quoms:

everything i hear about jessica krug’s behavior sounds like an honest to god minstrel act. an absurd caricature of black and/or latina identity performed, one might almost imagine, for an audience of white people who inhabit a racially segregated environment

i know it’s easy to sit back and say ‘i wouldn’t have been fooled’ but jessica la bombalera? come on

Girl With Public Humiliation Thing Tries Raceplay

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

Get a gun and fire a gun at a person. Then, while you are lying motionless on the ground, have your lawyer show up, and when they say you are legally justified in what you did, say “no, you’re wrong. I had a legal right to do this, and you’re violating my rights by saying I don’t.”

I mean as far as I’m concerned caring about the culture war we won, there was a strong first-mover disadvantage and Trump finally baited them into moving first, now it’s just who do we want in charge of mopping-up

>@slatestarscratchpad said: Do you have a post where you explain why so much of this political violence is concentrated in Portland?

Well I guess I can make one. Imo, it comes down to “Portland is so white the Civil Rights Movement didn’t reorder culture and politics”

• Oregon was born out of the “free soil, free labor” tradition that hated slavery for taking our jerbs, as a white producerist utopia and was really exclusionary
• Perhaps more important, there wasn’t much industry or any direct train lines from the Deep South circa the Great Migration – to leave sharecropping for Portland, you’d have to pass through somewhere with better jobs
• So Portland’s biggest civil rights initiative was busing the small redlined black neighborhood’s kids all over town until they asked for their local Black Power school back and the white establishment said “sure”
• The city’s official narrative is “we ended residential segregation in the 1990s by asking realtors nicely”, the unofficial is “no, that’s just when the ghetto started to gentrify”
• So future “identity” claims didn’t have a confrontational model to go off of, and were welcomed in and co-opted by the establishment
• So politics never repolarized away from lunchbox labor vs. progressive owners, both of which fit in the current Dem party coalition
• So there wasn’t white flight and urban decay, and there’s still an inner-city white working class that identifies as working class, not white
• That’s sure under stress from rising prices now, and has no expectation a continuation of the existing trends would work for them
• That’s combatitive, there’s almost a European-style labor combatitiveness that, Euro style, overlaps with street politics and soccer fandom
• Portland’s been radical, there’s an anarchist axis going from Olympia to Oakland, it got called “Little Beirut” by H.W. Bush, the governor once threw a hippie festival to clear out town for a Nixon visit
• The surrounding suburbs aren’t, though, and the rural exurbs especially aren’t, they’re still free soil/free labor really
• Because of “Urban Growth Boundaries” (cause no white flight!), rural areas aren’t far out from the city
• So because they were never understood as black, an existential threat, “excesses of the 60s-70s” were never really seen as excesses and reigned in.
• Like, Oregon has the most extensive free expression protections in the country, which has been interpreted as protecting the right to give naked lapdances
• And many understand as protecting anything going as “protest”, meaning they see the government as having COMPLETELY delegitimized itself by making ANY effort to suppress crowds menacing government buildings at night
• When I arrived at the start of the 2010s, Portland was very inward-looking. There were around 10 local newspapers but I knew multiple people w/o computers and even TVs
• The elite gatekeepers followed national stuff, but they kept The Conversation Portlandy enough that everything in Portland, even the “opposition” was, definitionally, compatible with Portland
• And propped up a hippie-academic-gentry-downtown business-landlord power system that congealed in the 70s, even as the city’s center of gravity moved east across the river
• Let alone the immigrant, minority, and poor communities on the land east of 82nd
• The smartphone revolution fucked that right up, empowered and connected the lower orders and realigned the whole city with national narratives
• Welp

“Trump Caravan” of like, lifted big trucks flying flags, came through Portland tonight. Included plongtime local rightists like the Vancouver-based “Patriot Prayer” guys who have been skirmishing with antifa downtown for years now, but also just suburban and rural college- and 20-somethings that don’t have boats to parade in I guess

Lot of conflict - counter-protesters, yelling, driving through obstructors, macing, the new thing is apparently rightists shooting hard projectiles out of paintball markers

Anyway ended up with one guy in a Patriot Prayer hat shot to death downtown, so that’s where we’re at now

Idly planning contingency plans for combinations of 2-4 of

• plague
• civil war (active front)
• civil war (infrastructure constricted)
• wildfire
• earthquake w/tsunami

Realizing that on top of that my long-term plans have to accommodate

• global warming
• regime change
• imperial collapse
• widespread and sudden adoption of novel ideologies and religions

Twitter sounding appreciably more Cool Zone after the Kenosha shootings last night

‘No Body of Men:’ A militia movement, recast, takes to the streets of North Idaho

So when I posted saying that judging from history, if some formal government force was not seen to pacify the “urban uprising” by force, the provinces would muster irregulars, purge themselves, and seek to do it on their own, and that known leftist figures should make contingency evacuation plans, calling out non-Mormon Idaho as particularly risky, I got pushback as melodramatic. Well:

Rebecca Schroeder doesn’t tell people her new address.

