I have said this for awhile: the democratic party’s general unwillingness to allow healthy dissent on the issue of Palestine will allow the fascists to “get ahead” on the issue because the antisemitic groyper faction is tolerated in the party and allowed to dissent.

The Epstein scandal has always been a scandal about the ruling class as a whole, not one individual or political party. Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together.

This is like after 9/11 when George Bush made sure all his KSA buds got to leave the nation while all americans were grounded, except for pedophiles lol

So Trump’s going to do Iraq II in Venezuela to distract from Epstein?

anyway. I'm just processing and analyzing some social friction months/years after the fact, as I must do in order to avoid making the same mistakes again. this stuff doesn't usually bother me much because I've gotten so used to keeping my expectations for most allistic-originating communication low

I think about other people so much: their motivations, fears, how they want to be perceived, how to tell when they're upset or approach them with a problem. I make a lot of effort because I thought all that came naturally to allistics. to my horror I found most don't think about that stuff at all!

it's not like allists are actually more empathetic (what about the world we live in leads you to believe that most people are burdened with an excess of empathy?) they just outnumber autistics and are all using the same OS. easy to guess what someone else feels when you feel the same way by default!

it's frustrating because autistic people aren't actually worse at communication in general. autist-autist communication is just as effective as allist-allist (if not more so!) and alistics do just as poorly communicating with autistics as autistics do with them journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

thing about autism is if you work really hard for many years, you can learn through trial-and-error how to navigate social situations and interpersonal connections SO effectively that people don't really believe you're autistic anymore and resent you for not being perfect at nonverbal communication

Not a single one in the Chicago apartment raid was charged with a crime, very cool that that was obviously done at the behest of a slum lord

Wonder how the uni where I work, which is betting heavily on AI to power through the next few awful years, feels about Peter Theil purging AI from his portfolio

Something i ponder is how the Sun Belt / New South conservative geography is under threat from climate change, and what will happen if these people decide to move northward

I showed this very chart to a bunch of high school aged history students last week and they were speechless when I explained what it represents

My wife follows these “journalist” guys on Instagram who just shout BREAKING NEWS scream a headline from a wire service about Trump and follow up with “wow guys!! Sound off in the comments!” What in the world…

Mainstream history glosses figures like Epstein because it *feels* to conspiratorial to be true and doesn’t fit with any school - social history, intellectual, material, Marxist, etc

For the record, I thought it was funny that Trump might have sucked Clinton’s dick because it amuses me to imagine the most morally repellent men in the world having sex. And, as usual, to the over 40 set the joke seems to be either that it makes Trump a fag or that it makes him a woman

most notably, this completely inverts the actual historic logic on the literal clause in the Constitution that imposed a 20-year moratorium on banning the slave trade, which was really that Southern delegates read population trends and concluded that was enough time to lock slavery in permanently.

right-wing pseudohistorians like David Barton and (and clearly, Heritage), totally do, yeah. They basically extend the "slavery was on its way out" Lost Cause narrative backwards to the founding and insist that all the pro-slavery clauses were secretly anti-slavery prophetic acts by the founders.

but far-right pseudohistorians also love to assert that the founders were prophets and the Constitution was divinely inspired and an extension of Biblical law, so there's a dilemma: either slavery is divine provenance, or the founders secretly Da Vinci Coded the seeds of emancipation into it.

Essentially, Southern delegates were convinced that they were a generation of slave imports away from swamping out everyone else's representation with Slave Power on the strength of their enslaved populace. A "great replacement", if you will.

Alan Dershowitz is one of those claiming Epstein was not a pedophile because he pleaded guilty to one count of having sex for money with a 17-year-and-10-month-old person. "That’s not a pedophile." See this important response from Julia Brown, the brave reporter who broke the news on this

Epstein is best understood as a service provider to the aristocracy, so the logical question is who has been providing this service since 2019 and who is protecting them

The people who choose to spend their lives in an idealistic pursuit of knowledge--and the social mission of disseminating it--will fight for those ideals. The assdeans in suits, appointed by a board of ex-CEOs and lawyers who were appointed by centrist democrats and republican fascists, will not.

One of the most important lessons you have to learn about what a university "is" is a very vulgar marxist distinction between its *managers* (directly or indirectly appointed by capital and/or state government) and its *labor,* who come to the university out of love and idealism.

