred sees my argument and it plants a seed of doubt in their mind about the nonsense they're being fed, that’s worth it.

This is about reaching them—the thinkers, the skeptics, the people who might not even realize they’re hungry for real information. Maybe they’ve been floating around in the middle, too timid or unsure to push back themselves, too lost in the noise to seek out better sources. When they see someone pushing back—whether with logic, mockery, or cold, hard facts—it might just give them the encouragement they need to look deeper.

We live in a time when people are retreating into ideological bubbles, only talking to people who agree with them. That’s dangerous. It allows bad ideas to fester, unchecked, and gives the impression that everyone is either an extremist or a coward. I'm not interested in talking only to my bubble. I want to break through the walls and let people outside see that there’s another way to think. That’s why I engage. That's why I argue. And when necessary, that's why I ridicule.

The problem with staying silent or pretending these people can be reasoned with is that it normalizes their nonsense. It gives the impression that their ideas are just one side of a "legitimate debate." Newsflash: they're not. When you engage with a creationist, you're not debating science versus religion. You're calling out blatant ignorance masquerading as intellect. When you respond to a QMAGA believer who claims Trump was sent by God, you’re not engaging in a political conversation. You’re confronting a cultist mindset. And when you take on a conspiracy theorist who thinks 5G is part of a global mind-control plot, you’re not discussing telecommunications technology; you're pointing out someone’s dangerous disconnection from reality.

So, why do I still bother? Because it matters. Even if 99 out of 100 people are unreachable, there’s always the chance that the one who’s left will see the truth. And that’s worth everything. We all have a responsibility not to just talk to our perceptive bubbles, but to provide others with the tools and information they need to see things for themselves. You don’t have to force anyone; you just have to be there to plant the seed.

The world doesn’t change because a few idiots get smarter—it changes when a silent majority sees that the idiots can and should be called out. When rational people stop being silent and start pushing back, others take notice. And maybe, just maybe, that leads to real change.

This is the goal—what should be everyone’s goal. Not to convince every lost cause, but to ensure that the people on the fence have a clear view of both sides. And to make damn sure they know which side is built on reason, evidence, and truth.

If calling out the bullshitters and ridiculing the dogmatic helps accomplish that, then I’ll gladly do it every day.

[onetwofeb]

LARGER THAN LIFE

A note on the death of Fredric Jameson

Slavoj Žižek

Fredric Jameson was not just an intellectual giant, the last true genius in contemporary thought. He was the ultimate Western Marxist, fearlessly reaching across the opposites which define our ideological space – a “Eurocentrist” whose work found a great echo in Japan and China, a Communist who loved Hollywood, especially Hitchcock, and detective novels, especially Chandler, a music lover immersed in Wagner, Bruckner and pop music… There is absolutely no trace of Cancel Culture with its stiff fake moralism in his work and life – one can argue that he was the last Renaissance figure.

What Jameson fought throughout his long life is the lack of what he called “cognitive mapping,” the inability to locate our experience within a meaningful whole. The instincts that directed him in this fight were always right - for example, in a nice stab against the fashionable cultural-studies rejection of “binary logic,” Jameson calls for “a generalized celebration of the binary opposition” – for him, the rejection of sexual binary goes hand in hand with the rejection of class binary… Still in a deep shock, I can only offer here some passing observations which provide a clear taste of his orientation.

Today, Marxists as a rule reject any form of immediacy as a fetish which obfuscates its social mediation. However, in his masterpiece on Adorno, Jameson deploys how a dialectical analysis includes its own point of suspension: in the midst of a complex analysis of mediations, Adorno all of a sudden makes a vulgar gesture of “reductionism,” interrupting a flow of dialectical finesse with a simple point like “ultimately it is about class struggle.” This is how class struggle functions within a social totality: it is not its “deeper ground,” its profound structuring principle which mediates all its moments, but something much more superficial, the point of failure of the endless complex analysis, a gesture of jumping-ahead to a conclusion when, in an act of despair, we raise our hands and say: “But after all, this is all about class struggle!” What one should bear in mind here is that this failure of analysis is immanent to reality itself: it is how society itself totalizes itself through its constitutive antagonism. In other words, class struggle IS a fast pseudo-totalization when totalization proper fails, it is a desperate attempt to use the antagonism itself as the principle of totalization.

