Queer historians love to write phrases like "now of course we in the West today believe [thing that is extremely unpopular among anyone who didn't get a liberal arts degree and even then], but things were different back then [when people just said the things they believe quietly now]"

women who have had elon musk's children should really be forming a consciousness-raising group at this point

Portland has been uniquely racialized and marked out for punishment for almost a full decade. Especially after the murder of Renee Good was excused and justified, we cannot meaningfully call this violence by Border Patrol "random." These killings are explicit policy and delivery on campaign promises

Viola Liuzzo Heather Heyer Renee Nicole Good Even white woman hood is not enough for this country to stop

This is really bad; Grok is now going into is third day of regularly producing nonconsensual deepfake pornography and nobody is doing anything about it. The "Mechahitler" and "white genocide" episodes were stopped much more quickly. I suppose this tells us all about relative priorities.

I think it is bad to provoke a destabilizing war with the potential to affect the lives of tens of millions. It was bad the last time we did it and I don't see how it would be any better now. This view puts a person at odds with both parties and possibly designates her as a terrorist sympathizer

You can tell how badly a year has gone by how cathartic you think it's going to be to listen to "This Year" by the Mountain Goats starting at approximately 11:56 PM local time. And I am very, very ready

This should not be shrugged aside. They have stopped with the fake 22 million illegal immigrants things and are flat out saying we want to deport 10's of millions of citizens and legal residents from "third world countries" Basically they are advocating removing 1/3 of the population on a gov site.

libraries and brick-and-mortar bookstores might do well to market themselves as curation agents against this onslaught of fake books from large language models. i don't think google books or amazon has ever been more inhospitable and consumer-unfriendly to readers than they are now

True bugbear of mine is how people online will read phrases with meanings, like "male gaze" or "banality of evil," and rather than reading the works those phrases come out of, will just try to guess what they mean based on the words in them and context clues

it's shameful regardless. Larry Summers is not the bar

This is because the left treats feminism—and particularly feminist critiques of sexuality and sexual exploitation—with contempt, not as a serious and necessary intervention but ad a bourgeois affectation at best and as a betrayal at worst. But you’re not ready for that conversation!!!

ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote: https://propub.li/3MTlm33

It's very strange when the White House issues statements that say Christian things. This is not even a partisan thing necessarily, Obama used to say "God bless America," and I know why they do it, but still, that's weird. We do still have an Establishment Clause, if only by a technicality. Stop that

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

Queer theory is when you use a lot of jargon to examine one of the same six pieces of evidence in the archive and the more jargon you use the more queer theory it is

It's happened: I've made a Substack. My first-ever post is a close reading of a truly awful documentary, an examination of the rhetoric of right-wing conspiracy, a philosophical meditation on youth liberation, and so, so much more. And it's free! hildegardeheinrich.substack.com/p/power-peda...

Book covers used to be better because they used to be worse. Trends change and everybody's trying to make a living, but if I could choose between the same book having a clean, graphic-design-101 cover or a terrible oil painting of a shirtless hunk fighting a dragon, I would always choose the latter

The glass-closet Nazis, of whom Posobiec is only one, have been openly comparing the US to Weimar and casting around for a Hitler for years. We ought to have done something about it before the President was saying that Sturmtruppen should be sent to this city to defend the honor of our retail stores

photo by one of DHS/Noem's handpicked right-wing media influencers (who have been getting access press have not)

When you get too libertarian, you forget how capitalism actually works. Case in point: there will never be a plucky, underdog, startup moderation service, because that's not where the money comes from. What revenue would such a thing possibly gain? Are people going to pay for a blocklist sub? Why?

banned books week…..a great time to buy a bunch of insanely famous books

Frankly I'm surprised it's taken Trump this long to suggest sending freikorps to Portland. Everyone who has suggested that this is a lawless hellscape, who has made propaganda about our homeless and drug-using populations, has basically wanted this, but been too cowardly to say it out loud

About 3/4 of the way in, I feel like I've understood what's basically been going on this year the least out of any year of my entire life. Which is really saying something.

Sometimes your day is immeasurably improved by seeing a really cool pigeon

It's difficult to acknowledge and address the ways that the long history of stochastic violence that helped build this country impacts our astronomically high gun violence rates today, but it's easy to scapegoat a minority you already hate anyway. What a country

There has been a rush among centrists like Gavin Newsom and Ezra Klein to brush over the hateful life of Charlie Kirk and valorize the man. Let me be clear, killing Charlie Kirk was wrong and abhorrent. We must condemn murder without sanitizing a man who built his empire on hate. My latest piece.

