The more historical context you know (i.e. that Portland was a mob town into the 60s) the more grimly hilarious this official history of the Portland Police Reserves gets.
“Like sure we started in the 1920s as ‘Vigilantes’ but that was just the custom of the time. The important thing was legitimate businessmen giving Christmas turkeys to the poor!”
“Not only did this ‘rough and tumble bunch’ of uniformed, armed, lightly trained but unpaid men offer flexibility and support on missions like prostitution stings, but they’re civically involved, pushing for things like higher police salaries!”
“Also since 2011 they can arrest anyone in Oregon”
or alternatively: the West maintains friendly diplomatic relationships with countries that have the death penalty for homosexuality.
this isn’t a story about Twitter, really.
Isn’t Prince Alwaleed bin Talal one of the bigger Twitter owners?
Haven’t Anil Dash and Ellen Pao and them been pushing Twitter to punish people for blasphemy and lèse-majesté and punching down and other political crimes?
Friendly reminder that “callous and blithe wits push society towards revolution for profit and attention while billionaires in their interests underwrite smug warmongering” historically IS journalism’s workable business model.
i decided to compile all the political proposals i’ve made with in various debates on this site into one big proposal for a hypothetical political model:
Governance: global direct democracy, with a nested council system wherein everyone can vote in the global council, anyone can vote in the territory council of their own territory, anyone can vote in the regional council for their own region, and anyone can vote in the local council of their own town. to represent this visually:
so each dot represents an individual, each square represents a council, and the red lines extending from each individual indicate the councils they would be able to vote in. (there would obviously be more people and councils than this, but that would be too many to visually represent, so this will have to do)
this allows for total direct democracy, as well as quickness and flexibility with regard to dealing with local issues, while still allowing for global-level coordination when necessary. these councils would take the form of internet forums wherein people could submit proposals to be debated and voted on.
Economy/Manufacturing: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, with heavy use of 3-D printing. in the place of most stores, we would have massive 3-D printers, which would produce items on the spot from either pre-loaded designs, or deigns downloaded off the internet. in the same way that competition for internet attention and views and notes and likes and such drives people to create stuff on minecraft or whatever, thanks to 3-D printing, this impetus can be harnessed to create actual usable goods. by giving people ~notes~ or ~views~ or whatever you want to call them for making frequently downloaded products, there’s still the element of reward/competition, without linking this element to the level of access people have to basic vital necessities.
Law Enforcement: If a violent crime was reported, nearby drones would activate, and would be able to be controlled by any citizen, to then neutralize the situation using non-lethal weaponry (there would be game-like simulations which would train people in the use of these drones). the video feed from these drones would be publicly viewable by everyone, and if someone was misusing the drone they were controlling, other people who saw that would be able to shut the drone down and the person who misused the drone would be barred from controlling law enforcement drones in the future. this allows for violence to be prevented without the creation of a separate policing class which is above the law.
Drug Law: All currently illegal drugs available for free in a controlled context, similar to the free heroin programs in the Netherlands. This ends the pointless and harmful war on drugs, while preventing the existence of a drug industry which exploits users for profit (and is thus incentivized to push users to dangerous excess).
Religion: An official position of agnosticism and the encouragement of cross-faith unity in the shared understanding of religion/mysticism within the framework of viewing symbolism/myth/ritual as tools for the overall shared goal of increasing human well-being, as well as the creation of new universally accessible ritual/myth/symbolism around this concept which isn’t tied to any previously existing belief system (ala Lunacharsky’s theories on Godbuilding, or the statue of liberty as a post-religious civic/mythic quasi-deity, or the cult of reason from the french revolution)
reblogging because holy shit.
I like that we’re all designing utopias and religions now, that’s a positive sign
I was going to say “fractals!” with as a digression “(that’s the modern equivalent of ‘wheels within wheels’)”
but then I realized the digression was more interesting
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stirred up controversy over the treaty that almost a century ago set the borders of modern Turkey, alarming both neighbouring Greece and secular opposition at home.
In a speech Thursday, Erdogan for the first time rejected the notion that the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne was a “victory” for Turkey and wistfully lamented the loss of Aegean islands which are now Greek territory.
