It’s a small contribution to the mess we are in but one thing that sucks about America is how our public discourse doesn’t even *pretend* to engage with ideas. They just assert “my enemies believe X” and everyone just goes along

I don’t think you’d ever get them to admit it but the connective tissue between all recent conservative action has been the idea that government should dictate culture and prevent decentralized movements from existing when they aren’t explicitly conservative in nature

Everich rose hath its þ

One of the most important things you can do when encountering one of these “my enemies all have this perverse psychology” posts is to ask if anyone has ever explicitly or implicitly used the reasoning described in an actual conversation. There are a few one-uppers out there but it ain’t a movement.

If theses one thing that the last few years have made really clear, it’s that the abstract values America continually pointed toward as explanations and justifications were always paper-thin, insufficient, misunderstood, and easily weaponized. So few people engaged with them as ideas, just as words.

Oooo-ooh Not quite monster not quite man Oooo-ooh But you know that it slouches toward Bethlehem

Prompt engineers, folks

its interesting to see people debating “how far into a group organizing a lynching can you (or someone) stop them” and “whose responsibility is it to stop things like that” and seeing a lot of “you can’t“ and “nobody”

It’s okay to have a more complex moral discernment apparatus than a single, abstract principle. I’m not surrendering my ability to judge right and wrong to whatever word cloud is trotted out. some people engage with an idea and others think it’s a spell that might work on their enemies

Beverly Hills Cthulhu

I slam through a bag of this Chocula

Anybody remember Havana Syndrome? Are America’s most nefarious enemies still using their undetectable superweapon or…?

Enough people with opinions. Time for some people with convictions.

The only republic I’m pledging allegiance to this Halloween season is to the republic for witches’ stans

Why do people keep saying that the day of the jackboot is a distraction. What could possibly be more important.

One of the less-appreciated technical achievements of the YouTube app is how seamlessly its ad insertion video interrupter allows me to transition between the “watching YouTube” and “closing YouTube to do something else” experiences

We only really got a palace insider’s look at thing in Macbeth and King Lear but I bet the average subject in the kingdom felt kinda like this too

It is not possible to find the words for this.

It’s so exhausting to remember the huge push that went into electing Not-Conservative-Lesser-Evils only to see them enact the exact policies the Greater Evils proposed. I’m not *surprised*, just exhausted

Speculation: Conservatives hate postmodernism because people trained in postmodernism can spot and pin down the shifting definitions and linguistic coded-ness that is characteristic of conservative catchphrases and argumentative styles

“The New York Times collaborated with a white nationalist eugenicist hacker and agreed to keep his identity a secret to publish a Zohran Mamdani hit piece” is a way bigger story than “18 year old Zohran Mamdani ticked ‘African American’ on his Columbia application because he was a citizen of Uganda”

Lotta businesses closed today. Must be a national day of mourning or something

Pretty embarrassed for anybody doing patriotic stuff for the 4th this year

People saying “we have to invalidate this election because the winner is a communist” are doing a good job proving the communists’ claim that the system cannot be reformed from within because it will never let a true reformer win pretty accurate

It sucks that both “common courtesy” and “thinking about an idea you had for a goddamn second to decide if you actually think that or if it was a dumb brain moment” get subsumed into this conception of “self-censorship”. Being afraid to speak because of political fear is bad! Reflecting isn’t!

Don’t worry everyone, even now, the guy who’s gonna fix all this is out there, leveling up. He’s probably got IRN SWRD!

When does “then they came for the senators” come in the poem? Oh, down near the bottom after they came for almost everybody else?

Just getting around to really trying V Rising (pretty late to the game) and I can say it really lets me live out the quintessential vampire fantasy of stealing raw cotton from poor farmers at gunpoint. … Wait, is this game a metaphor?

I have never before been called a fascist imbecile for the crime of thinking democrats didn’t really do enough to stop the rise of fascism

I know there’s daylight between religious belief and conspiracy theory but our government is functionally emptying the treasury to buy cold iron to fight the fae folk or refusing to repair roads because the rapture will happen imminently

Have the “optics” people thought about the optics of supporting the side shooting journalists and clubbing civilians? Seems to me they’re just giving the “don’t trust a centrist” folks ammunition

“Feeling like a stranger in their own country” okay but when I got new neighbors I introduced myself to them and got to know them instead of immediately plotting to have them destroyed

I guess my cringe dad opinion is that, if a social media site ceases to be social, it’s just a place for Personal Brands to advertise to an abstracted audience

Truly incredible, miracle of life, how many posts on this public social media website are some variation of “let me talk at you but do not interact with me in any meaningful way”

Mr. Beast of Faram Azula

Is “The Letcher in the Rye” anything

Imagine you're being summoned. What GIF represents that?

Beavis is Just Alright with Me

Robotnik spends all his time researching and building. Sonic was born fast. I kinda want Robotnik to win just to prove that working hard at something pays off sometimes

America has a history of stripping language of meaning and converting terms into words that just mean “person who deserves death”. It works really well. Most Americans end up hating the targets. First it was “terrorist”. Now it’s “woke” and “extreme left”.

I have a set number of times I’ll listen to someone complaining about the people that follow them on social media before I just unfollow and block them, no matter how good their other takes are

Talking to my archaeologist friend and suggesting that maybe some of the most mysterious fallen civilizations (Cahokia, etc) collapsed because everyone just kinda decided that’s what they wanted all at once

I miss what “performative” meant before the internet got its teeth in it. A thing that came into being through performing it, like a marriage. And the social stuff was supposed to be that! By speaking against bias, we reduce bias, etc. But now the word means “only a performance and no more”.

Contrarian take: the information you get from “reading” a book or “listening” to an audiobook is the same and you have the same right to talk about the book and its ideas. But, like, we can acknowledge that processing a written language and hearing a spoken one are different cognitive tasks yeah?

what I’ll never understand is what the conservatives tell themselves that makes them so furious that they feel the need to take this level of revenge on people who never harmed them and only wanted to exist in peaceful dignity

Because I am for some reason still seeing this sentiment in hobby spaces: everyone who said “keep politics out of my games/movies/memes” or “I go here to escape the real world”…the politics are coming for you now whether you like it or not.

Again, this is the part where we relearn that politics is about real shit

Really finding myself rooting for the ghost in those “powerful family dumps resources into fighting a haunted house” stories

you are loved, we will win

@jasonkpargin.bsky.social you were aware of your citation in cultural studies, right?