Healthcare in this country is a system that is manifestly unfit for purpose (at least, for the purpose it should serve), and I have to admit, I don't know how to fix it. I am broadly supportive of M4A as a stopgap, but both this new House bill and the example of the UK have proven that's not enough

It's difficult to acknowledge and address the ways that the long history of stochastic violence that helped build this country impacts our astronomically high gun violence rates today, but it's easy to scapegoat a minority you already hate anyway. What a country

I don't know why a certain subset of people seem so excited about Donald Trump maybe dying. Are we all so thrilled about the prospect of 48th President of the United States J.D. Vance?

Need to grab Jonathan Ned Katz's The Invention of Heterosexuality at some point. Many great and insightful examinations of how masculinist politics have led to this radical right present, and I'm wondering how to conceptualize the new version of heterosexuality forwarded by that movement

In times like these I find myself returning to Emma Goldman's The Psychology of Political Violence, penned (with some historical inaccuracies for safety) following the McKinley assassination. We do not want random acts of violence, but in a society which is against life, we will always have them

Feel like many people who have never lived in California and are used to thinking of it as a monolithic "blue state" are getting a rude awakening from Harris and Newsom as to what CA Dem politics are actually like lately. This is not an accident, or Newsom taking a turn, I promise

It's nowhere near enough to make up for the damage he did, and really is still doing, to generations of children, but I am glad James Dobson is dead. No hell would be hot enough

how we were dealing with pronatalism…. in 1979 (Rosalind Petchesky, in her introduction to Feminist Studies vol. 5, no. 2)

There are people who haven't yet internalized, or even conceptualized, the idea that, in my lifetime, either society is going to have fully collapsed or we simply will not have disposable plastics and year-round produce. And I have to pretend take their advice about what to do with my life seriously

Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.

Trying to come up with a non-rude way to say that you should actually read old books

I believe the science that shows that audiobooks light up the same parts of the brain as regular books, but some of these people have got to be doing it wrong. Like, there's no way listening to Business Secrets of the Pharaohs at double speed while doing something else is the same as Jane Austen

Read Agustina Bazterrica's The Unworthy. It's interesting to see that, even as "climate fiction" gets used as a kind of loose descriptor (even among subgenres) we're getting these weird experiments in what the form can be. I'd be interested to see more "climate gothic" of the same kind

Your medium never gets to be "real art" until it hits a critical mass of scholars with a tenuous grasp of Freud (or, better yet, Lacan) making points they already wanted to make based on slant readings of major pieces. This is why video games, radio plays, and podcasts are all still low culture

the US profoundly needs a children's rights movement. children are not property... they deserve opportunity and learning and autonomy and security.... and our country just does not acknowledge this

The idea that jazz, rock and roll, cubism, and expressionism are "degenerate art" is, of course, ridiculous- to us, now. But how many people look at something they just don't like, or that they think isn't properly morally instructive, in our own time and think the same thing?

RIP to Tom Lehrer, a true titan among curmudgeonly, over-educated pedants and an inspiration to too-clever-by-half kids with unfettered access to Youtube everywhere

Obscenity does not exist. It's not real. There is no standard on Earth that neatly sorts Greco-Roman and Renaissance nudes and Lolita from "pornography," a term with a famous definition, however unpleasant its contents often are. I repeat, this is not a surprise to campaigners against "obscenity"!

Most apps and websites are trying to make you think and behave like a baby. It makes your life worse.

It's genuinely upsetting that in the present year, it's still basically acceptable to deride something as "degenerate art." The people pushing for its removal from society know what that means, and the project it is a part of. Do the people who go along with it?

Nobody wants to admit they're in charge anymore. Boss still decides whether or not you make rent, but you're all one big happy family. Doctor still decides whether you get institutionalized, but you're in charge of your healthcare. The only ones left not passing the buck enjoy the feeling of command

Every contemporary book on queer history has to chuck a few rocks at the effigy of Foucault. I've read books on Roman sexuality that have needed to toss a few his way. It's been too long since I've read History of Sexuality to say, but I wonder if that work is not so much right as productively wrong