It is also fashionable for today’s Leftists to reject conspiracy theories as a fake simplified solutions. However, years ago Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen which cannot be explained by a reference to some anonymous “logic of the capital” – for example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” of some financial circles. The true task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions.

Another Jameson’s insight which runs against today’s predominant post-colonial trend concerns his rejection of the notion of “alternate modernities,” i.e., the claim that our Western liberal-capitalist modernity is just one of the paths to modernization, and that other paths are possible which could avoid the deadlocks and antagonism of our modernity: once we realize that “modernity” is ultimately a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that such historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism which would avoid its constitutive antagonisms:

”How then can the ideologues of “modernity” in its current sense manage to distinguish their product—the information revolution, and globalized, free-market modernity—from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about “alternate” or “alternative” modernities. Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. . . . But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.”

The significance of this critique reaches far beyond the case of modernity—it concerns the fundamental limitation of the nominalist historicizing. The recourse to multitude (“there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of them irreducible to others”) is false not because it does not recognize a unique fixed “essence” of modernity, but because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism that inheres in the notion of modernity as such: the falsity of multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the capitalist system, by relegating this aspect to just one of its historical subspecies. One should not forget that the first half of the twentieth century already was marked by two big projects which perfectly fit this notion of “alternate modernity”: Fascism and Communism. Was not the basic idea of Fascism that of a modernity which provides an alternative to the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist one, of saving the core of capitalist modernity by casting away its “contingent” Jewish-individualist-profiteering distortion? And was not the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the late 1920s and 1930s also not an attempt at modernization different from the Western-capitalist one?

What Jameson avoided like a vampire avoids garlic was any notion of the enforced deeper unity of different forms of protest. Back in the early 1980s, he provided a subtle description of the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them: "To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant replies in its own favorite language."

In a similar way, the Swedish detective writer Henning Mankell is a unique artist of the parallax view. That is to say, the two perspectives – that of the affluent Ystad in Sweden and that of Maputo in Mozambique – are irretrievably »out of sync,« so that there is no neutral language enabling us to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the »truth« of the other. All one can ultimately do in today's conditions is to remain faithful to this split as such, to record it. Every exclusive focus on the First World topics of late capitalist alienation and commodification, of ecological crisis, of the new racisms and intolerances, etc., cannot but appear cynical in the face of the Third World raw poverty, hunger and violence; on the other hand, the attempts to dismiss the First World problems as trivial in comparison with the »real« Third World permanent catastrophies are no less a fake – focusing on the Third World »real problems« is the ultimate form of escapism, of avoiding to confront the antagonisms of one's own society. The gap that separates the two perspectives IS the truth of the situation.

As all good Marxists, Jameson was in his analysis of art a strict formalist – he once wrote about Hemingway that his terse style (short sentences, almost no adverbs, etc.) is not here to represents a certain type of (narrative) subjectivity (the lone hard-boiled cynical individual); on the contrary, Hemingway's narrative content (stories about bitter hard individuals) was invented so that Hemingway was able to write a certain type of sentences (which was his primary goal). Along the same lines, In his seminal essay »On Raymond Chandler,« Jameson describes a typical Chandler's procedure: the writer uses the formula of the detective story (detective's investigation which brings him into the contact with all strata of life) as a frame which allows him to fill in the concrete texture with social and psychological apercus, plastic character-portraits and insights into life tragedies. The properly dialectical paradox not to be missed here is that it would be wrong to say: »So why did the writer not drop this very form and give us pure art?« This complaint falls victim to a kind of perspective illusion: it overlooks that, if we were to drop the formulaic frame, we would lose the very »artistic« content that this frame apparently distorts.

