Autonomy and liberation without concession.
Public Key
npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 Profile Code
nprofile1qqsftgcgv07tdyn67uj8tx0vxl9jdvxpv54lrgajupprsg4pcwy942cpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qqhqkjj
Show more details
Published at
2026-08-18T12:24:41Z Event JSON
{
"id": "15a9a5ca7312f8605e9cfda7c43313370201a89542ca55f361f8e58775f9344f" ,
"pubkey": "95a30863fcb6927af7247599ec37cb26b0c1652bf1a3b2e0423822a1c3885aab" ,
"created_at": 1787055881 ,
"kind": 0 ,
"tags": [
[
"proxy",
"https://social.treehouse.systems/users/PallasRiot",
"activitypub"
],
[
"client",
"Mostr",
"31990:6be38f8c63df7dbf84db7ec4a6e6fbbd8d19dca3b980efad18585c46f04b26f9:mostr",
"wss://relay.ditto.pub"
]
],
"content": "{\"name\":\"PallasRiot\",\"about\":\"Autonomy and liberation without concession.\\n\\nTransphobia is patriarchy, Marxism-Leninism is spicy liberalism, analysis is not advocacy, I have no patience for boneheaded contrarianism.\\n\\nWARNING: I am extremely sparing with the Content Warning feature. I use it pretty much exclusively for the most graphic things and as required by moderators. I have firsthand experience that CWs lead to people who would like to read things not seeing them and have found the overall effect to be mostly negative. I discuss politics, bodily autonomy issues, queer issues, and all sorts of difficult, messy, sometimes depressing but important topics. I do not believe that these topics should be censored. There are no hard feelings whatsoever if you would prefer to mute or block me to not see my content. I will always give consideration to requests to CW something but in the majority of cases will not do so.\\n\\nI'm at or above the age of majority in your country\",\"picture\":\"https://cache.treehouse.systems/accounts/avatars/113/771/934/695/054/039/original/d1dc98dcea8f8f68.jpg\",\"banner\":\"https://cache.treehouse.systems/accounts/headers/113/771/934/695/054/039/original/facf2254562a0b4d.png\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \",\"fields\":[[\"Pronouns\",\"She/her\"]]}" ,
"sig": "07aa1f9e0ed48f9dd8f7361f95df3da723280ab004f86a33beb83ac06f6b828241b9d0fc42d91e2185e0b6c5444b7b1c7727e1fc8d294a73de56a98209f4e4aa"
}
Last Notes npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot 25 years later it continues to be more and more clear that al-Qaeda was wildly successful and they really did unrecoverable damage to the US, effectively hastening the political destruction of the world's foremost superpower. The politics of fear and authoritarianism that sprung up like weeds in the wake of the attack has only grown more dire over time, and now no one can argue that the US hasn't been diminished and humiliated as a result. Mass surveillance, politically active militarized police, and the politics of white supremacy have all grown fat and strong on the perpetual insecure anxiety of the American psyche. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Ukraine and Palestine together represent like a total collapse of the US liberal and neocon foreign policy ideologies. Fundamentally it's been demonstrated that the US can't reliably function as a safeguard of liberal democracies because the US has been a totally unreliable partner to Ukraine, and it's been shown that the US will act to perpetuate exactly the sort of crimes it accuses other states of through US participation in the genocide in Palestine. Obviously these aren't the first or only examples, but in a very short time the US has totally invalidated the justifications for US militarism, mainly that the US must maintain a global military superpower status in order to preserve the rules based international order and to foster American values around the world. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The extent to which TERFs* are deluded about their own politics is impressive, they really have almost no understanding of their position as useful idiots for patriarchy despite the fact that the only parts of their ideology that get any traction are the areas of overlap with explicitly patriarchal movements. When you delve into TERFism within its own movement spaces you find a lot of stuff that literally gets no traction whatsoever in public, despite the incredible overrepresentation of TERFs in media and public discourse. A good example is that it's not uncommon for TERFs analysis to argue that female* non-human animals are part of the same female-specific oppression of female humans, that the oppression of non-human animals is an extension of the oppression of female humans. Not like a related or intersecting thing, but just like a contiguous manifestation of the same female-oppression. Unironically the position of movement TERFism is for the most part that female chickens have more common struggle with female humans than female humans have with trans women(a dichotomy that also doesn't make sense but one thing at a time). But this level of TERF analysis literally never makes it into broad public view despite the positions of power and prominence held by TERFs. The parts of TERFism that make it to the public are just....Catholic gender politics basically. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot @nprofile…glyx The White Power movement of the 80s and 90s thrived because of the involvement of women: women were crucial to the social club aspects, and were very much active participants in planning, recruiting, etc. Even in the context of rigidly patriarchal extremism, women's involvement was vital to the movement. I think some of the smarter folks in the modern incarnation of extremely aware of that. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The grim killing of Jason Arday is especially evil because the guy who got the ball rolling is a smirking little Chris Rufo nazi, and like Rufo he knows he can just say everything out loud and it doesn't matter because the press will do his dirtywork anyway. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot "I've been working nights and weekends at the right-wing terrorism factory and all I got was right-wing terrorism" npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Oh my god that Atlantic essay from Julia Curlee is like the worst thing I've ever read npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot It's just objectively true that "woke 1" was an electoral winner for Democrats and a good organizing structure for Americans lol, like all these pundits who have been complaining about defund the police and whatnot are all acting like there weren't historically massive protests that swept the Democrats into power npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I feel like every couple years there's a story about an amazing innovation that some kid has invented for a science fair or something, and then I just never hear about that thing ever again npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Farmers will continue to mostly stick by Trump because A) "farmers" in the American context means farm owners, not people who farm and B) what farmers wanted from Trump was to get rid of the anti-slavery reforms that Biden did to the H-2A visa system, and Trump did that. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot People knew Jim Crow was being imposed as it happened, like it wasn't done by ambush. Some of the last remaining elected radical Republicans desperately called on their party to pass voter protections, because it was pretty clear that widespread disenfranchisement was one of the pillars of Jim Crow, alongside pogroms and economic devastation of Black communities. Smart, studious people articulated plainly what was at stake npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot A major failure of US liberalism is a total blindness to enemies. Republicans routinely work hard to reduce the political power of their opposition, quite flagrantly: gerrymandering and the suppression of voters of color is an obvious one, but attacks on science and education also degrade important power bases for the Democrats, reducing the money and resources that can be marshalled for the Dems. Passing laws that make life difficult for queer people has the effect of making queer people move and degrading the resources of queer people, again degrading the power of a Dem aligned bloc. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Important pollinator content!! npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I've never felt so vindicated as I have by Mamdani proving my major thesis about how the Biden administration failed prior to October 7th. Before Genocide Joe destroyed his presidency with his love of Mediterranean Rhodesia, his administration was the most progressive since at least LBJ and possibly FDR(the LBJ comparison is especially fitting). The Biden administration accomplishments were a long and varied list of good governance reforms and legitimately powerful, if largely procedural, fixes that were well targeted to help build political power among the coalition of the modern Dems. Stuff that made life materially better for everyday Americans in a lot of ways, many quite significant. And it basically didn't buy them a dram of popularity or an ounce of political capital. Biden's administration was politically limping long before he fully embraced genocide as national policy. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Urban liberals: rural conservatives are poor lost lambs, we can return them to the fold if we get a masculine enough dude to send then money for their hospitals npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot A litmus test for whether a US liberal can be meaningfully ideologically opposed to fascism is whether they use comparisons to the lead up to the Civil War to illustrate what we must avoid. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot @nprofile…qkvg Yeah absolutely, but on some level I think it's still worthwhile to attack the justification on it's own terms npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Hey so I know this is uncomfortable but teenagers see porn and that's fine, it's not a new thing, teenagers have been furtively enjoying porn for as long as porn has existed. The idea that any exposure to any kind of sexual material will damage young people is, frankly, just an excuse to actually harm young people in profoundly domineering ways. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Until the 1900s, most national borders were the same as any other political borders, like the borders of towns, cities, or provinces: administrative boundaries that demarcate administrative authority. Militarized borders were rare and considered despotic, with Tzarist Russia as an example. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I am once again reminding you that militarized borders are a modern invention, like a century old. Before the 1900s, "immigration" was just people traveling a place. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Activists spend their whole lives in dangerous toil to make Nazis afraid to march openly. It's not the police or state intelligence or whatever else: it's antifascists. Antifascists infiltrate then, research them, identify them, counteract them, etc. Please for the love of everything good recognize that real people are fighting this fight and have been for decades. