argumate:

Sady Doyle is well and truly nonguynary now

I mean, I can’t imagine a more on-the-nose sign that the leading edge of the culture war dialectic is emerging from thesis and antithesis to new synthesis than Sady Doyle writing an essay about how Dudes Rock

So after all this time I can say I finally know someone who got COVID (one of my high school buddies) but for him it was 3 days of coughing just clearing up and keeping himself occupied in quarantine, so I still don’t know anyone who got it got it

one-time-i-dreamt:

I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS REAL

So Oregon just legalized shrooms and decriminalized basically all other Schedule I drugs

kudzuman-deactivated20220925:

theweirdwideweb:

quoms:

so as far as the current conflict goes

there was a skirmish on the ARM-AZ border back in july - large in the context of the very low-level friction that usually happens across the border, because it actually resulted in one hilltop position changing hands, but still very limited in scope. in this case it’s actually very unclear who started it but the important thing is AZ lost outright

even though it was a tiny conflict this made it in some ways worse for AZ than the four-day war, or april war, of 2016, in which AZ completely failed at penetrating NK with a massive combined-arms assault but did take 2 hills so at least they could pitch that to their population as having won something. that didn’t happen in july

the AZ failure in july was followed by mass protests on the streets of baku criticising the government for not taking a hard enough line on ARM and not following through on 25 years of promises to return NK. although the protests only lasted a couple days, this probably contributed to a sense of pressure on AZ leadership to do something that would get results

this dovetailed neatly with a suddenly heightened interest on the part of TU in heating up the NK conflict. traditionally TU has rhetorically strongly supported AZ, but has avoided intervening directly. their only intervention has come in the form of closing their border with ARM for the last 25 years, and in the credible threat that they will invade ARM if ARM so much as glances the wrong way at nakhchivan, the AZ exclave that borders TU. this has historically just had the effect of removing nakhchivan from the conflict entirely

but starting in august, TU:

• started recruiting syrian mercenaries through its intelligence agency and private contractors, and airlifting those mercenaries to AZ; this was initially dismissed as rumor but became credible through september as more and more sources emerged with similar accounts
• started supplying AZ with massive amounts of ordnance, especially TU-produced bayraktar TB2 drones, which have played a key role in the current fighting as well as in AZ propaganda (coincidentally, these propaganda vids serve as excellent advertisements for the TB2 itself, which happens to be produced by a company owned by erdogan’s son-in-law)
• held joint military exercises in AZ but left thousands of personnel there after the exercises concluded; these personnel are believed to consist of senior military advisors, trainers, drone operators, and possibly some special forces

in the week or two before the war started there was also additional evidence in AZ of preparation for an attack, including the large-scale movement of armor and vehicles to the front line and the alleged commandeering of civilian pickup trucks for “wartime purposes”

all of this was more or less known to the public via the international media and therefore certainly to ARM and NK intelligence. so when AZ actually attacked on 9/27 absolutely no one was caught off guard

and that all, i hope, should provide a very clear-cut answer to the question of who started it this time. there is one immediately responsible party here, and it is AZ with the assistance of TU. AZ was relatively forthcoming about this and only presented its attack as a response to the general AM occupation of NK, rather than trying to fabricate some thin story about shelling from the NK side as they did in 2016 (that attack was also entirely one-sided and premeditated)

furthermore, the war crimes committed by AZ so far in the current war have been completely egregious, largely gratuitous, and completely out of proportion to anything done by either ARM or NK. we’re talking about:

• use of cluster bombs in dense urban areas
• consistent shelling of civilian settlements with heavy artillery over a period of weeks
• public execution of captured civilians
• intentionally bombing a church and then double-tapping it to target journalists
• reports of beheadings (still not 100% verified)

their goal in the NK conflict overall is expressly the ethnic cleansing of armenians from the claimed territory of AZ, and they are pursuing a military strategy that is consistent with that. NK has shelled AZ cities a few times, and i’m not saying that’s right, but it’s completely out of proportion

but all of that aside, this war doesn’t have good guys in it. the central thrust of the AZ narrative here is that NK did some pretty fucking horrendous things in the war in the ‘90s that have never been made right, and that’s entirely true. for many years AZ had more IDPs per capita than any country in the world. there has never, ever, ever been any acknowledgement from the ARM/NK side that ethnically cleansing 300,000 non-armenians - as happened from NK and the surrounding, now occupied, territories alone - in order to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the 150,000 armenians living in NK is maybe not an entirely morally robust position

but the entire AZ perspective and narrative fixates around that. it’s the reason there’s near-universal support for the current war, it’s the reason there’s been near-universal support for every single round of fighting since the end of the first war, it’s the reason the public bought the government’s narrative around ramil safarov (who was the son of an IDP). i’m not saying there wouldn’t be grievances without this One Big Grievance, but there is a total underestimation on the ARM/NK side of just how terrible and inhumane the thing they did was and how much it animates their enemies

which is funny for a group whose national identity revolves entirely around the long-term trauma inflicted by ethnic cleansing but you know whatever

i mean, you can go back further than this. did AZ start the NK war by launching government-sponsored pogroms against its resident armenians, or did ARM help spark those pogroms with the intense nationalist rhetoric surrounding NK and the ethnic cleansing of azeris from parts of ARM, and so on and so forth. in pretty much every direct comparison AZ comes off as clearly worse, but there has always been a commitment to a pattern of mutual escalation. and since kocharyan took over in ARM in ‘98 there has always been a total lack of interest on both sides in avoiding another war because they both figured they would win it easily

and we see how that’s going

lilcowgirl7-deactivated20210223:

