#they claim to be against fascism and then turn around and call people fascist for not being center-right enough politically

[alertarchitect]

Gotta love seeing concrete proof of liberal brainrot.

So, I use BlueSky a decent amount. It's kinda Twitter-like in function, but instead of algorithmic bullshit that actively pushes white supremacist content, it's an open-source platform that lets you curate your own feed - it's kinda like Tumblr in that latter respect, actually - that has a lot of really cool trans people on it. Overall, it's a great place, and my boyfriend enjoys it a lot too since it's NSFW friendly and he's an NSFW artist. And I just had my first experience of being knowingly blocked on there!

Essentially, someone I follow was responding to a post of a person who was saying no one should ever use Twitter due to how it's mostly a Nazi cesspool at this point, but was using that sentiment to push hate towards trans sex workers because there are more than a few of them that are basically forced to use Twitter in order to actually keep their income since no other website has the same level of users & engagement that actually allows them to pay their bills. I then made a kinda generic reply to the effect of "yeah I agree there's more nuance than this person seems to think there is, there's no reason for trans SWs to force themselves into poverty just because the main platform they're forced to use is fucking horrible." This lead to the person encouraging hate towards, and the harassment of, trans SWs to attempt to make a strawman of that statement calling me - a queer, neurodivergent anarchist - a Nazi sympathizer because I don't think trans people should go into poverty and starve just because the only way they can make money in our fucked-up system is by using Twitter to advertise their sex work.

She then blocked me for calling out her obvious strawman that refuses to acknowledge nuance, and found out from another user in the conversation that the person who blocked me is a liberal to the degree that, to quote the post, "[other user] resigned as her moderator after she insisted that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't a communist because that would mean he didn't support her ideals of liberal democracy and then she called a sexual assault survivor a liar purely because her abuser was a Democratic politician."

I don't understand how someone who claims to be a leftist and is a published academic refuses to engage with the facts of reality so thoroughly that she's doing the same kind of bigotry the people she claims to be against engage in. I should also note this same person ended up blocking and/or muting everyone in the discussion that was part of the exact minority group she was sending harassment towards, who were all being rather polite. I was the only one that got any level of rude and even then it was only after she called me a Nazi sympathizer for disagreeing with her.

[destinygoldenstar]

Apple White is by far one of the best written ‘spoiled brat’ archetype characters I’ve ever seen.

She’s actually my favorite character in Ever After High, but NOT because she’s a good person. Quite the opposite in fact.

Like, obviously we all sympathize with Raven and how screwed over she is by their worlds ‘follow your destiny’ system as the daughter of the Evil Queen, and we’re absolutely routing for her when she says no to it.

Nobody is agreeing with Apple one bit when she calls this move selfish and that she ruined everything. It’s very much the deciding factor for a lot of people to hate Apple.

And… yeah. Fair.

Like “She had a future planned out for her where she’s forced to do a heinous crime and get ostracized for it her entire life and imprisoned like a monster at the end. And she DIDN’T want that? HOW DARE SHE?!”

Like, yes, the show wants you to hate Apple in this scene and be on Raven’s side.

But it feels like a lot of people from then on completely dismiss every single line and action Apple makes as pure evil fascism propaganda with no depth behind it.

And that’s just not true, because that in no way makes her a bad character.

“Well, actually, Apple is promoting a fascist world system and forcing everyone around her to conform in it, then proceeds to act entitled to her own role in that system where she does not suffer one bit. And that’s a bad thing.”

WELL NO SHIT THATS A BAD THING. ITS ALMOST LIKE THATS THE POINT.

The show never frames her as the one with the moral high ground, the closest they get to that is when it’s an argument that’s morally grey on both ends.

The entire point of the Royal’s side of the story, and Apple’s character, is that she is a byproduct of promotion to a system that is morally f*cked. Where she is an exception as a person who gets the best possible future by that very system.

She was born and raised in a world that heavily values destiny as its main driving force and all the myths that come with it. Myths their world was raised to believe. She was born and raised on the top of the world, and destined for nothing but greatness and to be a successful ruler. Of course she’s gonna be a harder glass to break.

When you’re told all your life that ‘you have to do what the book tells you or you will all DIE’. Of course you’re gonna believe it and push your loved ones to believe it. Especially since, you know, in your point of view there’s no negatives to it.

Sure your roommate doesn’t get a happy ending by that, but that’s just a necessary sacrifice. A means to an end. A sacrifice for your own life of royalty to happen.

That’s a sacrifice they’re willing to do and is worth it. Right? RIGHT?!

And then what do you know, her worldview gets absolutely shattered throughout the show as her loved ones join the rebels and call Apple out on her bullshit.

True Hearts Day, her friend Ashlynn is dating a guy that isn’t her intended prince. And Apple tries to help her through her crisis on the matter… by encouraging her to dump the guy because ‘destiny’. And when Ashlynn doesn’t do that, Apple, while deciding to still claim Ashlynn a friend, still says that she thinks it’s wrong.

Thronecoming, there’s Raven deciding to sign for the sake of them, and then it turns out that was a scheme by Milton Grimm, to which Apple actually calls him out and sides with Raven for the first time. And gee, I wonder who prompted that? Maybe it had to do that her best friend got a reality check in her own fate and went against it, which Apple experienced herself, and got rescued by that very friend.

Then there’s Way Too Wonderland, where that whole system Apple has known gets DESTROYED. Ironically by Raven doing the very thing Apple wanted from the beginning. Part of that has to do with everything she’s been through with her friends and Raven thus far. But also in this special, Raven succeeds in her own routes, and even encourages Lizzie to follow her destiny in one scene, something Apple would’ve never imagined from Raven at that point. But one that makes sense because Lizzie genuinely wanted that life and it was always her choice. And, you know, don’t give the throne to the dictator jester. And who is the one to snap Raven out of her power trip? Oh yeah, Apple.

Then there’s Dragon Games, which might as well be the ‘Apple redemption arc’ special. Which starts with her doing the morally worse thing she’s ever done, letting the Evil Queen free from her prison and proceeding to HELP HER.

All because she couldn’t accept this new world she’s found herself in, where she was not only not on top anymore, but was left aimless and lost with no direction. It was painful to her, and it shows. The spoiled privileged girl isn’t spoiled and privileged anymore. Whatever could she do?

So she really was just a sitting duck asking to be persuaded by evil. This is the only point in the entire show where I would call Apple a ‘villain’. Before, yeah she was antagonistic, but she wasn’t actively doing evil things, at least in her mind. Here? She knows her actions are wrong, but she’s doing them anyway to save her own skin.

And she gets exactly what she deserves for it. She gets the same ostracizing that Raven would’ve gotten from Apple’s own ideals. She makes her own loved ones lives so much worse.

But it’s only through that very brutality that she does everything she can to make up for her actions, side with the rebels, apologize for her spoiled behavior, and fight for a future she can’t see. Something she wouldn’t have done before.

(Oh yeah there was also this whole bit where she gets poisoned and comatose and it turned out her Prince Charming was actually a lesbian… honestly that just felt like a waste of fifteen minutes. I mean, maybe that was leading up to more Apple character development, but too bad the show got cancelled before it was shown, isn’t that great-?!)

You can’t tell me that Legacy Day Apple and Dragon Games Apple are the same person.

It’s almost like she was a character designed to be flawed and unlikeable and was set to grow and change as a better person through trials.

But another reason why I loved her as a ‘spoiled brat archetype’ was that she felt like a real person. A real, spoiled person. She was spoiled, but she wasn’t self aware of it.

She’s not a selfish rich lady who abuses her riches because she could. She wasn’t complaining about getting her hands dirty or demanding anyone worship her. Unless it’s an inanimate object. The only time I remember her complaining about her stuff being broken was with that one mirror episode, and even then it was revealed her whining was an act and she wasn’t bothered by it. She just wanted to torture Raven with guilt I guess. She also isn’t screaming for her parents to do her bidding.

Rather Apple, while a massive hypocrite, is portrayed, in her view, as a genuine hardworking person who cared and valued the people around her. She cares about her position as a future queen and understands it’s a massive responsibility and never complains about the work. She does it all. No matter what it is. She puts in effort to perfect her role, and only ever accepts the praise when she feels she’s earned it. She actually gets a bit self conscious when she’s not doing something exactly right. Well, when she’s aware it’s even wrong anyway.

Not only that, but she genuinely loves the people in her life and wants to make as warm of a presence as possible. Yeah she accused a lot of stereotypes with Raven when designing her room, but she also had no reason to have Raven as a roommate because they’re supposed to be enemies. But she makes the arrangement anyway because she values Raven and the partnership needed, even if she doesn’t value Raven’s ideals. She doesn’t dismiss Raven as ‘a bad person’ just ‘someone destined to be bad, and just doing a job’.

She actually cares about her friends and their well being. If she didn’t care about Ashlynn or Briar, why would she even try to help them in their crisis episodes? Yeah her way of helping is anything but, but in her point of view she is. She also does not push Daring into a relationship just because it’s set in stone. Points for consent I guess.

She also doesn’t use her mother as a tool for her own gain or for a step stool for her own progress at their lineage. It’s her mom that does all the pressure on the daughter. Aww she’s a mommy’s girl.

Watching the show and hearing all the Apple hate beforehand, I was waiting the entire show for the rug to be pulled under, where it was revealed that Apple’s kind demeanor was just an act and she was actually a very nasty manipulative mean girl…

…and that never happened.

Hell, the only time that DID happen, was because of a CURSE in Spring Unsprung. A curse that makes the person act the opposite of their true selves. So that was the real rug being unpulled that it wasn’t an act and Apple actually cared about fairness and good heart. (Also cursed Apple is a treasure. Sorry not sorry.)

I’m just saying, there’s a lot of spoiled archetypes they could’ve done with her but didn’t do. And I appreciate it cause it makes her seem far more realistic. And it makes her hypocrisy hit that much harder.

But she is still spoiled. She knows she’s on the top of the world and has the highest privilege in this world, and thus everyone treats her like a queen. So she subconsciously expects that admiration and praise, and when she doesn’t get it, there’s something wrong. Things come so easy to her because of her privilege, even if she puts in the effort to earn it. That IS being spoiled.

And on top of that, her forcing her friends to conform in a life that benefits her, IS very much spoiled behavior.

Like, she feels like how a spoiled privileged entitles teenager would actually act in the real world. (And Do)

And yet, while it’s very obvious to us how spoiled rotten she is, it doesn’t feel like Apple has self awareness. In her mind, she earns the attention and praise. And again, destiny is a whole reality they have that’s drilled into her head. So in her mind, she’s the most logical person in the room, and cannot accept the change. Because change would mean that she’d lose not only her future, but her privilege. And when she does, it’s so much emotional turmoil for her that she goes to the dark side to get it back.

I love that her transition from spoiled brat of a system to a humiliated rebel of that system is very rough and rocky. Because how can you expect someone like her to immediately accept a situation like this? There’s a lot more depth that goes into the discussion besides ‘following destiny bad, living life blind good’. And that absolutely shines with Apple teetering on the fence again and again.

So yeah I like this character. Can’t stop me.

(If you hate her though, I understand that.)

[infiniteglitterfall]

*gym coach voice* O-kay, people, walk it back! Walk it back!

First: you're all confusing communism with fascism. Here's how.

Donald Trump is a fascist. He didn't pull off running America as a fascist dictatorship by 2020. But he pushed the country so far towards fascism that he was able to attempt a coup at the end of his term.

If his coup had succeeded, this would be a fascist dictatorship right now, run under the name of democracy. Some elements of democracy would remain. Local and state voting systems, for example. And the constant loud claim that were are the one great force for democracy on earth.

That doesn't mean democracy is an evil, fascist system.

Likewise, communist countries have included A TON of fascism. Ranging from bloody coups to decades-long genocide.

Those aren't the communist elements. That's the fascism.

The ideology of communism, like the ideology of democracy, is about ensuring the rights of the common people. It's much more about human rights than the ideology of democracy is (imho), and is usually focused specifically on protecting those rights -- as a reaction to top-down, centralized governments taking them away.

It's about how the workers, in any industry, create most of the value, and get to share in almost none of it. It's about centering the voices of those workers, and of the rest of the common people. About how all of us can work together to run things, instead of being run.

It's all that Tumblr ideology that we're so used to.

Second: Angela Davis is a human being. Human beings are complicated messes.

She is an Icon who has Achieved Amazing Things. And yeah, actually, she absolutely has defended and supported genocidal regimes in the name of communism.

As far back as the 70s, when she was a political prisoner, people asked her about imprisoned Czech dissidents who were also political prisoners. And she said, "They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison."

When Alan Dershowitz asked her to help "Jewish refuseniks and other prisoners of conscience" who had been imprisoned for opposing that Czech regime (which, for example, denied Jewish religious rights), she told him, "They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism."

She was very "by any means necessary" about communism and socialism. She also has a very American perspective. In our Christan-normative culture, it's hard for people to even encounter the concept that Judaism is a culture and an ethnicity, never mind understanding how those things are interwoven with religion, or how fundamentally different it is from Christianity.

It's like, once people turn against Christianity, or the Christofascism of the right wing, they assume that that's just how religion works, therefore religion is inherently bad.

They don't have the knowledge to see where that can run directly into the antisemitism you find in fascism.

And third: to white supremacy, communism IS Jewish; both of those are also queer, as in screwing around with the rules of gender; and all three of those, along with every form of disability and non-white race, are Perversions of a Healthy Aryan Body/Mind.

Some people might balk at calling queerness "screwing around with the rules of gender." Those people are looking at it from an insider's perspective, from a culture in which gays and lesbians firmly separated out the trans people decades ago.

From the outside bigot's perspective, we're all a bunch of kinda creepy gross weirdos. SOME of them mentally separate "the good ones," the few straight-passing white gays they personally know of.