Another Jameson’s unique achievement is his reading of Marx through Lacan: social antagonisms appear to him as the Real of a society. I still recall a shock when, at a conference on Lenin that I organized in Essen in 2001, Jameson surprised us all by bringing in Lacan as a reader of Trotsky’s dream. On the night of June 25 1935, Trotsky in exile dreamt about the dead Lenin who was questioning him anxiously about his illness: “I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, ‘This was after your death’; but I checked myself and said, ‘After you fell ill…’”

In his interpretation of this dream, Lacan focuses on the obvious link with Freud’s dream in which his father appears to him, a father who doesn’t know that he is dead. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn’t know he is dead? According to Jameson, there are two radically opposed ways to read Trotsky’s dream. According to the first reading, the terrifyingly-ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin “doesn’t know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and which we call soviet communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation expended on him by the living – that he was the originator of the Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP – none of those insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, upon him. How is it, how can it be, that he still thinks he is alive? And what is our own position here – which would be that of Trotsky in the dream, no doubt – what is our own non-knowledge, what is the death from which Lenin shields us?” But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Badiou calls the „eternal Idea“ of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill.

Like me, Jameson was a resolute Communist – however, he simultaneously agreed with Lacan who claimed that justice and equality are founded on envy: the envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. Following Lacan, Jameson totally rejected the predominant optimist view according to which in Communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures; dismissing this myth, he emphasizes that in Communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. Jameson’s solution is here radical to the point of madness: the only way for Communism to survive would be some form of universalized psychoanalytic social services enabling individuals to avoid the self-destructive trap of envy.

Another indication of how Jameson understood Communism was that he read Kafka’s story on Josephine the singing mouse as a socio-political utopia, as Kafka’s vision of a radically-egalitarian Communist society – with the singular exception that Kafka, for whom humans are forever marked by superego guilt, was able to imagine a utopian society only among animals. One should resist the temptation to project any kind of tragedy into Josephine’s final disappearance and death: the text makes it clear that, after her death, Josephine “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people”(my emphasis added).

In his late long essay “American Utopia,” Jameson shocked even most of his followers when he proposed as the model of a future post-capitalist society the army – not a revolutionary army but army in its inert bureaucratic functioning in the times of peace. Jameson takes as his starting point a joke from the Dwight D Eisenhower period that any American citizen who wants socialized medicine needs only to join the army to get it. Jameson’s point is that army could play this role precisely because it is organized in a non-democratic non-transparent way (top generals are not elected, etc.).

With theology it’s the same as with Communism. Although Jameson was a staunch materialist, he often used theological notions to throw a new light onto some Marxist notions – for example, he proclaimed predestination the most interesting theological concept for Marxism: predestination indicates the retroactive causality which characterizes a properly dialectical historical process. Another unexpected link with theology provides Jameson's remark that, in a revolutionary process, violence plays a role homologous to that of wealth in the Protestant legitimization of capitalism: although it has no intrinsic value (and, consequently, should not be fetishized and celebrated for itself, as in the Fascist fascination with it), it serve as a sign of the authenticity of our revolutionary endeavor. When the enemy resists and engages us in a violent conflict, this means that we effectively touched its raw nerve...

Jameson’s perhaps most perspicuous interpretation of theology occurs in his little-known text “Saint Augustine as a Social Democrat” where he argues how St Augustine’s most celebrated achievement, his invention of the psychological depth of personality of the believer, with all the complexity of its inner doubts and despairs, is strictly correlative to (or the other side of) his legitimization of Christianity as state religion, as fully compatible with the obliteration of the last remnants of radical politics from the Christian edifice. The same holds, among others, for the anti-Communist renegades from the Cold War era: as a rule, their turn against Communism went hand in hand with the turn towards a certain Freudianism, the discovery of psychological complexity of individual lives.

Another category introduced by Jameson is the “vanishing mediator” between the old and the new. “Vanishing mediator” designates a specific feature in the process of a passage from the old order to a new order: when the old order is disintegrating, unexpected things happen, not just horrors mentioned by Gramsci but also bright utopian projects and practices. Once the new order is established, a new narrative arises and, within this new ideological space, mediators disappear from view. Suffice it to take a look at the passage from Socialism to Capitalism in Eastern Europe. When in the l980s, people protested against the Communist regimes, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their lives outside of state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy . . . in short, the vague ideals that led the protesters were, to a large extent, taken from Socialist ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. In Europe, the socialism repressed in the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of Right populism.

