...once again, one of the easier ways to turn up the virality on your post is to go from "[popular thing] is true" to "no one wants to admit it but [popular thing] is true"

pissing off my friends on this San Francisco trip because i won’t stop growling “IT’S A WARZONE” in a right-wing propaganda voice while we walk around some of the most beautiful city streets in America

I answered a question on #askhistorians about whether the claims made by feminist writers such as Andrea Dworkin about numbers of witches executed are correct. TL;DR: they’re not. www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

Whether it’s a kid at Oberlin asking for a trigger warning for the president of the United States convincing ABC to fire one of its biggest stars, both sides have shown a great deal of disrespect for the principle of free speech

Good evidence that, in US politics, the "polarisation" is all coming from one side.

Think this is my favourite Dee Dee sketch. Also really like this Youtube comment. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mYo...

God's saving of Donald Trump, but refusing to save Charlie Kirk from an assassin's bullet shows that Kirk wasn't MAGA enough. by Nick Fuentes

last night as i was trying to wind down for bed i had a unified theory of what the fuck just happened, and i wrote it down, and filed it under "well, i can't talk about this on main without sounding insane until and unless the perp gets caught and is provably a groyper" anyways, great news! (1/X)

A great critique of the idea that the Western Roman Empire fell because of sexual libertinism. #askhistorians www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

In a society whose politics are increasingly conducted as entertainment and spectacle, the response to the death of an influencer will be much more dramatic than the response to the death of a public servant. I wish I’d expected it bc then it wouldn’t be so upsetting. Attention economy. Again.

In absolute earnest, I think terror of “elitism” has put a powerful vocabulary for describing what’s going on here out of play. These people are vulgar, thuggish, unsophisticated, crass, unschooled, unreflective. They are low in a sense that has nothing to do with income, & it’s fine to say so.

i mean, this is essentially Elon Musk's approach to transhumanism

We have a paper on how Labour's strategy is disastrous. There's an exclusive coverage in @newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

The term “anti-establishment” was redefined the same way as “working class.” Both now mean “person of any income, education level, or type of work who holds right-wing culture war views.” By contrast, “elites” means “holds broadly left-wing views on cultural issues.”

Insane and frightening how normalized open racism has suddenly become around the world.

I worry that the decades it took to build anti-racism norms are unravelling quite quickly. Clearly the protests/social media drumbeat has created a permission structure that makes people think they can behave like this. Hard to see how it can be easily re-bottled.

Let's put that Blueskyism to work: I'm in search of a gig graphic designer who's available for a teeny tiny project that I could probably complete with AI but refuse to use AI to complete. My DMs are open - if you know of such a person, please send recommendations my way!

A prescient passage from Roger Griffin's "The Nature of Fascism" (1991):

You fool, Pedro, that’s what the demons want you to think. By causing storms mostly in spring and summer they’re making the bad weather appear to be natural. But actually it’s demons. Excerpt from Julian Goodare’s The European Witch-Hunt (2016):

The memory of Civil War and Reconstruction really do provide a playbook here. Once the history gets falsified - in memorials, government pronouncements, popular culture, etc. - it's very hard to dislodge. And trying to do so gets you accused of "erasing history."

It’s crazy that America just like. Destroyed science. Just looked at its golden goose and went “wow should we kill this? And not for the gold, but just because we fucking hate this thing” And if you tell random people about it they go “no, that doesn’t seem true” and just refuse to believe you

Basically, there is an online subculture of squalid degenerates obsessed with the worship of mass shooters as a form of fandom and that, more than anything clearly ideological, is their primary motivation. Which is also why they are a prime recruitment base for more ideological actors.

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

There can’t be any gun restrictions because we have to protect against federal government tyranny, and if kids get shot we just have to live with it. Also the President can send troops to cities because the federal government can do whatever it wants. These two ideas are consistent and reasonable.

