to paraphrase an adage I once read, that I think was originally about the American military in Vietnam: if your military or police goes to a village of 100 where 5 insurgents live, and publicly executes those 5 insurgents, how many insurgents will you have left afterwards? the answer: 95

"Pay Attention" (Bruce Nauman, 1973, lithograph)

@lukeoneil47.bsky.social ‘s verse about this never fails to move me

The latest ICE murder victim was, by all accounts, a good person. Caring and brave and kind. A profound loss. But the worst person in Minnesota doesn't deserve to be killed by his government either. You don't have to earn the right not to be murdered by the state. That's what makes it a right.

I keep thinking “my god the people they’ve killed seem like exceptionally good folks” and I think the lesson there is that they’re not exceptional, but that wonderful people abound and that a baseline distrust in humanity is a shitty conservative trope that privileges power over collective strength

Czesław Miłosz, “This World”

the video of another person being murdered by the state on the streets of minneapolis shows exactly what people are saying it shows. make your own choices but don’t feel like you are obligated to bear witness to it. reading a description is enough.

"Anarchist Jews Against Zionism and Fascism" Sticker spotted in Sioux city, Iowa

“BY YOUR RESPONSE TO DANGER” (Jenny Holzer, 1980 - 1982, red paint and white enamel on metal) www.pafa.org/museum/colle...

the president wont see your posts making fun of how he's looking these days but your friends whose skin seems to be sloughing off in wet discolored chunks as the psychic weight of their craven wretchedness becomes manifest will

"Dreamcast", a haiku Each day he rises. Asks me, "Is it still launch day?" "Yes," I lie. "Always."

i feel like the viral bus thread resonates because at every step of the way you're like "ok surely this will be resolved shortly, any second now," which seems like what all the passengers are also thinking. then the fact that the situation doesn't resolve and the bus just keeps going is an Allegory

completely unironically, this is how we'll know

this thread, jfc

It exposes directional alignment; you still seek to limit, not expand, who is allowed to be human. Yes, you have set your limitation more inclusively than our fascist gang of white supremacists; it doesn't mean you're not also setting limitations & they'll use your limit as long as it serves them.

probably not a good sign that I have the lyrics for "Invisible Sun" on repeat in my head today

hey Mom can you come pick me up. yeah everyone on the niche microblogging website is arguing about who has the correct emotional posture to the unknowable future again

"A CROWN?" His voice shook with rage. "I NEVER WORE A CROWN!" "You never wanted to rule." - from "Reaper Man" by Terry Pratchett, 1991

there was a time in my life when I could say something like "I wouldn't wish prostate cancer on anyone" and mean it the last ten years or so have taken that from me

Jesus Christ @lukeoneil47.bsky.social

Discworld QOTD, from Snuff

thinking a lot lately about our surprise when the victim of state violence is white, a citizen, a priest, a veteran, some category viewed as exempt from that violence. it’s time to understand you aren’t. no one is. whiteness isn’t the color of your skin it is a conditional privilege you can lose.

"The strong women told the faggots two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win."

And the executioner's face is always well hidden

last month I used this tool to back up all my important Discord chats, which wasn't trivial but it worked, and then deleted my account. looks like I had good timing I don't have any good advice on where large communities can go, but everybody really close to me is just using Signal now #discord

You were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?

I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for in a politician but not having every day be a nightmare of horrors would be pretty high up so someone should run on that

this is your mission. our pedophile president needs you to jump out of a helicopter to kidnap a head of state and his wife so some oil ceos can make a lot of money. we’ll be watching from a resort in florida that still serves wedge salad and checking how many retweets we get. good luck soldier

What if none of these things is a distraction from the other things and instead they're all just horrible things

something to keep in mind tonight:

some months ago I was helping my mother clean up her house, and I found a Playboy from 1984, before my parents split up, on top of a closet shelf he wasn't into those kind of women, but after browsing it, and looking at the books on my shelf that I inherited from him, i figured out why he had it:

I have never stopped masking since I started in February 2020. And at this point I don't think that I will ever be able to safely stop. Our public health systems, which are formed by both the government _and the people_, they will not recover from this disinformation campaign within my lifetime.

"Get the principals on camera" is such a telling phrase here, because it tells us that for Weiss there's no world in which the victims of these horrific actions can actually be seen as the subjects of the story: They're background noise, and the people who matter are the ones sending them.

Generations of quite strategic right wing scheming to establish perma-dominion and the guys charged with getting across the finish line are... these guys

every so often I look at the shelf with all the Umberto Eco books, with the essays on fascism and semiotics, and I remember that he died in February 2016, before Trump and LLMs and all of *this*, and I can't help but think that maybe it's good that he didn't have to watch the final death of meaning

they didn't need AI to make Silksong, it just needed some deeply insane guys to have a blank check for living expenses until their next thing was done, I think we should try doing more of that instead

new scam going around where they hire you for a job but pay you less than the value your labor produced

"Before that, dreams. The dream of being warm and staying warm. The dream of the upper hand like a love song, the dream of the right weapon and then the perfect escape." Jorie Graham, "To The Reader"

The appeal of stuff like cassette futurism has morphed over the past few years for me from childhood nostalgia to a very genuine desire for tactile, reliable, functionality over flashy, futuristic aestheticism that seems to only make things more difficult

The issue with Neoliberalism isn't that it doesn't work, it's that it only works once. You can sell the family silver once, you can strip the copper out of the walls once, you can burn the furniture to keep warm once. But then you have to come up with something else!

There are so many people living lives of quiet dignity despite horrific medical news or poverty or tragedy where every day they still wake up and try to be good people in the world even as the world pushes against them and it makes me even angrier at the absolute shitheads that rule over things

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." — Robert Anton Wilson

Ah, I'm awake again. Time to open the psychological harm app

Rolling out the Matt Christman quote from after Charlottesville (2017) again:

Mainstream news covered the Jeffrey Epstein emails related to ppl like Trump. Today, I want to take a look at Epstein's correspondence with prominent atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss, who asked the pedophile's advice on responding to accusations of sexual assault skepchick.org/2025/11/so-i...