But even the Log Cabin Republicans (a gay republican sect) are willing to throw in their lot with the party that's banning drag brunches, and banning gay books in schools, and whose Supreme Court is openly waiting to challenge their marriage rights.

Like I said, human beings are messes. As bi icon Walt Whitman wrote, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Some people (not Walt Whitman, who is dead anyway) are willing to risk a sacrifice, as long as they can take down those they hate.

The rules of gender explicitly include being hetero, gender-normative, and following the Hetero Life Path.

The Nazis were VERY CLEAR ABOUT THIS. They wanted nice straight white Aryans getting married young and making LOTS of nice straight white Aryan babies.

Yes, that sounds like the command of every evangelical cult church. But if you noticed that, you probably already know that that the white supremacist/evangelical Venn diagram is often perilously close to being a circle.

The reason the Nazis were burning communist books is that, to a white supremacist, a Jew is an evil creature who controls money, education, government, and the media.

They basically think that we're scheming to make the world "soft," to use "bread and circuses" (communism/socialism and the media) to distract and corrupt everyone until they can't fight back.

To seduce them into "liberal" "perversions." Until the world is a bunch of blue-haired, pronoun-having, multiply-pierced, mentally ill, physically disabled, special snowflake freaks.

To most of us, Judaism, socialism, communism, trans rights, disability rights, indigenous movements, Black Lives Mattering, etc, are extremely different topics. They're an overly-widely-spread-out Venn diagram, with slight overlaps labeled "intersectionality."

To white supremacists, that Venn diagram is a circle.

[cosmicanger]

❍

❍ “Reminder that in 2020, the first two weeks of rebellion were not led by Leftist orgs/milieus. Leftists joined the fray late and largely engaged through a range of tactics, from support for the militants to general agitation + conscientization. Others moved counterinsurgent tho. These, alongside the regular old conservative political guard, typical pacifist liberals, radlibs looking for photo ops, the buy black and black business crowd, the fascists and sinophobic anti-vaxxers, the pigs, & these companies all worked in different ways to coopt the energy. Alot of what we are seeing rn re: Tyre Nichols are strategies that I didn't see prior to summer 2020. They are also all culminations of strategies that have been being worked out against Black Rebellion for decades, most especially from the late 20th century onward.”

❍ “the idea that its only “white anarchists” who are militants when it comes to anti-police movements should be discredited by now. the idea that the only legitimate multi-racial organizing or activity is that happening in orgs that focus on policy should also be discredited by now.”

❍ “I think some wise activists have rightly pointed out that some actions have become liberal parades and serve no purpose. For whatever APTP is or will be, it does seem clear the organization and its leadership embraced NGO money and the org is now part of the system. We can’t achieve our goals by embracing liberalism and incrementalism. Rolling down the street behind a truck, standing around and then dispersing is the very definition of a liberal parade. That’s their choice and their type of action. Perhaps they will achieve some good with their NGO cash. That said, real change comes from the actions of people that fight and resist by all and any means. That much we know.”

❍ “we need ungovernable Black communities—not just from the State, but all extensions, functionally or by proxy, of it, including the NPIC and orgs/groups which prioritize hierarchy above all else. this is by far one of the most direct ways to reach the margins because these ungovernable communities are by definition distant from the structures and institutions that create that marginalization such as the police. they are where we are most safe.”

❍ “ppl who aren’t in the bay & have little to no experience with street movements in the bay, please read this. aptp leadership has been actively working against militancy in anti-police street movements before aptp was even a thing—only now they have a lot more $$$ thanks to their associations with the Tides (Foundation) Network and Cullors’s BLM™️. ppl unfamiliar with their history boosting them isn’t helping this worsening situation.”

❍ “imagine the amount of lost time and resources wasted by the NPIC and shitty "socialist" orgs that when not being antiBlack, they protect abusers and sexual assaulters.”

❍ “another way of saying that “you can’t reform this” is to say “you can’t defund this. you have to abolish it or it goes on.” ppl trying to “defund” literally got their messaging turned against them by both the gop & dems after the riots of 2020. you rlly can’t reform this… you cannot trick the state into slowly but surely disarming itself so that you can then take it down, too.”

❍ “so annoyed with the ppl bragging about how peaceful the protests are. it doesn't matter, fascists will not suddenly grow a conscience because you protest peacefully. you either destroy fascism or it will destroy you.”

❍ “this swift condemnation of Black cops has more to do with the fact that they’re Black and therefore can be scapegoated to pretend that reform is occurring, than it does with literally anything else, including the murder itself.”

❍ “anyone calling for more funding of police and military in this country is a fascist. it's someone who is condoning ongoing genocides. i don't care what party they claim.”

❍ “i'm so upset "defend the p*lice” ever came from the mouths of "abolitionists". it should've been defund or nothing.

❍ “the c*ps were gloating and bragging to each other over beating Tyre Nichols to death because that's what policing is about—the brutal lynching of Black people.”

[antifainternational]

Hi, I'm from Germany and it's bothering me that you're using the three arrows in your avatar. 1933, the german communist party called for a general strike against Hitler and the iron front who used the arrows as their symbol refused to participate, weakening something that could've been a very powerful action of all workers. One of the arrows symbolizes fighting communism, which means that the iron front rather sat and did nothing against fascism instead of working with communist. If you show up with the three arrows at an antifascist protest in germany, you get side eyed, not only by communists but also by anarchists. To us they symbolize being inactive in a time where action would've made a huge difference, and today only the party SPD is using them sometimes when they want to act like they're part of the antifascist movement while they're in reality centrist cowards that have been busy butchering worker's rights for the past 30 years. They're using the arrows specifically to distance themselves from more radical anti-capitalist groups and groups who feel that parlamentarian democracy is not enough and call for a government that makes it possible for everyone to participate way beyond voting. Some of them think talking to nazis is a good strategy. I gather that the symbol is seen differently in America, but for a worldwide antifascist group I feel like you should consider the origins

Ah, it's that time the year again when we get to school folks about the antifascist "three arrows" symbol!

The antifa “three arrows” symbol is one of the most recognizable anti-fascist symbols in the world.  It originated with the Iron Front - a militant antifascist organization created in late 1931 in Germany by the Reichsbanner, the socialist SPD, and various labor organizations (Bray, Mark; Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook; pg. 23).  The SPD had a lengthy history of hostilities with the KPD, the German communist party at the time, which is probably why some people have misconstrued it as an "anti-communist" symbol.

Mark Bray writes in his book that the “three arrows” symbol was created for the Iron Front by a Russian socialist living in Germany named Sergei Chakhotin.  “While walking around town, Chakhotin noticed that someone had drawn a line over a swastika to cover the Nazi logo.  This gave him the idea of turning the line into a downward facing arrow.  After discussing it with receptive comrades, he turned it into three arrows (Drei Pfeile).  In his mind, they stood for ‘unity, activity, discipline,” or the SPD, the unions, and the Reichsbanner. (Ibid, pg. 24). Let’s reiterate that last point for you, Anon: In his mind (the mind of the person that designed the symbol!), they stood for ‘unity, activity, discipline,” or the SPD, the unions, and the Reichsbanner.  

Some people (like yourself, Anon, and also Wikipedia) claim that the three arrows symbol is anti-communist, but the person who created the symbol was a socialist who created it for a coalition that included socialists and trade unions and clearly did not conceive of it as an anti-communist symbol.  Eighty-six years later and any “anti-communist” or even specifically socialist meaning that may or (more likely) may not have been implied with this symbol has been lost as it’s become as commonplace and recognized an anti-fascist symbol as the “two flags” symbol of Antifaschiste Aktion (which was formed by the KPD in response to the popularity of the Iron Front [Ibid., pg. 25]).  

Like we always say, anti-fascism is non-partisan.  It’s a big tent where people of all sorts of different political inclinations unite in their mutual opposition to fascism.  We don’t believe that the three arrows design ever symbolized anti-anything besides anti-fascism and even if it once did over eighty years ago, we certainly don’t think it does in this century.  

[mugasofer]

It seems like many, perhaps most, people historically believed in some immanent apocalypse.

Many philosophies claim that the world is passing into a degenerate age of chaos (Ages of Man, Kali Yuga, life-cycle of civilisation), or divine conflict will shortly spill over & destroy the Earth (Ragnorok, Revelations, Zoroastrian Frashokereti), or that the natural forces sustaining us must be transient.

Yet few panic or do anything. What anyone does "do about it" is often symbolic & self-admittedly unlikely to do much.

Maybe humans evolved not to care, to avoid being manipulated?

Many cults make similar claims, and do uproot their lives around them. Even very rarely committing mass suicide or terror attacks etc on occasion. But cults exist that don't make such claims, so it may not be the mechanism they use to control, or at most a minor one. "This is about the fate of the whole world, nothing can be more important than that, so shut up" may work as as a thought terminating cliche, but it doesn't seem to work that strongly, and there are many at least equally effective ones.

Some large scale orgs do exist that seem to take their eschatology "seriously". The Aztecs committed atrocities trying to hold off apocalypse, ISIS trying to cause it. Arguably some Communist or even fascist groups count, depending on your definition of apocalypse.

But even then, one can argue their actions are not radically different from non-apocalypse-motivated ones - e.g. the Aztecs mass-executed less per capita than the UK did at times & some historians view them as more about displaying authority.

I'm thinking about this because of two secular eschatologies - climate apocalypse and the Singularity.

My view on climate change, which as far as I can tell is the scientific consensus, is that it is real and bad but by no means apocalyptic. We're talking incremental increases in storms, droughts, floods etc, all of which are terrible, but none of which remotely threaten human civilisation. E.g. according to the first Google result, the sea is set to rise by 1 decimeter by 2100 in a "high emissions scenario", not to rise by tens or hundreds of meters and consume all coastal nations as I was taught as a child. Some more drastic projections suggest that the sea might rise by as much as two or three meters in the worst case scenario.

It really creeps me out when I hear people who confess to believe that human civilisation, the human species, or even all life on Earth is most likely going to be destroyed soon by climate change. The most recent example, which prompted this post, was the Call of Cthulhu podcast I was listening to casually suggesting that it might be a good idea to summon an Elder God of ice and snow to combat climate change as the "lesser existential risk", perhaps by sacrificing "climate skeptics" to it. It's incredibly jarring for me to realise that the guys I've been listening to casually chatting about RPGs think they live in a world that will shortly be ended by the greed of it's rulers. But this idea is everywhere. Discussions of existential risks from e.g. pandemics inevitably attract people arguing that the real existential risk is climate change. A major anti-global-warming protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, is literally named after the idea that they're fighting against their own extinction. Viral Tumblr posts talk about how the fear of knowing that the world is probably going to be destroyed soon by climate change and fascism is crippling their mental health, and they have no idea how to deal with it because it's all so real.

But it's not. It's not real.

Well, I can't claim that political science is accurate enough for me to definitively say that fascism isn't going to take over, but I can say that climate science is fairly accurate and it predicts that the world is definitely not about to end in fire or in flood.

(There are valid arguments that climate change or other environmental issues might precipitate wars, which could turn apocalyptic due to nuclear weapons; or that we might potentially encounter a black swan event due to our poor understanding of the ecosystem and climate-feedback systems. But these are very different, as they're self-admittedly "just" small risks to the world.)

And I get the impression that a lot of people with more realistic views about climate change deliberately pander to this, deliberately encouraging people to believe that they're going to die because it puts them on the "right side of the issue". The MCU's Loki, for instance, recently casually brought up a "climate apocalypse" in 2050, which many viewers took as meaning the world ending. Technically, the show uses a broad definition of "apocalypse" - Pompeii is given as another example - and it kind of seems like maybe all they meant was natural disasters encouraged by climate change, totally defensible. But I still felt kinda mad about it, that they're deliberately pandering to an idea which they hopefully know is false and which is causing incredible anxiety in people. I remember when Greta Thurnberg was a big deal, I read through her speeches to Extinction Rebellion, and if you parsed them closely it seemed like she actually did have a somewhat realistic understanding of what climate change is. But she would never come out and say it, it was all vague implications of doom, which she was happily giving to a rally called "Extinction Rebellion" filled with speakers who were explicitly stating, not just coyly implying, that this was a fight for humanity's survival against all the great powers of the world.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. I despise lying, but as I've been rambling about, this is a very common lie that most people somehow seem unaffected by. Maybe the viral tumblr posts are wrong about the source of their anxiety; maybe it's internal/neurochemical and they world just have picked some other topic to project their anxieties on if this particular apocalypse wasn't available. Maybe this isn't a particularly harmful lie, and it's hypocritical of me to be shocked by those who believe it.

Incidentally, I believe the world is probably going to end within the next fifty years.

Intellectually, I find the arguments that superhuman AI will destroy the world pretty undeniable. Sure, forecasting the path of future technology is inherently unreliable. But the existence of human brains, some of which are quite smart, proves pretty conclusively it's possible to get lumps of matter to think - and human brains are designed to run on the tiny amounts of energy they can get by scavenging plants and the occasional scraps of meat in the wilderness as fuel, with chemical signals that propagate at around the speed of sound (much slower than electronic ones), with only the data they can get from input devices they carry around with them, and which break down irrevocably after a few decades. And while we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the history of progress in both computer hardware and AI, that progress is incredibly impressive, and there's no particular reason to believe it will fortuitously stop right before we manufacture enough rope to hang ourselves.

Right now, at time of writing, we have neural nets that can write basic code, appear to scale linearly in effectiveness with the available hardware with no signs that we're reaching their limit, and have not yet been applied at the current limits of available hardware let alone what will be available in a few years. They absorb information like a sponge at a vastly superhuman speed and scale, allowing them to be trained in days or hours rather than the years or decades humans require. They are already human-level or massively superhuman at many tasks, and are capable of many things I would have confidently told you a few years ago were probably impossible without human-level intelligence, like the crazy shit AI dungeon is capable of. People are actively working on scaling them up so that they can work on and improve the sort of code they are made from. And we have no ability to tell what they're thinking or control them without a ton of trial and error.