Been thinking a lot abt James Baldwin’s excellent Report from Occupied Territory in the context of ICE abuses & military deployments to our communities. Couldn’t be clearer that “occupied territory” is the form of governance pursued by this lawless regime.

sexual violence is THE patriarchal technology of oppression. wherever there is any kind of oppression--colonialism, genocide, capitalism, the state, the police--there is sexual violence as its frontline operative mechanism. the child is THE archetypal object of legitimate disciplinary violence.

we have GOT to stop thinking about this in terms of hypocrisy because that's not what's going on! we NEED to understand why pedo apologia is so rampant in anti-trans pseudoscience, why abuse is so rampant in the home, why child marriage is still legal across the country etc.

Sometimes I think people forget that a major, maybe THE major, driving force behind the AI bubble is the surveillance and military apparatuses of multiple state security and intelligence agencies and especially their subcontractors

Good example of the epistemic enclosure that's foundational to Trumpist conservatism

oh. well that's that, then! www.theverge.com/column/82066...

Am I to understand that Clinton and Trump are the actual original Blowjob Brothers

I cannot begin to properly articulate how upsetting it is to have had people baselessly accuse trans people of being groomers and pedophiles only for it to come out that they were deliberately doing this as part of a project to provide cover to actual groomers and pedophiles in positions of power

The loathsome Republican defense of Trump is essentially “well it’s not like he was into BOYS”. Pedocon is a theory like evolution is a theory

The argument is “why didn’t we get that kind of investigation from the Times,” instead of the trans panic/Gaza panic/Zohran panic/here’s who the hell “Chris Rufo” is and all the other “We Didn’t Start the Fire” lyrics from Hell that the paper has instead pushed in the last nine years

It's funny that AI companies are still like "it's good for pattern recognition but sometimes makes things up - 1 quadrillion $ please" while the average user apparently wants their computer screen to be their soulmate and spiritual guru. Meanwhile my workplace is putting all their chips on this

Gawker doesn’t look so bad now does it, you massive pile of shit?

Wonder if the 2010s revival of “race science” is downstream from Epstein, via his friend Peter Thiel

or i guess more relevantly here, karl marx recognized capitalism as a *new and distinct* phenomenon, something radical and different which was sweeping away an old shitty order these days you ask people what capitalism is and they'll give you a definition indistinguishable from feudalism

marx was anti-capitalist in the sense that he longed for what (he thought) would come after; these days it seems many anti-capitalists are anticapitalists insofar as they long for what came before

The Uninhabitable United States

Which is all to say: yes the real economy is hurting, but the markets respond to speculation rather than reality. (Also another way to think about it: No Bank wants to be the first to announce "no more loans because we gave out too many bad loans." You can't be the one who kills the economy).

speculation (OpenAI, SpaceX) etc, and so that needs to get funneled into public markets somehow—and that's why it becomes almost entirely on NVIDIA's stock to represent "AI." (Which is why all the major firms are trying to push 401ks and Pensions into private credit to cover the spread).

Obviously what we see is that "market up" but in reality what we are seeing is "extreme reactions on More News" existing. Because more and more traders are betting on short term bets rather than long term investing, that can easily drive a market crunch. Plus we can't see all the private market

I think others have pointed to the general causes (speculation), but I think Matt Levine's thesis is important here: we actually have volatility based on extreme financial news (tariffs, wars, AI announcements) that thus encourage high yield betting rather than long term investing.

CW sexual violence Colonialism is predicated on sexual violence. I would put my neck on the line to say you will not have war without rape. Even the land was feminised when discussed as something to be taken and plundered. These scenes, then, are as unsurprising as they are horrifying.

Between this, the suicides, the divorces, and the other behavior facilitated by AI chatbots it feels like Altman et al read McGowan's Programmed to Kill and thought "sounds good, let's make it happen"

tbh it's not even that directed, it's just a direct correlation between labor and locality. All medical labor is local, same with colleges, etc etc. The further you go down the list, the less local the labor is.

A reminder that this anti-trans panic is 100% bullshit and exactly none of our country’s problems are related to someone expressing their gender identity and everyone who isn’t a hate-filled weirdo knows it.

Most logical follow up to the Trump Era would be a US constitutional convention to abolish the Senate and the electoral college, reform the Supreme Court, curtail Presidential power, and generally bring into line with modernity