kontextmaschine:

I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway.

- = - = -

Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever.

But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”.

But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free.

- = - = -

Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place.

And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back.

And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.”

Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point.

“The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It”

“First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda.

And I can see how you’d get upset.

-=-=-

“What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.”

Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves.

Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine.

But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests…

“He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic.

Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict.

You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through.

(There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.

i know i give white people a lot of shit but u guys are really nice. like when the light turns green and there’s a white pedestrian that’s almost across the street u guys always do that jog thing. i know it’s kind of insignificant but i appreciate it white people. u and ur half jog thing.

)

The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?”

(“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.)

And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?)

Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline.

And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH.

And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.)

“But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!”

If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together.

- = - = -

The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!

The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.

You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.

Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.

Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.

- = - = -

I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before.

Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on.

But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.

And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option.

- = - = -

Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.

Happy 10th birthday, This Post!

So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?

Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there

kontextmaschine:

>  [same “less anger toward the left” anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you’re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right’s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]

You’re seeing something real but you’re not seeing it right.

If I’m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it’s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn’t looked down yet, well by now they’ve looked down.

And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.

Like, what’s the last time the cultural “left” tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the “targets” there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.

(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn’t you know it most “sexual harassment” law is leveraged out from similar implications.)

The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order’s plummeting, and all the stuff that’s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.

I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - “radlib”, “wokescold” – by which their rivals don’t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.

I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders’ patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women’s vertical that wasn’t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.

I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there’s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the ‘80s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with “catering to the male pornographic gaze” as a popular hobby.

And I’m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the “other side” have noticed this – Sady Doyle’s looking back over ’00-’10s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she’s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you’ve read her work long enough you know she’s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren’t so much defeated as just… gave up on and left to wither.)

Like, “this too shall pass”, y’know? It’s passing. Which doesn’t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won’t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the “cultural left” to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the ‘80s backlash had run through and the reigning “cultural right” was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the ‘70s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices…

Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power… Well, at some level I’m “ohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT’S how you create the good times, they should’ve told us, no wonder we’ve been fucking it up”. But I’m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.

5/22/19

(I like “meep meep, motherfucker”)

vintagegeekculture:

David Gerrold called it.

kontextmaschine:

Hicks showing up to repel antifa isn’t a joke. “In the face of urban insurrection, increasing numbers of irregular troops muster in the provinces” is a familiar pattern. Unless either

1. They are suppressed by main force, which would either result in the start of the long-planned shooting war or the suppressing troops defecting to them, or
   
2. Existing governments convincingly crack down on antifascism, in the face of impending elections
   

I strongly expect they will attempt to seize control locally, purge their territories of what they take to be antifa, and begin to raise armies to retake the cities.

Everyone involved in leftist activism, known as leftists, media workers, nonprofit workers, visible minorities, as well as anyone who doesn’t want to be around for this, in the Northwest outside of the I-5 corridor from Seattle to Eugene should have supplies and plans to relocate to it, by multiple routes. Alternately, if you are east of Idaho, consider taking refuge with the Mormon Church.

Eastern Washington, rural Oregon, and Northern Idaho have well-developed alternative government structures already. Even in places where “oh those guys, but they don’t run things around here”, the people who “do” have strong professional networks, those guys have guns and training and can press that advantage. Spokane, Kalispell, Whitefish, Sandpoint, even at extremes Missoula and Bend may not be secure.

Plan ahead. This is important. Reblog freely.

Took shit for this 6/10/22 post, and in retrospect yeah, I was kind of losing my mind to COVID of the brain at that point, but

Living With The Far-Right Insurgency In Idaho

Idaho really is congealing an alternative order these days

Mentioned I was bi to a girl and she gushed that her boyfriend was bi too in a way that I kinda suspect was angling for me to proposition them for a threesome, so my “the ‘20s will be for bi men what the '90s were for bi women” prediction going well so far

I remember in the 90s the most head-in-the-sky cultural analysts were like “with the mainstreaming of homosexual relationships, maybe straight couples will come to pick up some gay relationship norms, like the lack of an expectation of sexual exclusivity!”