If you follow this blog, you're probably familiar with all the above arguments for why we're probably very close to getting clobbered by superhuman AI, and many more, as well as all the standard counter-arguments and the counter-arguments to those counter arguments.

(Note: I do take some comfort in God, but even if my faith were so rock solid that I would cheerfully bet the world on it - which it's not - there's no real reason why our purpose in God's plan couldn't be to destroy ourselves or be destroyed as an object lesson to some other, more important civilization. There's ample precedent.)

Here's the thing: I'm not doing anything about it, unless you count occasionally, casually talking about it with people online. I'm not even donating to help any of the terrifyingly-few people who are trying to do something about it. Part of why I'm not contributing is, frankly, I don't have a clue what to do, nor do I have much confidence in any of the stuff people are currently doing (although I bloody well hope some of it works.)

And yet I don't actually feel that scared.

I feel more of a visceral chill reading about the nuclear close calls that almost destroyed the world in the recent past than thinking about the stuff that has a serious chance of doing so in a few decades. I'm a neurotic mess, and yet what is objectively the most terrifying thing on my radar does not actually seem to contribute to my neurosis.

[f4liveblogarchives]

Fantastic Four Vol 1 #247

Tue Dec 22 2020 [10:46 PM] Wack'd: So according to Doom when he was in charge Latveria was "the most prosperous [nation] in all Europe" [10:46 PM] Bocaj: *Cough* [10:46 PM] Bocaj: I have follow up questions like what were they exporting [10:46 PM] maxwellelvis: The Gift of Doom [10:47 PM] Bocaj: So is this like when Doom created his own programming language? He has his own economic theory Doomnomics [10:47 PM] Wack'd: Johnny points out times are tough all over, which--yeah, this is late 1982, America is currently in the grips of the worst economic depression since the 1930s [10:47 PM] Umbramatic: oh wow [10:47 PM] Wack'd: And Ben points out that, uh, at least the country isn't still fascist, which seems like the more pressing point [10:47 PM] Bocaj: *sigh* times are tough [10:48 PM] Wack'd: Doom thinks these arguments are colored by the Four's hatred of him and that he never did anything bad to his people [10:49 PM] Umbramatic: suuuuuuuuure [10:49 PM] Wack'd: Then a small child runs into him while barreling down the street and Doom starts threatening him [10:49 PM] Umbramatic: f [10:50 PM] Wack'd: The boy's mother shows up and begs this stranger to spare her son, but is relieved when it turns out to be Doom back from the dead--and so is the boy even though his beloved "master" was just threatening him two seconds ago [10:50 PM] Bocaj: You think Doom would find it easier to keep the mask on [10:51 PM] Wack'd: 🥁 [10:51 PM] Bocaj: Thank ye, thank ye [10:52 PM] Wack'd: So this random lady decides to exposit to the Four the situation [10:53 PM] Wack'd: She claims Latveria was happy and free of strife and people would call out thanks to Doom as he walked down the streets [10:54 PM] Phantom: hmm [10:54 PM] Wack'd: Under Zorba however, without the threat of punishment, crime became a problem. We see stores being robbed and, uh, the aftermath of a scantily clad woman being assaulted [10:54 PM] Umbramatic: oh [10:54 PM] Bocaj: Wow it sure is fortuitous that this lady who'll shill for Doom happened to encounter the Four to give this testimony [10:55 PM] Wack'd: To rectify the situation Zorba instituted martial law, declared himself king, and used Doom's minion robots as "secret police" [10:56 PM] Wack'd: Oh also, uh, "prices rose without reason and stocks were depleted without replacement", which...not really any cause and effect here. Kind of a throwaway line [10:56 PM] maxwellelvis: "Over the past five years, Doctor Doom has thrown over ten thousand bums in jail. Zorba? None." "Criminals support Zorba; should YOU?!" "Vote Doom on Election Day! (or else)" [10:56 PM] Bocaj: oh my god [10:56 PM] Wack'd: As the lady finishes her testimony she is assassinated in broad daylight by the "secret police" [10:57 PM] Wack'd: According to the robots Zorba is still in charge which, again, doesn't square, but he was previously deposed in a backup story in an annual so it's an understandable oversight [10:58 PM] Wack'd: It's fight fight fight against the robots and Doom waits until the last minute to reveal he can immediately shut them down with an "electronic scrambler", which Reed finds curious [10:59 PM] Wack'd: And while he doesn't necessarily believe the rose-glasses version of Doom's reign, he feels like if robots are running around killing people something probably needs to be done [11:01 PM] Wack'd: More political discussion as a hoard of townsfolks approach Doom and rejoice. One speculates Zorba turned evil because he just couldn't handle the job [11:01 PM] Wack'd: Doom claims "all [he] ever took from the people was a single freedom--the freedom to commit evil" which, uh. Most countries can manage this without outright fascism I feel like [11:02 PM] Umbramatic: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL [11:03 PM] Bocaj: DOOOOM [11:03 PM] Wack'd: Cutaway to Zorba. He's frustrated the people are turning on him even though he gave them freedom, "forcing me to bring upon their heads punishment more terrible than any [Doom] conceived" [11:03 PM] Bocaj: Ok so Zorba is back [11:04 PM] Bocaj: Saved by backupinannual syndrome [11:04 PM] Wack'd: An advisor points out Doom rarely punished anyone and threats were good enough. (Sure.) Zorba rejects this line of thinking

[11:05 PM] Wack'd: Okay look [11:05 PM] Wack'd: Doom can't have been a great guy and also had a big red button that will unleash giant robots that indiscriminately murder all in their path [11:05 PM] Wack'd: That's not how that works [11:07 PM] Wack'd: Fight fight fight [11:07 PM] Wack'd: A running theme I should point out is members of the Four ruminating to themselves about Doom's natural charisma and trying to keep themselves being convinced by his arguments [11:09 PM] Wack'd: The robot fight ends. Reed decides they need to depose Zorba and Sue is like "can we even do that, legally" [11:09 PM] Wack'd: Which. She's right! But also it's not like that has ever mattered before [11:09 PM] Bocaj: I'm sure its fine for americans to do foreign coups [11:10 PM] Bocaj: I'm sure its fine for that to be portrayed as a good and heroic thing [11:10 PM] Bocaj: Ha ha ha [11:10 PM] Wack'd: Sure but the government needs to approve it first probably. I feel like if random private citizens go off and do coups it's a much bigger problem [11:10 PM] maxwellelvis: Especially if the American is Christopher Walken, @Bocaj [11:11 PM] Wack'd: Anyway it turns out to be a moot point [11:11 PM] Wack'd: Doom takes care of it himself [11:12 PM] Wack'd: Zorba tries to do a divine-right-of-kings thing and, uh, yeah, this isn't a retcon, he was always the brother of Latveria's original king and it kinda stank, even if he was planning on doing a democracy regardless [11:12 PM] Wack'd: Doom is unpersuaded and tosses Zorba off a balcony [11:13 PM] Umbramatic: TOSS HIM [11:14 PM] Bocaj: "I have the divine right of kings to not be a king!" "DOOM AGREES" -yeet- [11:14 PM] Wack'd: Anyway Doom reunites with the Four and Johnny and Ben are like "well okay if Zorba's taken care of you're next on our shit list" [11:22 PM] Wack'd: Doom refuses to fight the Four because it'd be petty, and he's never petty [11:22 PM] Wack'd: Sure Doom hates Richard because he showed him up once in college but he's never petty [11:24 PM] Bocaj: I feel like sometimes Doom does not have an accurate view of himself [11:24 PM] Wack'd: And Reed agrees to leave on the condition that he actually be someone worthy of the stories Latveria tells of him, which Doom refuses to commit to because, y'know, inhibitor ray, the Four literally cannot beat him up [11:24 PM] Wack'd: End of issue [11:24 PM] Umbramatic: f [11:25 PM] maxwellelvis: "Be better than this, Victor!" "No." [11:25 PM] Bocaj: Reed: "I claim that as a moral victory"

[route22ny]

By Timothy Snyder

Published Jan. 9, 2021 - Updated Jan. 10, 2021, 10:12 a.m. ET

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.

My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.

Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.

If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom.

***

Essay copied & pasted here in its entirety for the benefit of those stuck behind the paywall. Follow the link for the accompanying photos and captions.

[crionic-soc]

Over the course of the last decade, the far-right’s engagement with “the woman question” has taken an even darker turn. Well-known commentator on the manosphere David Futrelle, elaborates:

"…like many traditionalists, Hitler and his fellow Nazis tempered their misogyny – or at least tried to make it seem more palatable – with praise for the supposed purity and womanly honor of Aryan women who fit themselves neatly into their restricted roles. Today’s neo- Nazis, or at least those who’ve come to Nazism through 4chan and the meme wars of the alt-right, have a much darker view of women, one influenced more by bitter misogyny of ‘Red Pill’ pickup artists and Men Going Their Own Way than by sentimental fantasies of ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’."

Going beyond traditional claims about the sanctity of the family and natural gender roles, many contemporary groups influenced by the Alt-Right promote an intensely misogynistic ideology that straight-up hates women. They have largely abandoned the idea that “women have important, dignified roles to play as mothers and homemakers” to promote the message “that women as a group are contemptible, pathetic creatures not worthy of respect”. For instance, men’s rights activist and white nationalist F. Roger Devlin refers to women as the new “white man’s burden���, arguing that traditional visions of marriage and the family “did not oppress women enough” and should be replaced with “a vision of absolute servility”. This is the realm of misogynistic fascism – women are not only inferior, but useless, and they have little to no role to play in the white nationalist movement. Examples of this orientation are terrifyingly ample.

Renown white supremacist website The Daily Stormer has banned women from contributing to site, virulently argues against their inclusion in anything, and has come into conflict with women associated with the older white supremacist website Stormfront. At several rallies in the last year, crowds of white nationalists could be found chanting “white sharia now”. Promoted by some on the far-right, the idea of “white sharia” proposes that in a future white ethnostate “the sexuality, reproduction, daily life, and right to consent of White women should be controlled by White men”. In a video promoting the idea, one proponent asserts: “Under ‘white sharia’ our women will no longer be permitted to live their lives as sluts…And you won’t have any career women invading your workplace either. Nope. Under ‘white sharia’ our women won’t even be able to leave the home without being escorted by a male family member”. Many defenders of the concept also advocate making abortions forbidden for white women, and mandatory for women of colour. Equally vile, members of the militant Atomwaffen Division encourage the rape of white women as a tool to force the birth of more white babies, and promote the rape of non-white women as a tool to terrorise by forcing “them to carry around the spawn of their master and enemy”. Beyond such obvious suspects, this particular orientation to women in far-right politics takes some less expected turns.

Under the umbrella of misogynist fascism, there exists a strain specifically defined by a queer misogyny. This subsection, referred to by Kirchick as “homofascism” is comprised of aggressively sexist and generally hypermasculine gay men who literally have no use for women. As mentioned earlier, the far-right’s position on sexuality is somewhat complicated. On the one hand, LGBTQ rights are seen as a sign of social degeneration, Jewish influence, and an attack on white society. In response, it is not uncommon to see “open calls for the expulsion or violent eradication of LGBT+ people”. On the other hand, when speaking specifically of the “homosexual question” things are much less clear cut. Nazi Germany rounded up and slaughtered homosexuals by the tens of thousands, yet, it is also common knowledge that there were gay Nazis. The most famous being Ernst Röhm, a high-ranking official and head of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary force (the SA). Along with Hitler, Röhm was a “founding father of Nazism” and his particular brand fascism “was identical to the Nazi’s Party’s ideology in almost all respects, save on questions of male-male eroticism”. Under Röhm, homosexuality was highly regarded in the SA where “they promoted an aggressive, hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning ‘hysterical women of both sexes’ in reference to feminine gay men”. They celebrated ancient warrior cults and frequently referenced the Greek tradition of sending gay soldiers, who were believed to be the most fierce fighters into battle. In the 1980s, an explicitly gay neo-nazi skinhead movement emerged in the UK. In the late 1990s, the American Resistance Corps (ARC) was founded in North America with the goal of uniting gay and straight skinheads to create “a new era of tolerance and compassion between racist heterosexuals and homosexuals in their war against non-whites”.

Looking to our current period, some on the far-right simply do not care about male sexuality one way or another. For instance, editor-in-chief of the influential Counter Currents Publishing Greg Johnson argues: “White Nationalism is for the interests of whites and against the interests of our racial enemies. Period. Anything else is beside the point”. Similarly, the infamous alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer insists that homosexuality is a non-issue – something that has been part of European societies for millennia and isn’t “something to get worked up about”. Against this backdrop, several openly gay figures and the ideas they promote have gained some traction on the far-right. A featured writer on several alt-right websites and author of a number of books, James J. O’Meara is best known for his book The Homo and The Negro. In the book, O’Meara makes the argument “that gay white men represent the best of what Western culture has to offer because of their ‘intelligence’ and ‘beauty’, and that ‘Negroes’ represent the worst, being incapable of achievement”. He insists that homosexuality is quintessential to Western Civilization and promotes gay participation in fascist movements. O’Meara and others like him, advocate a future in line with the classic Aryan fantasy of the Männerbund. Associated with male warrior tribes and homoeroticism, the concept celebrates the unique bonds between men and speaks to a social order where elite bands of men rule. Male dominance is central and the fundamental building block of society isn’t the church or family, but close-knit groups of organized men.

