xunzilla

[xunzilla]

2016 Trump was plausible as a new synthesis. 2024 Trump – the unholy alliance of too-online tech managers, White Sharia unassimilables, and the oil and gas industry – is not. But you don't need a synthesis to win; all you need is a scapegoat to unify the rest of the country against. We've had a number of candidates – "1350", "groomers", "deplorables", "Eurabia", – but right now it looks like the enduring one is "wokes", a broad-spectrum word which can be interpreted to mean anything from "the Democrats in their capacity as people whose electoral strategy was normalizing workplace discrimination against the majority" to "the people who invented trans in 2015 to sterilize your children". One of these is true.

The overall mood is that there are too many claims on the polity and some must be voided. Do the Democrats have a way to do this? They could try running against the ultra-rich, or leading the American people away from support for Israel, but do they have options that don't involve pissing on the third rail? I don't think they do.

Or, in short:

I'd been hoping that Harris would limp into office, and the Republicans would lick their wounds and then go to the effort of becoming a party that doesn't suck.

Didn't happen, obviously. The Republicans didn't have to do anything in order to win. So now, sigh, we're stuck hoping that the Dems lick their wounds and then go to the effort of becoming a party that doesn't suck.

Seems laughable, I know, but...I guess the version where the Republicans learned anything, in the current political climate, was even more laughable.

The upside is that the Dem-rooted version of the New Synthesis, should it actually manifest by some miracle, is likely to be a lot better than the Republican-rooted version. Trump of course thinks that he is the New Synthesis, that the political side of the culture war has been won, but - I'm pretty sure you can't create an enduring consensus just by kicking people in the face, which is apparently all that he knows how to do.

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Ethnic minorities make up over 25% of the population of Israel, so even leaving aside the Oops! I Can't Believe It's Not Ethnic Differences between different groups of Jews, it's less of an ethnostate demographically than South Korea, Lithuania, Argentina, or Vermont.

I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.

I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.

Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.

Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.

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some small part of my descent into madness was caused by, when "food deserts" were the Current Thing, looking up where I lived on the #important cutting-edge researchers' Food Desert Map, and discovering that I lived in a Food Desert, at a time in my life when I regularly got food by walking to the grocery store

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GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Doom is a user-extensible aesthetic vision of Hell, and one of the reasons it works so well at that is monster infighting - if one demon's attack hits another demon, the second demon will get mad at the first and retaliate. Hell is an endless cycle of violence where badass ripped monsters twelve feet tall with rocket launchers for arms kill each other until they die in Hell and are resurrected to fight again. As an irritable and short-tempered person who would very much like to be twelve feet tall with rocket launchers and tren, watching the hideous robotic spiders, musclegoats etc. slaughter each other in a 2.5D mosh abattoir totally succeeds at convincing me I should fear for the state of my immortal soul

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GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: it sucks that race science doesn't work

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: What do you mean by this.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: think about it. if race science worked everything would be so much easier. evaluating competence would be a simple matter of breeding, and all men would be born into their rightful station

HAMPHECIUS HUMBUG: The sons of the tillers of earth would till, and the sons of the rulers of earth would rule... maximally efficient, with no more strife than between the lion and the ant...

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Doesn't it devalue human intelligence to reduce it to that of the ant?

HAMPHECIUS HUMBUG: bro are you asking me if i want to #disrupt received wisdom to secure the bag. what do you think america is about

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: America is about the eugenic breeding of a transnational master race; look up what the founder of MIT said

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Here's one for the 'post-doomer literature' files. Don't worry about which literature :-)

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in 2024 the conservatives broke the civil rights era taboo on explicitly recognizing white identity in a major-party election. this passed without comment

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that's at best a side effect of the process of figuring out how to make reproductively viable life paths that are meaningfully distinct from dying at 25-35 in a manner that aligns the various stakeholders, a set which includes forces that would really like for people to die to the world outside the office at 25-35, and does not in a relevant manner include the owners and operators of the individual lives in question

We're in a global memetic race to develop a secular breeding imperative

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I'm not saying this doesn't go hard, I am listening to it on purpose, but that entire era of American culture where we got into music from Germany - where some of us learned German and went there - like, there's a cultural studies dissertation in that that I'll summarize (too flippantly) as "a response to Peak Rap for white people whose cultural inheritance included Enya"

Like how people looking for an alternative to rap got into German music when it was Kraftwerk and invented Detroit techno

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conservatives often see government entitlements as a form of property, which we parody as like "get your government hands off my medicare" but are they wrong? if property rights are created by the government – which they are: patents, IP law, etc. – why should medicare be any different?

hence "welfare queens", a class of aristocrats that the working class both resents and disdains. resents because they're aristocrats and we don't hold with nobility, disdains because the proper values come from submission to authority. like you don't see middle managers having feuds

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In which is regarded our Atlantic coast:

HANPHECIUS HUMBUG: Tegucigalpa-Saxon lawn farmers, Cadillac-fattened cyber-peddlers, seventh failsons of bloated baronets—

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: do you know what they used to call senescent civilizations with fading, unearned wealth? societies of illiterate, lethargic, cart-pulling cud-chewers, ruled over by priests in strange robes who babble in dead tongues and wave idols over their primitive flocks? the sick men of the world system, the excreta of history?