And I got the sense that was considered silver linings bait for horny straight allies, but looking around at the absolute explosion in idioms for straight nonmonogamy – “cucking”, “sharing”, “passing around”, “free use” – to say nothing of the whole “poly” thing, that was absolutely correct, wasn’t it?

Hey where’s that anon that was always telling me to ACT, how’s he doing?

kontextmaschine:

I had been saying I could only see 3 days out. By now, for known major issues I can see vague outlines of likely pathways for a few months, but even there there’s noise and a minefield of black swans I can’t see 30 minutes through.

Like, for the travel (“Muslim”) ban I could guess at maybe 3 immediate outcomes and as we come closer make pretense to weigh them, but that’s within the given system.

As for changes to the system, beats me. Like,

• The Supreme Court tires of staying circuit decisions against the same executive actions over and over AND…

• The American Bar Association proposes a plan to “fix the problem” of big states filing against the executive in obscure federal courts with judges who are outliers on the issue, like Texas did against Obama and California does against Trump. It IS…

And then there’s the black swans. Individually low-probability but even the ones I can imagine are numerous enough that you’re likely to get at least 1. That’s where the whole country if not world can turn on heat-of-the-moment actions of a tiny random sample of humans. Like, try to tell me any of these are impossible:

• Faced with reform DA Larry Krasner, the Philly police work-to-rule. Violent crime soars. The “collar counties” that decide Pennsylvania are watching. Bricks are tossed through the windows of Independence Hall. Optionally, molotovs.

• On a third-tier city street, 3 antifascists are kicking a man on the ground outside a bar. By pure chance, an off-duty deputy with a Cowboys sweatshirt, a concealed handgun, and a drinking problem walks around the corner 10 yards away and yells at them. A 6’2” black trans woman charges him. There are no video or audio recordings. Journalists find their respective social media accounts were full of memes.

• In separate incidents over one late November night, assassins kill Elena Kagan and put Sonia Sotomayor in a coma. A viral twitter post claims with certainty there was inside assistance from multiple security forces. The new Senate takes office on January 3. Within a week, 6 Senators have been accused of rape. Sotomayor is declared brain dead. A living will is produced, and contested.

• Full Clancy: In a BJP-controlled state of India, communal rioting escalates into a door-to-door Muslim extermination campaign. Pakistan threatens retribution and mobilizes its Shaheen missiles. Malaysian protests threaten to overthrow the government unless it acts against India. A popular Indian public figure makes a high-profile statement that if one drop of Hindu blood is spilled Mecca will be turned to glass. In the confusion, Israel dusts off a contingency plan for a strike against Iran. The US prepares its own contingency plans to secure foreign nukes. Russia has exported one more S-400 SAM system than the world knows.

We’re running on Interesting Time, now

– December 25, 2017. I’m cheery on Christmas, aren’t I?

The pandemic was a hell of a black swan, I suppose if you generalize back we got “Supreme Court allegiances shift post-RBG”, “street unrest challenges police reform politics”, and “events caught on tape become flashpoints with radically divided audience sympathies” too

argumate:

11,000 new cases in Australia yesterday, today 11,000 new cases in New South Wales alone, looks like the pandemic has entered a new stage and it’s only a matter of days before contact tracing has to throw in the towel I mean how is it even possible at this point.

told you

kontextmaschine:

Can’t wait to see public health twitter’s heads explode when they need to approve pilots flying with known infections for the airlines to get everyone home after Christmas

C.D.C. Faces Pressure to Change Isolation Guidelines for Sick Workers

supernulperfection:

heritageposts:

leviathan-supersystem:

internet politics and real-world politics have gotten so separated, and pretty soon all this internet weirdness is gonna come crashing into real life and politicians are gonna start throwing around words like “SJW” and “anime communist” and “dark enlightenment” and it’s just gonna be the most ridiculous fucking thing

date of origin: 13th of april, 2015.

poipoipoi-2016:

kontextmaschine:

So everyone’s talking about the militarization of police. Now Radley Balko’s been on this beat for years, but the ironic thing about everyone suddenly bringing it up keying off the Ferguson stuff is that that’s actually the least radically unprecedented manifestation of this tendency.

