Mastodawn

The Wanderer, James Gleeson

really like this, reminds me of something like the honor in stubborn willfulness or maybe hopeless struggle. Not especially hopeful resistance. The thing resisted is weird and the atmosphere is weird 😁

#art #weird #eerie #fish #push #pushback #stubborn #kicker #slime #mutation #human #love #self-improvement #empowered #antagonism

Mark Carrigan Oct 21

The late 2020s as the final act of modernity

In The Reflexive Imperative Margaret Archer tells an initially slightly counter-intuitive story about modernity in terms of an accumulating struggle from which ever fewer people are able to insulate themselves. Her arguments rests on an understanding of how social and cultural change was encountered and responded to by differently positioned groups. For some it cast them in a position of protecting what was slipping away. For others it created the challenge of creating something new after change was forced upon them. The different interests of groups, as well as the changing ways in which they interpret those interests, leads increasing numbers to act in pursuit of those (often mutually exclusive interests) with important conequences:

Firstly, that these initial manifestations of competitive contradictions spread to affect all social institutions – in state and civil society alike – where the actions of collective agents were a spur to acquire organisation and to articulate goals on the part of disgruntled primary agents, as I have analysed at length for education. Secondly, that this spelt increasing mobilisation of greater and greater sections of the population, though far from the majority.

Reflexive Imperative Pg 27

In other words the more groups organise themselves in pursuit of their interests, the more imperative it becomes for inactive groups to defend interests that might have until then only been latently recognised. There’s a spiral of mobilisation which happens patchily and unevenly but creates a long-term tendency to ever increasing collective activity. I think we can see the depoliticisation of late stage neoliberalism as a temporary interregnum in which countervailing forces engendered a new radicalisation but that, as Richard Hames puts it:

There was this period we talked about a lot of a very rapid atomisation from the late 60s through to the 90s and early 00s. My sense is that the internet has reversed some of that, people have stitched themselves back together in new kinds of ways. That has happened in a context where there hasn’t been much political organising on the ground, but there has been a lot of political ideas and people have attached themselves to them.

In essence social platforms offered a new infrastructure through which this tendency towards mobilisation could begin a spiral of acceleration. Archer wrote in 2012 that “Those who decline such personal involvement could remain temporarily untouched by these struggles and their associated situational logic of competition … for the time being” (pg 31). The psychic counterpart to this is what Zizek once described as the desire for “floating freely in my undisturbed balance”. It’s a fantasy of being insulated from struggle, being above the fray in an individually sovereign life which will remain undisturbed by social antagonism. That’s exactly what Covid briefly ruptured for everyone, to at least some degree.

It’s what now becomes decreasingly possible for anyone in late 2025 as the far-right rises globally. It makes me suddenly wonder if rather than seeing a social formation beyond modernity, we are instead seeing something more like the final act of the modern story. Which again brings me back to my morbid but necessary preoccupation with the explosion of antagonism which the coming crisis will inevitably bring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa0x3c42pXw

#antagonism #archer #capitalism #collectiveAgency #crisis #criticalRealism #economicCrash #modernity #reflexiveImperative

Atomised society has stitched itself back together and it’s pretty awful really

Mark Carrigan

Estelle Platini Aug 3, 2025

Heterosexuality is a regime of political oppression 🧶

"Just as racism produces race and not the other way round, sexism produces sex through the relationship of domination that reduces the dominated to things or natural objects."
… said Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz summarizing Monique Wittig

#materialism #beliefs #subjugation #radicality #EstelleSays #materialistFeminism #naturalism #appropriation #sexism #heteroSexuality #saphism #heteroNormativity #feminisms #history #MoniqueWittig #Wittig #literature #homosexuality #lesbianism #feminism #internationalism #patriarchy #linguistics #writing #minorityStudies #universalism #queer #constructivism #antagonism #culturalHistory #lesbians

Dr. Korinna Allhoff Jul 23, 2025

🚨 new paper online 🚨

From friend to foe and back: coevolutionary transitions in the mutualism–antagonism continuum

1st author Felix Jäger studied the dynamic nature of biotic interactions and identified an evolutionary #TippingPoint: a gradual change in environmental conditions may lead to an abrupt breakdown of #mutualism to #antagonism, which can‘t be reversed by restoring the initial conditions. 🤯

#TheoreticalEcology
#EcologicalModelling

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.2326

WIST Quotations Has Moved!Jul 8, 2025

A quotation from Bill Watterson

   CALVIN: I’m writing a fund-raising letter. The secret to getting donations is to depict everyone who disagrees with you as the enemy. Then you explain how they’re systematically working to destroy everything you hold dear. It’s a War of Values! Rational discussion is hopeless! Compromise is unthinkable! Our only hope is well-funded antagonism, so we need your money to keep up the fight!
   HOBBES: How cynically unconstructive.
   CALVIN: Enmity sells.

Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1995-07-07)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/watterson-bill/77538…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #billwatterson #calvinandhobbes #anger #antagonism #compromise #culturewar #demagoguery #demonization #donations #enmity #fundraising #hatred #politicalmovement #politicalpower #politicalpressure #politics #usvsthem #values

WIST Quotations Has Moved!Mar 17, 2025

A quotation from Addison

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, statesman
Essay (1711-12-08), The Spectator, No. 243

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/addison-joseph/1442/

#quote #quotes #quotation #antagonism #belief #binary #honesty #opinion #oversimplification #partisan #partypolitics #politics #principles #takesides #virtue

Dr. Korinna Allhoff Jan 13, 2025

Finally, Felix‘ #ecoevo paper is back from #PeerReview:

"…this manuscript is an important contribution that almost uniquely explores the evolutionary transitions between #mutualism through #commensalism and on to #antagonism, and vice versa. […] Not only are the results strong, but some of them are surprising, and in interesting ways that will be worth exploring in future years"

Thank you! 🤩
The #preprint is available here:

https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.27.615354

Dr. Korinna Allhoff Oct 23, 2024

More #TheoreticalEcology today @sfe2_2024 !

Felix Jaeger will talk about evolutionary transitions from #antagonism to #mutualism and back (11:15 in room Rhône 3B) and Franziska Koch will talk about the structure-stability relation of #competition #networks (15:15, also in room Rhône 3B).
Enjoy!

Show thread

Chuck Darwin Oct 7, 2024

The Republican turn against democracy begins with racism

Support for authoritarian ideas in America is closely tied to the country’s long-running racial conflicts.

A September 2020 paper by Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels, shows a statistical analysis of a survey of Republican voters -- analyzing the link between respondents’ score on a measure of “#ethnic #antagonism”
and their support for four anti-democratic statements
(e.g., “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”).

Their data show a clear finding:
💥The higher a voter scores on the ethnic antagonism scale,
the more likely they are to support anti-democratic ideas.

This held true even when Bartels used regression analyses to compare racial attitudes to other predictors, like support for Trump.

“The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism,” he writes.

For students of American history, this shouldn’t be a surprise.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act cemented Democrats as the party of racial equality,
causing racially resentful Democrats in the South and elsewhere to defect to the Republican Party.

⚠️This sorting process, which took place over the next few decades, is the key reason America is so polarized.

It also explains why Republicans are increasingly willing to endorse anti-democratic political tactics and ideas.

In the past, restrictions on the franchise served to protect white political power in a changing country

🔥Today, as demographic change threatens to further undermine the central place of white Americans, many are becoming comfortable with an updated version of the Jim Crow South’s #authoritarian #tradition.