signifiant other (new to bsky)

yeah, it's slippery. saw some people on here with a reasonable enough interpretation of "rigged election" as disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and dark money PACs, but then others jumping in with straight-up Q-style "machines were hacked" stuff

if that sounds contradictory, my point is that this particular episode is missing the real enemy (neo-Nazis) but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also call out eugenicist dog whistles, many of which are embedded in our biological essentialist vernacular. thanks for the article, will check out!

agreed, I wouldn't describe Sweeney as complicit, and I see the dog whistle as inadvertent, but I also think that it's not bad to be critical of eugenicist tropes in popular culture. still, I largely think much discourse amounts to a bad "everything must have a hidden meaning" conspiracy thinking

sorry last thing: it's this common sense eugenics that neo-Nazis seek to exploit for political projects, and they enlist/exploit content (and people!) like AE and Sweeney in this project. hence a natural aversion to these dog whistles, even if they were not intentional (which I do think is the case)

when I say that eugenics is deeply culturally ingrained, I'm referring to the commonsense, crude Darwinian interpretation of human success/goodness. genes belong in discussion of inheritable diseases, not in evaluations of the worth of individuals, but culturally they are invoked frequently to do so

yes, but: when tracking childhood development, IQ is not eugenicist. When describing women/POC reporters, it is a dog whistle for racial differences in intelligence. Ditto for genes: when parroted by models, it reinforces essentialist, eugenicist logic. neo-Nazis have interpreted it as such

Maybe I wrongly assume that marketing professionals can be pretty obtuse or not trained in internet discourse, but the whitewashing Ancestry ad was a thing, and the new Dunkin genetics ad suggests that either the companies are doing eugenics for clicks or that eugenics is just culturally embedded 🤷‍♂️

I don't deny that AE could have been aiming for political controversy, but sans evidence, I would imagine the norms of marketing professionals still prioritize sex, celebrity, white beauty standards, and humor over internet outrage. I am wary to lens everything through online affective polarization.

Still not convinced by this. I think the Dunkin and AE ads demonstrate how deeply ingrained eugenicist thinking is in our culture (due to white supremacists) but I think most marketers are thinking genes/jeans is a playful motif for a "sex sells" ad, not "how do I stir up political controversy?"

in either case, the problem is the woman who has been corrupted by a bad society. sometimes men are told that if they can just get the woman, then they can deprogram her! but for a macro solution, you need to destroy the cultural institutions that have made women turn against men

i think this analysis holds for both trad manosphere ("women have become impure, you must only have sex with a 'good' woman") and pick-up culture manosphere ("women are being brainwashed, you must navigate the new realities of womanhood to trick them into having sex with you")

this helped me articulate my previous thoughts on the manosphere: because men are socialized to feel entitled to sex, an inability to have sex at their discretion is evidence that something is wrong with the world, not them. the manosphere identifies those problems and builds coalitions around them

Are Young People Having Enough Sex? Confronted with a Vegas buffet of carnality, Generation Z appears to be losing its appetite.

there's a nice piece from Jia Tolentino that challenges some of Sherman's diagnosis (the guest on NPR), particularly by shifting it from being a "sex crisis" to being a symptom of the broader loneliness crisis:

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

hence so much misogyny about "roasties" and "blue hairs" who represent the decay of the patriarchal/masculine culture. essentially, "why would you want to get laid when these are the women who would have sex with you?" but ig that's trad/r9k manosphere vs pick-up culture, get-sex-quick manosphere

i agree bc some "reject modern women" communities shame men who get laid BUT i think most manosphere content tries to convince young men that they can't get laid in *this world* because the world is bad, therefore they must recreate the traditional, patriarchal world where they should get laid

NYTimes headline reading "NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say"

Onion headline: 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens'

THEY LITERALLY DID THE ONION HEADLINE

now, the fact that neo-Nazis online have used the ad to promote white supremacy is important, and that should be the leverage used against AE and the right: "look! no matter your intentions, Nazis love it!" AE wants to sell jeans, as far as I know they're not into subliminal GRT messaging

such as everything re: the Boers. I think it's what happens in an entertainment/celebrity-driven culture where image politics feel accessible to the online masses while actually accountability for neo-Nazis feels futile, but also a widespread attachment to faux-critical analysis (the Real Meaning™️)

I think the essential background on this is that Republican Sweeney has become a fantasy object of the right while her recent bathwater soap stunt made her a pariah to some on the left. So centering criticism on her is missing the forest for the trees (the boobs for the actual white supremacy rn)...

starting a greenwashing natural health influencer account where i belittle people for panicking about microplastics because "they're actually like micrometals such as zinc and iron, which are essential for your skin"

omg all the heinous "maralago face" stuff was like: you can hate an aesthetic, analyze the patriarchal/political dynamics of that aesthetic, and not be a misogynist! in fact, you can do it in a way informed by feminism that doesn't reward a bunch of men who want to call a woman ugly

it's like all the homophobic jokes about Trump and Musk: giving people a pass for their homophobia because they're tacitly addressing a real problem with masculinity is still just signaling "homophobia is OK"

yeah, for the people saying "but he is pointing out something important about femininity and fascist aesthetics":

misogyny is not a shorthand for a deeper critique/analysis, and suggesting that the two could be compatible is a big problem on this app (same for trans/homophobia, racism)

That also means you can request money from them.

The surveillance is the point. The data collection is the point. And there are but so many customers for everyone’s data. With this subscription and data collection model, Big Tech is inevitably going to be an arm of police surveillance.

"This whole thing is just such bulls**t": Not every Democrat wants to talk about Epstein "I don't think this issue is big outside the Beltway," one prominent centrist House Democrat told Axios.

my beef with so many centrist democrats is honestly less their ideology than their total lack of political instincts. the actual public is going wild with epstein speculation and this anonymous idiot is skeptical that it is playing outside of washington www.axios.com/2025/07/24/j...

like who are these people, why are they joking about destroying the Fed, why can't they stop smiling, who watches this

being forced to watch live CNN coverage of Hulk Hogan's death, and I forgot just how bad broadcast news is

"he was a key supporter of Donald Trump 🤨 and a great entertainer who loved America 🙂 and also a Thiel-funded pawn in a legal battle that used his racist sex tape to take down Gawker 😁"

The level of ignorance among liberal pundits about surveillance technology, police violence, and authoritarianism is astonishing. Just no effort to understand important issues before commenting on them.

this may be a rare case where Trump's "reality" still aligns with popular consensus, and that there are thus a sufficient number of people in his circle saying "pls god do not do this"

the economic-accelerationist, anti-statist crowd does not *yet* seem to have the power to puncture that reality