The treaty — the founding basis of the modern Turkish state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire — has usually been seen inside the country as a triumph of its secular leadership led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
“You see the Aegean, don’t you?” Erdogan told local officials in the speech at his presidential palace.
“In Lausanne, we gave away islands (so near that) your voice can be heard if you shout across to them. Is this a victory?” he asked.
“They were ours. There are our mosques, our shrines there.”
Erdogan rounded on those who negotiated the treaty who included Ismet Inonu, Ataturk’s right-hand-man who would later succeed him as president and still a hero for secularists.
“Those who sat at that table could not make the best of the agreement. Today we are suffering the consequences.”
Turkey’s main opposition party leader spoke out against Erdogan’s comments, describing them as a betrayal of history.
“Don’t forget that you sit on that chair thanks to Lausanne,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the party founded by Ataturk which sees itself as the guardian of his secular principles.
“Nobody has the right to betray their history.”
Yusuf Kaplan, columnist in the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper, however described Lausanne as a “death warrant” and praised Erdogan for throwing “taboos on the trash.”
“Turkey could not be invaded from outside but was captured inside by being secularised from the top by secular elites.”
I wish I could come up with a caption funnier than this extract.
The thing is, we already laugh at movies like Reefer Madness for things like this. Anyone who doesn’t think that, a century from now, people are going to rofl about current attitudes to, say, cocaine is kidding themself.
Cocaine and pot were widely expected to be decriminalized in the US in the late ‘70s - at the time the two enjoyed the same “soft drug” identity, plates of white flake got the High Times centerfold a few times. What possibly derailed it was the FBI threatening to make a thing about Carter’s chief of staff doing blow at Studio 54.
“Queering Benedict Arnold" is historical gay fiction. The story alternates between
twenty-first century scenes in which Jake Preston and Ben Arnold (a descendent)
investigate Benedict’s life, and eighteenth-century scenes imagined by Jake and
Ben. Some characters and allusions hark back to “Wayward Island” (in nifty’s file
on Beginnings). Jake Preston is the narrator in both works.
Most episodes are faithful to history, except for sexual encounters, which are
fictional. You should not read this story if you are a minor, or if you are offended
by explicit gay sex.
Benedict Arnold was an American military genius who was treated unfairly by
jealous rivals while he lived. After his death, he was denounced as the archetypal
traitor in history and folklore, but he was a target of inexplicable hatred long
before his treasonable conspiracy with John André to surrender the fort at West
Point to the British. Taken as a whole, “Queering Benedict Arnold” is an attempt
to discover the origins of that hatred.
I… wait a second… 14 Feb 2013 minus… OH MY GOD I think this gay Revolutionary fanfic ripped off its framing device from Assassin’s Creed’s.
Something I like to remind people of to highlight the fluidity of history is that well into the 20th century major Anglophone associations with Islam were “decadent sexual deviance, cosmopolitan tolerance, particularly queer-positive”.
Something similar is that if you go back to early 20th century America, stereotypes of Black manhood get a little off. You still see “bestial brute” but you also get dopey, cringing, lackadasical, henpecked, can’t get or keep a woman. (The unifying theme is lack of self-mastery) Like, a cuck. Remember, like, The Blues? And how they’re about how your woman left you, or doesn’t stay true to you, or won’t accept your love? One of the central contentions of the infamous Moynihan Report was that the reason the mid-60s black American community was unhealthy even after the 1950s civil rights movement was that repression had prevented black men from establishing *dominion* - hadn’t been able to earn a breadwinning wage, could by honest toil have less earning power than a sex worker, couldn’t offer black women enough to discipline them by threat of its withdrawal - in short, had prevented them from establishing a healthy, stable patriarchy and reaping its benefits. And one of its central recommendations was to promote this patriarchy.
A lot of 60s-70s black activism invokes “masculinity” in a way that seems incongruous to moderns because it was experienced as not only a valued but long-denied reward but a valuable resource to be deployed in service of the cause.