Arguably the most infamous of this camp, self-described “anarcho-fascist” Jack Donovan promotes a blend of white nationalism, gang masculinity, and androphilia (love or sex between masculine men). He calls for the establishment of a tribal order called “The Brotherhood” – an order that is comprised of men who swear an oath to each other and is based on “the way of the gang” understood as a life centered “on fighting, hierarchy, and drawing the perimeter against outsiders”. Utilizing violence, gangs of white men are to create decentralized “homelands/autonomous zones” marked by racially defined borders and the exclusion of (white)women from public life. Donovan is a prominent member of the neo-fascist cadre organization The Wolves of Vinland. Inspired by the theories of the late Italian philosopher Julius Evola, the group promotes a particularly anti-populist and anti-woman take on fascism. They prioritize physical fitness and fight training, and argue that the solution to western decline is “a return of heroic masculine warrior-kings”. All of these groups and figures advocate a politics defined by extreme hyper-masculinity based in an almost pathological veneration of “manliness” and a distain for femininity. They reject gay culture for its association with decadence and hate effeminate men as much as they hate women.

[starsgivemehp]

The Argument Against and Defense of Hetalia

Let me preface this by saying that I have not watched the show or read the manga in a few years now, and thus I am working mostly off of memory and what fan content I see these days, which is not a lot. Also, I am a gentile, and I don’t claim to know a lot about the Jewish community or traditions. I am, however, a writer and I have plenty of practice analyzing and criticizing works of fiction from multiple angles. With that in mind, this essay is an attempt to explain everything that is wrong and not wrong with the show, the comic strips, and the fandom.

I’m putting this under a read more for sheer length, this was 11 pages on Google docs.

Let us start with the list of grievances assembled largely from one post, the majority of which I had to go digging for as the original person in this post who mentioned Hetalia said, and I quote, “i dont feel the need to link a source for [hetalia] because…” and then listed two things, one of which is incorrect entirely. But I digress, I will address each one at a time. The list of grievances is as follows:

It is called ‘Axis Powers’ Hetalia

One of the main characters is a personification of Nazi Germany

The entire point of the series is:

Advocating for eugenics

Racial fetishization

Advocating for fascism

Nazi sympathizing/propaganda

The entire franchise is terrible due to rape jokes, racism, and Holocaust jokes

Hetalia fans are all terrible due to rape jokes and other issues

Death of the author cannot apply to this fandom

There may be more that are in other reblogs of the post in question, and I may add addendums further in this essay, but for the time being, I will address each of these grievances and explain the validity or non-validity of each, from a position understanding of both fans and of non-fans. Thus, in order:

‘Axis Powers’ Hetalia

When people talk about Hetalia, they usually are referring to the anime due to its widespread popularity. However, Hetalia began as a series of strip comics posted on a forum by Hidekaz Himaruya (and I spent a while trying to actually find the original comics, but I can’t, there are links to his blogs there in what I’ve provided). It later was formatted into a manga, and then later became an anime. While it was originally titled Axis Powers: Hetalia and the first two seasons of the show are named as such, it usually is only referred to as Hetalia. The anime seasons after said first two seasons have all been ‘world’ focused: Seasons three and four were titled World Series, season five was titled Beautiful World, season six was titled World Twinkle, and the upcoming season seven is titled World Stars.

For the purposes of tagging everything, I tend to see the tags ‘hetalia’ and ‘hws,’ which is short for Hetalia: World Series. This name of the third and fourth anime seasons is the most widely accepted and used name for the series as a whole. While it is true that, years ago, people referred to it as ‘aph’ for Axis Powers Hetalia, the fans and the series have put that behind them, for good reason. It is understandable, even righteous, to not accept the title ‘Axis Powers.’ It does draw focus to the WW2 era, and place the fascists and nazis as the ‘main characters,’ or even, ‘the good guys,’ which is not the case. Obviously, the Nazis were terrible and the entirety of the Axis Powers did horrible, unspeakable things during the war.

It must be noted, to anybody who has not seen the show or read the manga, that the first one to two seasons do have a ‘focus’ on the WW2 era, per se, but it largely talks about interactions between countries, as they are the personified party, and makes extremely few allusions to the war itself, and none to the Holocaust. I will address that in a later section. For now, the point to make is that after these original two seasons, Hetalia branches out into a much wider worldview, adds several more characters, and focuses more on said characters in individual arcs and offerings of historical facts - as generalized as they may be. Nobody claimed that Hetalia was correct in everything it said, but it aims to play out some historical information in a simplified and humorous way. This is due to the fact that the characters are all singular people meant to personify entire countries, which leads us to point two.

The Personification of Nazi Germany

This is the second complaint of the strand of the post in question that I was presented with, quoted as “one of the main characters is a personification of nazi germany.” This is an entirely incorrect statement. ‘Nazi Germany,’ as people call it, is the state of Germany during the era leading up to and of World War 2. The country is still Germany, the people were still German, the Nazi part comes from the political regime in power, a real world nightmare. In the Hetalia series, the characters are called by their country names, because that is who they personify. This may change at times. For example, the character now known as Turkey was previously called Ottoman Empire. They come to be when civilization starts or a colony is introduced to a place. This can be seen in the strip or episode where China ‘finds’ Japan as a small boy and begins to teach him reading and writing - and Japan thereafter invents hiragana. It can also be seen in the comic where a young child, Iceland, questions who he is and why he knows his people are “different beings” than him. The country that speaks to him (I only have the comic here in my likes in that list, the name isn’t mentioned and it’s been a while, but it might be another of the Scandinavian countries) explains that he is Mr. Iceland, they don’t know why he is Mr. Iceland, but they know he is.

What I am attempting to explain with all of these other examples is that there is no ‘Nazi Germany’ character. There is a character called Germany (or Mr. Germany), and all of his adult life, he has been called Germany. He is never addressed by anything else. He does, however, look remarkably similar to a childhood friend of Italy’s, Holy Roman Empire (or just Holy Rome), but as far as it has been explained in canon, Holy Rome went off somewhere and, later on Germany and Italy met as strangers. The general consensus is, due to the area where the Holy Roman Empire used to be is around-ish Germany, the characters are the same. But never, in any of the comics, anime, or movie, is Germany referred to as Nazi Germany. I don’t believe the word ‘Nazi’ appears at any point in time, even, though I cannot claim I have seen every shred of content, so I may be wrong. But I doubt that very much, as it is not in the nature of the series to do such a thing. Moving on.

Advocating for Eugenics

I will start and end this section by saying that Hetalia was, in the original post, roped in with Attack on Titan, of which (as far as I know) the author advocates for eugenics - or the idea that certain people should not be allowed to produce offspring due to their race or other factors. There is no example of Hetalia content wherein this disgusting opinion is ever mentioned or supported in any way. This is at worst a flat-out lie, and at best lumping Hetalia in with a much worse show that does do this (but I won’t get into that, I have never seen more than a few episodes of Attack on Titan and I don’t care to see any more of it. Throw your opinions or defenses elsewhere, I care 0% about it entirely). I have no more need to prepare a more detailed response to this accusation. It simply is not true.

Racial Fetishization

This particular accusation is a difficult one. Fetishization may be a strong word, as the series is largely a comedy. Everyone gets their turn in the spotlight, so to speak, so I find it hard to plainly state that any one character is fetishized or displayed as the most powerful. There is, of course, Rome, who only appears in small segments as Italy’s grandfather and is, in the series, touted as an amazing empire who had it all. I do not believe this is what the accusation is referring to. This accusation seems to be some sort of insistence that the show and creator believe that white people (or possibly just Germans/Nazis/the Aryan race?) are touted as the most powerful and nobody else can compare. I can confidently say that while that is never said anywhere, there are a few issues. Hetalia, particularly the animated series, had (and may still have) a longstanding issue of whitewashing countries that should not be white. This includes Egypt and Seychelles (who both later got a darker skin tone, probably still not dark enough though) as the worst offenders, and even Spain, Turkey, Greece, and Romano (southern Italy), and so on. Yes, this is a big problem. There is no defense against that. It should not be the case. These characters obviously should have darker skin. I will note, however, that many fans are already completely aware of this, have been complaining about it since the beginning, and tend to draw these characters with more correct skin tones in their fanart. This is a case where yes, the original content is not good, but the fans make their own fixes. If you are angry at Hetalia for whitewashing, good. You should be. But I do not believe this should reflect on the entirety of the content and the fandom (And note that I am not linking any particular fanart here, because I want nobody to go attack any fans).

It is also important to note that yes, a large majority of the series builds upon stereotypes. No, stereotypes are not good. No, you should not assume that the personifications of the countries encompass all citizens of said countries. The entire premise of the show is one person = the embodiment of a country, and that person changes and adapts with the times in terms of uniform and personality. It is extremely hard to do this without stereotyping. Most serious fans are aware of this, and do not in any way believe that these characters represent everyone from these countries. It may be true that much younger fans used to, and it may be true that people do not want to watch the show because stereotypes are, arguably, bad. But do remember that this is a comedy, and every character is picked on. Every one. And it is understandable if this branch of humor is not for you. I, personally, don’t like Family Guy or South Park or any shows like that for their humor. I also don’t attack the people who do. I ignore it.

Advocating for Fascism

This is another area wherein I believe the accuser is simply lumping Hetalia in with the original poster’s subject, Attack on Titan. Again, I will not defend or attack that show, as I do not care about it at all. However, regarding Hetalia, I can confidently say that it does not advocate for fascism. While the first two seasons are (sort of) set in WW2 era, as previously mentioned, the fighting is not really a big part, and nobody is touted as correct - only struggling in the conflict. For example, there is a scene where Germany, post WW1, is shown making cuckoo clocks by hand and lamenting the fact that he has to make so many thousands in order to pay back France. This is by no means painting fascism as a good thing, or explaining anything about how poverty and other struggles lead to the formation and rise of the Nazi party. It is simply a scene where we see a man frustratedly making cuckoo clocks and complaining while France’s big head jeers at him in his imagination. The surrounding scenes and the end of this one are making note of how Italy keeps coming over to his house to try and be friends and Germany keeps kicking him out because Italy is annoying and whiny. The episode further goes on to mention that Germany is attacking France again, and Italy has suddenly become his ally, and he is not happy about it for the aforementioned reasons. Again, this does not in any way paint Germany as being ‘right.’ The purpose of the segment(s) is/are to show him disliking the annoying Italy (whom the show is named for) and trying to get him out of his house before eventually giving up and accepting that they can be friends. Is it all 100% historically accurate? No, not by a long shot. Does it paint him as sympathetic? Sort of, you feel bad for the guy making a thousand cuckoo clocks, but only in the sense that he is one person doing a lot of work, a completely fictional situation. But Italy - and the audience - obviously know that attacking France again is not a good thing, so does it advocate the Nazis or fascism? Also no.

Nazi Sympathizing/Propaganda

I pretty well covered this in the previous section, but I will expand. I have alluded to the first two seasons as “focusing” on WW2, in a way, and also mentioned that this is a generalization of sorts, so here I will attempt to clarify. The first few episodes do, indeed, touch on ‘the way they all met’ in a sense; Germany is starting a war and he reluctantly becomes allies with Italy, and less reluctantly becomes allies with Japan, who examines both of them and decides he is content with this situation. However, none of it is very serious, and these ‘formalities’ give way easily to more humorous personable interactions, such as Italy hugging Japan without warning and the touch-anxious Japan pushing him off and getting flustered, Italy petting a cat and then freaking out when he is licked because a cat’s tongue is rough, the two of them ‘training’ by doing your regular old exercising and jogging and Italy being late, etc etc. Stupid, personable jokes.

On the flip side, the show covers the Allied Powers quite a bit too. A lot of this is the five big ones - America, Britain (/England/UK), France, Russia, and China - all meeting around one table and squabbling about various things. I fondly recall one scene where China arrives late and has a bunch of workers suddenly building a Chinatown in the meeting room because he was hungry and wanted his own food, and the others protesting. They are then offered food and become okay with it, because food. Other such nonsense plays out in other, similar meetings. There is also a segment where the Axis powers are all stranded on an island for… some unknown reason… and they set about attempting to survive via campfire and fishing and such. Twice (three times?) the Allied powers ‘attack’ them on this island via China whacking them each with a wok and, as the three of them are in a sad heap, something interrupts the scene to make the Allies retreat. One time, it is Rome’s sudden and also unexplained entrance across the sky singing a song, and another time, it is England’s preoccupation with a cursed chair. Also, at one point, Austria is playing a piano. Does any of this magic logical, real life sense? No. It’s stupid and funny and has nothing to do with war. These are just personable characters thrown into weird situations so they can be funny, with some extremely mild historical context along the way.

I will note again that WW2 is pretty much completely dropped after these two seasons, with the war hardly addressed at all, and future seasons focus more on other characters. The Scandinavians get to all have fun together, the Baltic trio is mentioned, there is a lot about Switzerland taking care of Liechtenstein (wow I spelled it right after all these years, go me) and being stiff and formal with Austria. There is also plenty about people mistaking Canada for America, and England and France squabbling throughout the years, and Spain finding Romano cute but also very grumpy, etc etc… This series is largely Eurasia-focused, yes, and it can be criticized for not being as diverse as it should be. But boiling it down to ‘Nazi propaganda’ is outright, obliviously false.

I don’t know if this is the best place to put this particular note, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to place it, so here it will go. I would like to mention that in the series, some characters, like Germany and Russia, express outright fear of their ‘bosses’ in certain points in history. It is important to realize that Germany, Japan, America, etc… these characters are not the actual, real-life humans in charge of these countries, but people of a fictional, separate species than humans who grow up as the nation grows and have lives that are affected by these world leaders (we even watch in the show America shooting up from child to young adult as the colonies expand, and England comments on how quickly he grew up - but not as quickly as his people, of course. We’ll get to Davie later). The president of the United States is America’s ‘boss,’ and naturally, that boss changes every time the president changes. The emperor of China is China’s ‘boss.’ It follows, thusly, that at one point, Hitler was Germany’s ‘boss.’ The terrible person himself was alluded to, as far as I know, exactly one time, not by name, and no face was shown. In a very brief scene, Germany laments that his new boss is scary and he was just ordered to go force Austria to come live with him. Said boss is shown as, I believe, an evilly laughing shadowy figure. That’s it. That’s the scene. There is no other mention of Hitler, nor is there any mention of the Holocaust anywhere. One could argue that the show is then trying to say that the Holocaust didn’t happen, but I think such an accusation is frankly absurd. It’s a comedy, it was always a comedy, and what in the fuck would be comedic about a mass genocide in any way? Nothing. None of it is funny. Of course it is not brought up in a comedy.