Historically speaking, it’s completely typical for American governments to respond to mass protest and civic unrest (esp. racialized unrest) by invading and conquering affected areas by main force, employing forces trained for that purpose and equipped with weapons and vehicles acquired by the regular Army for its last war and then passed on as surplus.

It’s just that up until the 1970s (and the National Guard’s post-Vietnam integration with the regular Army) state militias filled this role. Civil unrest and its pacification isn’t so much a matter of law but meta-law, which is to say war - conflict between two forces to determine which shall hold authority in the affected territory. And maintaining distinct forces for law enforcement and domestic war had several advantages over the present system.

For one, this precluded the use of militarized force for situations like serving warrants that couldn’t plausibly be counted as “civic unrest” even if you squint at them hard.

For two, militia are less likely than police to be involved in the inciting incidents behind civil unrest. This distance meant the militia didn’t take unrest personally and in turn their pacification activities were regarded as more legitimate - this is why even in the post-Vietnam era, the National Guard was used to pacify the 1992 LA riots, the LAPD being poorly suited to calm an anti-LAPD action. (Also after Iraq War I, the real modern overseas Guard debut, the domestically oriented elements of the Guard wanted to reassert themselves, and the Guard as a whole wanted to prove their utility in the face of post-Cold War drawdowns).

For three, this raised the costs of resolution by force - “militia conducts operation locally” was big news and to happen at all, let alone regularly, indicated a failure of normal processes, creating pressure for local authorities to resolve situations by other means. By contrast, “police conduct operation locally” is pretty dog-bites-man as news goes.

So, going forward, if you want to do something to reduce government violence against the public, you should seriously consider reestablishing a military force devoted to the sole purpose of conducting domestic war against American citizens.

14 August 2014

kontextmaschine:

So a rivalry of /pol/ vs. Shia LeBouef is gonna be hilarious from the concept alone.

But the fact that /pol/ can go from analysis to infiltration operations to counting coup anywhere in the Anglosphere within 48 hours… and remember those times they were comparing subtle background details with satellite maps to target airstrikes in Syria? Plus their workaday schtick IS “conducting propaganda and provocation campaigns to increase unrest, influence elections, and congeal scattered resentments into an insurrectionary force”.

I mean, insert banepost here, but we should acknowledge they’re organically developing as a 3-letter intelligence agency.

RELATED:

Goofy fraternal societies as revolutionary agents (Oct 2014)

/pol/ as catalyst of transnational white-Anglophone ethnogenesis (May 2014)

Friendly reminder “underemployed, undersexed, disillusioned young men drawing unified reactionary identity from social media” is the most successful revolutionary model of the 21st century (Aug 2015)

kontextmaschine:

I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway.

- = - = -

Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever.

But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”.

But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free.

- = - = -

Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place.

And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back.

And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.”

Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point.

“The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It”

“First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda.

And I can see how you’d get upset.

-=-=-

“What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.”

Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves.

Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine.

But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests…

“He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic.

Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict.

You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through.

(There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.

i know i give white people a lot of shit but u guys are really nice. like when the light turns green and there’s a white pedestrian that’s almost across the street u guys always do that jog thing. i know it’s kind of insignificant but i appreciate it white people. u and ur half jog thing.

)

The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?”

(“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.)

And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?)

Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline.

And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH.

And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.)

“But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!”

If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together.

- = - = -

The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!

The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.

You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.

Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.

Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.

- = - = -

I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before.

Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on.

But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.

And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option.

- = - = -

Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.

12/2/2014

kontextmaschine:

I have been rolling my eyes at a lot of the “ICE will be the spearpoint of the new Trumpian reich” stuff coming out of the left recently but this… is actually something worth keeping an eye on.

“The Government” is not a monolithic whole but a semi-integrated collection of squabbling feifdoms and “The FBI is the agency in charge of federal domestic policing/repression” is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. At various points in American history the equivalent role’s been filled by the US Marshals, the US Postal Inspection Service, Treasury Department agents - the Secret Service and “revenuers” presaging the modern BATF. For a while in the Gilded Age it was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency acting directly under leading capitalists with the government cut out of the loop entirely.

