sur-realpolitik

[sur-realpolitik]

one of my favorites of all time

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US politics: an analysis by this bozo right here.

Hello I'm Felix Warren and I've been reading Politico every day since early 2016 as the equivalent of how other people watch their "soaps." One of my chief goals in this weirdly obsessive reading habit was to see if I could understand what was going on enough to analyze it, and if not, how long it would take me to get to where I could do so. The test would be if I could predict where general trends in politics and related news would go. It's been like that for the past few years, actually--I've been able to anticipate a few things before they were reported over the past couple years in fact. So, this is my take on where things are going now that it's almost November 2023.

The big thing is, people worry a lot about where the Republican party is going. Republicans do as much as Democrats do. And this is because the Republican party has been having some internal problems for awhile, which became very visible once the Tea Party became a big thing. And I think what's going to happen eventually with the Republican party is either a split or a purge, where it becomes several parties that more accurately reflect their own members' beliefs. The Democratic party could also use a split but it's still able to come to compromises and agreements for the good of a strong majority, so I don't know if it's in danger of cracking in half in the same way.

In the short term, though, things are probably gonna coalesce around Trump until he has a downfall. The man can't live forever and he can't stay out of jail forever either. I know a lot of people get scared of his followers having some sort of uprising but I think his downfall is going to be a lot more boring than all that. His real flaw is that he's got a horrible paper trail and he's not able to instill loyalty in his many, many co-conspirators. When three lawyers flip on a person within as many days, it's a sign that that person isn't as powerful as they wish they were.

The biggest thing that's affecting global politics is that the status quo that was sort of invented after World War II is the only thing that we have keeping international "norms," and it's been wearing down significantly in the last decade. One big part of the equilibrium has been that several world powers, including the US, make a huge chunk of their GDP off of weapons sales for "defense" to their allied nations. A lot of people look for excuses to fly drones or fire rockets because then there's more to order for restock. I don't know how this winds down. It's not sustainable in terms of technology and in terms of resources, let alone lives. Nuclear technology is wrapped up in this, with a new fleet of submarines on order, and a new fleet of IBMs being requested--things we have no long-term plan for when it comes to storage of the waste and decommissioned items.

I feel that if we can ride out the next five years there's a chance that some technologies could come about that could dramatically change the status quo for the better. I don't think it'll be AI. AI is largely a buzzword and often a hoax--the ultimate mechanical turk.

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???

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Study finds that maybe possibly demented people should not run the country

Yes that includes Biden and Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi.

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eminem’s got about lyrics about how the secret service interviewed him, so a journalist FOIA’d info about eminem from the secret service to fact check his rap

it turns out the secret service investigated eminem because of lyrics threatening trump and ivanka

and they really did interview him

and when one of the secret service agents started reading the threatening lyrics out loud eminem started rapping along 

and they noted that

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I think it's actually awesome that the president's failson smokes crack, he's a man of the people, literally based

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This a cult, pure and simple.

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this is the fucking funniest thing ive ever seen im in tears of laughter. (right axis) . this is a work of fucking art

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"Snouts. I'm here for it."

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not to post a screenshot a tweet screenshoting a tumblr post but the fact that this was posted by the grandson of herman mankiewicz, actual screenwriter of citizen kane, sure is something

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Have we considered that instead of "cancel culture" or "purity culture" or some other sort of phenomenon that is temporary or can be explained with an origin story, that this is, in fact, culture? It's a part of human culture. This is part of how human culture functions, has always functioned, and always will function in some way, and the reason I think it's important to face that instead of trying to label it as some extra thing that doesn't belong is because if you accept it as a constant part of reality, as a common difficulty arising in culture, you can start to better figure out how to handle it when it happens.

There's no future where we stop having problems interacting with each other. There's only a future where we learn to handle those problems maturely and rationally when they occur.

I can't stress enough how much the John Green debacle was an early example of how cancel culture and purity culture combine to make people feel righteously justified to engage in harassment.

John Green, during his time on tumblr, committed the heinous sins of...being neurodivergent and talking openly about it, earnestly interacting with fans in a very direct and unfiltered way, and writing about teenagers navigating first love and sexuality while he himself was an adult. The worst things he ever did were be a little cringe or misspeak, for which he was always prompt to apologize (often whether he really needed to or not).

Yet despite the former two being things tumblr claimed to love and the last one being true of 99.99% of YA authors, in this case a large segment of tumblr users steeped in the early 2010s resurgence of purity culture decided that these things were suspicious and predatory, and used that as an excuse to justify some truly awful behavior.

