Marc Elias (elections lawyer): "The one that is the biggest puzzle to me is the dropboxes. Because honestly, I'm not aware of any partisan valence to the dropboxes. I don't know that it helps the Democrats or hurts the Democrats or helps the Republicans — "
Marc Elias: "It's a weird obsession, though, Chris. It's just weird that they keep trying to ban secure metal containers."
Chris Hayes: "Yes, right, as if, I want to be like — It can't hurt you. It's just a box. It's a box of metal, and people are going to put their votes in there. ...obviously, there's a long history in this country of voter suppression, right? Particularly along racial lines, right? There's that. But I also think it's [the attempt to ban dropboxes is] playing a weird kind of ideological role right now, which is a means of avoiding the hard truths about the more basic stuff that happens in elections — which is, like, did you run good candidates and did you have a good message? If it's the metal boxes' fault, then you don't have to talk about that."
Marc Elias: "That's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that has happened is that, rather than confront bad candidates, bad issue set, bad campaigns, they have demonized voting. Which is an odd thing to do, if you're trying to win elections. But they've demonized it and then they bring these ridiculous post-election challenges like we're seeing in Arizona, sort of as part of the further 'theater of losing,' so that they can further their grievance as to what happened."
GOOD NEWS! As a result of a court victory, Kansas will stop enforcement of a voter suppression law that undermined the work of civic engagement organizations to register voters.
Paige and I explain the case and what happens next.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM5t...
Just sneaking in to poke you about my book. It's queer. It's dark. It's paranormal fantasy. It's based on a true story of a trans trauma survivor. Demons are the good guys and angels are dicks. Sprinkle in a bit of horror. More here 👇 pic.twitter.com/w0VpPIO4Eu
Looking for beta readers! It's the sequel to my 1st book, but it's much darker & more mature in content. There should be enough information in the book to where if you'd like to beta this dramatic, at times philosophical, monsterfucker mess, you can w/o reading the 1st book. pic.twitter.com/TBHPJfG9n4
— Shane🖤Blackheart (they/them) (@ShaneBlkheart) December 7, 2022
*Slides in real quick*
Hey! Just a quick nudge. If you've read my book, it would mean a lot if you'd consider leaving a short and honest review 🖤 Amazon, Goodreads, your blog, whichever floats your boat. It would help to give my book a little boost!
— Shane🖤Blackheart (they/them) (@ShaneBlkheart) December 9, 2022
THE SURVIVING SKY is my Hindu philosophy inspired epic science fantasy with a 30s something husband -wife duo who are trying to save their floating plant city from crashing into jungle storms while they save their marriage https://t.co/M5MArmJC0Ypic.twitter.com/DiinPYYdzm
— Kritika H. Rao 🌿 preorder THE SURVIVING SKY (@KritikaHRao) November 26, 2022
I'm still talking about women writers here, and I hope those of you who stay will still read about them. I interviewed @Ursulaofthebook about her short story collection MATH FOR THE SELF-CRIPPLING, a generational storytelling of Chicano families in Texas.
— Maggie May-I-Get-Gun-Control-NOW (@fluxcapacitor74) November 7, 2022
i’m one of essayists in Latinx Poetics, edited by @RubenQuesadahttps://t.co/2OOMJpr0Qy if you are in Chicago in Feb 2 or anywhere in the world you can see some of us gathered to talk about poetics. my essay comes from a paper that incorporates scifi, fiends, & zombies.