Long-term a major theme of the Trump Era will prove to have been that he goaded the left into fully revealing they had intentions incompatible with the current system before they had the necessary strength to replace the current system

Proud Boys adopting Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” as an anthem is something

antoine-roquentin:

azerbaijani government official music video for the war

This comes 27 years after the video for “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (the “Remove Kebab” song)

I was thinking for a while the early Trump-era “let’s channel memer energy into bonehead punching-minorities-in-the-street” didn’t actually make sense but the right couldn’t fully demobilize its street-fighting wing in case they needed to repel general or rent strikes. I suppose the Proud Boys becoming the face and being told to “stand back and stand by” fits there, I don’t think they’re up to mattering in a national election yet

kontextmaschine:

So tomorrow there’s gonna be a big Proud Boys event in Portland, first big rightist event since a Patriot Prayer guy got killed downtown. It’s in an outlying park and it’s pretty much expected to be a lethal melee, so, heads up

So in bracing for this the (first openly bisexual in the US!) governor convened a joint state/county/local police command (incidentally, not bound by the restrictions Portland put on its own cops), and the US Marshals deputized the riot squad as federal officers (which ?? but might circumvent the local “reform” DA who’s showily not pressing protest charges)

But it was much smaller than feared, like 200 who had cooperated with police in planning and mostly hung out while leftists rallied in two separate locations.

Then as night fell and those day rallies gave way to the regular nightly mob, the fresh, augmented police force just showed up and tooled them up

The governor ended the state of emergency (early!) the next day but apparently the deputization lasts til next year, not clear what that means practically but the cops have been in playtime’s-over mode since.

My speculative read, originally mayor Ted Wheeler, who played up “resistance” stuff to hitch his centrism to gentry and underclass-activist Democratic energy and was staring down re-election, was like “sure, don’t let them set the courthouse on fire, but don’t be the bad guy, let them work out their energy and harness it in a useful way”

So when federal forces came in he went down for a photo op and took tear gas with everyone. But all this time and now it’s down to radicals and the radicalized that couldn’t be accommodated by any viable government, and pressure builds up and there’s now statewide and downtown coalitions behind suppression (and I’m sure Democrats over the non-metro PNW and nationally whispering about how Portland undermines the “elect us and we WON’T empower anarchist mobs!” message).

And if things do go unresty after Election Day, best to have stomped out the “form angry mobs and menace local government buildings” subculture before then.

(Portland is the basis of The Simpsons’ Springfield, and the depictions of “young punks vandalizing civil monuments with spray paint” and “dumb angry mob” were maybe less fictionalized than you thought)

So tomorrow there’s gonna be a big Proud Boys event in Portland, first big rightist event since a Patriot Prayer guy got killed downtown. It’s in an outlying park and it’s pretty much expected to be a lethal melee, so, heads up

If conservatives get a lock on the Supreme Court it would represent the culmination of multi-generational movements to undo its capture by progressivism since either 1937 (for the economic conservatives, the “switch in time that saved nine”) or the 1960s (for the sociocultural conservatives, the Warren Court)

But that does set it apart from other 2020 narratives of bills coming due or corruption through decay – the oil companies didn’t particularly want harsher weather, the law-and-order types didn’t want a backlash.

Social media companies wanted engagement thus ad revenue, not this public sphere. Unitary executive supporters wanted a civil service that acts like presidential elections mean something, not this pandemic.

But the Court, a lot of people for a long time wanted exactly this and put a lot of effort into it. Same as conservative media cultivating a more rightist electorate.

I mean, they wanted a more conservative Court, they put effort into building a judicial apparatus, they got it.

They wanted a more conservative electorate, they put effort into convincing them and they got it.

They wanted a more conservative legislature so they consolidated in the Republican Party, converted Southern Democrats, built up in statehouses, Newt Gingrich in the 80s, a Republican majority under Clinton, something like a conservative one under Obama…

Like all along, the “the current year” stuff, it’s now “it’s 2020, we can’t have a reactionary moment now!” And the response is “yeah, it’s 2020, we just finished our long march through the institutions, capturing them according to established procedures (as modified by established meta-procedures), this is exactly when we earned a reactionary moment!”

An ex teaches in a private school in LA that’s reopening next week and just got an email saying that between heat-driven migration and leaving windows and doors open for COVID ventilation, the building is now full of vermin

Well this AM it looked like Silent Hill, visibility down to like half a block, my eyes, sinuses, and wounds stinging if I got close to a closed window

My vent system is on drawing through a filter, my bathroom and fume hood exhaust are on

Apparently no chance of the fires coming this way, just holding out for early AM rain on Tues

Badger still goes out and acts normally, but when he comes in he seeks me out to stay close to

With the caveat that I’m no longer sure if something fouled my mood or it just did that itself, wow, this apocalyptic palette outside is really bringing the 2020 vibe home

remember on like January 1st how I was like “Christ, that was a terrible decade, glad it’s over now”?