Many of Jameson’s formulations became memes, like his characterization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Another such meme is his old quip (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) which holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine a total catastrophe on the earth which will terminate all life on it than a real change in capitalist relations – as if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism will somehow continue… So what if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the death of Jameson.

[bakaity-poetry]

Slavoj Žižek on Jameson

—————————————

LARGER THAN LIFE

A note on the death of Fredric Jameson

Slavoj Žižek

Fredric Jameson was not just an intellectual giant, the last true genius in contemporary thought. He was the ultimate Western Marxist, fearlessly reaching across the opposites which define our ideological space – a “Eurocentrist” whose work found a great echo in Japan and China, a Communist who loved Hollywood, especially Hitchcock, and detective novels, especially Chandler, a music lover immersed in Wagner, Bruckner and pop music… There is absolutely no trace of Cancel Culture with its stiff fake moralism in his work and life – one can argue that he was the last Renaissance figure.

What Jameson fought throughout his long life is the lack of what he called “cognitive mapping,” the inability to locate our experience within a meaningful whole. The instincts that directed him in this fight were always right - for example, in a nice stab against the fashionable cultural-studies rejection of “binary logic,” Jameson calls for “a generalized celebration of the binary opposition” – for him, the rejection of sexual binary goes hand in hand with the rejection of class binary… Still in a deep shock, I can only offer here some passing observations which provide a clear taste of his orientation.

Today, Marxists as a rule reject any form of immediacy as a fetish which obfuscates its social mediation. However, in his masterpiece on Adorno, Jameson deploys how a dialectical analysis includes its own point of suspension: in the midst of a complex analysis of mediations, Adorno all of a sudden makes a vulgar gesture of “reductionism,” interrupting a flow of dialectical finesse with a simple point like “ultimately it is about class struggle.” This is how class struggle functions within a social totality: it is not its “deeper ground,” its profound structuring principle which mediates all its moments, but something much more superficial, the point of failure of the endless complex analysis, a gesture of jumping-ahead to a conclusion when, in an act of despair, we raise our hands and say: “But after all, this is all about class struggle!” What one should bear in mind here is that this failure of analysis is immanent to reality itself: it is how society itself totalizes itself through its constitutive antagonism. In other words, class struggle IS a fast pseudo-totalization when totalization proper fails, it is a desperate attempt to use the antagonism itself as the principle of totalization.

It is also fashionable for today’s Leftists to reject conspiracy theories as a fake simplified solutions. However, years ago Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen which cannot be explained by a reference to some anonymous “logic of the capital” – for example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” of some financial circles. The true task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions.

Another Jameson’s insight which runs against today’s predominant post-colonial trend concerns his rejection of the notion of “alternate modernities,” i.e., the claim that our Western liberal-capitalist modernity is just one of the paths to modernization, and that other paths are possible which could avoid the deadlocks and antagonism of our modernity: once we realize that “modernity” is ultimately a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that such historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism which would avoid its constitutive antagonisms:

”How then can the ideologues of “modernity” in its current sense manage to distinguish their product—the information revolution, and globalized, free-market modernity—from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about “alternate” or “alternative” modernities. Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. . . . But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.”

The significance of this critique reaches far beyond the case of modernity—it concerns the fundamental limitation of the nominalist historicizing. The recourse to multitude (“there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of them irreducible to others”) is false not because it does not recognize a unique fixed “essence” of modernity, but because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism that inheres in the notion of modernity as such: the falsity of multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the capitalist system, by relegating this aspect to just one of its historical subspecies. One should not forget that the first half of the twentieth century already was marked by two big projects which perfectly fit this notion of “alternate modernity”: Fascism and Communism. Was not the basic idea of Fascism that of a modernity which provides an alternative to the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist one, of saving the core of capitalist modernity by casting away its “contingent” Jewish-individualist-profiteering distortion? And was not the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the late 1920s and 1930s also not an attempt at modernization different from the Western-capitalist one?

What Jameson avoided like a vampire avoids garlic was any notion of the enforced deeper unity of different forms of protest. Back in the early 1980s, he provided a subtle description of the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them: "To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant replies in its own favorite language."