Rape Jokes, Racism, and Holocaust Jokes

While I did somewhat address racism already in the section about whitewashing and racial fetishization, I have another clarification to make, especially regarding the jokes. A lot of people complain that there are rape jokes throughout the series, and that there are two Holocaust jokes. I will begin by saying yes, this is all true, those things did happen during the course of the show. However, it is important to note that all of those things happened in the English dub of the animated show, and none of these terrible jokes exist in the Japanese/subbed version, or the original comic strips.

The English dub is, on all accounts, pretty terrible. Everyone has an over exaggerated accent, there are the aforementioned jokes, there are name changes (England referred to as Britain, among them, very confusing), and the voice actors themselves make mention in commentaries that their goal in this job was, to paraphrase because I haven’t listened in a while, ‘to be as offensive as possible to absolutely everyone’ (and one of the English dub voice actors is even a convicted sex offender, but that’s it’s own mess).  Not the most glamorous or noble of goals. One could say ‘at least if it’s everyone, it’s not really racism, is it? Just humor?’ There is a case for that. Many comedians will say that they poke fun at everyone to avoid singling anybody out as inherently superior. It cannot be said to be the best way to make humor, but it cannot be said to be the worst way, also. Overall, I don’t like the English dub, I don’t watch it, I prefer the subs. And yes, the subbed version has a few issues of its own, but I can say that at least, no, it does not make any Holocaust or rape jokes. Are those kinds of jokes excusable? Fuck no. They’re completely inappropriate. Should you judge the whole series and fandom based on the grossness of the English dubs? Also no, the people who did the English dubs have zero to do with the original creator, the animators, and the fans. Screw them.

The Fandom Being Terrible

I must again preface by saying I was never super active in the fandom at large. I had my own little niche of friends and I stuck to them and I didn’t often branch out. I did, however, go to cons back in those days, and saw plenty of cosplayers. The main complaint I see regarding the fandom is that most of the fans are completely rabid, make a bunch of rape jokes, and even dress up as ‘Nazi Germany’ (iron cross and red armband and all) and pretend to shoot up synagogues. Now, I have not seen cosplayers do the nazi solute or do such photoshoots, but I can believe that people have done it. I have seen plenty of rabid fans, and some of the OCs created for Hetalia, especially many interpretations of individual states (or Antarctica), were extremely cringey, racist, and overall just not good. And yes, these things are undeniably bad. They are very bad things! Those people should be ashamed. They should know better, regardless of their ages or anything, for fuck’s sake. The nazi salute is not a thing you do jokingly, pretending to shoot people is not a joke. Everyone is aware of this. The people who did, or maybe even still do, those things need a serious sit-down and to be woken the fuck up, because they are acting terrible.

However, it is extremely unfair to paint all Hetalia fans in the same light. That is a very stereotypical thing to do, no? As I mentioned earlier, I stuck to my little niche friend group of fans, and while we all had our own flaws and were younger and kinda dumber, we never did things like that. I never did things like that. Rape jokes were never funny, I never liked them, I never accepted them. I have people I still know who still like Hetalia and they never made those kinds of jokes either. I think, as the years have gone by, a lot of the more rabid fans have died out of the fandom. They’ve either grown the fuck up or they’ve went off to pollute some other fandom. Recognize that, especially in the beginning, the anime was low-budget and had a lot of that old and gross queerbaiting and stuff like that, so it was undeniably a magnet for crazy yaoi fans. But the majority of fanart, fanfics, and just overall fan stuff that I see these days are nothing like that. Overall, the fandom has seriously calmed down. A lot of the focus is much more on taking these characters and applying them to other historical events with more accuracy than the show might give. The history in these fanfics and fanarts may also be of questionable accuracy at times. I personally once wrote a fic where I made allusions to the death of Joan d’Arc and, later, the death of Elizabeth I, but did I add much historic fact? No, do I look like a history major spilling all this? The point of the fic was England - the character - maturing through starting to love one of his rulers and recognizing a terrible thing that he did before. It’s not the best piece of work out there, and maybe someone could point out a few things I did wrong with it, but for what it’s meant to be, it’s harmless. Takes on characters not actually in the series, like Ireland, Scotland, etc etc are generally pretty mature from what I see, fanart tends to just be the characters in various poses and styles. The overall love the fandom has, I think, is in the better character designs and in the very concept of the countries as people who laugh and cry and live through war and peace for thousands of years. And here is where I address the final grievance that I personally saw in the notes of the post which started this whole thought process and essay.

The Death of the Author

A lot of people might not fully understand what ‘The Death of the Author’ means. The death of the author is a belief rooted in the 20th century that the personal intentions, beliefs, and prejudices of the authors of certain works can have no bearing on their produced content, because once it is out in the public, every reader may then have their own interpretation and belief system. By publicizing the content, the author ‘dies’ and the reader is born.

There are some scenarios where this cannot apply. One example is JK Rowling, a very special case of a very problematic woman who happens to be so powerful, and so rich, that consuming any type of official (or even unofficial) Harry Potter anything can and will give her that much more power to spread her TERF bullshit. Let me be frank: Any time that consuming a product is allowing a bigoted or problematic person to gain extra money or extra power that they then use for evil, the death of the author cannot apply. You cannot use it as a moral justification. You might perhaps use it as the reason why you struggle to let go of a fandom near and dear to you, as Harry Potter is to so many people, but you absolutely must recognize that purchasing the books, the movies, or any other official content is outright supporting a TERF.

That in mind, there are dozens of other cases where the death of the author absolutely can apply. The easiest, of course, is with authors who are actually dead, such as Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a complete bigot and racist, an overall terrible person, and his works are saturated in that racism. But he is dead, and his work is very popular, and there are ways to take and use his work that do not contribute further to racism and bigotry. All you have to do is slap a non-racist cthulhu on a page. Make that cthulhu eat everyone equally. That’s a good cthulhu right there, a nice, safe cthulhu.

So where does Hetalia fall in this spectrum of can or cannot have death of the author? I believe it leans more to the side of yes, you can apply it. For one thing, you can definitely find the show for free in some places, and watch it without giving Himaruya a single cent. The comics are also available online for free, and while you might be giving your ‘support’ by being a viewer, I think overall, that’s not only negligible, but does not contribute anything bad? The author of Attack on Titan has many charges levied against him in the post which prompted this, and arguably, giving him any money is bad. But as far as I have seen, while Himaruya might have started out with a flawed premise and may have some whitewashing issues, I have seen nowhere that he funds any kind of racist, nationalistic, fascist, etc anything of any kind. This is not like Chick-Fil-A, where offering any kind of patronage is (or maybe used to be) sinking funds into terrible organizations. This is not supporting literal Nazis, as the complaints claim. This is a largely mediocre series with good parts and bad parts and zero ties to horrific organizations or ideals. Consuming good fan content does not make someone a racist or a bigot or a nazi sympathizer. Even rewatching some old favorite scenes or checking out the new season doesn’t make someone that. By all accounts, the show is flawed but not a means to fund nazis.

The Bad Anything Else

I will now take some time to talk about some other problems Hetalia has, because no, it is by no means flawless. I already discussed the whitewashing and stereotypes and the mess of the English dub, but there is more. I made mention of the fact that battles and seriously bad events such as the Holocaust are not mentioned, and this holds true throughout pretty much all of the series. There are certain points where ‘battles’ of a sort are seen, but only flash moments. One scene in particular that I really enjoyed as a tween and can now see the problems with is the whole revolutionary war scene. This was a scene split into two episodes (for some weird reason, even an unrelated episode in between, like, what? Why??) about a particular (unnamed) battle in the American Revolution where England faced down America, they each had a gun with a bayonet, and England charged America and his bayonet deeply scratched America’s gun, and America declared he was no longer England’s little brother, and the whole thing was played out as an extremely emotional scene. England is lost in the past of seeing America as a cute little kid he took care of, who has now grown up and is being reckless and stupid, and America is all righteous and independent and proving he’s a grown up, it’s all very emotional, I cried, other fans cried, there was much fanart.

This scene is problematic in a way. Boiling down an extremely nasty conflict following lots of really bad laws and protests to this one scene doesn’t do history any justice. It says nothing about the struggles of the American colonists, the struggles of the British empire, the awful things the colonists did to the natives, etc etc. It is one small scene and it focuses on these characters as humanoid, with feelings, and completely ignores the complexities of history. And yes, in a way, that is bad. But it is bad in the sense that nobody can - or at least should - take this show to be the end-all be-all of history. It is not. It is not often entirely correct, and it picks and chooses what points in the past several thousand years to play with, and trying to use it as a map for history is a bad idea. However, this focus on the countries as human-like and struggling can also be a good thing.

It is also important to note that there have been other problems. The portrayal of South Korea, for example, is extremely controversial, and while I do not know all of the specifics, I believe that it was banned in Korea due to this, and the character was entirely removed from the anime, among other things. Obviously, a bad take, a bad character. There are also just straight up not great characterizations in certain cases. I don’t, for example, like anything about how Belarus is portrayed as a crazy psycho constantly begging Russia (her big brother) to marry her? I think that that is ridiculous, and I know nothing about Belarus as a country but I am pretty darn sure that that is not how one ought to go about portraying the country. There are a few other examples, but my purpose here was not to pull up a list of every country and explain what is correct or incorrect about each characterization. It is enough to say that some characters were not portrayed perfectly. But with that in mind...

The Good Anything Else

It is the most important to remember that this, all of this, is fiction. This is a silly, silly fantasy series. The countries are not humans, they are some weird semi-immortal species that share a universal language and know they are not human and are referenced by humans as ‘those people.’ They are fictional constructs. But the good out of all of this is that they explore human emotions. The American Revolution scene should not be taken as how the revolution was, and who might have been right or wrong. But it is a very emotional story of a big brother unable to accept that his little brother has grown up and wants to make his own choices. That, right there, is a heartfelt scene that I’m sure plenty of real people can feel something about. And there are plenty of other scenes that really grab you by the heartstrings, especially given how crazy, stupid, and humor-oriented the rest of the show is. And I will take a moment and enthuse about some of the more popular scenes that I think are, in fact, pretty good.

There is one episode in season 5, Beautiful World, where an American woman visits France (the place). This woman, Lisa, is blond and bears a striking resemblance to Joan d’Arc. While visiting some historical place somewhere or another in Paris, France (the person) spots her and rushes up with an odd look. When she questions him, he apologizes and offers to give her a tour of the area, which she accepts. He then proceeds to lead her around and explain some history and show off some beautiful sights, and he mentions some stuff about Joan d’Arc. She butts in and lists off some stuff she knows, he beams and looks proud and says yes, she’s right. The end of the scene has the two of them standing alone somewhere and him commenting how young Joan was when she was killed, and that he always wished she could have had a better, nicer life. He then states that he is very happy that she got it, while giving this American tourist a gentle smile. She looks away for a moment, distracted by something perhaps, and when she looks back to ask just who the heck he really is, talking about a historical figure like he knew her, he is gone. It’s a very emotional scene in a quiet sort of way, because the watcher/reader understands that he took one look at this woman and instantly believed that she was, in fact, Joan d’Arc reincarnated into a totally different and totally average life, and he is so genuinely happy that a woman he saw as a hero gets this chance to live normally. Whether or not you may personally believe in reincarnation, and regardless of how often other times in the show France is shown as an obnoxious sexaholic, this is an extremely tender scene that lots of fans seriously love. It is very ‘human.’ And I feel like this is what the series as a whole strives to offer. These human moments. They may be peppered in a sort of lackadaisical style in the anime, but they are far more prominent in the comic strips, so it is important to realize that that kind of scene is more of what the creator likes to focus on.

Another very popular and touted scene is the Davie scene. I don’t remember if it was put in the anime or not, I read it as a comic. It was a scene set in colonial America, where the man himself was just a very small child. Little baby America was hanging out in a field with a rabbit and sees this boy, who introduces himself as Davie. Davie brings America to his house and opens up a botany book and points out a blue flower (possibly a forget-me-not) that he wants to see but that isn’t in the New World. America assures Davie that he will find him one of those flowers, and goes off to do so. He fails his search and goes back to Davie, who is older now, but Davie looks embarrassed and turns and walks away. Distressed, America runs to England and explains about the flower, and England says the flower is not there, but they do grow at home, and he will bring some the next time he leaves and comes back. America happily waits, and when England returns with a bouquet of the blue flowers, America takes them and runs off to Davie’s house. He is let in by a boy who looks just like Davie and presents the flowers, and the boy then puts them on (or maybe in) a coffin of an elderly man. America, smiling, does not seem to understand what is going on, and hopefully calls the boy Davie.

This entire scene, in the comic, has very few words. Davie’s name is repeated a few times, but most of the rest of the ‘dialogue’ is in images. The flower, England saying it is not there, etc. This makes the scene extremely poignant, and when we reach the end, we, the audience, realize suddenly that while baby America was fixated on finding a special flower for his new friend, years and years went by, and that friend grew up and got married and had children and eventually died, all while America remained looking the exact same age and understanding the exact same things. Look, folks, I don’t know about you, but that is some angsty stuff right there. I cried. We all cried. We all miss Davie. Mention the name to fans and you will get sobs. We love you, Davie.

Which brings me to my penultimate point, that this series is heartfelt and, while it avoids a lot of the bad of history, can be very poignant about what human nature is like. Human lives are long, very long, but also so very short, they fly by. Some lives end in tragedy, others are mostly peaceful, and maybe we get second chances if you believe in reincarnation, maybe not. Maybe it’s good that our lives are so short, maybe the fate of living forever and watching people you connect with die is tragic. Or maybe it would actually be really fun, having friends for thousands of years that you may squabble with at times but ultimately care for. Maybe nothing is simple and life is about finding joy where you can, and everyone needs to sometimes take a step back and realize that everyone is flawed, and there might be good and evil but the vast majority of people are in a grey area, trying to live their own lives and do what good they can for whatever reason they might give. I want to end with one last topic, one I have not yet addressed this whole time. The big white alien in the room, if you will.

