Sam Menefee-Libey

Two omissions particularly stuck out for me for The Horror Studies Reader: Julia Kristeva and Carol Clover. Kristeva does appear in The Monster Studies Reader, so it’s clear Weinstock knows the importance of her concept of the abject, and I’m sure he did not want to repeat more than one essay between the two books. However, it’s telling that Kristeva’s name never appears anywhere in The Horror Studies Reader. The author of Powers of Horror and Black Sun, the person who gave us one of the most powerful ideas for any sort of horror theory of the last 50+ years (the abject) … has no entry in the index. Imagine if Weinstock had included an essay building from Kristeva’s ideas — something like, to choose one almost at random, “Horror in Kristeva and Bataille: Sex and Violence” by Judith Still from 1997. (Something by Bataille would also be useful. He wrote a whole book called Literature and Evil, after all!)

💯

They revel in death. It is beyond grotesque. And we must stop them.

“In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West” by Wendy Brown (Columbia University Press, 2019)

There’s a book about why the current crop of fascists are different and why we should still blame neoliberalism and neocons for their rise. I highly recommend checking it out, even just to skim it. cup.columbia.edu/book/in-the-...

The US and Israel are bombing schools, hospitals (nine hospitals) and other civilian facilities in Iran. They have massacred over 700 civilians, including nearly 200 children. Absolute genocidal monsters.

Yikes.

One of the ironies anti-capitalism is that big flashing signs of dysfunction in the financial system cause much more alarm and strategic reassessment for critical than they do for people who take economic systems for granted.

Re-upping this thread from last year…

Thanks!

Proton mail is primarily used by those interested in digital security for personal computing. This story makes it seem like we need other options. Do you have any email servers you recommend?

ICE arrested Nashville journalist without warrant, attorneys say The journalist, Estefany Rodriguez, was taken to a detention center and remains there as of 3 p.m. March 5.

"She frequently reported on stories critical of ICE for Nashville Noticias, the Spanish-language outlet."

www.tennessean.com/story/news/l...

Pretty wild that this happened yesterday during a Senate hearing and has just gotten washed away amidst all the other horrible news…

Here’s what GWOT vets said about the restrictive, woke rules of engagement they dealt with in Iraq

www.scribd.com/document/506...

I’ve never even considered it seriously as it’s based in Germany, whose state apparatus doesn’t seem like a preferential alternative to Switzerland…

Just immediately losing its strongest market niche… I miss the days when riseup was secure…

Well, fuck.

They are torturing and killing people in our concentration camps, and I wish more people were actively bothered by that

The collapse of the tragedy/farce dialectic - everything is now already both

Kansas and the History of State Identification as Administrative Violence w/ Cassius Adair (03/03/26) | The Death Panel Get more from The Death Panel on Patreon

In our latest, we speak with Cassius Adair @cassiusa.bsky.social about Kansas’s new law stripping trans people of their driver’s licenses overnight, and the long history of state identification documents being used as tools of administrative violence

www.patreon.com/posts/152164...

Who speaks for Iran?—and from where? – Spectre Journal Nazanin Shahrokni rethinks the meaning of transnational solidarity, understood as a political intervention stretched across an uneven geopolitical landscape.

The brilliant Nazanin Shahrokni on who speaks for Iran:

spectrejournal.com/who-speaks-f...

History of Science - YouTube In 46 episodes, Hank Green teaches you the history of science! This course is based on the 2nd and 3rd edition of Science & Technology in World History by Mc...

I recommend this to undergrads frequently, advising them that the style sucks but the content is solid and will help them read things like Marx and Foucault more effectively youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I thought this was good when I encountered it last year

Read Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions since World War II(William Blum, 1995) on ProleWiki .

“As matters turned out, the overthrow of [Iranian Prime Minister] Mossadegh in August 1953 was much more an American operation than a British one.”

meanwhile, war rages on at home.

Now I want a “Fuck ICE” season of Fargo

As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Leave in Droves for ICE Many of the problems the agency is facing now are not new, but staff and prisoners fear an exodus of officers could make life behind bars even worse.

Citing my reporting for @propublica.org, 4 House Dems have formally asked the head of the federal prison system to explain how the agency will fix severe staffing shortages affecting safety and operations.

My latest:

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

I’m not sure we can donate to small independent media our way out of the reality that the media and arts landscapes are controlled by an authoritarian and his friends. I’m as supportive as anyone else but this seems like a critical problem that goes beyond that.

I can't even speak about Nurul Amin Shah Alam. All I have to say is that the people constantly distinguishing between ICE, CBP and the REGULAR COPS are fools. That's it.

One month.

"In 1979, welfare benefits reached eighty-two out of every one hundred families with children in poverty. When TANF was first introduced, that number dropped to sixty-eight. By 2020, a mere twenty-one out of every hundred impoverished families managed to access this resource...That was on a national level. In Georgia, only five out of every one hundred families living below the poverty line received support through TANF in 2020, even though they were eligible for the assistance" (p. 137).

A striking stat from Brian Goldstone’s “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America”

Just a reminder that every high-profile shooting by an ICE/CBP agent this past year was done by a long-time veteran who went through more extensive training, with many refresher courses over the years, and at least a couple were instructors themselves.