The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

Lord forgive me for I have blogged. A longer expansion on my thread about Greenland and what it means for The Fascism Debate

And this is why the fascism argument can only go so far as a historical analogy for our current conjuncture (a thread of thinking out loud):

so much of what we colloquially call "neoliberalism" is just "shit the political class said in the 1980s to trick people into letting them dismantle the postwar state so they could make more money"

Save this for when it comes back online! It’s currently down due to fash finality discovering it.

This, plus Bovino’s idiotic interview on CNN, was a serious misstep that exposes a key fault line on the right. Some of them are at their core slaves to obedience, in thrall to the psychic pleasures that come from proximity to power as either a supplicant or authoritarian. A transhistorical urge!

I know things are crazy rn but i wanted to plug my upcoming @cinejourneys.bsky.social course that starts tomorrow night on Zoom at 8 EST: The Birth of Cinephilia. On the one hand, it will be historical: we’ll learn about the postwar New Waves and Henri Langlois’ Cinémàtheque Française

Rob is my best friend’s father in law and I know him well. He’s an absolutely incredible person and knowing him now, his past seems impossible. He is one of the most kind hearted, loving people I have ever met. He’s also brave AF to admit his past deeds and march alongside people he has harmed.

The Atlantic Magazine just dropped a tremendous story on the Minnesota Resistance. The author is a war correspondent & sees the echoes of leaderless community empowerment around the globe: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202... (supposed to be a gift link, might not work, it’s in Apple News, too.)

I run a film club at a school and I regularly attend a local cinema. The crowds that are there are increasingly demographically diverse. My students love talking cinema and they are eager to hear/read about cinema’s trailblazers. I am optimistic about cinema IF it stays diverse…

It's crazy that people are trying to give minnesotans advice when what we really need is for them to train the rest of us

unsurprisingly excellent

oh huh

Bezos just announced the gutting of the WaPo sports section, which is a large driver of traffic keeping the lights on for the paper by the way

the more i see how regular people are responding to this the more confident i am that we are going to make it

Fuck doomerism. This is the only energy o want to see and be involved with. We are going to win.

Minneapolis, capital of the 2020s

Alex Pretti… This is who Trump’s secret police killed today in Minnesota. He was a VA nurse.

The people of Minneapolis are proving that for all the visions of a monolithic fascist deportation machine punishing every villain of the regime, they can’t even hold one midwestern city let alone a country of 350 million people stretched across an entire continent

It is genuinely insane to watch capital decide that allowing this shit to go on is better for them than having to allow the FTC to do mild monopoly investigations and require cancellation buttons on websites.

Eddington vindicated

Oh I saw one on the hellsite from @matthiasellis.bsky.social

I wrote about how fucked up the past year has been as a person who's covered the far right for over a decade and who lives in DC. The guardrails are gone, and everyone knows it. Everything those of us on this beat warned about happened, and then some. postsfromunderground.ghost.io/the-not-so-g...

I keep seeing leftists from outside of Minneapolis say they’ve seen all this before, and no, you haven’t. I’ve been at this for 30+ years and I haven’t either. It’s not what you’re picturing. This is something else

I know people keep saying this but it’s hard to communicate the depth of active resistance here. Like, I’m on random cafes and people are checking in for observation shifts. Signs everywhere. Folks in visibility vests on the corners. It’s wild. Absolutely wild.

If confirmed, this really is a new low, where a state agency is altering image of real events with an intent to deceive the public.

I've never seen a population more united. If people can hold onto that unity, if people can accept that different people will have different ways of confronting fascism, if we can remind NGOs and orgs that they can join but not control the resistance, then, well, people here will write history.

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

Half the street corners around here have people--from every walk of life, including republicans--standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.

the inability to sit with discomfort or unfamiliarity, to learn from it rather than instantly laughing it away, is an absolute plague on society that has implications far beyond how people behave in movies

Respectfully, look at this fucking bullshit that we’re dealing with, not a single person here has “taken the bait.” We have born witness as little kids are used as bait and neighbors are kidnapped on our streets. A mad dipshit is going to invoke the Insurrection Act regardless and you are blaming us

Und thus, modernity comes to a close just like it started, with a guy ranting at windmills

Like for every Will Stancil chasing ICE around in his Honda Fit, there are grandmothers delivering groceries or giving vulnerable people rides. But you cannot switch from one to the other, and certainly not in the same car.

A thing that might not be clear from the outside is that while everyone here is engaged in this fight, ICE’s use of dystopian technology means that you essentially have to pick a lane between observing ICE and doing mutual aid. They are tracking observers’ cars, and taking pictures of their faces.

Daniel Blumberg's soundtrack to The Testament of Ann Lee is one of the most incredible pieces of music I've heard in a long time--old haunting hymns with occasional minimalist instrumentation, field recordings, and eventually heavy guitars. Screams and wails interspersed throughout. It's metal!

guys minneapolis is a living hell today. they've tear-gassed so many people, tear-gassed a park, beaten people up in front of me. greg bovino is rolling around to gas stations and posing in front of them, trying to cause a riot.

So they just made up some shit to appease Trump that they have no plan to actually undertake, right

ICE is not Gestapo, but slave patrols. It's not foreign, but deeply American, categorical brutalization of non-white people (& now those who stand up for them). They do not need to have warrants, and people facing deportation are not entitled to lawyers, or what we imagine as due process.

James Baldwin in the 1980s reads like people complaining about Gen Z kids today

Please be serious, there is a big difference between what Trump is doing with Greenland and how Hitler viewed Czechoslovakia. This kind of thing is why the fascism debate was criticized, because it creates this movie remake mindset that obfuscates what's happening TODAY, RIGHT NOW

You’re not going to make it in the new world that’s been emerging over the past decade if you spend even one second bemoaning the loss of consequence as a mechanism for social discipline

That word doesn’t have an e in it

unfortunately not true! a bill is coming due that nobody knows how to avoid paying

The narcissism of the denied Nobel is certainly a causal agent here but we shouldn't get too carried away with the televisual spectacle here--in a world headed for war (which is the world that exists), there *will* be fight for control over resources, and Greenland has many. This isn't just Trump!

dude the world is never, NEVER going back to the way it used to be

The person who is actually executing all this stuff, Marco Rubio, was confirmed by every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

great interview with Amanda Seyfried

neat film-going opportunity for #pdx folks - "the harder they come" (1972) at the hollywood on thursday evening - an all time classic likely added after jimmy cliff's passing <3

they can’t ever quite seem to carry their work over the finish line with a coherent and satisfactory thesis intelligible by anyone, most of all, themselves. Naturally, they are my favorite working directors.

All of this manifests in an obsessive drive to locate the moment when It All Went Wrong in the cacophony of the historical record, but the more they unwind the threads of the past, they find themselves caught up in the minutiae of detail, aesthetics become the only map they know how to read;