Paint it: White!

There is a Hetalia movie, folks, if you didn’t know it, and it’s called Paint It White. This movie has just as many silly parts as any other Hetalia thing, but it also has a plot! In this movie, strange, all-white aliens are starting to invade the Earth. They arrive and anything they touch, they turn into completely identical white humanoid blobs, even the country personifications. With this scary and seemingly-unstoppable threat, the main eight - America, England, Russia, China, France, Japan, Germany, and Italy - all try to infiltrate the alien spaceship in frankly hideous uniforms to find out more and figure out a way to defeat them. Hijinks and disaster ensues, and at the end, each of them is fighting a mob and gradually being defeated. Italy is the last one standing, and as Germany is slowly being transformed into a blob along with the others, he tells Italy to smile. Italy then finds (or has? the plot isn’t great, it’s just there) a black marker and he suddenly starts going around drawing ridiculous faces on everyone. He draws fitting faces on each of his friend blobs, like a stern face on Germany-blob, a deadpan face on Japan-blob, etc etc. The invaders suddenly stop. They look at each other, marker-faced, and start to laugh. Then their leader of sorts comes out and is basically like “wow, we thought you were all stupid and you have wars and stuff, but this? This is beautiful. Wow. We all look exactly identical on our world, and these faces are cool and new and unique. We’ll turn everyone on your planet back if we can have this magical thingie you’re holding.” And of course Italy hands the marker right over, and everyone is put back to normal, and crybaby, scaredy-cat, useless Italy saves the world.

The plot is, obviously, not super great. It’s not going to win anybody any awards. But it has a very poetic premise. The strength of humans is that they are all unique. Every human has a different face, a different body, a different life. Our differences may cause conflict, but they are also something to celebrate. At the end of the day, Hetalia is an okay show that can get you hooked on history and tries its best to teach you that we’re all only human and there might be war and conflict and bad things, but you have to reach for the good things and find yourself good friends and have stupid laughs and enjoy life, however long or short it may be. I think that that’s a pretty decent message to send out to people.

The Bottom Line

In the end, this is a fandom like many others. Hetalia has its flaws and its cringe moments, and it certainly had its fair share of awful fans. But I truly believe that painting it overall as nazi propoganda and one of the most problematic and harmful shows out there is a blatant lie and disregards… just about everything of the actual content. I think it is difficult for someone to concretely say anything is super good or super bad without seeing at least some of it, or doing some research, and this business of blithely going along with what everyone else says just because they use big danger words does not do anybody any favors. Spreading misinformation is, I’m sure, the exact opposite of what most people want to do. And make no mistake, I am definitely not saying that everyone needs to like, or even watch, the show. If you never ever want to watch this show in your life, that is absolutely fine. Go forth and never watch it. But mindlessly following the herd and yelling overgeneralized, unsupported opinions about it is not a good thing. I beg of you, do research on the things you want to form or share an opinion on, think critically, and for the love of God, do not swipe a giant paintbrush to forsake every single individual fan of a show as a terrible, awful person. By all means, hate nazis, they are pieces of shit. Boycott things that support genocide and fascism, yes, fight for equality, yes. But do not go accusing without thinking, and do not overgeneralize. I leave you with the words of my old laptop bag that I bought years ago at a convention:

Make pasta, not war.

Thank you for reading.

[windstorm64]

Attack on Discourse I Guess

I swear to god if I see one more post on tumblr dot com saying that Attack on Titan is “pro-fascism” or “pro-imperialism” I’m gonna lose my freaking...

*deep breath*

Listen, I absolutely want people to be critical of the media they consume, especially from Japan. Due to their role in WW2 and their glorification of past military actions from their conservative side, there’s a lot of Japanese media that contains themes and imagery that would (ideally) not at all fly in the west. Sometimes it’s harmless, being simply misguided, other times it’s bad, containing some pretty horrific subtext regardless of the author's actual intention. Attack on Titan absolutely does contain themes of imperialism, xenophobia, propaganda, extreme nationalism, and more. But the all important distinction here is that Attack on Titan does it

with.

a.

purpose.

It’s NOT condoning them. Just like how Lolita isn’t promoting pedophilia, or the clockwork orange isnt promoting whatever the heck that movie is about, simply having these themes present in your story does not mean they are being condoned.

Do I blame people for not understanding that at first? No. AoT takes its sweet time when developing its themes, and is constantly overturning what you thought you knew about its worldviews. That’s just the kind of story it is. It will go incredibly into detail about a plethora of opposing views, some being downright deplorable, and takes extra care to make them all look inviting and sweet. You don’t realize it at the time, but what seems to be the only right answer at the time is secretly ushering in the worst that man can muster. That’s how it is in real life. That’s how these evils get into real society; “with thunderous applause”. The difference here is that AoT, even if it takes 100 chapters to do so, slowly but surely will overturn all these themes and let the right way show itself over the course of the series. It doesn’t hold your hand, it doesn’t sugarcoat it, and I’ll even admit that I was a little nervous during some parts over what exactly the author was trying to say, but every single time Isayama chose to let the reader decide what was right in the moment, until AoT’s own in-universe marketplace of ideas eventually worked as intended and snuffed out the unsavory.

Does that mean you personally have to enjoy seeing it? No. The marketplace of ideas approach often does not work in real life (punching nazis is good) and seeing it used in fiction might not be your cup of tea.

Does that mean I think all of its themes are handled well or tactfully? Absolutely not. There are some stories that I think are handled VERY poorly, with the redemption of Magath’s character, for example, being downright horrendous. But those aren’t the complaints I hear from you people. All I hear are the same tired arguments that have been countered in-universe time and time again.

You think the survey corps are an allegory promoting imperialism? Then you’ll love the part where the real villains are revealed to be actual greedy governments invading foreign lands to oppress and murder the populace and steal valuable resources. And how the main characters, in-turn to learning that there’s more people out there in the world, switch their goals from expanding their territory to understanding and allying with the outside population.

The titans represent xenophobia? Then you’ll love the internal conflicts of the main cast when they realize that the titans are just like them, and the constant struggle thereafter against the prejudiced countries outside the walls who seek to punish them for their ethnicity.

Nationalism? Propaganda? The story has just spent the better part of 2 arcs displaying just how evil, dangerous, and reality-warping these things can be.

Fascism? Y’all’s favorite arc would probably be the one where the main cast literally overthrows their own corrupt fascist government because it was, in fact, fascist and corrupt.

German influences glorify nazism? Germany does not equal nazi. The author is clearly a fan of all parts of German history, and is a fan of war memorabilia in general (which admittedly becomes pretty risky when looking through the lens of conservative Japan’s notoriously glorified WW2 outlook), but nothing about it supports Nazism, or any of their ideals. Misguided? Perhaps, I can’t say I’m a fan. But it doesn’t denote anything about the author's character that we can reasonably glean. Eventually the true villains of Aot were given clear similarities to Nazis, clarifying Isayama's true moral priorities.

And before any of y’all start trying to point out what the author said in the past- I KNOW what the author has said. Or rather, what he was rumored to have said. But even if the rumors are true, and that shitty ignorant take on Twitter about Japan and Korea was from him, it's 100% the kind of thing that can be called out and learned from. The tweet was like, what? 10 years ago? Maybe more? Even if it was him he has clearly been educated on the deeper implications of his statement, as evidenced by the way these themes are handled in his story. Attack on Titan directly condemns eugenics on multiple occasions. It tackles it in a surprisingly on-the-nose way too, compared to how the series handled its serious themes prior to that point.

That's why I WANT y’all to be critical of the media you intake. So you CAN call out the glorification of unsavory themes and bring them to the attention of those in charge of them. Because that’s how people learn and grow. That’s how you create an educated populace that understands the implications of the things they create. I am 110% convinced that all these themes were tackled in AoT BECAUSE of all the criticism he got in the past. 10 years is a long time, and we are still getting new developments to this day that challenge the themes introduced in the first couple of chapters. Whether or not these themes were planned to be tackled from the start, or were introduced later on after being called out, is something we’ll probably never know. But please do yourselves a favor and learn what the heck you’re talking about, and the context around it, before going off for years about misguided claims. Don’t cheapen words that should be reserved for the most grievous of behaviors when you really just want to make a point.

Attack on Titan is a brutal nuanced story that shows off the worst that humanity has to offer, and how hard it is to do the right thing in a world where the right thing doesn’t always work. But taking an honest, elongated approach to exploring how these themes interact with humanity and society is NOT the same as promoting it. If you like your stories more black and white, where the good and bad of real world themes are more clearly defined as opposed to AoT’s more nihilistic and gray approach to morality, then by all means go enjoy that other story. I’m not trying to convince anyone to like it. I’m not expecting everyone to enjoy seeing these themes shoved in your face every installment. And I’m certainly not expecting anyone to understand all of this right away, hell I’m constantly arguing with dudebro AoT fans on reddit who are SURPRISED that Armin and the Alliance are taking an anti-genocide stance. And somehow I’m the crazy one for seeing this plot line coming for literal years. There’s simply just a lot more to this story than you can understand at a glance, and I implore anyone who thinks that’s they can simplify the real world themes dealt with here in such a menial way to seriously reconsider.

You are welcome to dislike Attack on Titan. You are more than welcome to criticize it’s possible mismanagement of sensitive real world themes. I am not so enamored by Isayama’s writing to expect a young manga artist to be the forefront of knowledge on such complicated, disturbing topics. But please, cut it out with the crazy claims. I’ve been hearing these things for so many years and it’s all the same. AoT has risen to become one of the most popular anime/manga of the current era. If the story was really as deplorable as you claim it would not have become as popular as it has been. The fans aren’t stupid (well, not all of them. Together, we can beat the reddit dudebros and save the world). This didn’t happen by mistake. The fans aren’t ignorant of the messages it’s sending. Attack on Titan is just... good! Even if I can’t get you to agree with me on that, at least look at it honestly for what it is, and what it’s trying to be. It’s really, really, not at all what you think, or what other tumblr users are trying to get you to believe.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Timothy Snyder [don't miss a word]

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy  seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version. Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in  the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he  would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly  claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his  rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the  various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and  implausible.                                                

People believed him,  which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to  educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they  already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make  sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for  tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and  enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented  demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware  of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a  system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that  no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in  institutions different points of view.                                                                                                                          

In  this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election  must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of  Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed  his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing  so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the  system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional  obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a  minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of  the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party  disproportionate control of government. The most important among them,  Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its  consequences.                                  

Yet  other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually  break the system and have power without democracy. The split between  these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on  Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican  representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like  nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would  force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Yet  for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected  institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow.  Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the  available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional  mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them  flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his  will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge  of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed  his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which  they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of  course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been  stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how  could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the  invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For  the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future.  Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for  the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.Post-truth is pre-fascism,  and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth,  we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create  spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts,  citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend  themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and  fictions.

Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not  very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir  Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is  no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek  emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction  between what feels true and what actually is true.Post-truth  wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last  four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking  fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position  has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to  treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher  Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of  patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.

My  own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise,  allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we  might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future  possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior  presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present  repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.Like  historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single  source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies  of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the  conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008  did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones.  The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old  pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks  to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a  pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part  these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe  in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to  believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such  personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone  else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted  adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as  he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created  an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism  fell short of the thing itself.

Some  of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful  businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama  was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of  aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing  party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals  for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s  Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One  historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation  of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized  agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that  ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving  were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much  they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s  account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world,  Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews  stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly,  Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence  substitutes for experience and companionship.In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. 

This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run  the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was  great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the  efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of  mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also  made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just  evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been  rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican  senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged  (for President) Election.”

The  force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters  and of experts but also of local, state and federal government  institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security  and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a  conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such  a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.Trump’s  electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not  so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims.  The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be  wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such  as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You  believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides  an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one  seemingly held by a president.

On the  surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump  as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the  pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the  position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged  “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black  people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a  crime committed by Black people against white people.It’s  not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump  never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in  2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical  protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The  claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just  because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a  conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the  moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American  history.

When Senator Ted Cruz  announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he  invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election  of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent,  since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there  really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the  seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of  1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided  that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement  whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better  part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the  beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the  original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest  brush with fascism so far.If the  reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues  released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days  later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or  many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the  party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back  then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the  Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past  half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a  predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in  keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black  voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching  white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to  yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be  better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who  deserves representation.

The  Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to  contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now,  the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who  would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and  those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the  voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between  those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it  favored them and those who tried to upend it.In  the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have  overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in  opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea  Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this  arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology  that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans  is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At  first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of  experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable  figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was  initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won  the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a  tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief,  McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the  rich.

Trump  was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His  objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally.  He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly  why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires  devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of  lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his  admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short  of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a  truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that  he might lose something.

Yet Trump  never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military,  some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made  the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators;  supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but  those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police  force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a  blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white  supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or  Gab. 

But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats  to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the  right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe  that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring  institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters  to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none  appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what  their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable  insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

The lie outlasts the  liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of  a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power.  How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On  Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly  conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and  even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for  which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live  on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In  November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it  would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the  last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea  that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to  him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters  who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big  lie only grew bigger.