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot US Nazis wear masks because they are afraid of antifascist activists. It's not because they secretly believe that what they're doing is shameful or whatever else, it's because of the constant and vigilant work of antifascists. If at some point they believe they have nothing to fear from antifascists then they will march without masks. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot As a labor organizer I can't overstate how important the Americans with Disabilities Act is to organized labor. If you have ever gotten your job to cut you some slack because of a physical disability or injury, or a mental health issue, or a learning disability, the ADA is what gave you force of law even if you didn't know it. I've been able to save the jobs of quite a few workers because of the Reasonable Accommodation process of the ADA npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The Dem right seems to be settling on a line of attack against the DSA and it seems to be "it's actually racist to primary right wing Democrats" npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot European homes aren't weatherized because the kind of society-wide push that makes mass weatherization a reality requires spending that the austerity-obsessed governments of Europe can't stomach. They would rather boil a thousand of their children and elderly every heat wave than spend on making weatherization accessible and prevalent. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I wouldn't take a trillion dollars if it meant I had to be Elon Musk npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Wow it's crazy how much the public hates this prime minister just for being bad at the job, extremely unlikable, having gotten into power via internal party coup, and having been plagued by scandal. People are really going to struggle to explain this one! npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Slavery remains enshrined in the US Constitution. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Increasingly of the opinion that pro nuclear energy sentiment is largely the result of a propaganda campaign by the oligarchs who see it as a path towards eroding regulatory tools that regular people use to fight corporate projects npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The Trump regime's repressive attack of those 15 activists in Minnesota is horrible and repugnant... npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Every June a bunch of chuds ask "when is straight pride?" and honestly that's a really good question? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot So if there is actually a deal being struck to end the US-Iran war, I will point out that it's actually very normal for an aggressor who lost to pay reparations. The US attacked Iran, and pretty clearly could not achieve its strategic objectives. That's an aggressor who lost. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot If nothing else I think the Platner campaign gives us a really good chance of getting some funny twitter exchanges when Republican operatives run their "the Dems are running a Nazi!" stuff and the Nazis in their base are like "sir don't insult our noble struggle for the white race by lumping us in with this gay hipster communist" npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot @nprofile…gfcd Hegseth is already making life harder for Catholics and Mormons in the military, we can see the club become smaller and smaller in real time. Anyo npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot So how does the Platner campaign happen? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Certainly open to being proven wrong, but my sense is that the latest Platner scandals don't significantly change his polling. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I say this as a non-vegan: anti-vegans are literally the most annoying people on earth npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Also in today's outrage from the right: apparently Hasan Piker enjoys heterosexual sex. This is scandalous, apparently. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Home ownership is basically the only real wealth that most working people can even vaguely hope to have, and it's a huge deal, right? Like obviously there's a lot more stability in owning versus renting, but also having a big expensive asset lets you access different financial tools. The ability to take out loans backed by your house can mean that even a fairly poor person can potentially take out tens of thousands of dollars of loans on really favorable terms; it opens up some pretty significant possibilities. In a real sense home ownership is what lets a working person actually use some of the kind of financial tools that businesses have. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot One of the issues with the US' commodified housing market is that property taxes are a vital tax base in the US, so when corporations use property investment as a big casino and drive up property values, the tax hike wipes out impoverished home owners, especially the elderly. