jackie ess

Probably one of the crazier heterodox economic movements to actually govern a large territory for an extended period. Cranktopia

Out of curiosity I read a bit of Clifford Douglas in college. His big theory is essentially that by altering the fraction in reserve, banks can control the money supply, and […] cause all the wars in the world. To cover their tracks. And somehow it became antisemitic…

The poet Ezra Pound was a big social credit booster and this was probably part of his way into hardcore antisemitism and fascism.

Sharron Davies ranting against 15 minute cities, because of course she is.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph saying she wants to... kill all dogs??

Julie Burchill asking "does it matter if Grok undresses us all?" in The Spectator

Graham Linehan in the midst of his now four-day-long double down on Alex Pretti's murder being justified and fine.

Calling transphobia a 'gateway drug' to the far right undersells it. It's pure accelerant. Grimly fascinating to guess what crankery becomes any famous transphobe's secondary obsession, cos they all have one: 15 minute cities are fascism! Grok noncing is cool! ICE are good! We should kill all dogs!

kanye should also apologize for rapping.

Baby YouTube thumbnail depicting a vanishing mommy. Baby will explain how peekaboo works

The Surprising Physics behind Mommy

Good and not enough

we'll fight on until every last one of them leaves

Dark McDonalds Peace Theory

I find this helpful for understanding institutions like the NYT: they seem to have absolutely no resources to deal in the moment with "primary definers" who behave malevolently or in bad faith. So they end up either carrying water or muddy it, for example by treating an obvious lie as "controversy"

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DEFINERS In this section we want to begin to account for the ‘fit9between dominant ideas and professional media ideologies and practices. This cannot be simply at­ tributed —as it sometimes is in simple conspiracy theories - to the fact that the media are in large part capitalist-owned (though that structure of ownership is widespread), since this would be to ignore the day-to-day ‘relative autonomy9 of the journalist and news producers from direct economic control. Instead we want to draw attention to the more routine structures of news production to see how the media come in fact, in the ‘last instance9, to reproduce the definitions <fthe powerful,, without being, in a simple sense, in their pay. Here we must in­ sist on a crucial distinction between primary and secondary definers of social events. The media do not themselves autonomously create news items; rather they are ‘cued in9to specific new topics by regular and reliable institutional sources. As Paul Rock notes: In the main journalists position themselves so that they have access to in­ stitutions which generate a useful volume of reportable activity at regular in­ tervals. Some of these institutions do, of course, make themselves visible by means of dramatization, or through press releases and press agents. Others are known to regularly produce consequential events. The courts, sports grounds and parliament mechanically manufacture news which is . . . assimilated by the press.9 One reason for this has to do with the internal pressures of news production — as Murdock notes: The incessant pressures of time and the consequent problems of resource allocation and work scheduling in news organisations can be reduced or alleviated by covering ‘pre-scheduled events9; that is, events that have been announced in adva

journalism." One product of these rules is the carefully structured distinction between Tact’ and ‘opinion’, about which we have more to say in a later chap­ ter. For our present purposes, the important point is that these professional rules give rise to the practice of ensuring that media statements are, wherever possible, grounded in ‘objective’ and ‘authoritative’ statements from ‘ac­ credited’ sources. This means constantly turning to accredited representatives of major social institutions - M.P.s for political topics, employers and trade- union leaders for industrial matters, and so oa Such institutional represen­ tatives are ‘accredited’ because of their institutional power and position, but also because of their ‘representative’ status: either they represent ‘the people’ (M.P.s, Ministers, etc.) or organised interest groups (which is how the T.U.C. and the C.B.I. are now regarded). One final ‘accredited source’ is ‘the expert’: his calling - the ‘disinterested’ pursuit of knowledge - not his position or his representativeness, confers on his statements ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’. Ironically, the very rules which aim to preserve the impartiality of the media, and which grew out of desires for greater professional neutrality, also serve powerfully to orientate the media in the ‘definitions of social reality’ which their ‘accredited sources’ —the institutional spokesmen —provide. These two aspects of news production—the practical pressures of constantly working against the clock and the professional demands of impartiality and ob­ jectivity - combine to produce a systematically structured over-accessing to the media of those in powerful and privileged institutional positions. The media thus tend, faithfully and impartially, to reproduce symbolically the existing structure of power in society’s institutional order. This is what Becker has called the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ —the likelihood that th