The breakers  and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was  either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had  no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the  breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone  and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the  division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The  invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few  senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward  anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives  doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own  flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s  supporters but by his opponents.Trump  is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is  the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By  now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last  weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he  will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to  provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see  Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still  around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support.  In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the  myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he  is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley  may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you  have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain.  Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar  as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights,  which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz  issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the  post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud,  only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations,  allegations all the way down.The  big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit  enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in  name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It  now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in  response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles  and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception  of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a  sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If  Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat  his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share  responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running  for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and  denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your  supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By  defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican  presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway  by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for  president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B,  to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by  faith.Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning  for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do  not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a  coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump  never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence,  ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big  lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an  election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that  the other side deserves to be punished.Informed  observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white  supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. 

Gun  sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political  violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties  openly embrace paranoia.Our big lie  is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending  upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also  structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial  thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication  that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four  years courts terrorism and assassination.

When  that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace  it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be  divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal  reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election  in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of  Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie,  demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if  those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?To  be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to  win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration  will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps  obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a  short time, to a moment of self-questioning. 

Politicians who want  Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the  election.America will not survive the  big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a  thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a  public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt  is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps  us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a  democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small.Democracy  is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of  gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of  others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

[lionheart49er]

My Thoughts on The Boys Season 2 Finale

*This Post Contains Spoilers for “The Boys” Season 2 Finale*

First off, before I get into spoilers, I just want to saw how much I love what “The Boys” have been doing. I loved Season 1 and I feel Season 2 is just as fun and crazy with more in-depth social commentary, especially with the character of Stormfront and her satirizing of alt-right conservative media. Overall, I love how the show combines dark humor with poignant satire of superhero media, celebrity culture, and large corporate conglomerates. And in many ways, the finale was just as good.

The show takes its imperfect social material and elevates it. Turning the macho grim-dark superhero parody that only barely deconstructs superheroes and never deconstructs the just-as-toxic macho characters like Billy Butcher into a show that is just as willing to deconstruct Billy’s toxic masculinity as Homelander’s fascist superhero antics. I think the show does a good handling these serious topics with sprinkles of anti-capitalist ideology. And yeah, the irony of an show with anti-capitalist themes being streamed on Amazon Prime does not escape me. 

However, I read The AV Club’s review of the finale and it raised some points that I simply did not agree with. And I’m going to argue them here. 

The AV Club had a big issue with the reveal that Victoria Neuman was the head-exploder who was working for Vought. They came out with it the belief that this was somehow the show attacking “both-sides” and conflating progressive politicians like AOC with literal nazis. To be frank, I am just not agree with this take. 

First off, I don’t the show did a good job showing how wrong Nazism and fascism is through the characters of Homelander and especially Stormfront. In particular, Stormfront was a character I was initially worried about. There is a risk in portraying Nazi characters where they came off as likable enough to where they can appeal directly to white supremacist and real-life Nazis. And Stormfront’s goofy portrayal as a Tiktok-using millenial-type was certainly running that risk initially. But the show cleverly pulled the covers to show the dangerous ideology that was powering the seemingly innocent meme-exploiting superhero to show how real-life white supremacists and alt-right groups use playful memes and social media to spread hateful ideology. And the show never condones Stormfront’s hateful ideology and always portrays her as in the wrong. Hell, even Homelander is weirded out by her blatantly racist beliefs. 

I say all of this to show how Stormfront is portrayed in the show is way different from how Neuman is and probably will be portrayed. Obviously the fact she is based on progressive  AOC and Iihan Omar, so we immediately are on her side, especially when it comes to the matter of regulating superheroes since we’ve seen how messed-up superheroes like Homelander and A-Train abuse their powers without consequence. Then, it comes the twist that Neuman was secretly working with Vought the whole time. Now, the AV Club believes this means that Neuman is going to be presented as just as bad as Stormfront. Which I simply don’t agree. I don’t see this as the show implying that progressive politicians are worse or even just as bad as Nazis. And I believe the reveal makes sense when looking at Vought and how Stan Edgar runs his business.

I think the reason why Neuman works for Vought is explained in the dining scene between Billy Butcher and Stan Edgar. In that scene, Stan explains why he is willing to work with an awful white-supremacist like Stormfront. Obviously, Stan Edgar as a black man hates the living hell out of her but the man is business-minded as hell. He sees how useful Stormfront is in causing divisions in society. And those kind of divisions are profitable as hell as we know in real-life how much media can prey on said divisions. Even though Stan personally hates Stormfront’s blatant racism, he is willing to tolerate it because her endeavors ends up aligning directly with Vought’s goals to simply make as much money as possible. The scene really shows Edgar’s thinking and reasoning when it comes to how he runs Vought. And it’s a great scene in general especially when Edgar calls out Butcher for his own white privilege. But this scene also shows why Edgar would want someone like Neuman on his side.

The fact is we don’t know yet how genuine Neuman is or was for her progressive superhero-reform goals before joining Vought. We don’t really have a handle on her backstory yet. So whether she is a genuine progressive who is forced to work for Vought or simply a Vought double-agent is not known. However, either way I don’t think it implies Neuman is worse than Stormfront. In fact, more so this is just a brilliant move on Stan Edgar and Vought’s part to curb the superhero narrative in their favor. Just like how Vought benefits from Stormfront’s racist beliefs, they could equally benefit from Neuman’s progressive beliefs. In fact, Vought has already been doing shady stuff under the guise of progressive ideology this entire seasoning (the blatantly pandering “Girls get it done” campaign, the co-opting of Queen Maeve’s gay status for LGBT+ brownie points, etc.) In many ways, it is a reflection of pink capitalism and how much corporations want to appear “woke” while still benefiting from a corrupt capitalist systematic status quo. Essentially, Edgar knows he’s going to get backlash for Vought’s attempts to take-over the world by distributing Compound V. So he wants to control the narrative by having someone on his side pretending to be working against the man but really working for it. This also parallels a lot of brands who claim to be fighting against a capitalist system but is merely paying lip-services to such changes and just another extension of a major corporation’s capitalist endeavors. Just look at all the Che Guevara and Karl Marx merchandise you can buy online. I believe Edgar is working that exact angle with Victoria Neuman.

And there was genuine foreshadowing for this too. This twist did not come out of nowhere despite what some people like the AV Club would have you believe. The fact that Stan Edgar is constantly watching news coverage of Victoria Neuman on TV. During the head-exploding courtroom scene, you can see every person Victoria stares at explodes soon after. After the first time we see someone’s head explode in the beginning of the season, it immediately cuts to Victoria Neuman. So this wasn’t just some twist the writers pulled out of their ass in the last minute. This was clearly planned. Besides, it is entirely possible that Neuman is or at least was a genuinely progressive before being forced to work for Vought against her will. She does mention her daughter multiple times in the season. It is almost a cliche how much sympathy the show pulls from its asshole characters by giving them a kid (just check the Honest Trailers video). But that could very well be the case. Regardless, I do think we will get some understanding as to why Neuman is working for Vought in the next season for whatever reason. And I am genuinely looking forward to it. Besides, this doesn’t even ruin her character and we could see her human side explored in the next season. One of the things I praise this show for is going in-depth into even its worst scumbaggy characters (Homelander, The Deep, A-Train, etc.) to explore their human sides while still presenting them as awful people.

Also, I think the reason why Neuman takes longer to explode the Scientology guy’s head in the last scene while she easily explodes heads quickly in the courtroom scene is just to show to the audience that Neuman is the head exploder. Besides, there is no reason Neuman has to be quick to explode his head since there is no threat that she’ll be exposed for it. I’m sure she can explode heads much quicker when Season 3 comes around.   

So really that was all my thoughts on the whole Victoria Neuman reveal. I just wanted to give some more praise for The Boy’s awesome finale. The episode was full of fun, awesome moments that were super satisfying. The three female superheroes kicking the shit out of the Nazi, Homelander being rendered completely impotent by the end, Billy Butcher deciding to do the selfless thing to protect the child for once (right after nearly trying to murder him), Edgar pointing out as a black man how little he can lash out, The Deep getting cucked out of The Seven, etc. I loved what the Season 2 finale did. I am looking forward to Season 3. Let me know what you think. I would love to hear your thoughts.         

[timeclonemike]

The War of the Words, Part 5: Counterstrike

Previous installments of this essay have repeated the point that the tactics used by nazis, terfs, and other varieties of bigot are those adopted by a force with a numerical and strategic disadvantage when facing a larger and stronger opponent, among other things. This may have given the impression that these types will eventually just die out. While I believe that this is true in the long term, it is demonstrably true that they can still do considerable damage in the short term, so this is unfortunately not the kind of problem that will solve itself. Action must be taken to undermine them at every possible juncture. This is especially true given that the current, semi-covert “secret agent” / muddy-the-waters approach was adopted because previous open displays of aggression were not getting the results they wanted. It is entirely possible that a shift in strategy will occur again and allow them to make more headway than they presently are.

Any given strategy employed by the nazis and terfs and racists has one or more potential counter-strategies, but simply waiting to recognize a specific type of propaganda or psychological manipulation or social engineering method puts everyone else on the defensive - by the time the problem is recognized and understood, it has already been effective for some time and may allow for a certain amount of momentum. Also, rapidly shifting strategies can lead to the defensive side lagging behind or being overwhelmed, which is one of the potential advantages of the “increase the signal to noise ratio when it comes to dog whistles” approach mentioned previously.

Therefore, as the old saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. The best chances of combating these ideologies involves going after them directly, rather than trying to play damage control after the fact (although that is also important.) And to do this most effectively requires a certain level of understanding of the psychology (and pathology) of the kinds of minds that are most amenable to fascism and radical exclusionism and racism.

The most important point worth considering is what I have taken to calling the Fascism Paradox. Fascism derives its name from the Fasces, a symbol that was adopted during the days of the Roman Empire and then appropriated by authoritarian political movements in the early twentieth century. It consists of a bundle of rods tied together, incorporating a handle and axe head, and the symbolism is pretty straightforward; a single stick might break, but a bundle of them together is much more robust. The obvious idea behind it is that many people united in a single cause and goal can accomplish what an individual cannot, which is why it was adopted by so many governmental offices and magistrates before the early twentieth century.

The titular paradox is that the Fasces symbolizes strength despite being an admission of weakness. The whole point of tying the rods together is because an individual rod is inadequate to the task at hand. Likewise, most authoritarian displays of power revolve around numbers; large military parades, massive rally crowds, mobs of angry young men wearing polo shirts and carrying lawn torches. The power of symbolism, and the attraction they hold, is a door that swings both ways; those who are attracted to the idea of fascism are those who are individually weak, and can only achieve strength and power by proxy, as part of a larger group.

Given that knowledge, the obvious counter is to strip away the protections of the group itself. After the Unite the Right rally, quite a large number of participants were identified by photographic evidence where they did nothing to conceal their identities, and the social consequences were considerable. These individual people were not part of a larger, dangerous force; they were people with names and addresses and once people could pair them with the faces in the photographs, it was basically open season. This technically wasn’t even doxxing; nobody can realistically make a claim to privacy when they are in a  public space, much less when they are deliberately drawing attention to themselves. (The lessons learned from this are implicit in the “secret police” tactics used by unidentified federal agents in Portland as of this writing.)

If this sounds like a roundabout way of saying “Divide And Conquer”, it’s because there’s another element to the paradox. A bundle of sticks may be stronger than any individual stick, but the strength of said bundle is still limited by the strength of the individual sticks. For an object lesson in why this is important, compare breaking a single uncooked spaghetti noodle with an entire package of uncooked spaghetti. The whole package technically puts up more resistance, but the difference is marginal in comparison to the forces involved. So it is with fascism and the people who are enticed by it; because their attraction to the group and the cause is motivated (subconsciously or not) by an attempt to mitigate personal weaknesses, the group itself inherits all off these weaknesses. This is especially true when it comes to the subject of morale and courage under fire; each individual in the group is relying on the group as a whole, and they take their cues from each other, so as soon as one person falters everyone around them starts to hold back. The result is a chain reaction of hesitation and lost momentum. (This can be seen in real time when watching videos of right wing protests fighting with counter-protest groups, and can also be seen in recordings of police and riot cops against protestors when a charge doesn’t immediately turn into a rout.)

This paradox also comes into play with another peculiar psychological characteristic: Being disgusted or enraged by compassion. Compassion directed towards weakness can serve as a reminder of said weakness, or an admission, or symbolize a loss or negation of strength; the human mind is very complex and this can get rationalized and justified many different ways, but it all comes back to a central idea; that they can’t or don’t have what they want more than anything. This is another reason why these groups turn on each other at the drop of a hat, because displaying compassion for, or receiving compassion from another, is an insult in a culture where strength is prized: “I’m helping you because you’re weak and you need my help / pity / support.”

(In a world, and especially a year, where the hits keep coming and they don’t stop coming like some sort of Fae contract involving a Smash Mouth song, this attitude is even less healthy than it normally is.)

The sense of personal weakness at the heart of the paradox can take multiple forms, not just physical strength. Financial stability, social leverage, political authority, health and wellness, even good looks can all qualify. What matters is it’s something that a person wants and does not have. This by itself is the origin of most conspiracy theories; some other nation or ethnic group or political party is hoarding or stealing all the food or medicine or political power, and if they weren’t, things would be different. The conspiracy theory angle is so complicated it requires its own essay to explore in full, so for the purposes of brevity and clarity we will leave that unaddressed for now; all we need to focus on is the idea that these people want something that they can’t have. The “can’t have” part especially plays into the idea of radicalization and recruitment. Somebody who wants to be physically strong can work out and get swole, and can measure their progress over time in terms of sets and reps. As a matter of fact, they have to in order to determine what exercises are working for them. How much they can lift and for how long and with what body parts will vary greatly depending on factors like genetics, environment, childhood and adult nutrition, but what matters is that it can be quantified and measured and progress can be seen.