The FBI’s 20th century preeminence was not foreordained but a consequence of bureaucratic maneuvering in reaction to specific moments and events – the anarchist wave of the early 1900s; WWI; the First Red Scare; Prohibition; the early automobile-era motorized bandit gangs; the Kansas City Massacre (before which the FBI didn’t carry guns or make arrests); WWII; the rise of Hollywood (and J. Edgar Hoover’s cooption of same); the Second Red Scare; COINTELPRO; RFK’s anti-Mafia crusade and the wrap-up of white ethnic urban machine politics; Cold War cocaine ‘80s Miami; the 1993 Waco seige (starting as a backfired ATF attempt at profile-raising and positioning in the face of Clinton-era budget trimming).

And now, with the FBI and the old-line three letter agencies at loggerheads with the elected executive and his party in Congress, a young upstart agency known for its enthusiastic loyalty to said executive, in the middle of a massive staffing-up, bids to expand its capabilities and portfolio…

that’s exactly the scenario under which things might change

On the occasion of news that the Post Office has been running “covert operations” programs tracking social media

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

So as far as I’m told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they are

• Women’s blogs that cover supermarket checkout topics
• Algorithmic content, creating crappy 20 minute how-to listicles from and for the internet, forever
• Recapping television shows

(Technical writing is still okay if you have a security clearance, everything else is going to India)

Now as an American without a security clearance who is not yet a beloved Hollywood darling and might like to work by writing anyway, that sucks but it’s a lot of other posts.

What I want to raise here (and leave dangling, without much resolution) is that last point, TV recapping. It is now a thing! But I don’t really hear anyone thinking or talking *about* it. Maybe ‘cause it’s not one of those three. Maybe I read the wrong tumblrs.

But isn’t that weird?

That we’ve outsourced TV watching? Moreover that we’ve outsourced TV-watching-for-cultural-fluency-and-status? The business of sitting through an episode, and developing opinions about the action, and the characters, and the writing, and the performances, and rendering those opinions witty?

Maybe it’ll turn out like book reviews were from the ‘50s-‘90s, half way for people to pretend to have consumed esteemed culture they hadn’t, half weird and nonobvious form where for economic reasons all the best essayists pitch all their best ideas pegged to tenuously related (b/h)ooks.

Like how modern blockbusters are stories pegged to tenuously related internationally bankable stars.

And another way to look at it is that just like medical care, or childcare, or cleaning, or sewing, or food preparation, or the ur-example, food production, television watching is a domestic activity we less and less find worthwhile to do ourselves - Baumol’s cost disease cheapening it minute-for-minute and pushing it under the respectable threshhold - yet still find worthwhile enough to Have Done.

And ISN’T THAT WEIRD.

I don’t even remember being on here in 2010

(12/12/2010)

kontextmaschine:

I DID put a lot of stock in his ability to claim the initiative, tear the media a new Overton Window, get inside liberals’ OODA loop and put them on the defensive, but even I’m a little slack-jawed lately.

I’m not terribly worried though, for two reasons.

First, Trump’s made very clear for decades that he thinks of himself as a negotiator first and foremost. And that one of his go-to tactics is to open with an absurd ask, backed by an adamantine self-confidence that means he can’t be laughed or shamed out of the room.

So to the extent there’s anything here, I think it’s just a refusal to do the “negotiating with yourself” - making preemptive concessions in the mere hope that your counterpart will reciprocate - that first-term Obama caught flak for.

So if a President Trump did anything with this, I expect it would be to say “Here’s this thing I’ve got enough support to make a decent run at that you really, REALLY don’t want. Now am I married to it? No. So. What’ll you give me in exchange for ruling it out?”

Honestly I think it’s the same with immigration. When your offer is as far from the status quo as “deport everyone immediately, Mexico pays for a wall”, you’re opening a lot of space for compromises where everyone leaves satisfied, your team feeling triumphant and the other guys like they held a defensive action.

Now, if you picture yourself on the other, liberal/Democrat side of the deal you could sniff that given our traditions and institutions you shouldn’t HAVE to give anything up in return for not registering and/or deporting ethnic and religious minorities.

Fair, fair. And going into 2015 conservative/Republicans thought that given those same things they wouldn’t HAVE to spend any power upholding the principle that full civic and economic inclusion shouldn’t be conditioned on willingness to participate in blasphemous parodies of the holy rites of the nation’s traditional and still majority religion.

