"Once upon a time, state bodies did not issue rambling statements radiating J Jonah Jameson-shout-dictating-while-pacing energy, describing their own plans as a 'porn user register'.
That time was before last Friday"
This is the Gist.
https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-coimisiun-na-mean-is-big-mad/
A groundbreaker, a force of nature, a pioneer, a friend. We could make each other laugh and cry and laugh until we cried. Once we randomly met Little Richard in a hotel lobby. She shaped more of today’s web than you can imagine, unless you were there. There were none like her, and never will be again. Godspeed, Mols.
https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/090523_molly_holzschlag/
If this thread has a thesis statement, it goes something like this:
In the early 70s, the capital class stages a revolt of the rich against the poor. The post-World War II consensus had transferred too much wealth and too much power to the working class, so the rich made it their mission to dismantle that consensus and make sure it could never re-emerge. First Nixon and then Reagan built and institutionalized debt traps, slashed social spending, annihilated labor unions, and poisoned the very idea that there was any such thing as “society” or that we could work together to solve our shared problems.
They took Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, that there is no such thing as society, and made it the guiding ethos of American society, to ensure we would remain atomized and unable to organize. And then they and their successors have milked us for everything they could, driving us as beasts of burden to the point of exhaustion. Or rather, of collapse.
11/
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. I soaked up the vibes of a high-tech, utopian future. I internalized the trajectory we were on was good, that we had reached the End of History. There might be a few bumps on the road, but the direction was inevitable and the destination was inexorable. It turns out that the fastest a human being has ever traveled was 39,897 kilometers per hour. That was the crew of the Apollo 10 mission returning to earth. That happened on 26 May, 1969. Fifty-four years ago. We peaked more than half a century ago. 1/of several
"No artist would be so crude as to simply show the police force of the state standing guard at Bank Machines, protecting money against the people who own it.
And now, no one needs to."
@Tupp_ed is on fire today!
Important reporting by Christopher Mathias. Same shit, different day. "Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name...to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black."