But fascists, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, fascism-susceptible people, are in a different situation. As much as they glorify, praise, and fetishize strength and power, what really drives them is their weakness. No matter how ripped they may be and how much they can bench, it’s never enough; they will always be afraid and insecure and there is always the possibility, if not the certainty, of somebody stronger. It’s the difference between wanting to be strong and wanting to not be weak. This also applies to knowledge, to social acumen, to power and influence. So long as they are unable or unwilling to confront the root cause of what drives them - to admit their weakness in whatever form they find intolerable - they can’t come to terms with it psychologically, never mind take action to correct it practically.

This leads directly to the next strategy for dealing with fascists; mockery and ridicule. The insecurity and weakness that drives fascism is bone deep and borders on the universal, and this is why so many alt-right insults are disparaging terms referring to a perceived lack of strength or fortitude or power. Trying to use those specific terms against them is about as effective as children on a playground going “I’m rubber, you’re glue” but individual insults and derogatory remarks are not what’s important; the underlying insecurity is. Simply not treating them with the deference and respect they desire is itself a potent starting point, and from there any number of comedic possibilities present themselves. Autocratic and authoritarian regimes are notorious about cracking down on dissent for this reason even more than an attempt to keep the citizenry from being agitated; just look at Vladimir Putin’s heavy handed retaliation against Russia’s internet access when somebody photoshopped heavy makeup onto his face. Wannabe dictators with no power can’t remove the object of their ridicule and it eats them alive from the inside out.

The final aspect of this counter attack strategy has to do with enemy morale and opposition. As stated in previous parts of the essay, a number of fascists and crypto-fascists abandoned the cause and ideology when they decided it was less stressful to stop being one. In other words, leave the door open for somebody to switch sides. Consider an analogy where Fascism is an island; some people will burn all their bridges in pursuit of the ideology, but others might not; if other people burn those bridges, the result is the same and they end up trapped on Fascism Island anyway, so they have nothing to lose by doubling down. A number of people on and off Tumblr have discussed this topic and the problems with what is called “essentialist” thinking long before this essay was written; there is a nearly decade old TED Talk by a DJ called Jay Smooth who suggested we start thinking of bias and prejudice the same way we think about hygiene like brushing our teeth, that prejudice is something people do as opposed to an inescapable part of their character.

It’s worth keeping in mind that this may be interpreted as weakness by the fascist or fascists in question and this may prompt them to redouble their attacks or attempt to “play” the person giving them an out in order to get information or undermine their confidence or even try to recruit them into the fascist cause; it’s also worth keeping in mind that it is impractical and unrealistic to expect everyone to adopt this approach. Some people have lost too much personally, and some people are too close to the ideological or physical front lines to even consider letting their guard down. Not everyone can be Reverend Wade Watts.

[antifainternational]

Is antifa technically an organization or does it just refer to people who are anti-fascist? I've seen a lot of posts about people talking about how people with anti-fascist views are grouped together and ostracized by people on the right claiming that they are antifa. And other posts about people claiming that antifa is a terrorist organization but if it is indeed not an organization just a set of beliefs how can this be? Have the thought police come lol

Antifa, an abbreviation for “anti-fascist,” is a movement opposed to fascism, full-stop.  Just like any other movement (the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc.), antifa isn’t an organization but there are thousands of organizations of anti-fascists within the movement. Calling antifa or any other human rights movement “terrorists” is one of the oldest tricks in the books, right up there with calling human rights movements “communists.”  It’s an attempt to shut down support for antifa by mislabeling antifa.  Political leaders that have called anti-fascists “terrorists” have included Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Trump - all of whom are fascists (and for those of you reading this that think we’re not being fair to Trump - read this). When someone called antifa “terrorists,” they usually justify it by claiming that antifa “uses violence” to achieve political ends.  But there are some real problems with this justification.  As Philosophy Tube explained in their video about antifa (jump to the 20:48 mark), all political ideologies and movements are predicated on violence (e.g. the police, the army, militarized borders, etc.), “to say that a particular form of political engagement is bad because it features violence isn’t quite enough because they all do.  If anti-fascism and fascism are equivalent because they both feature violence, then every political position is equivalent, because they all feature violence.  What separates them is who the violence is being done against, and why it’s being done.”

Antifa will physically defend their communities from fascist activity.  If fascists aren’t actively encouraging people to discriminate, attack, and murder people, antifa aren’t “violent.”  Fascist violence is targeted at people because of who they are - disabled, LGBTQ+, a member of a different ethnic/racial group, a member of a different religion, people with different migration status, etc.  By contrast, anti-fascists target fascists because they are threatening to hurt people. Again, that Philosophy Tube video gets into this quite well around the 25:15 mark. Let’s also look at the “evidence” of “antifa violence” presented by the fascists in power in the U.S. recently: -the FBI could find no links between antifa and violence at the most-intense Black Lives Matter protests -the U.S. Justice Department found no connection between antifa and arrests made at the protests -none of the people facing federal charges in the U.S. were found to have any connection to antifa -An analysis of 217 arrests in DC and Minneapolis found that none of the arrestees were connected to antifa -Three days after Trump tweeted his plan to have antifa declared “domestic terrorists,” the White House tweeted a photo of a stack of rocks in LA, claiming they had been planted there by antifa to throw at cops, etc.  But an LA synagogue quickly pointed out that it was an anti-terror barrier they put in front of their synagogue to prevent a car bombing, (causing the White House to quickly delete their tweet).  -a purported antifa Twitter account calling for acts of violence at protests turned out to be a fake run by white supremacists.  -at the start of the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, a man dressed in all black and carrying an umbrella smashed out the windows of an AutoZone with a hammer after spray painting “free shit for everyone zone” on the wall.  But this guy wasn’t antifa, an anarchist, or a Black Lives Matter supporter - it turned out he was Mitchell Wesley Carlson - a white supremacist gang member, who was clearly trying to make antifa/anarchist/Black Lives Matter protestors look bad/instigate shit. Last year, when people talked about antifa “violence,” they referred to fascists being punched or having milkshakes thrown at them. So we see violence on the level one would see in a typical high school being elevated to “terrorist violence” if antifa commit it; we also see the Trump regime working with full-on white supremacists to try to frame antifa as the cause/instigators/provocateurs of “violence” at recent protests (and failing miserably at doing so). Philosophy Tube specifically addresses the “antifa = terrorists” thing at the 29:15 mark of the video by referencing the work of terrorist researcher & scholar Louise Richardson, who points out that terrorists want three things - Revenge, Renown, and Response and that the targets of terrorism are interchangeable (meaning that terrorist targets are symbolic, not specific).  Antifa action is motivated by self-defense, not terror; antifa’s notorious tendency to be camera/media-shy doesn’t equate with a desire for renown, and antifa don’t tend to make demands for government responses to their demands - they just want to shut down fascists.  Even if we were making demands for governmental response, every political movement does that and that one criteria thing does not a terror group make.  Then there’s the matter of who is targeted by antifa - fascists, who comprise a very specific and non-interchangeable target. The other question is what is the extent/severity of antifa “terror” compared to fascist terror?  We listed above some of the “terrorist violence” opponents of antifa (read: fascists) have attempted to attribute to us.  A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies looked at 900 politically-motivated plots and attacks in the U.S. over the last quarter century or so.  Here’s what they found: 

This chart could be replicated in just about any other country or region you’d care to name.  In Europe, for example, you are five times more likely to die in a fascist/extreme right-wing terror attack than you are to die in a terror attack committed by anyone else. Two immediate takeaways from this: 1) the deadliest terrorists are right-wing extremists/fascists. 2) if antifa are “terrorists” we are fucking bad at it, given we haven’t killed anybody. So are antifa “terrorists” or are they people trying to stop the most dangerous terrorists in the world and are trying to do so using minimal violence themselves?  Is it logical to equate antifa “violence” with fascist violence?

Clearly it’s not and calling antifa terrorists or equating their violence as the same as fascist violence = the logical fallacy of false equivalence.  This essay by Gregory Shupak really lays bare the absurdity of speaking of antifa “terror” and “violence” in the same conversation about fascist terror and violence.   So no, encasedinpermafrost - antifa is a movement, not an organization, and characterizing antifa as terrorists is laughable at best and also an obvious attempt to deflect from the real terrorists - fascists, white supremacists, and the far-right.  The real question to ask is “why is this person trying to convince me that antifa are terrorists and who benefits if they succeed in convincing enough people of that?”

[anubianpagan]

Ma’at and Is/f/et

It seems the kemetic community is confused as to what is Ma’at and what is Isfet.  So let’s break this down using the most recent instance of this ignorance.  Prompted by @secondgenerationimmigrant ‘s hate-fueled rages.  I’ll let @belovedbysetandsekhmet​ and @ngdiscourse​ speak for themselves but here is my take.

Let’s start with Ma’at, there’s been alot of great discussions of what Ma’at is and I feel these discussions are some of the more pertinent and excellent ones to peruse for understanding Ma’at.  These discussions all make very excellent points and are well worth the reads: Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here and Here!

To begin with the hate anons “someone” sent me directly after a post of light mocking beginning with this one:

Now, I appreciate the politeness of saying “please” but the rest shows a complete lack of understanding about what Ma’at is.  Nothing I’ve posted is “anti-ma’at” unless of course you are a radicalized extremist who relies on overly emotional and manipulative mental gymnastics to justify yourself.  Most of the kemetics in the little political fandom group tend to think along these lines, that being a hateful, bitter person is somehow justifiable because they have convinced themselves it’s “ma’at” mostly these people are misguided and ignorant, and to be pitied. 

It is one thing to send such hate anons to someone, and another to wish horrific harm to someone for lightly mocking you.  As evidenced in this link: Here.

To be clear, this is not an execration because nothings being purged, nothings being removed, is/f/et isn’t being snuffed out, the wyrm isn’t being destroyed, this is just pure bitter hate.  Pure malice wished on someone because you can’t handle anythign outside your echo-chamnber.  Lets break this down:

“I hope your government fucks you personally over and that you drown in debt and starve like the people who were victims of austerity in the UK. “

It takes a special kind of evil to truly wish this on someone for mocking you.  Getting a light bit of mocking and you wish the government destroys their lives and they go into financial ruin?  This is not fighting is/f/et this is actively trying to feed it.  This is not Ma’at, this is actively stomping on Ma’at out of such bitter hatred and lack of moral fiber, even in a rage, this is a truly vile thing to wish on people you politically disagree with. However, when you justify to yourself that everyone who disagrees MUST be evil and all political dissent is the work of pure evil...it’s easy to cast yourself the hero in your own demented morality play.

“I hope you feel the despair of the people who had to choose between food and heating, of the people who had to work several jobs to exhaustion just to make ends meet, of the people who had to ration lifesaving medication because they couldn’t afford refills.“

Good vitriol but poor choices of wording.  How can you think you have any morality what so ever, that at the sight of being mocked for your political opinions, you immediately turn to this as your go-to reaction to wish on people?  Wishing harm, despair, pain and suffering on people who disagree with you or don’t believe you.  How can you honestly sit there and pretend you have felt even one modicum of Ma’at’s light fill you when this is where your mind goes because you lost a political event?  Your team didn’t win this time, it sucks, sure, but turning to wanting such horrible poverty and hardship and wishing it on people who politically disagree with you...is honestly, not anywhere near Ma’at, in fact, it’s directly the opposite.  You aren’t fighting FOR Ma’at here sweetie, you’re DEFENDING Is/fe/t.  We are just people disagreeing with you on the internet, we aren’t salivating over people dying and suffering, or complicit in desiring pain and hardships on families you deluded downer debby duckling.

“How is this Ma'at, you awful pieces of shit? How can you justify this to yourselves and be OK with treating the whole situation as an occasion to get your shits and giggles out of the “leftie snowflakes who have finally gotten got”?“

To be clear, we’ve mocked SGI’s politics, we never agreed with the opposing parties.  But to an extremist so blinded by their own hubris and false senses of moral superiority...I’m sure it looks the same.  Much is the case with social justice crowds, they are completely blinded by their own foolishness that they hurl themselves into the darkness and call it light.  To blame some people who mocked you, for the evils of the world, is at best terribly naive, at worst, willfully ignorant.  These same people also tend to not understand the difference between “I disagree with you” and Fascism™, but that usually stems from not actually wanting to know the difference.  It’s a lot easier to disgrace someone’s name when you claim they are literally evil and morally abhorrent.  This is why so many who don’t bow down to the kemetic fandom’s crowd of toxic sjw’s get called fascists, or nazis, or any kind of -ism imaginable.   Mostly it just shows these people are profoundly ignorant and exist in a toxic echo-chamber headspace that is, in the long run, unhealthy.  It’s an ideology of unlearning and unthinking, it’s gross, it’s not “social awareness” because social awareness would include knowing what words mean.  Not throwing them around so hard they lose all meaning.  “Owning the leftie snowflakes” isn’t the goal, usually it’s to argue against what is thought to be bad leftist ideas, with better, more sound arguments that go over their heads because they worship their politics.

I’m sure some would argue it’s “mean” to tease these people or mock them for their bad ideas/opinions, but when you watched them support the people who led the charges in the sjw war on the kemetic community, the people they hurt, the people they smeared and chased away, the content they trashed, gods they disgraced...They become comically tiresome clowns.  We’re tired of their bullshit, the kemetic community was trashed into a garbage heap because people wouldn’t bend the knee to their political tripe.  In hateful revenge they made sure everyone who didn’t agree was either smeared, chased off, or they lied their asses off to disgrace their names.  None of them really have any idea what Ma’at or Is/fe/t are, they just throw the words around without any care for meaning, or quoting some violent racist rapists book as holy doctrine on the subjects of Ma’at.

To be clear, I’m not angry, I’ve long since passed angry and went all the way around to pity.  I pity these kids, alot.  I hope they wake up someday.

This clear overreaction is even more hilarious when you consider that they have no idea how to form an execration...imagine if such terrible people actually knew how to use magical systems to achieve working goals...the world would look like the middle east, shredded in war and poverty and religious extremism, terrorism and death.  It truly is a blessing of the Netjeru that these fools have no concept of how to use magic, heka, or execration ritual prayers.