(Which means that the pre-X Malcolm Little strutting around Harlem in a zoot suit and a guy in a suit and a sandwich board reading “I Am A Man” and Richard Roundtree posing with a leather jacket and a gun while the soundtrack called him a sex machine to all the chicks [Shaft!] were going in on the same political project. The same one as Eldridge Cleaver reclaiming “rapist”. And, I mean, it worked. When’s the last time you associated “black man” and “harmless cuck”? [When’s the last time you did “white man”?])
In a world where Trump was competent rather than a holy fool of a d100 that got nominated because sometimes it came up “America was legitimate even before the ‘60s”, he’d take advantage of this and redo Reagan’s trick of defining himself against the “welfare queen”, updating it to be an overweight 36-something with a government/NPO social service iron triangle job she got by taking community college all through the terminal postgrad level and a sense that men are dismissably wrong for not living up to her.
(The flip side of that is the “woke bro”, the new worthy object of ridicule who tries to define his total identity, including social and sexual capital, around racism-awareness… was already comprehensively roasted 25 years ago in A Different World and School Daze, treatments of pretentious Black yuppie larva)
Of course even within whiteness this stuff’s never been as stable as either the eternal-order conservatives or the ultimate-revolution whigs would have you think. If you’ve ever harkened to the authentic masculinity of the 1950s, or Teddy Roosevelt’s kettlebell strongmen-and-Muscular Christianity, or the ruggedness of Victorian explorers, know that a lot of that stuff was considered self-conscious and borderline pretentious artifice at the time, part not of an organic maleness but deliberate initiatives to promote and assert masculine force in the face of a threateningly feminizing, white-collar, peaceful, touchy-feely world.
Until he had run for Governor [in 1938], W. Lee [”Pappy”] O’Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics—not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer….
[D]oubts about Pappy’s sincerity were occasionally raised in print by commentators who noted that the first of his fervent paeans to Texas had been composed when he had hardly arrived in that state, having previously lived in Kansas, and that even now he was occasionally prone to minor errors about Texas history—such as confusing the Battle of San Jacinto with the Alamo. Those closest to him knew that his country-boy image was a pose; he was actually a business-college graduate and a businessman who dealt not just in Hillbilly Flour but in Fort Worth real estate… Intimates also had some doubts about the depth of his religious feeling; although he was constantly urging his listeners to go to church, he seldom went himself….
O’Daniel’s candidacy was not taken seriously by politicians or by the press, who noted his total lack of political experience (since he had not paid his poll tax, he was not even eligible to vote); reporters treated it as a joke, if they mentioned it at all; newspaper articles lumped this “radio entertainer” and flour salesman…with the numerous other fringe candidates who regularly people Texas politics. Then the campaign began. O’Daniel’s first rally was held in Waco. When he drove up in his red wagon, the crowd waiting for him was possibly the largest crowd in the history of Texas politics—tens of thousands of people….
To his opponents’ charge that since he had no platform, he had no reason for running, he replied that there was indeed a reason; the reason, he said, was them. The principal reason he was running, he said, was to throw them—the “professional politicians”—out of Austin….
Press and politicians had predicted that once the novelty of seeing him in person had worn of, O’Daniel’s audiences would get smaller. They got larger: crowds unprecedented in Texas politics—20,000, 30,000, 40,000—came to hear him in the cities. Crowds followed him from town to town. They barricaded the highway to force him to stop and speak to them….
According to the press, the leading candidates in the race were two of the state’s best-known politicians, onetime State Attorney General William McCraw and Colonel Ernest O. Thompson, chairman of the Railroad Commission. McCraw received 152,000 votes. Thompson got 231,000. O’Daniel got 573,000. Polling 30,000 votes more than the eleven other candidates combined, he won the Governorship without a run-off….
Almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of government, O’Daniel proved unwilling to make even a pretense of learning, passing off the most serious problems with a quip; asked once what taxes he was proposing to keep the deficit-ridden government’s head above water, he replied that “no power on earth” could make him say….