Wow. I'm grateful and honored to share some major news. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind received the MLA PRIZE FOR A FIRST BOOK from the Modern Language Association. The MLA is the largest scholarly humanities association on earth. 1/ pic.twitter.com/TrgcYzDllP
Bleeding into New Worlds by me @3BPublishing Pre order available. Out Jan 4th 😊 A cult utilises astral projection to explore new and forbidden realms. Not all members return...https://t.co/ZIMt27MuMF
Holy hells... picked this up on a whim shoved in the back of a greeting card rack in a store here in Montreal. Half-way thru and it's such a forceful, surreal, and poetically muscular read about a resiliently catastrophic future. So so good. The Half-Drowned by Trynne Delaney. pic.twitter.com/uBYSHQfbqA
In the House of Transcendence is also nominated for Best SFF Novel, Best Title, and Best Protagonist! Here's where you can vote. https://t.co/aM5aiplNsf
In the House of Transcendence is also nominated for Best SFF Novel, Best Title, and Best Protagonist! Here's where you can vote. https://t.co/aM5aiplNsf
Recently had the privilege of reading an advance copy of Chain-Gang All-Stars by @NK_Adjei. The book is radical, intimate, wrenching. I hope it sets the world on fire when it releases next year. pic.twitter.com/C7ufKDzG1I
Happy publication day to Charles Holdefer's DON'T LOOK AT ME, in which basketball, Emily Dickinson, steamy historical love letters and academic intrigue collide in a perfectly balanced MidWest college bildungsroman. https://t.co/xIQnnncIy7
Time to leave Twitter. Cleaning out the Twitter bookmarks.
A wonderful interview/discussion about horror, history, mothers and daughters, and the Asian diaspora. These women have launched a discussion and movement with the books featured here, and I'm so proud to be a part of this Unquiet sisterhood.https://t.co/wKt6rVbweF
For your consideration this awards season, I have 2 short stories that I’m very proud of. “A Hole in the Light,” a tale of grief, science, and amoebas in the early universe, came out in The Sunday Morning Transport. https://t.co/rBDq1YBHNc
I've read today's Essay Daily by @c_biondolillo three times already today. Now I'm going to listen to it WHILE listening to Joni Mitchell while I read her essay again. https://t.co/euYqkHdXHf
In "Cause of Death," Beth Anne Macdonald examines the connections between evangelical Christianity, misogyny, and her mother's death in a moving and formally inventive essay.https://t.co/SQyhGY90jw
Funny how you go years and then a new poem takes over, becomes a pivot point for you. This is that kind of poem for me, by Jeffrey McDaniel. I can't tell you how many times I've read and reread this poem, studying the metaphorical moves it makes.https://t.co/aTuOtcT9RX
Thank you, James Diaz & everyone else who had a hand in this latest issue of @Heroin_Chic_Mag. So grateful to have two poems there in brilliant company. pic.twitter.com/oHwisKk3dF
This @jbouie column gets at a point that is perhaps the central thesis of my book-in-progress on backlash movements since Reconstruction. They are often treated "if [they] were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process."/1 https://t.co/4JEAl1TvwK
We sent @angermonsoon to one of the most unbelievable places in America. What he found there will surprise you, challenge you, and move you. https://t.co/nutZ8cyRSA
I'm about an hour behind the live-stream, but this is my live thread of the House Oversight Committee's hearing on "The Rise of Anti-LGBTQI+ Extremism and Violence in the United States."
Among topics I'll miss when Twitter finally goes lights-out (or I turn them out for my account) are these conversations about books and art.
I'm wondering if there would be a desire (on both creator and consumer side) for youtube videos that are just a good reading of an indie book's first chapter?
We talked about emoji in philosophy of language & two questions came up: why is emoji considered inappropriate for serious settings? And how can we characterize the generational divide in how emoji is used?
Really pleased to see this article about @SkeuomorphPress from the @UofIllinois News Bureau—"For me, the point of a printing press like we have at Skeuomorph is to help students understand where the design and assumptions of contemporary media come from" https://t.co/nkQyCClugR
— Ryan Cordell @ryancordell@hcommons.social (@ryancordell) December 8, 2022
I wrote this Solstice piece aimed at a new generation of creatives hungry for meaning. Thrilled by the collaboration. Fab Mpls musician/artists cello, violin, voice. Here's to the beauty of restorative darkness & emergent wonder.
One of my advance readers for The Communion of Shadows said he intended to read for an hour and stayed up till 4AM, and that it's one of the best books he's ever read. I started crying.