In a similar way, the Swedish detective writer Henning Mankell is a unique artist of the parallax view. That is to say, the two perspectives – that of the affluent Ystad in Sweden and that of Maputo in Mozambique – are irretrievably »out of sync,« so that there is no neutral language enabling us to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the »truth« of the other. All one can ultimately do in today's conditions is to remain faithful to this split as such, to record it. Every exclusive focus on the First World topics of late capitalist alienation and commodification, of ecological crisis, of the new racisms and intolerances, etc., cannot but appear cynical in the face of the Third World raw poverty, hunger and violence; on the other hand, the attempts to dismiss the First World problems as trivial in comparison with the »real« Third World permanent catastrophies are no less a fake – focusing on the Third World »real problems« is the ultimate form of escapism, of avoiding to confront the antagonisms of one's own society. The gap that separates the two perspectives IS the truth of the situation.

As all good Marxists, Jameson was in his analysis of art a strict formalist – he once wrote about Hemingway that his terse style (short sentences, almost no adverbs, etc.) is not here to represents a certain type of (narrative) subjectivity (the lone hard-boiled cynical individual); on the contrary, Hemingway's narrative content (stories about bitter hard individuals) was invented so that Hemingway was able to write a certain type of sentences (which was his primary goal). Along the same lines, In his seminal essay »On Raymond Chandler,« Jameson describes a typical Chandler's procedure: the writer uses the formula of the detective story (detective's investigation which brings him into the contact with all strata of life) as a frame which allows him to fill in the concrete texture with social and psychological apercus, plastic character-portraits and insights into life tragedies. The properly dialectical paradox not to be missed here is that it would be wrong to say: »So why did the writer not drop this very form and give us pure art?« This complaint falls victim to a kind of perspective illusion: it overlooks that, if we were to drop the formulaic frame, we would lose the very »artistic« content that this frame apparently distorts.

Another Jameson’s unique achievement is his reading of Marx through Lacan: social antagonisms appear to him as the Real of a society. I still recall a shock when, at a conference on Lenin that I organized in Essen in 2001, Jameson surprised us all by bringing in Lacan as a reader of Trotsky’s dream. On the night of June 25 1935, Trotsky in exile dreamt about the dead Lenin who was questioning him anxiously about his illness: “I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, ‘This was after your death’; but I checked myself and said, ‘After you fell ill…’”

In his interpretation of this dream, Lacan focuses on the obvious link with Freud’s dream in which his father appears to him, a father who doesn’t know that he is dead. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn’t know he is dead? According to Jameson, there are two radically opposed ways to read Trotsky’s dream. According to the first reading, the terrifyingly-ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin “doesn’t know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and which we call soviet communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation expended on him by the living – that he was the originator of the Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP – none of those insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, upon him. How is it, how can it be, that he still thinks he is alive? And what is our own position here – which would be that of Trotsky in the dream, no doubt – what is our own non-knowledge, what is the death from which Lenin shields us?” But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Badiou calls the „eternal Idea“ of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill.

Like me, Jameson was a resolute Communist – however, he simultaneously agreed with Lacan who claimed that justice and equality are founded on envy: the envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. Following Lacan, Jameson totally rejected the predominant optimist view according to which in Communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures; dismissing this myth, he emphasizes that in Communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. Jameson’s solution is here radical to the point of madness: the only way for Communism to survive would be some form of universalized psychoanalytic social services enabling individuals to avoid the self-destructive trap of envy.

Another indication of how Jameson understood Communism was that he read Kafka’s story on Josephine the singing mouse as a socio-political utopia, as Kafka’s vision of a radically-egalitarian Communist society – with the singular exception that Kafka, for whom humans are forever marked by superego guilt, was able to imagine a utopian society only among animals. One should resist the temptation to project any kind of tragedy into Josephine’s final disappearance and death: the text makes it clear that, after her death, Josephine “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people”(my emphasis added).

In his late long essay “American Utopia,” Jameson shocked even most of his followers when he proposed as the model of a future post-capitalist society the army – not a revolutionary army but army in its inert bureaucratic functioning in the times of peace. Jameson takes as his starting point a joke from the Dwight D Eisenhower period that any American citizen who wants socialized medicine needs only to join the army to get it. Jameson’s point is that army could play this role precisely because it is organized in a non-democratic non-transparent way (top generals are not elected, etc.).