As an outspoken progressive advocate from Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho, she’s grown accustomed to local animosity.

But when online messages suggested she be put in a body bag, bullet casings appeared on her friends’ front porches, and armed civilians — some of them members of unofficial militia groups — began patrolling the streets downtown, she packed her bags and left her birthplace, taking her 13-year-old son with her to an undisclosed location.

straightallies:

show me the forbidden coping mechanisms

If we’re super-lucky the combination of the plague and every social institution’s sharklike need to keep operating to hold its position in the firmament will conspire to resolve the culture wars by implacably shaving off the most conscientious, high-scrupulously elements (not to mention the legacy oldest and least resourced)

and then some element of them will launch some last grasp on control that’ll be fatally undermined by the fact they have *other* factions against their victory but ultimately swamped by the fact everyone else just wants to grill (at a rager with hot chicks) and they just become irrelevant

and posterity will remember the 2010s as we once remembered the 1950s, as an undifferentiated mass of grumps American culture had to fight! for the right! to paaaaaaarrrty!

Who even remembers Polio?

2020 like every day

“::sigh:: it’s happening”

femmenietzsche:

kontextmaschine:

tumblr’s 2020 notion that it’s cast all its sins onto twitter to be driven off as a scapegoat is wild

I think of it as like when you wake up to find that a besieging army has left your medieval town in the middle of the night to go attack another city

for like 4 or 5 years you could rock a “if you can read this, you survived 2020 too” shirt

Someone was talking about Anne Frank yesterday, so I made an In the Aeroplane Over the Sea reference and there was a youngster who had no idea what I was talking about even when I explained it

quoms:

Seeing Tom Cotton and Larry Householder in the news all the time is making me feel like reality is suddenly operating with the naming conventions of a didactic Victorian novel

The “looming childcare crisis”, by creating sharp incentive gradients both away from dual-income households to stay-at-home parenting AND from high-scrupulously, high-investment “helicopter parenting” to blithe low-investment “latchkey parenting”, almost feels like a targeted intervention to bring back Gen X childhood

(All while the popular intellectuals are like “see we need to get past the nuclear family centered on a monogamous dyad” and get back the disturbing response “you’re right, incest is hot”)

kontextmaschine:

…huh

On the one hand I’m ticked we might not get a 2-year Lover era, I liked it even better than Red

On the other she is VERY aware of the cultural context she works in, and after Reputation as the failed flirtation with 2010s minority-led pop culture and Lover as the summing-up of her entire body of work offering the way she resolved her personal struggles as a model for resolving our cultural struggles…

Cutting that era short to release an album called “folklore” with a Kinfolk magazine cottagecore aesthetic, kind of a maturing of the mason-jar-wedding-reception Americana aesthetic she dropped after Red, in July 2020 is FASCINATING

Like, ok, it’s black and white and it’s not wheat but this

is absolutely a white girl with braided hair and a folk dress in a field

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

horseshoe theory real

renniequeer:

Hot take but we actually do need more representation of healthy M/F relationships in media, and I personally feel like deriding intimate partner abuse as “straight culture” does a disservice to everyone. 

People in M/F relationships shouldn’t only see representation painting their relationships as inherently unhealthy and bad, because it normalizes abuse and makes it easier for abusers to take advantage of others. If “that’s just how straight relationships are,” fewer people will be able to recognize the warning signs of a dangerous situation. Also, not every M/F relationship is “straight,” because queer people can absolutely be in M/F relationships, and deserve to see themselves represented, too.

On the flip side, queer people shouldn’t be led to assume their relationships will never be unhealthy and bad. The vast majority of my social circle is queer, and I have seen some truly vile things happen to my friends because they didn’t really get an education on what abuse in queer relationships can look like.

I just feel like it’s irresponsible to paint toxic relationships as “a straight people thing.”