Oh my God. OH MY GOD. I have found The Book. You know, the one that you read when you were 13 and barely remember anything about but then spent, like, 20 years on a holy quest to find said Book, just to prove that it actually exists?
3 bills with major climate implications (IIJA, CHIPS, IRA) have passed the 117th congress. There are more opportunities for smart, effective climate philanthropy than ever. Here are 4 strategies we think have particular promise:
When Aníbal Quijano elaborated his critique of coloniality in collaboration with
Immanuel Wallerstein, the two argued that the continent's history of violence against and resistance by indigenous peoples made it possible to 'speak of Americanity as a concept' that structured global modernity. Here this study has been influenced by methods and insights of long-standing research in decolonial thought led by distinct groups of theorists in the Americas, including, but not limited to, Ramón Grosfoguel (Puerto Rico/continental United States), María Lugones (Argentina/United States), Walter Mignolo (Argentina/United States), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia), and Catherine Walsh (United States/Ecuador). All these thinkers recognize the influence of decolonization struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, Asia,Latin America, and the Caribbean on their current research that seeks to decolonize thought and life practices. Even so, they differentiate epistemological decolonization from that political process.
Research into Amerindian thought permeated theories of American negation in the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, in and beyond Acha's and Gullar's prefixes. The Argentine Rodolfo Kusch founded an interdiscipline he called
antropología filosófica americana (American philosophical anthropology) in his landmark book La negación en el pensamiento popular
(Negation in Popular Thought, 1975). Amerindian epistemological,
spiritual, and affective imaginaries helped Kusch to comprehend
the importance and shape of American negation and led him to break with
Claude Lévi-Strauss's influential structuralist anthropology for its failure to comprehend the universality of indigenous thought...
* * *
Kusch thus identifies the limits of the European tradition he calls conocimiento (knowledge), which myopically focuses on
objectivity and so produces knowledge that is ultimately univocal.
Instead, he embraces the popular thought that he terms
comprensión (comprehension), which values subjective emotions
and opinion, and so creates forms of understanding that provide
multiple answers to the same question.
My colleague Joey Miller (Mvskoke) & I are putting together a very cool Indigenous Philosoph(ies) event. If you are a Native scholar studying philosophy, a non-Native scholar studying Native philosophy, a Native scholar studying Native philosophy, please reach out! Please share!
Stop using the term “rewilding”. You are perpetuating the erasure of Indigenous peoples & our relationships to our lands since time immemorial. It’s a recipe for continued failure in ecological restoration. Land healing isn’t “reset it and forget it”. #nativesinstem#ecology
Hmmm being seeing tweets saying a lot of allies want to help #ProtectICWA but don't know how to start having the conversation because they lack historical and contemporary context, so let me help you. You don't HAVE to say anything other than #ProtectICWA.
— Johnnie Jae aka The Burnt Ball of Fury (@johnniejae) November 12, 2022
Non-Natives, please PLEASE pay attention to the ICWA case currently before the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court overturns ICWA, the result will be - and I cannot stress this enough - genocide. pic.twitter.com/7j0v755ONg
I am heavily RTing #ICWA-related info right now because I need all my non-Native followers to understand that the Supreme Court is considering whether to overturn what is literally a genocide-prevention law.
— Daniel Delgado's backup is @DDelgadoVive@zeroes.ca (@DDelgadoVive) November 9, 2022
Why ICWA is important to me:
I was a baby when a judge gave custody to my white dad. Despite it being a time when courts overwhelmingly favored mothers in custody battles, my Native mom didn't stand a chance in rural Alabama. The judge decided I needed a "Christian household."
"In the late 1880s, around the time when the Lake Mohonk gang was advocating for a dramatic expansion of the residential school system, a Paiute man named Wovoka had a vision. He said that the Creator had come to him with a new dance, one that would bring about a better world without white settlers and their endless expansionist wars. The dead would reunite with the living, and the buffalo killed by settlers would roam the plains again. It’s not difficult to understand why this message would be profoundly moving for people who had lost so much in the Indian Wars and whose children were being taken away for reeducation by the US government. It was a story about a hopeful future, where Indigenous culture flourished and the land came back to its original caretakers. Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) historian Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future, writes that the government had outlawed Indigenous dancing at that time, and therefore ‘the Ghost Dance was fundamentally oppositional in spirit.’”
Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 2: A Fake Frontier.
Great Inuit movie called Atanarjuat; not exactly the area you’re asking for but it’s really cool
Book description: The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a human life, each composed of four eras - or "turnings" - that last about twenty years and that always arrive in the same order. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order takes root after the old has been swept away. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion against the now-established order. Then comes an Unravelling, an increasingly troubled era in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis - the Fourth Turning - when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. Together, the four turnings comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. By applying the lessons of history, The Fourth Turning makes some bold and hopeful predictions about America's next rendezvous with destiny. It also shows us how we can prepare for what's ahead, both individually and as a nation.
Update: Please note harmful uses of the idea. For example, transphobes may identify a "fourth industrial revolution" as the ground for transgender self-determination; they believe transgender people are "new" and that such an era must be rejected because it contains or affirms trans people.
https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/noho-t%C5%ABturu-noho-tangata-stay-real-stay-human
Also
"[Steve] Bannon’s Manichaean worldview started young. At a Catholic military school in Richmond, Virginia, he learned about the 1492 reconquest of Spain as the turning point in an ongoing clash of civilizations between the Christian West and the Muslim world. As an adult, he devoured books on Attila the Hun and great military campaigns. He was obsessed with history, specifically the concept of historical cycles — the idea that time was not, as Americans usually learned, a linear march of progress, but rather, more like the view of ancient traditions, a recurring pattern of distinct phases. Bannon especially liked the version of this theory in “The Fourth Turning,” a 1997 book by historians Neil Howe and William Strauss, which ordered American history into generation‐long periods of highs, awakenings, unravelings and crises. The book predicted a coming rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, across the world and in America.
Bannon was not merely a student or passive observer of this prophecy; he wanted to be an agent of it, and an architect of the era that came next. So when he watched Trump glide down a golden escalator to announce his campaign for president, in 2015, his first thought was, “That’s Hitler!” By that he meant someone who intuitively understood the aesthetics of power, as in Nazi propaganda films. He saw in Trump someone who could viscerally connect with the general angst that Bannon was roiling and make himself a vessel for Americans’ grievances and desires."
— Isaac Arnsdorf, Finish What We Started, released April 9, 2024. Excerpt published in the Washington Post.
Here's another example from a June 2, 2023 blog post citing the idea:
[A video clip of Tim Pool and Joe Rogan talking about civil war is
"from four years ago, but I think we’ve escalated even more recently.
Just yesterday, Twitter blocked sharing and boosting a film titled “What is a Woman?” and the dispute was so serious that it caused their head of trust and safety to resign.
The film critiques gender ideology and the transgender activism movement. It was labeled as sensitive material and commenting and sharing were blocked.
I stumble upon pornographic content on Twitter all the time, and it’s never marked as sensitive. How is it controversial to have a discussion about what it means to be a woman?
It doesn’t make much sense, right? Well, unless you consider that we're in the fourth turning and in the middle of a full blown crisis that is about to blow like a volcano."
The author of this post tweeted "Don't call me cis" on June 20, when Elon Musk declared it was a slur.
Also pay attention to
"TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism." It was identified by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specialising in existential threats to humanity. These are separate but overlapping beliefs that are particularly common in the social and academic circles associated with big tech in California.
* * *
Longtermism is the belief that we should discount short-term harms to real existing human beings — such as human-induced climate change — if it brings us closer to the goal of colonizing the universe, because the needs of trillions of future people who don't actually exist yet obviously outweigh the needs of today's global poor."
— "We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus," November 10, 2023, Charlie Stross, antipope.org
Read: "Climate: Now a national security issue." By Russel Honoré. Salon.com. December 4, 2022. As a U.S. Army general, I prepared to do battle with enemies and face disaster. All of humanity must do that now