With theology it’s the same as with Communism. Although Jameson was a staunch materialist, he often used theological notions to throw a new light onto some Marxist notions – for example, he proclaimed predestination the most interesting theological concept for Marxism: predestination indicates the retroactive causality which characterizes a properly dialectical historical process. Another unexpected link with theology provides Jameson's remark that, in a revolutionary process, violence plays a role homologous to that of wealth in the Protestant legitimization of capitalism: although it has no intrinsic value (and, consequently, should not be fetishized and celebrated for itself, as in the Fascist fascination with it), it serve as a sign of the authenticity of our revolutionary endeavor. When the enemy resists and engages us in a violent conflict, this means that we effectively touched its raw nerve...

Jameson’s perhaps most perspicuous interpretation of theology occurs in his little-known text “Saint Augustine as a Social Democrat” where he argues how St Augustine’s most celebrated achievement, his invention of the psychological depth of personality of the believer, with all the complexity of its inner doubts and despairs, is strictly correlative to (or the other side of) his legitimization of Christianity as state religion, as fully compatible with the obliteration of the last remnants of radical politics from the Christian edifice. The same holds, among others, for the anti-Communist renegades from the Cold War era: as a rule, their turn against Communism went hand in hand with the turn towards a certain Freudianism, the discovery of psychological complexity of individual lives.

Another category introduced by Jameson is the “vanishing mediator” between the old and the new. “Vanishing mediator” designates a specific feature in the process of a passage from the old order to a new order: when the old order is disintegrating, unexpected things happen, not just horrors mentioned by Gramsci but also bright utopian projects and practices. Once the new order is established, a new narrative arises and, within this new ideological space, mediators disappear from view. Suffice it to take a look at the passage from Socialism to Capitalism in Eastern Europe. When in the l980s, people protested against the Communist regimes, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their lives outside of state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy . . . in short, the vague ideals that led the protesters were, to a large extent, taken from Socialist ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. In Europe, the socialism repressed in the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of Right populism.

Many of Jameson’s formulations became memes, like his characterization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Another such meme is his old quip (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) which holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine a total catastrophe on the earth which will terminate all life on it than a real change in capitalist relations – as if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism will somehow continue… So what if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the death of Jameson.

[eretzyisrael]

By NAYA LEKHET

Other strategies to combat anti-Zionism include demonstrating that Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, thus opposing the claim that Zionism is a form of settler-colonialism. The logic here being, a group of people who are indigenous cannot be colonists. While this is true, that is, that Jews are very much the indigenous people of Israel, it reinforces the progressive framework that power equals guilt. 

A third dominant strategy is to influence Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in universities, hoping that in the mandated anti-racism and anti-discrimination trainings, DEI officers would include the long-suffering Jews. But as Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, founder of AMCHA recently writes, “it turns out there are numerous problems involved in trying to address antisemitism within a DEI framework... as a practical matter, DEI programs limit their ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ efforts to certain identity groups, which rarely include Jews.”

Focusing predominately on marginalized groups, DEI programs are not equipped to deal with the fact that for American Jews, “this is no longer the case.” DEI frameworks necessitate a worldview in which only marginalized people matter. By extension, Zionists, who are Jews with power, not only do not matter but must be dealt with opprobrium. This is not an opinion. It is a fact. In December 2021, the Heritage Foundation published a troublesome finding in which DEI staff harbor antisemitic views toward Israel and Zionism.

What, then, is the solution? At the forefront of this battle is the Institute for Jewish Liberal Values, founded by David Bernstein, whose 2022 book Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews documents how the sweeping ideology of progressivism has given fertile ground for contemporary Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism, to flourish. Identifying a correlation between progressive ideology and antisemitism, Bernstein’s important work sheds light on how and why Zionism is perceived to be racism as progressive ideologues espouse the notion that people with power can be racists.

Naturally, the solution would be to disprove that Jews are privileged, or rather prove that they are beleaguered. But we are not. In numbers alone, we are, indeed, a minority. But we are successful; moreover, Zionism is the realization of the Jewish people’s will to take its rightful place among the nations: to establish secure political borders under the aegis of self-determination.

As Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Revisionist Zionist leader and military commander of the Irgun, said in 1937, “Tell them [the Jewish People] three things in my name, and not two: they must get iron [i.e. weapons]; they must choose a king; and they must learn to laugh.” We are to read this statement as an extension of self-determination. This is Zionism: the Jew with the weapon who is a sovereign. This, however, is also entirely unpalatable to progressivism.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

What do you think it will take for the gendie/trans movement to die?

Lawsuits.

And losses.

Some organizations are not really on board with this ideology, but are playing along either because there's a loud minority of moralizing activist ideologues - mostly woke, straight white churchladies who style themselves as "queer" or "nonbinary", or at least, "allies" - within them who are sucking up all the oxygen, or because they feel they're obliged to by the market. And particularly, they don't want to be conspicuously non-compliant. They just want the beast to eat someone else. For reference, see the Twitter accounts which post Pride banners and icons in western countries, but not in Middle East/North Africa (MENA) countries. They just need sufficient reason - legal or financial - to start ignoring the ideologues and get back on-mission.

Others are fully on board, from the top down. And unfortunately, this category tends to include medical institutions. These organizations need a good legal or financial bat taken to them. Which will hopefully then trigger a spill of their management layer. And with more and more whistleblowers, and more and more lawsuits, such as those by Chloe Cole, Layla Jane and others coming down the pipeline, and increased scrutiny due to the widening gap between European and North American approaches, something will eventually give. Insurers, risk assessors, shareholders, regulators and others with a vested interest in the longevity and viability of the organization will be forced to intercede. Especially as it becomes undeniable that the Europeans are deferring to evidence, while the North Americans have succumbed to ideology. At some point, the US in particular, will need to undergo the same process as the UK, Finland and other countries in conducting an inquiry and review into what's going on and the scientific evidence that supports it... or not.

The really big problem is that these ideologues are notorious liars. Consider what happened when the Tavistock was announced to close, with the interim Cass report describing the GIDS service as "not safe or viable as a long-term option for the care of young people with gender related distress." The ideologues spun this into "they're closing it down so they can open many more! Nothing wrong with it except capacity!" Countries like Finland and Sweden have stopped prescription of puberty blockers and hormones, which was spun into "they didn't ban affirmation" (i.e. blockers and hormones). They conveniently leave out the part where they can only be used in strictly controlled clinical trials, because the current evidence is astonishingly weak. It's like saying "ebola is safe" because certain high-security labs have access to it for research and testing. It's the same kind of pathological dishonesty you get from Xians trying to make their demon god into the "good" guy because free will, salvation, you send yourself to hell, etc, etc.

There are also people so over-invested that actually acknowledging the boiling pot they found themselves in would be too psychologically damaging. Imagine being a Jack Turban, who has made his name lying for virtue, being confronted with the people whose lives were directly impacted by the misrepresentations he'd spun. Or being Michelle Forcier and figuring out you'd spent your life sterilizing children for no reason. How do you ever come back from something like that? The psychological architecture of religiosity tends to have mechanisms to protect the believer from the psychological damage of this kind of atrocity: denial, rationalization, etc. We see that in the traditionally religious. It's not even possible to get a Xian to acknowledge the logical and moral problems with religious concepts such as hell, sin or salvation. They're psychologically incapable. Even if Ray Comfort realized he'd made a mistake about evolution, he'd never be able to publicly admit it, and would still go on with his schtick. Because backing out of such a major commitment would be inconceivable.

I wish I could say that people will have a "come to Jesus" moment (so to speak), an epiphany and come to their senses. But that won't happen. It won't be a moral or scientific revelation, it will ultimately be the pragmatism of the bottom line.

People can believe that they have a mismatched gender thetan living in their body, or that they are "cakegender" or whatever. But they don't get to force the entirety of society to play along, any more than a Xian gets to force everyone else to pray, or a Muslim gets to force everyone to observe Ramadan. We need to start reassembling the secular walls the genderists have been breaching.

[love-me-like-a-reptile]

The internet as a whole has a problem with obsessing over the shitty opinions of rando individuals who you literally wouldn't even know existed without the internet. I'm not talking about dangerous political movements, or ideologues, or rich guys who chose to become mouthpieces for violent ideology just to make themselves richer.

