relatedly, this "frisson of transgression" thing convinces me that if Trump had gone to prison MAGA would have abandoned him wholesale

This, to me, is the root of it: the left is always going to be more stuffy, constrained and dogmatic because *the left believes that oppression exists and matters.* This is a turnoff to a certain sort of person who does not wish to believe this. But reality wins eventually.

Young women drawn to the cause in recent years for more traditional reasons — religious convictions, pro-life politics, a preference for conventional gender roles — are having a rude awakening of their own, finding that MAGA sexism is not the same as the old patriarchy. On the New Right, male licentiousness, violence, and domination are not only acceptable but valorized. “When Andrea Dworkin wrote about the draw of conservatism for women in the 1970s and ’80s,” says Katya Ungerman, who writes about online culture under the pseudonym Katherine Dee, “there was a certain plausibility to the pitch.” Ungerman has never been a conservative, but many of her friends are young MAGA and she has observed the milieu closely. Dworkin wrote that right-wing women were not deluded: “They see the world they live in, and they are not wrong.” In exchange for female submission, the conservative men of Dworkin’s era offered a refuge from the physical danger and chaos of modern life — or so they said. The right, she wrote, “tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend” and “promises that despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified rules.” “That part is gone,” says Ungerman, at least in the segments of the movement with real momentum. The men of the New Right not only fail to be protectors, she says, “they’re not even symbolically protective. They’re very hostile.”

The other side of this is, in some ways, actually the more interesting one: that conservative men have increasingly completely given up on even paying *lip service* to the idea being constrained by defined social roles, even when there are women who are amenable to that

If some Verso intellectual wants to write A History of Dubai: The Dystopian Global City as Late Capital Hyperobject (1966-2026) I promise to buy it and read the heck out of it

Pie chart showing that nearly 2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S.

🚨NEW: Last year, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. increased again. The driving factor? President Trump’s deportation agenda.

Our annual report, The Whole Pie, gives the big picture of mass incarceration. Here are some key takeaways 🧵

Manipulation of prediction and stock markets is a hallmark of the Content Ward

The obvious example here is Elon Musk. Musk is an explicitly white nationalist political force now, aligned with Republicans, but implementing his politics by supporting the far right in at least 18 countries around the world. Within the US, he was Trump’s largest donor during the 2024 campaign, and used his position in government to dismantle parts of government that progressives have championed, often in legally questionable ways. The U.S. government has developed a multi-layered dependence on Musk’s companies, particularly in aerospace, national security, and digital infrastructure. If it wants to send astronauts to space, or bring them home, it increasingly must turn to Musk. The DOD depends upon Musk for both Starlink for internet service, and for military-use satellites. Grok has been embedded into government, including the Pentagon. Most recently, HHS is sending users to Grok as part of its Make America Healthy Again campaign.

A third sovereignty concern: your contractor is your ideological enemy, deeply embedded in government, with more resources than many nation states, and willing to use his power to undermine your policy goals. I don't think Dems have thought through if and how they would dislodge such contractors.

I find it bizarre that it's essentially impossible to find out what is actually happening in the ME right now, all we get are second-order effects like oil price spikes or media perceptions of perceptions like "image of US tomahawk missile massacring children might spell trouble for GOP in midterms"

Whatever happens, even miraculous Venezuela-like stability in Iran and/or Cuba, the end of US diplomacy as we knew it weakens the US. Diplomacy is a tool of power, we had the best, and we blew it up deliberately. These waters are plenty charted, and they are full of icebergs. 15/15

Americans have slowly forgotten that they owe their hegemonic status to a post-WWII military order that was restructured into a financial order in the 1990s, a hybrid of the two in the 2000s, and finally, totally wrecked by Trump in the 2020s

y'all ever wonder what itd be like if adam curtis were a 27 year old bronze age pervert fan

I read this in a Warren Zevon voice

Clearly a forgery. Jesus dots his i with a heart.

*on antiques roadshow* I’m sorry…what?

We haven't "been at war with Iran for 47 years," we've been undermining their struggle for sovereignty and democracy for much longer than that, with terrible consequences 7/7

The coup created a loose coalition of communists, socialists, nationalists, and Islamists, all devoted to opposing the Shah and his Western backers 6/

(Truman had been against the coup plot as he thought it would set a terrible precedent for the then-new CIA to overthrow governments, but Eisenhower decided it was worth it) 5/

In 1951 the democratically elected PM decided to nationalize the oil industry and reclaim its wealth; in response the CIA and MI6 collaborated to overthrow that PM and set up the Shah as a puppet monarch 4/

The USSR armed and funded two short-lived separatist states (which briefly overran Tehran); the Brits set up the largest oil company in the world to drain resources from southern Iran 3/

The Brits/Soviets both promised to leave once Germany was defeated and help the Iranians financially etc. The latter didn't happen; the Brits nominally left but kept control of the vast oil fields and the Soviets just decided they didn't really have to leave after all 2/

It's forgotten history but in 1941 neutral Iran was invaded from the North by the USSR and from the south by Britain and the Shah was forced to abdicate, in order to create a secure supply line to support the Soviets against Nazi Germany /1

Screenshot of text: First, it’s a mistake to say that Trump got America into war on Saturday. What he did was respond to a war that Iran has been waging against the United States since 1979.

Cool hey did anything happen *before* 1979 between the United States and Iran

This is what intrusive thoughts sound like

An interesting counterfactual is "what if the Shah's White Revolution reforms succeed instead of blowing up in his face" but I think the answer is Iran either becomes a giant version of the other Gulf states (fuel concessions/parking lots for global capital) or is first carved up by Iraq & the USSR

I get the feeling Trump (if still alive) will be the lamest of lame ducks by the end of this year

Veterans of the Content Wars

The deep irony of course is that the US just moved the early warning radar from Asia to the Gulf, so if China wanted to, they could utterly crush the legacy of "Chiang/Chang" right now forever

I wish people would come to understand transphobia as systemic, structural, and pervasive so we could stop treating transphobia as explicitly limited to people saying "I hate trans people" and accept the way our society conditions us all to dismiss, diminish, and dehumanize trans people.

SpecOps Cmdnr Breighlynn-Kace lumbers ashore at Bandar Abbas, his Helmet Cam streaming the invasion for his billion followers; as he kneels in the footprints of Zoroaster and Umar to ask the blessing of Christ the Sicario for allowing this Blessed Apocalypse he's vaporized by a HESA Shahed 136

The approximate cause of death for Anne Frank was the Nazis. The specific cause of death was the outbreak of Typhus at Bergen-Belsen camp, which overtook her (and others) from chronic malnutrition and medical abuse. These conditions are not, in character, unlike our system of immigration camps today

This might seem like a relatively obscure ruling but believe me when I say this has ramifications for all the AI co's, who each had "scrap/reform outdated 'copyright' laws" as a slide in their investor pitch decks