Which is really all that cancel culture is: the normalization and even celebration of the process of misapplying morality or ethics to dehumanize someone for the express purpose of justifying whatever pain and suffering you want to inflict upon them. Basically, deciding "this person is bad, so I am exempt from affording them basic respect and human dignity, and am allowed to cross any and all otherwise uncrossable lines in order to punish them without damaging my own moral or ethical standing."

Contrary to popular tumblr lore, the infamous "cock monologue" was not the sum total of the harassment, or even the worst of it. Callout blogs issued long lists of "receipts" about how terrible John Green was, most if not all of which were either taken out of context or completely refutable. His works were torn to shreds by people who'd never read them, as evidenced by much of the criticism being obviously and blatantly counter to the actual contents of the books.

Not that it mattered. Once the John Green hate party reached a certain level of critical mass, it became less about who he actually was or what he'd done, and more about proving you were a good person by hating him. That's the natural conclusion of cancel culture, after all: virtue signalling by identifying yourself in opposition to the cancelled parties. They're bad, and I'm good, so I hate them! Or, more often: They're bad, and I hate them, so I'm good!

Before it was over with, John Green had been accused, with no evidence, of being everything from a Nazi to a pedophile and subjected to hate mail and death threats. He eventually left the site for the sake of his own mental health, and because he no longer felt comfortable engaging directly with fans in the same way he once had.

Yet even now, with the benefit of hindsight, and even among those who ostensibly reject purity culture and condem bullying and harassment, very few on tumblr take what was done to John Green as seriously as it should be taken or condemn it as thoroughly as it should be condemned. Which I think is something we need to at least consider doing, given the increasing rise of purity and cancel culture online, and given the recent influx of professional creators eager to interact with fans on a more direct level than they have on other social media.

And my concern is not purely, or even primarily, for the Mike Flanagans and Lynda Carters of the world. I'm far more concerned, actually, for the small, independent or self-published creators in this space, and how much even a very small level of visibility gives too many people a feeling of carte blanche to engage in harassment.

I myself have less than 3k followers on here, a handful of popular posts, and zero notoriety or consequence outside of tumblr whatsoever, and I've been repeatedly told to kill myself for saying such innocuous things as "I don't think censorship is the cure for the world's evils" and "maybe learning the history of communities you want to participate in would be a good idea."

Thankfully, all it took for me to stop the harassment that came my way was to block those few individuals. But there have been many instances over the years of small creators or just random tumblr users that got a bit popular being stalked, doxxed, swatted, and harassed to the point of leaving the site and dealing with serious mental health issues as a result. It has never been just John Green. John Green isn't even the worst example. And tumblr has never learned its lesson.

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one of my grandmas was a teenager during holodomor years, she told me stories about people eating dirt from the fields where wheat grew before soviets took it and that her mother used to make them pancakes stinging nettles for holidays because there was nothing else to make them from. she kept a loaf of bread in pockets of all her sweaters and little pouches with cereal around the house. my great grandma told me how her mother used to hide her from a neighbour who lost her mind from starvation and wanted to eat her. her father used to steal oat grain by grain from kolgosp to feed his family. she told me that cats taste better than dogs. she never brushed off bread crumbs from the table just picked them up very carefully and gave them to her pigs or chickens. most of the recipes she passed to her children are meals you can make from grass. she also never learned to make a soup with meat. the biggest ass-kicking i ever received was for throwing away a piece of moldy bread. you hear these stories long before school explains to you what it was, you literally see you grandparents hoarding food that’ll last you a lifetime before you know what food is. and there’s thousands, if not millions, of stories like these. ukrainians do have a cult of food and maybe that’s because our ancestors have been so violently deprived of it.

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Wizard Politics Update | Hone your divination skills with news headlines | Monday November 14 2022

Come catch up with politics with me and let's talk a bit about how divination and political news intersect.

This is a segment I've been wanting to do for awhile where I talk about politics and current events in news from a magical and neopagan angle. This time I went a lot into how I use political headlines to hone my predictive intuition. And of course, discussed the midterms results.

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"Many of the (plausible) outcomes predicted by top GOP officials didn’t materialize. There was no massive shift of the Hispanic vote toward the GOP. There was no surge of hidden Trump voters. There was no widespread takeover of deep blue House territory. There was no expansion of the Senate map into New Hampshire, Colorado and Washington, where incumbent Democrats cruised to reelection. The governor of New York won easily. There was no red wave."

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sorry I was hanging out with your libertarian boyfriend last night and Well he's a marxist leninist now

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Today the Tory whip received a text in parliament, put down his phone, and then put his head in his hands.

I wonder what he could have read?

[sur-realpolitik]

Today the Tory whip received a text in parliament, put down his phone, and then put his head in his hands.

I wonder what he could have read?