I mean some random cornball in Bumfuck, North Dakota who's severely out of touch with reality making extremely lukewarm takes and forming parasocial discourses & vagueposts around said takes and I realize the hypocrisy of me saying this because I'm forming parasocial discourse and vagueposting about parasocial discourse and vagueposting but like... people are putting way too much weight into this shit.

People are dying and starving and working themselves to death and it's extremely privileged to be sitting on Tumblr.com giving yourself a fucking aneurysm over rage bait because "person practically indistinguishable from Chris-Chan did this" and "niche micro-celebrity said that" and "person X on the opposite side of the country said person Y isn't punk" GO OUTSIDE!!!

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

February 16, 2025

Feb 17

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.”

German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.

—

[misfitwashere]

February 16, 2025 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 17

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.

—

[miiju86]

@the-metroplois-marvel ..... gosh you have problems.

First - what has the sex of a person to do with them promoting and upholding misogynistic male-supremacist ideology? Nothing.

The only ones here acting all offended - and hateful by they way - are you guys.

First, one of you comes on, reblogging from me absolutely nothing to say, nothing to add to the post; but to creech "she's a terf". And why is this done? Because people like you coined this term to ostracize, bully, threaten, fire and silence people - notably feminist women.

No other motivation behind that. Because that is what you all actually mean and wanna say: "shut up bitch". For there are no "terfs" - you just mean feminists.

So who is really hateful here? Hint: It's you.

Only thing I did, was to answer. That's all.

I also said absolutely nothing about trans-identifying people, at all.

It is you that is offended and attacks with slurs and insults.

And all that just to defend, uphold and further promote socially enforced patriarchy - which is what 'gender' is.

And with that comes all what it entails:

Gender ideology is regressive, oppressive, massively misogynistic and homophobic and even racist (just go look up how they abuse black women to push their bioessentialist* belief - it's disgusting)

(*yes - YOU are bioessentislist. YOU are saying your body &/or its sex HAS to define everything about you, your personality, your place and worth(!) in the world. Feminism says the exact opposite.)

Instead of realizing, that all these people that don't fit in these boxes of stereotypes are an excellent proof that gender IS NOT REAL, they go on and uphold it even more.

It's nothing but patriarchy on steroids. An oppressive and exploitative system of social hierarchy.

The "trad" genderists tell you, you have to bend and mutilate your mind and soul to fit; the modern, queer-theory gender ideologues tell you to mutilate your body instead.

It's just two sides of the VERY SAME coin....

"Gender" is going backwards. Regressing.

It means going back to - again - more division, more inequality, more authoritarianism, more dogmatism, more imposed cult-like faith instead of truth. It means ideology over science, over truth, over everything.

It means extreme capitalist consumerism (*BUY* your "real self"! Buy, buy, buy!). It means authoritarin behaviours like policing and oppressing freedom of speech, information-control, lobbying with mostly astroturf organizations; it even means teaching people straight up thought-stopping techniques (Just look at what & who started this here! What do you think they do that for??).

That's also why all of this is absolutely no surprise, why only males really benefit from it and why only women & femaleness are getting targeted, erased, oppressed, exploited and - again - straight up appropriated and colonized.

It's even so far gone already that they're talking about "men and non-men" - "female" being completely erased as a lived, physical reality, existing in its own right.

You never see 'sex' and 'genderidentity' on the same level, treated equally. This is, because it's literally impossible - for the concept of 'gender' is directly opposed to the ideologically neutral physical reality of sex and the egalitarian thought behind sex-based rights.

'Gender' is social class hierarchy based on male-supremacist thought. It is lived patriarchy.

And last but not least - it hurts the most vulnerable the most.

It hurts especially women and girls. It hurts young gay people. It hurts overproportionally neurodivergent people (esp. young autistic people). It hurts and targets the ones that suffer the most under the gendered social hierarchy we still have anyways.... and feeds them even more of it.

THIS is what you felt the need to attack me for. So that all your people would know who to avoid, so none of these truths would come out.

THIS.

THIS.

let that sink in....