So learning experience for everyone.

Second, I don’t think he has a deep enough following to bend American institutions to his unimpeded will even if he got elected and tried - he has some high profile majordomos and allies that could lead initiatives, and at his rallies a ton of dedicated foot soldiers, but he doesn’t have, as far as I can tell, a corps of loyal professional (political and/or technical) middlemen of sufficient size or scalability. Assembling such a corps is a big part of why political parties (and within parties, party elites) are so powerful.

In his business dealings Trump’s offloaded that stuff on mercenary institutions like building trades unions, contractors, investment banks, New York Mafia families, and media companies, but I can’t see that working at national scale.

11/23/2015

kontextmaschine:

One thing I’m disappointed hasnt come together to realize the potential of uh, Campaign Trumpism, is the alt-right seeing the potential of unions. (mostly)

Like, it’s an article of faith that one of the movement’s biggest vulnerabilities is to censorious bluehairs putting pressure on cucked employers to fire them from their jobs. But “dismissal for improper reasons”, particularly unrelated to job duties, particularly in regards to causes unpopular with the comfortable bourgeoisie, is a CLASSIC cause for labor action and impetus for unionization.

And if the bossman shrugs, points to the contract, “nothing I can do”, what are they gonna do, go after the union? Labor bosses are some of the least cucked guys out there, as you see with police unions lately half their job is to reply to ANY external pressure with “haha get fukt buddy”.

Plus there’s whatever that could do to split the left coalition, which has precedent – the hardhats and war economy workers against young hippies (which led to the Dems basically throwing the ‘72 election to Nixon), the NYC teachers’ strike of ‘68 (splitting the Jewish/labor and black/social activist wings of the city’s social democratic coalition, inspiring the domestic neoconservatism by which logic elites finally gave up on minority rights movements in the 80s-90s)

Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman is taking time off from commercial diving to have his 15 minutes of fame, but he doesn’t betray any insecurity that being the public face of the most aggressive faction of a controversial political movement might make it hard to return to his $6500/mo job. And I have to suspect that might have something to do with Pile Drivers Local 34.

::ahem::

6/16/2017

poipoipoi-2016:

kontextmaschine:

So everyone’s talking about the militarization of police. Now Radley Balko’s been on this beat for years, but the ironic thing about everyone suddenly bringing it up keying off the Ferguson stuff is that that’s actually the least radically unprecedented manifestation of this tendency.

Historically speaking, it’s completely typical for American governments to respond to mass protest and civic unrest (esp. racialized unrest) by invading and conquering affected areas by main force, employing forces trained for that purpose and equipped with weapons and vehicles acquired by the regular Army for its last war and then passed on as surplus.

It’s just that up until the 1970s (and the National Guard’s post-Vietnam integration with the regular Army) state militias filled this role. Civil unrest and its pacification isn’t so much a matter of law but meta-law, which is to say war - conflict between two forces to determine which shall hold authority in the affected territory. And maintaining distinct forces for law enforcement and domestic war had several advantages over the present system.

For one, this precluded the use of militarized force for situations like serving warrants that couldn’t plausibly be counted as “civic unrest” even if you squint at them hard.

For two, militia are less likely than police to be involved in the inciting incidents behind civil unrest. This distance meant the militia didn’t take unrest personally and in turn their pacification activities were regarded as more legitimate - this is why even in the post-Vietnam era, the National Guard was used to pacify the 1992 LA riots, the LAPD being poorly suited to calm an anti-LAPD action. (Also after Iraq War I, the real modern overseas Guard debut, the domestically oriented elements of the Guard wanted to reassert themselves, and the Guard as a whole wanted to prove their utility in the face of post-Cold War drawdowns).

For three, this raised the costs of resolution by force - “militia conducts operation locally” was big news and to happen at all, let alone regularly, indicated a failure of normal processes, creating pressure for local authorities to resolve situations by other means. By contrast, “police conduct operation locally” is pretty dog-bites-man as news goes.

So, going forward, if you want to do something to reduce government violence against the public, you should seriously consider reestablishing a military force devoted to the sole purpose of conducting domestic war against American citizens.

14 August 2014