tablished For example, once race relations in Britain have been defined as a ‘problem of numbers’ (i.e. how many blacks there are in the country), then even liberal spokesmen, in proving that the figures for black immigrants have been exaggerated, are nevertheless obliged to subscribe, implicitly, to the view that the debate is ‘essentially’ about numbers. Similarly, Halloran and his co- workers have clearly demonstrated how the ‘inferential structure’ of violence - once it became established in the lead-up period - dominated the coverage of the second Anti-Vietnam Rally and the events of Grosvenor Square, despite all the first-hand evidence directly contradicting this interpretation.14Effectively, then, the primary definition sets the limit for all subsequent discussion by framing what the problem is. This initial framework then provides the criteria by which all subsequent contributions are labelled as ‘relevant’ to the debate, or ‘irrelevant’ - beside the point Contributions which stray from this framework are exposed to the charge that they are ‘not addressing the problem’. 15 The media, then, do not simply ‘create’ the news; nor do they simply transmit the ideology of the ‘ruling class’ in a conspiratorial fashion. Indeed, we have suggested that, in a critical sense, the media are frequently not the ‘primary definers’ of news events at all; but their structured relationship to power has the effect of making them play a crucial but secondary role in reproducing the definitions of those who have privileged access, as of right, to the media as ‘accredited sources’. From this point of view, in the moment of news production, the media stand in a position of structured subordination to the primary definers.

Stuart Hall et al on primary and secondary definers, from Policing the Crisis, 1978.

"Arguments against a primary interpretation are forced to insert themselves into its definition of ‘what is at issue’ - they must begin from this framework of interpretation as their starting-point."

Transphobia really does seem to act like a mind virus in this way.

however you get there

I'm seeing a lot of calls to block/report any and all "Alt" accounts in the replies, but I think it's worth saying that AltNPS is BY FAR the worst, most harmful, and most dangerous "Alt" account.

The others are generally pretty harmless, and I don't want to unnecessarily lump them in with AltNPS.

You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.

yes and for what it's worth I really find refreshing and valuable that you don't tell a story which dwells obsessively on radical feminist politics, which was after all the self-narrative of one corner of the anti-gender movement for a long time

I don't think it's bad to trace these threads at all, and one of the really important things it can do is disprove the popular idea that all anti-trans politics is actually post-tipping point backlash, a response to some kind of liberal overreach in the 2010s etc. but wanted to counterbalance

I think we would agree that the catholic anti-gender tendency has proven to be one of the most powerful and important, and that this movement became relatively hegemonic within the catholic church in a short time. so the issue is: how was that possible? why did that happen?

there were dozens of kooky right wing books in the catholic sphere in the late nineties, and dozens of completely secular and rather hardcore attacks on judith butler from various intellectual and political camps.

here's an analogy bsky.app/profile/did:...

what I wrote was not meaning to dismiss the thread you've found, but I do genuinely disagree with your genealogical framing of "the back story" and tried to explain why. and by the way, I'm trans as well

hi mallory, sorry about the replies-off thing, it's just my default setting here. I followed you so that should be fixed. I agree that EPF fall a bit short in acknowledging the specificity and intensity of anti-trans attacks

imagine if someone were storing unsafe quantities of flammable chemicals in their house, which had also undergone a lot of incompetent electrical work over the years. one day it burns down. one question you could ask is: did the fire start in the bathroom or the kitchen? is that the right question?

the role of Butler and of opposition to Butler, which came from *many* quarters, seems to me overrated.

one thing I think is ambiguous here is whether a movement which borrows some of its language from a book is actually following on from that book or that moment. by analogy, I don't think that people who talk about "co-dependency" necessarily have anything to do with al-anon.

I think you can find a more satisfying account of these developments in three successive reports by Neil Datta for EPF: "Restoring the Natural Order," "The Tip of the Iceberg," and "The Next Wave." These do a lot of explicit mapping of power and funding networks in the anti-gender movement.

The “unmute” and “block” buttons on this site are too close together