Games Workshop looking dinosaur. #ChaosSpikyDeathBits www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Imaginary Bestiary Vol VI—a table of contents for an imaginary 80s Dungeons & Dragons monster book. The Bestiary parodies D&D’s thesaurus use, repetitiveness, and weirdness. Volumes I–VI can be downloaded as pdfs here: www.enworld.org/threads/the-... #dnd #ttrpg #osr

incel in the ancient inca empire using quipu to keep track of his body count and its a rope with no knots... it's because his skull is too round

We need everyone back in the office because we want the serendipitous magic that only happens when you let humans get creative together and also we're replacing all of you with an AI machine that can only do things that it's seen done before

The US electorate is used to thinking of partisan combat as a choice between two slightly different flavors of constitutional liberalism deal...vanilla vs. strawberry...rather than a choice between constitutional liberalism or authoritarian illiberalism...vanilla vs. arsenic. Messaging that is hard.

Suspected witches would often be tolerated or even bought off by their local communities. In the Duchy of Lorraine, Fleuratte Maurice was given gifts of food whenever there was a feast in her village. #witch #witchtrials

Really enjoyed Alien: Earth. It was great to spend a couple of hours in an idyllic optimistic future where many of our current problems appear to have been solved. In Alien: Earth, neoliberalism has reached its logical end point and the world is controlled by five megacorporations. /1

The Ethicist | I was laid off in April and have had a hard time getting job interviews since then. Can I Photoshop myself into a January 6th photo so I can get hired by the Trump administration?

Have you noticed that cats wait for a gap in the conversation before they miaow? They are very polite.

If the art in your torture chamber is scary enough then you don’t need to torture anyone. Excerpt from Bernd Roeck’s "Criminal Procedure in the Holy Roman Empire in Early Modern Times" (1993).

Right wing memes haven't changed much in 400 years.

Odd request: I'm looking for someone with knowledge of carboniferous paleontology (and maybe its histories) who can help me identify some species from 19thc names, many of which which are now obsolete. Any takers?

It’s been surprising to me over ten years. To see how few true conservatives there were in this country. You could count on one hand the number of right-wing conservatives who defected from the politics tyranny, authoritarianism, dictatorship, anti-free speech, anti-freedom. It’s not even 5-10%.

This seems to be an example of a genuine (in a sense) pact with the Devil from 1575. The culprit was treated very leniently. Excerpt from Robert W Scribner's "Witchcraft and Judgement in Reformation Germany" in History Today (April 1990), 12-19.

This shows the urgent need for witch-socialism. First excerpt from William Monter's chapter in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe Vol 4: The Period of the Witch Trials. Second from Robin Briggs' Witches & Neighbours. #witches #witchtrials #socialism

It’s useful to distinguish between maleficium (harmful magic) and witchcraft as a spiritual crime (demonic pact). The latter idea made witchcraft more frightening and was a major cause of the early modern witch trials. It was impossible to prove without a confession, usually elicited by torture. /1

Dune, 1965

I do really like the idea of a "Heroes for Hire 1974" movie where Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Thundra team up to fight Dracula.

This is an interesting idea. Some characters are more strongly tied to their time of creation than others. Captain America is very much a WWII character and he's presented as a man out of time in both the comics and movies. The Fantastic Four are Space Race astronauts/explorers. /1

How werewolves dressed in the 1970s vs how werewolves dress today.

My dream job? Yeah, I’d say it’s, like, the pope, but specifically one of those corrupt Renaissance popes, not one of those boring 19th or 20th century popes. Anyway, kinda niche, but orgies in St. Peter’s have always been the dream.

The MCU should bring back Mahkizmo, a parodic satire of male chauvinism created in 1974. Given that the current US government has become a "He-Man Woman-Haters Club" the character seems more relevant and less parodic now than it did in the 1970s. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

I'm hearing reports that President Trump's erratic mental state and decaying physical condition are both being driven by continued discussion of the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up, so please, if you care about this man's health and well-being, please, do not mention the Epstein stuff anymore, please.