“He just got up at his rallies. and said, in effect, ‘I’m going to protect you from everything.’” And the people believed he would. In 1938, he had gotten 51 percent of the vote; in 1940, he got 53 percent, winning re-election as he had won election, by beating a field of well-known politicians without even a run-off.
man *waking up from 12 year coma*: excuse me…. Doctor… ive been asleep for so long….. can you please…. bring me a newspaper… so i can better understand the current world… doctor: no i absolutely fucking cannot do that
I keep hearing references to Harambe in the context of presidential politics and I have absolutely no idea where it’s actually coming from.
honestly, I think he just resonated enough with Weird Twitter(s) and that lies close enough to Young Hotshot Journalist Twitter that they started doing it a bit to signal how with-it they were
it’s weird though, I’m sure it’s meant as shitposting, but the stuff they do - portray him as this noble figure shot down by the man as a microcosm of a failed system, rewrite the lyrics to recognizable popular tunes to convey this story, make art and micromythology where he blesses favored causes and stands ready to avenge disfavored ones - is like textbook birthing of a folk hero legend
I guess that’s not unprecedented - 4chan wasn’t too far off with their “can’t corner the Dorner/dodge the Rodge/flim-flam the Zimmerman” stuff, and Black Lives Matter has been showing the power of social media as a martyr-making platform
wonder if it’s just Weird Twitter using their ironic idiom to express an instinctual reaction to Stability going negative, same thing as Bonnie and Clyde and the social bandit vogue of the late ‘60s/’70s
(Clerks One and Two are discussing the merits of classic Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Me: You hear MTV's making a '90s throwback channel? They're going to call it MTV Classic.
Clerk One: Well, I remember when they started VH1 Classic to show music videos again, but soon they filled *it* up with shows too.
Me: Yeah, I remember when they started MTV2 to show music videos, but then they filled it up with shows *too*.
Clerk Two: I remember when they started *MTV* to show music videos, but then they filled it up with shows.
I’ve spent the last 20 minutes reading about “Aristasia,” which seems to be a sort of steampunk lesbian separatist version of the Gorean subculture
Beginning roughly in the late 1960s at Oxford, Aristasia began (as far as anyone around today can tell) with a group of young women disillusioned by the cultural changes of that decade. They saw the cultural upheaval of the 1960s as the end of civilization, and responded by seceding from mainstream society to form a culture, and, ultimately, a country of their own.
The Empire of Aristasia exists on another world (usually called Herthe) where there are no men. Everyone is feminine. Nevertheless, there are two sexes: blondes and brunettes. Brunettes are the stronger, more dominant sex, and hold most of the positions in the military, while blondes are frailer but are regarded with reverence due to their higher morality and spirituality. One Aristasian publication describes brunettes as “twice as feminine” as contemporary earth women, and blondes as “ultra-feminine.” Needless to say, blondes and brunettes in Aristasia can reproduce with each other, though the exact method remains undescribed. […]
Where does all this come from? A book series? A graphic novel? No – while a few books have been written taking place in Aristasia, the largest part of the Aristasian community is centered around living the life. Aristasians seek to live as though Aristasia existed here and now. They form communities – both virtual and physical – where women take on the roles of either blondes or brunettes from the Aristasian provinces, dress in vintage garments, and act out schools, coffee shops, and movie theaters. […]
Another aspect of Aristasia often seen in the old media is discipline. Apparently, the Empire of Aristasia employs corporal punishment to keep maids from straying, ranging from light spankings to canings. Of course, this is purely for disciplinary purposes. […]
Aristasia has changed a lot since its inception. In 2006, the core group of Aristasians started a movement called Operation Bridgehead which posited a real, actual Aristasia and reincarnated Aristasians in human bodies, making them a sort of Otherkin. It also resulted in Aristasians invading Second Life and setting up an Embassy and college there. This movement also tried to distance itself from the discipline aspect of Aristasia, and eventually entirely did away with it. As of 2013, the Bridgehead movement has abandoned the name “Aristasia” entirely, and now calls itself the “Herthelan Protectorate of Chelouranya.”
(This is from TV Tropes, which for some reason seems to contain the only clear and straightforward summary of the thing on the internet; this appears to be a more in-depth, controversy-focused insider’s history; there are various news stories about the founder, “Miss Martindale,” which seem to confirm that this is a real subculture and not the whole cloth invention of internet fetishists)