HANPHECIUS HUMBUG: what

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: the East

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It's fine. We're in an era where the polity is contracting. Conservatives want to contract it in certain ways, but they're wrong about where it is! More people have dyed hair, piercings, short hair as women or long hair as men, etc. than are monarchist weirdos like JD Vance who believe in repealing the 19th Amendment, banning contraception, and having a transnational absolute monarchy that believes everyone who doesn't support its king will be tortured forever in the afterlife. Catholic converts are creepy and weird! They're also very literally engaged in a conspiracy to subordinate America to Rome. They even have a creepy vizier! The creepy vizier, who the Trump administration appointed to the federal agency for managing the administrative state, says that politicians should replace the administrative state's staff with Catholics in order to make America a Catholic theocracy—and that it's fine to make it a Catholic theocracy since it's currently a Pelagian one. Pelagian? Very weird. These people are deeply out of touch. They've lost the plot. They don't get it. They're the kind of guy that joins an organization that, within living memory, had the biggest child-rape scandal in history—they're creeps.

Sometimes it's fine for the polity to contract. Sometimes it's fine to stop being tolerant of things that we used to be tolerant of. This country used to tolerate the Ku Klux Klan—used to think it wasn't weird to be a Klansman—is it bad that we stopped?

You guys do not understand that for the average person "freak" is already an inherently terrible thing to be, and "weird" only recently became acceptable when its meaning was softened and palatable "weirdness" became marketable alongside "nerd culture". In everyday usage a "weird guy" is still someone you want to avoid, it's a common euphemism for "probable sex offender", and to call someone a freak is about equivalent to calling them a slur. Being visibly mentally ill or visibly homeless is enough for a good portion of the population to believe you don't deserve human rights (although they wouldn't phrase it that way), and having visibly autistic mannerism is enough for people to think you shouldn't be let around kids. LGBT acceptance was won by arguing that gay and trans people are "normal, just like you and me", that they aren't weird, that they aren't freaky sex perverts they just want to love and be who they are. There has never been any kind of broader acceptance towards weirdness qua weirdness or freaks qua freaks, even on the left. It doesn't exist. For the average person, to be weird and gross is to be inhuman, unworthy of life. There is no distinction made between the subjectively disgusting and the morally condemnable; if you are freaky you are bad and that's that.

People calling J. D. Vance a weirdo is not going to come back around to harm LGBT people in some sort of indirect way, because mainstream acceptance of LGBT people is already predicated on the assumption that they are not weird. That's what the last 15 years have been about, convincing mainstream society that LGBT people are "normal", because normalcy is a deeply ingrained prerequisite for acceptance. Obviously I think this is ridiculous and stupid, but I think it's pretty silly to look at Dems calling J. D. Vance "weird" and "freaky" and be like "that's what's doing it". No, it's like attacking a politician by insinuating that they're gay in the 70s or whatever. It sucks that that's something that can be used as an insult but it's the water we're fucking swimming in, it's gonna be years before anyone looks back on it with shame. And a lot of supposedly progressive people are gonna realize they were on the wrong side of history, but that's par for the course.

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Given that many Americans are extremely sensitive about the perception of Satanism - see the public responses to Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, Lady Gaga, etc. - S&P seems less like people making things up than like sensitivity readers, whose job it is to ensure that mass-market cartoons don't cause cultural offense, even to people who Alex Hirsch has never met and thinks are unreasonable. I mean, we live in a country where people believe in Real Raw News - and some of those people have children, and determine what products their children consume, and are part of Disney's market.

But, like... should they be?

Should our cultural output be sanitized to avoid offending the sensibilities of the uneducated and terminally simple? Or are some people's views so retrograde that they aren't worth taking seriously?

More importantly for Disney, a publicly traded corporation: would it be good for business to write our social inferiors out of the public square?

I don't know - would you have invested in Charlie Hebdo?

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

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The first paragraph of her Wikipedia:

Anna Dalia Ayala (born December 22, 1965) is an American fraudster and convicted felon. She is most known for bringing a fraudulent tort lawsuit against a Wendy's restaurant in San Jose, California in 2005. Ayala’s claims cost the chain more than US $21 million in lost revenue.[1][2] This led to a felony charge of attempted grand larceny against her, to which Ayala pleaded guilty in September 2005.[3] She was sentenced to nine years in prison on January 18, 2006 and served four years.[4] In 2013, she received another prison sentence for an unrelated incident regarding filing a false police report and felony firearm possession

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David French, the National Review writer and former president of FIRE turned rhetorical foil for a Catholic convert from Trotskyism (from Nietzscheanism from atheism from Islam) in a Twitter post about the event planning choices of a library in Sacramento (which were globally available and distributed on the internet) that blew up into "the French-Ahmari debate", about whether the mission of conservatism should be to advocate for the rights of a Christian minority under a liberal framework or to make the government Catholic?

Yeah, that tracks

Trump/MAGA incite political violence and never condemn it. Maybe Trump will understand that weak men with guns are not a good thing.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

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Speaking of 2014, who else remembers the slate of media articles about celebrities coming out as conservatives? Phrased in that idiom, taking alignment with an invisible minority 'out of the closet' and into public to advocate for its normalization. David Mamet was one, which is why I've heard of David Mamet

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It's surprising seeing Popehat quoted by Liberals Are Cool Dot Tumblr since I remember him as a conservative blog run off in the realignment ca. 2014, but that might be spillover from Clarkhat, his co-blogger who went Moldbug until, to the disappointment of part of his audience, he didn't get to be a co-blogger anymore

Trump/MAGA incite political violence and never condemn it. Maybe Trump will understand that weak men with guns are not a good thing.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.