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot To clarify, the Trump slush fund is being reported as a 2 billion dollar settlement fund, but that's not actually what's in the administration's documents or order. What they're trying to set up is a fund that Trump has control over which draws from the DoJ's settlement funds: those settlement funds are an "ongoing appropriation", meaning it's not a set amount of money that's determined by Congress as part of a budget, but instead Congress lets the DoJ pay for settlements as needed, with not cap. It's an unlimited amount of money. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Genuinely the Trump slush fund is the greatest act of corruption in US history and blows so far past Orban that I'm rethinking my previous analysis that the US is entering competitive authoritarianism, because it's so far into warlord or dictator stuff. If Trump is able to actually carry it out there will be no comparison that can be made to literally any other act of corruption in US history. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I haven't kept up with The Boys in years and have no idea what the show has been up to. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot There are two kinds of right-wing content creator: npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot There have been Muslims in the US since the founding of the nation. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Under a fascist regime everyone is a criminal, which is perhaps a truly hopeful and even aspirational thing. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Anarchists among immigrants provide a strong intellectual, cultural, and organizational infusion to American anarchism and American labor organizing more broadly. Anarchists made a point of organizing among and with every kind of person on all kinds of issues. Anarchist newspapers in German, Czech, Yiddish, and more circulated broadly. In fact, the depiction of anarchist as bearded bomb-throwers likely stems from anti-worker newspapers depicting Johann Most, a German anarchist and polemicist who was so influential in US politics that his visage became the icon of anarchism for generations of liberal critics. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Throughout the 1860s and 70s states and municipalities pass 8 hour workday laws, but they're largely unenforceable in the face of the increasingly concentrated power of the capitalists. Throughout the US workers organize for their mutual aid and protection, and the bosses respond with security crackdowns, harsher worker conditions, and more union busting. In business districts the small business owners frequently form their own militias to shoot at protesting or parading workers. The Know-Nothings move from a secret society of racist anti-immigration zealots to an important bloc in formal politics. Meanwhile, unions in the US West refuse to organize with Chinese workers, dividing worker power. In the East, unions often refuse to organize with the Irish and Germans. Across all of the US, Black workers are excluded from unions. Even the Marxist International Workingmen's Association splits worker power by insisting that women's struggles be secondary. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Tech entrepreneurs run roughshod over their workers to churn out technologies to deskill and displace other workers. Across the nation labor laws stand as increasingly dead letters while forced overtime and gigwork leads to 12-16 hour work days 6-7 days a week. Right-wing paramilitary groups and lone gunmen menace US cities, threatening immigrants and shooting people in "defense" of property. Anti-immigrant sentiment is used as a wedge to expand surveillance and control by the state, with businesses and even churches in many states coming under attack for not aligning with reactionary causes. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot It is a celebration of the ineffable dignity of the human spirit that refuses to bow to state power, whether that power manifests through the murderous logic of borders, the threat of state strike breakers, the twisted consumption of bodily autonomy for state needs, or whatever else. To be human is to seek liberation, to seek the liberation of all is anarchic, and so May Day reminds us that through anarchism we assert our humanity. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot May Day memorializes anarchists executed by the state for labor organizing, mostly immigrants. It's a day of solidarity against authoritarianism, to build a united front of the liberatory against the forces of authoritarianism. We must organize alongside and among immigrants, queer folks, people of color, and take every struggle as our own. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Technology has never, not a single time, been liberatory in and of itself. Every labor saving device will be used to extract more surplus value *unless* organized power can force it to be used to reduce work and increase safety. Every communication technology will be used for mass surveillance and propaganda *unless* organized people force it to be used to share knowledge. Etc etc npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot One would assume that "if voting could change anything they would make it illegal" would have the corollary "they're illegalizing voting because elections still matter" npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The US labor movement was heavily driven by anarchism, from the Haymarket Martyrs to the IWW and beyond. It's hard to separate the resistance of the US labor movement from Propaganda of the Deed, which was an influential part of anarchist theory at the time. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I think Belle of the Ranch is probably right that if Iran keeps control of the Strait of Hormuz that's got functionally the same deterrence value as having nukes, but frankly even more politically effective because it doesn't come with the negative consequences of being a known nuclear power npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot It's kinda funny how often white supremacist arguments are basically "well a white guy got famous for doing classical music which is basically like me doing classical music if you think about it" npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot It's pretty crazy that Pete Hegseth is avowedly anti-Catholic to the point of open and flagrant anti-Catholic discrimination and that's not a bigger story. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The basic reason I think it's worthwhile to push back on the "America has always been fascist" talking point is that it creates the impression of a sort of acausal, inevitable present. But America's current fascism has been the culmination of work by a surprisingly small number of groups and people, with plans and goals and means, which often enough we can identify. And that means we can understand it and fight it from a position of understanding. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Very good analysis of tankies and their effect on the Western left npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I said that Noem's firing was significant because Trump II had a firm "no scalps" policy that they had held onto for like a year. Bondi getting fired pretty well confirms it, Trump's personal capacity to stick to that policy has been shattered. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot So the Supreme Court didn't actually rule that conversion torture is constitutionally protected. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot We've got to defeat transphobia but in the nearish term I think maybe a *little* transphobia is useful. You know like there's a whole cohort of cishet dudes who really want pathologically submissive women who dress like 50s house wives with crushing self esteem issues, and the fact they're not willing to date trans women is a blessing tbh. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Regular reminder that if you send proof of canceling your NYT subscription to Current Affairs they'll give you a free year subscription to their much better publication npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot For years and years I've tried to convince people that the rich are literally stupider than average and I want to thank Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen for making that inarguable npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Robert Mueller's cowardice and ineptitude makes a lot of sense when you learn that he built his life around chasing the high he got from butchering Vietnamese resistance fighters when he was a kid npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Jesus Christ, apparently Nancy Mace wrote the bill that would have made the records of sexual misconduct in congress public, and she did such a slapdash job that it would have *legally required* doxxing victims. There's literally no depths that woman won't sink to npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Very sharp analysis of the NYT from Lily Alexandre, really worth a listen npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot And I saw folks arguing recently that it's justified for some people to wear Meta glasses because of their disability and like...I'm sorry but if that's you I think you need to know you're a rube. Every single time these tech barons invent a new perversion to rob people with they argue it will help disabled people. Not only does it never work out but also none of these tech companies bother doing even basic things to accommodate disability. You really want to argue that disabled people should be subjected to Zuckerberg's panopticon? For the sake of what poorly put together bullshit exactly? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot When I go to union actions it's pretty reliable that retirees will show up. It's pretty reliable that they're the most radical too. I've seen squeamish, fence sitting local executive board members get shocked into silence by retired union guys very seriously suggesting getting into fights with cops on the picket line. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot If you've gone to the bathroom wearing Meta glasses chances are that some desperately poor worker in India or Africa has been subjected to footage of your junk. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Hey so like we all know that everything those Meta glasses see gets sorted through by sweatshop workers right? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot It turns out that blowing up an 86 year old man with likely terminal cancer who chose not to go into hiding when threatened with assassination isn't a genius move and doesn't lead to the kind of instability that Trump thought. Tbh this is probably a huge gift to a regime that has been struggling to deal with decades of organizing and resistance from the Iranian people. A frail old man dying from cancer would have provided opportunities for resistance, but a courageous martyr dying at his post at the ends of the most powerful empire in history does the exact opposite. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Undoubtedly Hegseth is nervously typing "are wars hard?" into unsecured ChatGPT on his personal phone right now npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Journalism appears to have some sort of autoimmune disorder where whenever some outlet gets caught acting extremely unethically and without regard for truth a bunch of journalists go on the offense against whoever pointed out the issue npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The Iranian regime is evil but rational. Throughout a few years of consistent aggression from the US and Israel they've been very measured in their responses and very specific about what signals they want to send with retaliatory strikes and then taking off ramps. I worry what happens if they conclude the US regime isn't rational. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot There's not many """leftists""" who will argue that Ireland should be ruled by the Brits because the Brits are the dominant regional power. They will not say that it was a mistake for other nations to lend support to the Irish independence movement. Similarly there are few nominal leftists that will argue that the US was *too* supportive of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Trump has robbed the Iranian people of the possibility of tearing Khamenei apart bodily after overthrowing him, and has instead turned him into a martyr. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Someone should probably explain to Hasan Piker that either nations will seek out security partners or they'll try to get nukes, and also that appeasement doesn't work. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Have any even vaguely credible sources said that Khamenei is dead? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Trump is obsessed with the idea of the "short successful wars" that the US carried out in the late 1800s, the era that he considers to be America's political golden age. The series of imperialist smash and grab operations turned the US from a continental empire to a European style colonial power, with colonial holdings abroad. To Trump's mind these wars also glued together the US polities and facilitated the supremacy of the robber barons. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Do you ever think about how the US government spent a huge amount of effort hiding the rich history of anarchism in the US and abroad and then readily embraced Leninism as the defining form of socialism? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot @nprofile…l2dj It constantly amazes me how every single US cop is somehow more bloodthirsty and fragile than the literal monarchist colonial gendarmie that is constantly committing brazen murders of indigenous people up north. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot You may hate cops now but when you're in trouble who is going to beat up your kids, run a propaganda campaign about how scary and ethnic they are, and demand that merry-making be outlawed like characters from the Scarlet Letter? You ever think about that punk? npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot *Amazing* story out of NYC: npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot You have to push back on "it's not left vs right, it's the bottom vs the top" because that's literally how the right builds false consciousness npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The lesson we must learn from Epstein is that there are clearly other Epsteins. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Minneapolis has broken ICE. Not permanently, but to the point that they have to redeploy and change strategy completely. They will likely have to get even more secretive and move even more quietly. They'll have to take pains to avoid drawing the attention of a lot of potential witnesses. They'll need to try to starve the resistance of flash points that can keep mass mobilization going. They'll likely give more attention to trying to go after specific activists and community resources. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Last year I got to listen to a speaker from the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC, the metalworkers union that Lula da Silva came out of. For the unfamiliar, Brazil's democratic government was overthrown in 1964 and the country was ruled by military dictatorship for about 20 years, until basically 1985 (though Brazil didn't formally return to democracy until a couple years later when the new constitution was adopted). Trade unions were a vital part of overthrowing the dictatorship, and even a few years ago when a right-wing president tried to perform a self-coup after losing the election, trade unions once again provided a backbone of resistance that gave the elected government the power to actually take office and hold the would-be dictators to account. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot By the by, the fed response to the murder of Renee Good goes to show why cops are often eager to have body cams. Ross and fellow travelers released his body cam footage explicitly to muddy the information space. Body cam footage will get used for surveillance, for PR, for exonerating cops, etc, far more than it will be used to reign cops in, because cops and not-exactly-cops-but-adjacent control the footage. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot SNL did a sketch about a family dealing with their Trumpist mom coming to term with Trump being awful, and it's really striking to me how liberal media is very consistently concerned with the humanity and dignity of right-wingers. Like another example that comes to mind is King of the Hill, which is kind of a liberal fantasy of militantly decent conservatism. It's especially striking because of how obsessed right-wing media is with depicting anyone left of Franco as a disgusting Satanic pedophile Stalinist. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot This is your regular reminder that "qualified immunity" isn't a piece of legislation or the result of legislation, it's something the Supreme Court made up during the Civil Rights era to undermine the laws the US passed to suppress the Klan. It's literally just an idea the justices invented to rewrite the explicit purpose of US law because they wanted to protect the police who were beating Black civil rights protestors. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Trump's hatred of Thomas Massie is pretty revealing in and of itself right? Because Massie is a lunatic extremist. The man is basically a segregationist, he hates the US Constitution and regularly writes to the Roberts Court to ask them to change plain text, he's ideologically entirely committed to Jeff Bezos' divine right to own your children, literally the *only* position that Massie has that's an issue for Trump is that Massie (surprisingly) hates pedophilia. It's the one thing. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot One of the problems of trying to argue against specific parts of a person's justifying ideology is that often the specifics don't really matter to them. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot "Barack Obama doesn't owe you shit" npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Federal Dems could, should, and from reporting might be adopting a strategy in regards to ICE of trying to force Republicans to sign on to some major restraints, since legislative possibilities are limited until there's a Democratic majority. But in addition to significant restraints, they should also use their skill in destroying agencies through frittering away budgets on stupid shit. The people who have helped to means test programs into near uselessness could employ similar strategies towards ICE: require onerous *and pointless* training (for instance force field agents to take lengthy courses on typing or driving safety or something, give them hours and hours of time wasting videos to click through), make the agency duplicate paperwork as often as possible by hand. Force the agency to spend money on things that give them nothing, such as forcing them to lease from private entities rather than using existing federal infrastructure for their offices. The Dems need to get the biggest restrictions they can and then think like saboteurs npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot The truth is that public panic is extraordinarily rare, communities tend to respond rationally to crisis, self-organized efforts after a disaster are generally well informed, and the supposed madness of mobs is essentially a Victorian pseudoscientific myth. Highly stratified societies are worse at dealing with crisis because elite panic becomes a greater issue, because when power and authority pool into fewer hands those hands are less competent and have fewer interests within the community. State power is not the only way to organize response to crisis, and it comes with a lot of downsides. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot Disaster sociologists have observed how elite panic is ultimately used to consolidate further authoritarian power; the rational mechanisms that communities use in the face of disaster are purposefully targeted and broken down, reducing faith in the community among community members, while the extraordinary measures that elites employ during the crisis are normalized. That's especially dangerous when the disaster is a crisis of authoritarian crackdown and breakdown in the consent of the governed. Even more so than in most disasters, the elite panic in this case threatens to serve as extraordinarily useful to the most powerful elites. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot What we're seeing from the state apparatus of Minnesota is called elite panic. The elites are responding to disaster as if the threat were civil disorder rather than the disaster itself, and their response is hampering the actually rational and competent responses by the people. Regular people in Minnesota aren't just acting heroically, though they are very clearly doing that, but they are also responding with incredibly sophisticated, complex, rational, and effective efforts that are meaningfully addressing the dynamic crisis unfolding around them. The elites are doing the opposite; they have entirely lost all worldly sense and are responding with entirely irrational efforts that are contrary to their own goals and self-preservation. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot I don't tell people to watch videos of people dying but you need to go watch the video of ICE executing that guy in Minneapolis, right now. It's full cartel execution kind of stuff, right wing death squad stuff, and you need to see it if you're in the US. Don't just read about it, don't take my word or anyone's. npub1jk3sscluk6f84aeywkv7cd7ty6cvzeft7x3m9czz8q32rsugt24swea9l7 PallasRiot If I told you that a particular politician was conservative you would probably understand that their specific ideology and views are dependent on their particular time and place. A conservative in Australia and a conservative in the US aren't going to be exactly the same. None the less, there are enough similarities that we can describe both as conservative and have some sense of what that means, their ideological lineage, etc.
