ben chambers 🏴

The current paradigm of "AI" encodes & recapitulates eugenicist, fascist, and generally bigoted tendencies— but previous paradigms did, too, & if these facts had been addressed, then, in the culture of technology specifically and our sociotechnical culture writ large, it might not still be like that

Thread, which illustrates nicely why I'm having that "hey uhhhh did the dissolution of the Union just kind of happen just now" feeling the last few days

Type of guy who refers to himself as “high-agency” but every decision, information interaction, and creative act he engages in was statistically determined by a billionaire’s computer program

Something bleakly funny that the tyranny that infects America is not some kind of nouveau 20th century authoritarianism, but truly 17th century monarchic "rule without parliament"

(it is perhaps not actually surprising that a far-right movement that took Moldbug seriously ended up half-wittedly aping the Anglosphere's last gasp of absolute monarchy)

Look, as long as we get to see his head cut off in the end I'm happy

It's one thing to be politically divided into red states and blue states. We are now being militarily divided into red states and blue states. It's crossing the Rubicon, a bright-red flashing warning that the constitutional order is coming unglued, in a way that will have monumental consequences. /x

Even if they had some legitimate need and legal basis for deploying the Guard in Chicago, the only reason to not use Illinois NG for it is to cast doubt on their place in the chain of command, treating them as though they are already in mutiny or rebellion, no longer normally functioning.

Aside from shattering core state sovereignty, it's saying one state's Guard (TX) is somehow more loyal to the national authority than another's (IL). It's treating the latter as something bordering on hostile, or at least alien. One part of the country and its soldiers are more America than another.

Presidents have federalized a state's own Guard to use over its objection, most famously desegregation. And sometimes regular military has been used. But taking one state's soldiers and putting them in another state? This is a completely unprecedented breakdown of what the Union fundamentally is.

Never before in American history has one state's military force been deployed in another state over its objection.

I say never because the Civil War involved states whose governments legally ceased to exist, their offices vacated by constructive resignation, with no legitimate governors to object.

"most of us never thought to counter that argument because it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense"

is basically the entirety of the present situation on every front

feel like we can do better than “man these guys are real fatsos” when talking about agents of state violence idk

The cities are exclusively for weak effeminate homosexuals but also too dangerous for strong manly heterosexuals.

I think something we have to do more of is talk about how kickass a lot of American cities are because right now some people think they’re run by Sharia Law nudists and most of us never thought to counter that argument because it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense

It doesn't make any sense to conceive of due process as a right that individual people can have or not have at all tbh. Bad framing from the start. Due process is a restriction on the government's actions, and by definition it applies to either everyone or no one.

This is true of basically the whole constitution. When conservatives say the bill of rights doesn’t apply to immigrants or non-citizens they’re saying the constitution isn’t a restraining document but an empowering one.

roughly as many Palestinians have been killed by Israelis between the Nakba and 10/7 and between 10/7 and today.

of course this has no real basis in modern history, which has demonstrated over and over again that bigotry is a luxury. bigotry is a waste of human potential that you can only get away with when you're *not* in a life or death struggle with an enemy "hellbent" on destroying you

The worrying possibility (as Bill Kristol of all people has mused about) is that the ascendent period of the center-right was a lengthy postwar aberration, and what we're seeing now is right-wing politics simply returning to its natural state

They don't do this because they're religious. Who knows if she is, probably not, but in any event there's no way everyone around that table is. They do this as a political statement and in-group loyalty ritual. To her it's no different from making everyone wear a MAGA hat.

It tends to get underplayed in American historical imagination, but our Revolution was in a direct, conscious lineage from the Glorious Revolution and before that the English Civil Wars. The road to 1776 began outside the Banqueting House in 1649. We are, in that real sense, still Anglo-Americans.

Early life and education Brunkow was born in 1961 in Portland, Oregon.[2][3] She graduated at St. Mary's Academy in Portland in 1979.[3] Brunkow received a BS in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Washington in 1983.[4] She received a PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University in 1991, where her advisor was Shirley M. Tilghman.[5] Her doctoral dissertation was titled Expression and function of the H19 gene in transgenic mice (1991).[1]

Remember how the Trump administration raged about "transgender mice" because of studies involving transgenic mice?

Well, the woman who just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine wrote her thesis using transgenic mice.

i’ll never get over how some people pointed out trump was going to do project 2025 and then eventually the media asked trump if he was going to do project 2025 and he said “never heard of it” and the media decided he surely couldn’t be lying about that one

After Reconstruction, the media refused to believe that white supremacists were massacring entire towns of Black people attempting to claim local sovereignty over their own lives. It is not true that violence, even when it's "plain as day," necessarily moves public opinion.

The entire political spectrum is patriarchally coded:

"the left" is a whiny nag that tries to leverage conscience an empathy by sucking up to "the right," which is a big strong alcoholic brute who can't be expected to think and always has the available trump card of just beating/killing his wife.

weimar civil society: "Well, I'd like to see ole adolf wriggle his way out of THIS jam!"
*hitler wriggles way out of jam easily*
"Ah! Well. Nevertheless,"

The nazis themselves were not some clever masterminds where everything they did went perfect. They were also comical idiots who did ridiculous things, like invading Russia in the winter.

They gained power because the opposition couldn’t understand that the fascists were not rational agents.

more and more I am convinced a good share of why Trump 2 is so much worse than before is because of what Elon did to Twitter. it's like those group chats where people gassed themselves up to join ISIS, scaled up a millionfold

research question: whats been written* on the parallels between troubled, impressionable young men radicalized into islamism and those radicalized into white nationalism?

*other than gambetta and hertog's engineers of jihad, which goes into their common stem background