Reminds me of this Baldwin quote:

"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."

Once again, it turns out that "run the country like a business" means "run the country like a dictatorship."

This, in turn, reveals how much despotism we take for granted in the economy. Capitalism has accustomed us to authoritarianism. Now our political institutions are catching up.

https://crimethinc.com/work

Crimethinc quote of the year

So, saying something that might be obvious, but bears some commentary:

Part of what makes sex-positive feminist discourse tricky is that it's one of those terms that rolls a lot of related (but not identical) positions into one word. Within it, I find three positions:

1. An advocation against things like slut-shaming and other aspects of sexual shame, specifically those targeting women
2. An advocation in favor of normalizing things like sex work
3. A rejection of the radical feminist assertion that hetero-sexual relations (at least, in our current society) are inherently oppressive

Anyway, I think part of where the challenge of this term is that different strands of feminism react to the different elements in different ways. I don't think a radfem disagrees with all the points, but they don't agree with the same ones a liberal feminist does, nor a Marxist, nor an anarcha-feminist or any other strand. I, for one, am pretty in favor of the first two, but am a touch more uncertain as to how I feel regarding the third, in that a lot of heteronormative tropes require unlearning to have healthy relationships imo.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's one of those things where people could benefit from being a bit more explicit about which aspects of it they're discussing

Then again, it's also helpful to identify with a movement, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The original rainbow pride flags were made by Gilbert Baker in 1979, in remembrance of the Stonewall Riots against cops who killed a trans woman.

They chose the rainbow because, among other reasons, it's so bright and easy to see that they couldn't be ignored.

Harvey Milk, the influencial civil rights leader who commissioned the flag, was assassinated by cops 5 months after it was first flown, cementing its position as an anti-cop symbol.

We keep forgetting that not everyone thinks of it this way.
Never forget your roots.

When we say "Pride was a riot", this is what we mean. ACAB is queer roots.
Pride is anti-cop.

https://blog.kyleggiero.me/Inclusivity-pride-flags/

Gonna read this soon, putting it here to come back to

Friends, the hour draws closer to midnight.

This means it is time to further debase myself and my credibility with the kind of analysis that even the most crank of crank professors would be ashamed by

Race, Ur-Fascism & Inceldom

Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, perhaps one of the most helpful commentaries on fascism out there, features a list of characteristics that define fascist movements. One of these traits is that the fascist's enemies, according to the facist's self-contradictory rhetoric, are too strong and laughably weak simultaneously.

The most obvious example of this, of course, is the fascist's characterization of "The Jew," who, despite being worse than (insert dominant ethnicity here), has somehow taken control of all the country's institutions.

Something worth pointing out here is that this stereotyping-scheme can be applied to the incel's (inceldom being more often than not a pipeline to fascism) psycho-sexual fixations. The reason the incel is incapable of getting the girl is that the bull (I use a term from the cuckoldry kink community due to the incel's fixation with cuckolding), despite being crude, brutish and unintelligent in the incel's view, holds a sexual monopoly on women.

While I'd be remiss not to mention the ways in which this attitude dehumanizes straight women, the point I'll be focusing on is the qualities of this "bull" character. It goes without saying that this character is oftentimes depicted as a black man. Sexual insecurity directed toward the "hypermasculine black man" trope is nothing new in American discourse, or in our moral panics. In fact, there was a time when it was not uncommon on places like 4chan to give the "bull" character the stereotypically black name "Tyrone." The extreme condescension with which this imagined character was met was undeniable, as was the assertion that this was the man you were losing to in sexual competition.

However, as time progresses, something unusual happens: As incel discourse leaves the backwaters it comes from and expands outwards, a character with most of the same traits starts filling the role. "The Chad" is a character who possesses many of the same traits as The Bull character of incel imaginings (crude, unintelligent, etc.) and is paired in a similar dichotomy ("The Virgin" = incel), but this time, is an aspirational, ubermensch-like figure instead of a sexual opponent. The Chad, of course, is also stereotypically Aryan in appearance.

Unlike the stereotypical (and again, oftentimes black) Bull character, the Chad is seen as an enviable, if almost unachievable ideal. The grip this nearly-mythic character had on the incel and formerly incel community was strong, to say the least. Everyone wanted to be "a Chad." This is the character who seemingly disrupted the contradictions in incel rhetoric, and, due to a variety of unfortunate political, cultural and economic machinations, the Chad is the vision of hyper-masculinity that now pervades our increasingly fascistic culture, and who is regularly cited in discourse about "ideal masculinity" among the right and their unwitting toadies.

The consequences of this are currently unfolding all across the world.