Yes, I’m in a similar boat. My general worldview has generally stayed the same since I was a child: every human deserves human rights. The vehicle by which I want to see that out, though, is what’s changed, as well as specifically what those rights ought to be.

I don’t know if this is true, because I’m definitely not a determinist by any stretch, but there is a part of me that believes that those core fundamental bits are fairly well solidified by the time we reach adulthood. Like, the framework stays the same, but what it looks like is what changes. Iunno I’m just rambling.

I was an active forum member in the heyday of &T, and I’ll say that people definitely did get arrested (myself included) but &T was rarely implicated. Post 9/11 there was quite a bit of attention because of antiterrorism propaganda, but to my knowledge Jeff and the mods all stayed out of trouble.

It really was a fun place with some incredibly cool people. The horseshoe effect in full swing as well; from my memory it was a healthy mix of communists, anarchists, and libertarians. Also it was more racially diverse than you’d think. The text file repository was mostly 90% bullshit, but there were some incredible nuggets in there. Much of what I learned about chemistry came from that place.

I often wonder what some of those folks are up to these days. Wish I’d been able to keep track of them. I ended up getting locked up for two years for unrelated shit and by the time I got out the place was pretty much dead. Those who remained were insufferable. There are &T enclaves around the internet, but they’re mostly boring and filled with sad people making the same jokes from 20+ years ago. Teehee huff raid teehee skreeeaaawwwww teehee u got belaired teeeheeee.

Rotten, Ogrish, and &Totse pretty much ruined me. What’s crazy is Ogrish was the first site that I’m aware of to break the news about Kevin Spacey being a chomo when they posted a video of him in a hot tub with a Guatemalan boy in the early-mid 00s. I’ve since tried to find evidence to support this claim, but it’s long since been scraped from the internet, but that shit is seared in my memory.

Cismale here (feel free to tell me to gtfo) and I tend to agree with you insofar as many (most? All? Any?) cis allies haven’t done any sort of rigorous analysis on their own gender, socialization, and the massive privilege it begets.

Before I continue: How do you see us being better allies and comrades? Truly asking.

Personally I tend towards gender nihilism, but decades of having a penis and testicles, being socialized as, being perceived as, and ultimately “being” male (i.e. internalizing masculinity, patriarchy, binary gender, etc.) — especially at critical points in my biopsychosocial development — give me an unshakeable experience. No matter how much I choose to see beyond gender, to assert its lack of existence, whatever, I still inhabit a male body and feel at home in it and benefit from a society who privileges me as such. I am destined to fuck up, make mistakes, cause harm both implicitly and explicitly. Such is the burden of gender — and I have it the easiest.

My point is that yes, you are right to be dubious of us, because even the most well meaning are socialized as gendered people, and benefit from the privilege of gender and it’s more work than 99% of us can ever be bothered to do (at least, at present) to actually be the allies y’all need. I wish that weren’t the case, and I hope that it isn’t, but goddam.

I doubt that’s helpful at all. I dunno. I’m just ranting. Feel free to cuss me out if I’m making useless unproductive noise here.

When he puts respect LITERALLY on the names of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good by doing them the dignity of spelling their goddam names right, I’ll consider it.

If he lacks the journalist integrity to fucking spell check the names of two people who were executed in the streets by their own government, what else does he get wrong?

I was in a book club with an Ezra once. Can’t say for sure if he was good, but he didn’t suck which is more than I can say for the aforementioned Ezras

Sure, yeah. Gov’t workers get unions. This is not a surprise. What is a surprise is… how bad this “journalist” is:

The murders of Perri and Renney Nicolle Good…

I had to watch The Cove recently, which isn’t overtly “political” in nature, but it is racist, classist, anti-rural, and literally makes shit up. It’s mostly just lib rage bait.

Like, yeah, the dolphin harvest in taiji is like, not cool… but you don’t need to be a crazy racist/classist nutjob that makes up statistics and racist jokes to convince people of that… you just do that cause you’re bad people.

They keep making the claim that “20,000 dolphins are slaughtered every year” and the best info I could find to support that claim is that one year, the Japanese fisheries commission issued nearly 20,000 permits for dolphin hunting in Japanese waters but there’s no record of how many of those permits were filled. The documentary implies — but is careful to never outright say — that all of those permits are used in one dolphin slaughter in taiji. As far as I could tell… maybe 1-2k dolphins were slaughtered in taiji every year? Maybe? Iunno.

And I’m not defending the dolphin slaughter in taiji, I just know that the documentary is a bunch of white Americans that do literally zero material analysis and do all of the racism and classism.

Okay I gotta stop before I enrage myself further.

I grew up in and out of boys homes and shit and man I’ve endured enough pranks to last several lifetimes.

Hell yes. I watched a couple last night and they’re excellent. Seems like he’s tight with the Let’s Talk Religion guy as well, so that’s cool. Thanks for the recommendation!

No, but I’m gonna check ‘em out. Always on the lookout for this type of stuff

Hell yes this looks right up my alley

While not necessarily documentaries, and, as much as I am loathe to recommend YouTube content creators, I really like

• Ancient Americas
• History with Cy
• History Time
• Religion for Breakfast
• Let’s Talk Religion
• Esoterica
• Historia Civilis

Mostly because I enjoy falling asleep to the sound of men’s voices talking about long ago and not-so-long-ago times. There are others, of course, but these are my favorites.

Yeah I see that now. Thank you.

I think one of the ways my autism comes out is just like, not understanding neurotypicals? (No shit, huh? (Also I hate that language but whatever)) And in moments like this, where something is just so painfully obvious to me — something I’ve been shouting about for literally my entire life — it makes my brain hurt trying to comprehend how people can’t or won’t see it.

Like, I used to labor under the assumption that all people believe, as you said, that capital pushes the state into fascism, but that everyone was just willfully complicit. Then shit like this happens and I’m like, “oh wait… yall like, really thought corporations were like… okay?” I dunno, does that make sense?

Sometimes I just feel really alien in this world and this is just one of those moments.

Ratio refers to the ratio of women to men. Epstein is telling musk that musks gold digger of the day might be uncomfortable because there will be SO many women. Musk then effectively says “my gold digging wench will do whatever I tell her to do because I don’t regard women as people so whatever it’s good”

My read was that this initiative was originally taken during the Biden admin with the intention of watching right wing extremists. Of course those tools, once built, have the capacity to surveil anyone, so when Donny and the boys came back to town they found they had a welcome home present waiting for them: a shiny new surveillance apparatus.

Thanks, Joe.

Old man yells—at The Cloud.

This very much reminds me of Nel Noddings and other folks who kind of pioneered the Feminine Ethic of Care movement (maybe not the right word).

While I have some quibbles with her, I do think her book Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education is worth a read. Her chapter on natural caring and ethical caring in particular really helped me reframe my own concept of self care, especially when there is so much to be done.

It’s about the color I would expect from one of these types