Batman: Dystopian Fascism

The US government, hollowed out, has all but collapsed. The east coast states down to Georgia have mostly held together and still recognize the authority of Washington DC. California, Oregon, and Washington have formed an independent coalition on the west coast. Texas' influence captures the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, now called the Gulf of Texas by several hundred million people. The Great Lakes states have merged with Canada. And the Great Plains in the middle of the continent are overrun by feral hogs, and war.

Some time around World War I, maybe earlier, and definitely by World War II, humans stopped being the scariest thing in the world. For thousands of years, the most terrifying thing to see coming towards you was a group of men, always with metal, often with horses. With the advent of the machine gun, chemical warfare, heavy artillery, airplanes, a mass of people no longer seems so frightening. The scariest thing now is a machine. Victims of modern war often never see the operators, only the plane, the barrel of the tank, the drone that just dropped a grenade on them. Sometimes death takes them totally unawares.

'Military' itself means something different now. No longer a reference to mass human violence, now it means networks of mechanical violence.

Patriarchy

Child is born. Child grows up among family, cared for by family. Child reaches puberty. If child is female, child stays among family and continues to be cared for. In lower status families girl will probably be put to work. If child is male and lower status, he most often leaves family and works to live. Sometimes he leaves voluntarily, sometimes he is pushed out. If male child is higher status, he continues to be cared for by family as he pursues his ambitions in society. He will be married off to a high status female to continue the family line.

Patriarchy is both the uplifting of the high status males and the casting out of the low status males. Neoliberal ideology tells these low status males they can gain status through the market. Patriarchy keeps women at home and disempowered but generally more in community than men. Isolated women are especially vulnerable. Patriarchy tries to erase people who don't fit into the binary gender system.

I’ve been listening to The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and I can’t remember the exact quote but something in his phrasing struck me. He associated the “Old Guard” Republicans with the defense of property rights, sometimes in opposition to human rights.

“Property rights” as they exist today in the US (I can’t claim to speak for other nations) can be traced through law back to Rome. They have a long history that has justified mass deportation, enslavement, and murder of entire continents of people.

Human rights as a secular concept trace their genealogy only back to the 1400s or so in Europe. It could be argued that Jesus preached for human rights in the time of Rome, but the development of his ideas were twisted by the absorption of his church into the Roman power structure through Constantine.

We might view the development of human history through the lens of tension between human rights and property rights. Powerful individuals’ trying to protect (or expand) their claims to land, or people fought wars over their property, expending human lives in the process. Religious leaders have pushed back, insisting on the inherent value of humanity.

Historically law has developed to organize forces around property rights, while religious practice has organized people. Today we live in a world where property rights are ascendant. The Republican party holds property rights absolute, while the Democratic party attempts merely to balance property and human rights. I’m nervous and excited to see how the social media networks that are replacing organized religion will affect these politics.

Luminescent digital fish flickering in the server sea

ok i just got this thought out of nowhere but blog divers (people who scroll through a blog and reblog things that were posted YEARS AGO) are actually a super important part of the tumblr ecosystem

With people going inactive and deactivating, a lot of classic tumblr posts and also missed gems get lost because those connections get broken. Even on my own blog I forget about posts I made until I see someone in my activity reblog one of them- which then inspires me to reblog it myself because it was a good post and I want my new followers to see

do not feel bad about diving through someone's blog and reblogging shit from years ago, it keeps dashboards alive

(and if anyone has a problem with that, they can just block you or they can delete the root post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, two things that have absolutely no effect on the grand scheme of our lives)

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, then, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that middle-class home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies”’ dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz. 2016 edition.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

What does does it mean to be a citizen of a nation built on genocide? America is made of conquerors and refugees, killers and survivors. Can the US absolve itself? I can't say we were ever great, don't know if I can say we were ever good. But I think the best we've ever been is when we've held a welcoming hand to the world's refugees. At this point it feels like the least we can do.

The perfect drink to wash down my ape biscuits

I get such a kick out of the prefix 'cis'

getting a book cislated: yup, still can't read it

cisition timeline: just a selfie

cisformation: make a bunch of super saiyan sounds and walk away

cisubstantiation: by the power of god this bread has remained bread

idk its just neat

Leaving MAGA -

They Left MAGA - Leaving MAGA

They Left MAGA Steve Vilchez Chicago Read His Story Erica Roach New York Read Her Story Justin Yu California Read His Story Deanna Raper Nor

This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.