Dr. Benjamin JJ Carpenter

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

I just heard the Fate of Ophelia for the first time. May she rise from the watery depths to claim her deserved vengeance.

People say this as if this being average wouldn't be, in itself, extremely alarming.

Why are scholars researching the far right still so reluctant to use racism as a defining concept?

It was problematic when racism was disguised under a thin veneer of twisted liberal discourses, but now it's pretty much in the open I'm surprised there still appears to be a reluctance

Throw all the shade you'd like, honestly. It can be grating when people profess a general intolerance for bad media and then make every possible excuse for their favoured trash. Like, climb in the garbage with the rest of us!

Makes sense to me that people might engage with different media differently, taking one 'more seriously' or paying more attention to it than others. I feel like I'm much more attentive to writing than to TV and film, generally speaking.

The world is so filled with beauty and wonder and I feel very strongly both that it should be a kinder place to live in and that it is within our power to make it as such

There's an older couple I often see in a local coffee place. They're usually around on Friday afternoons, always take the same seat by the window, holding hands and watching the world go by as they sip on tea. Occasionally, they take a nap in their seats, side by side.

Honestly that's the ideal.

So much TERF vomit is just projected insecurity about aging, a fear that the world might leave them behind. The irony is that the world is rushing too precisely because they insist on being so utterly vile.

Since the Ezra & Ta-Nehisi discussion is still happening: the main point I think most are missing is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates says the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth

Ah, you can speak only for yourself there—I'm very much enjoying it!

I believe they require multiple encounters to unlock.

If a government tells you that you can’t call it authoritarian, it’s authoritarian.

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

I'm going to say the quiet part out loud: the threat to the speaker's safety, and to the safety of their family, would more than make Klein's suggestion untenable.

Klein, like everyone else who fetishizes debate, does so unmoored from the on the ground reality of our political climate.

“You used to be able to say anything” comedians never been more quiet in their lives

What we're seeing in the "don't sign up for protests" discourse is what Paulo Freire described as the convert's failure to trust the knowledge of the oppressed. As the convert tries to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, they refuse to let go of a world where they were the authority by default.

"I can abhor the violence that took your life, but I don't have to celebrate how you chose to live."

Pastor Howard-John Wesley

Weird how Robert Redford and Ozzy Ozborne had zero people calling them pieces of shit after they died, by the simple virtue of not being giant pieces of shit

I confess to being an Autumn lover, so I'm weirdly excited that I get to walk to work in the rain...we'll see how many steps I take before that wears off.

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

I allow the computer madness into me, but I am aware of its presence like inviting a demon to share my body

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

Feel like I’m going insane with the revisionist history that Charlie Kirk fostered open debate. He chilled speech and his targeting of professors for wrongthink led to threats, harassment, and being forced out of their jobs. His legacy is chilling speech right now, about him

This you? Just two hours later?

Deluze, in 1976: "All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle...every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighbourhoods, in our local theatres."

After Charlie Kirk's death, teachers and professors nationwide fired or disciplined over social media posts At least a dozen faculty and staff have faced fallout over insensitive comments online.

I am having a hard time reconciling "Charlie Kirk was a fierce advocate of open dialogue and free expression" with "we must identify and persecute everyone who is insufficiently mournful"

It is pretty amazing to see people go from “the left is the enemy of democracy and must be purged” to “who can really know why good kids do bad things?”

Too bad the GOP effectively criminalized studying how information moves online and news orgs laid off and demonized all the reporters who covered the burgeoning online accelerationist performative death cults. All of that work was somehow "censorship" that needed to be stopped. Now we're here.