The World Through Fiction Podcast

Raven. 20s. Any pronouns. Fandom nerd and political scientist talking about how the world we live in influences the fiction we love

[theworldthroughfiction]

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[creature-wizard]

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

They talk about a shadowy group of people supposedly manipulating everything behind the scenes. They might refer to them by terms such as globalists, bankers, international bankers, secret rulers of the world, the elite, the cabal, Kabbalists, Talmudists, satanists, satanic pedophiles, pedophiles, generational satanists, satanic bloodlines, the Illuminati, the Babylonian Brotherhood, lizard people, Reptilians, Orions, regressives, regressive entities, Khazarians, Marxists, cultural Marxists, or leftists. Sometimes, very rarely, they'll just come right out and say "Jews."

They claim that the conspiracy has been working to conceal historical and spiritual truths from humanity.

They claim that the conspiracy uses stuff like food, entertainment, and medicine to control the masses. For example, "additives in food suppress our psychic abilities" or "Hollywood films contain subliminal messages" or "COVID vaccines were actually created to alter your DNA to make you more docile."

Also, claims that the conspiracy controls people via spiritual or technological implants, 5G, or alter programming, with or without explicit mention of Project Monarch (a conspiracy theory promoted by far right cranks such as Mark Philips and Fritz Springmeier, who used hypnosis to respectively convince Cathy O'Brien and Cisco Wheeler that they'd been put under mind control by a global satanic conspiracy).

They claim that this conspiracy is controlling the media, has fingers in every institution they disagree with, and is generally behind everything they disagree with. (EG, the conspiracy created the Catholic Church; that other New Ager they disagree with is actually controlled opposition, etc.)

They claim that the conspiracy is trying to keep people in fear.

They claim that the conspiracy harvests something from people. Blood and adrenochrome are common ones. Loosh is somewhat less common. Expect to see something else pop up eventually.

They claim that the conspiracy practices genetic engineering; EG, creating animal/human hybrids, using vaccines to genetically sever people's connection to God, etc.

They claim that true spiritual wisdom can be traced back to places like Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu.

They claim that world governments have secretly been in contact with extraterrestrials for years.

They appeal to known frauds and cranks, including but not limited to Erich Von Daniken, Zechariah Sitchin, David Icke, David Wilcock, Graham Hancock, Jaime Maussan, Bob Lazar, Steven Greer, Richard C. Hoagland, Fritz Springmeier, and Drunvalo Melchizedek.

Appeals to forged documents, including but not limited to the alleged diary of Admiral Richard Byrd, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Urantia Book.

Appeals to channeled information, such as that provided by Edgar Cayce, Carla Rueckert, or George Van Tassel.

"But all of this has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?"

Oh, it all comes from somewhere, all right, but the where isn't what most people imagine.

A lot of the stuff above is just a modern spin on the content of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Russian Jews. The Protocols itself was plagiarized from a political satire and incorporated a lot of the post-French Revolution conspiracy theories about Freemasons and Jews being behind the French Revolution. I wrote a summary of the conspiracy tropes found in The Protocols over here.

The stuff about Satanic sacrifices and the consumption of blood, adrenochrome, loosh, or whatever are simply just variations on blood libel, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews practice ritual cannibalism. Blood libel can be traced back to ancient Greece. (With the Greek version, I really can't help but notice the similarity to modern urban legends of gangsters kidnapping random people for initiation rituals.)

Many of these tropes can also be linked back to the early modern witch hunts. It was believed that witches sacrificed babies to Satan, practiced cannibalism, and put people under mind control by way of diabolical magic. It was also believed that some witches didn't even know they were witches; they'd go off to attend the Devil's Sabbath at night and come back in the morning without remembering a thing. In the late 20th century, this witch hunter's canard would be reinvented as the alter programming conspiracy theory when media such as the 1973 book Sibyl and its 1976 television adaptation put DID (note: the woman who inspired Sibyl did not have DID) into the public consciousness. For a more complete list of witch panic and blood libel tropes, I wrote a list over here.

Lemuria was a hypothetical landmass proposed to explain the presence of lemur fossils in Madagascar and India while being absent in continental Africa and the rest of Asia, because if lemurs evolved naturally, they wouldn't be in two separate places with no connection to each other. The discovery that India and Madagascar were once connected not only made the hypothesis obsolete, it precludes the existence of Lemuria.

The whole notion of Mu began with a horrendous mistranslation of the Troano manuscript. A man named Augustus Le Plongeon would link the mistranslation with the story of Atlantis, and use it to claim that Atlantis actually existed in the Americas. (For Plongeon, Mu and Atlantis were one and the same.) And then other people (like James Churchward) got their hands on the whole Mu thing, and put their own spins on it, and the rest is history.

Le Plongeon's ideas influence modern Atlantis mythology today; EG, the idea that it was in the Americas. Another guy who helped shape the modern Atlantis myth was Ignatius L. Donnelly, an American politician. Dude claimed that Atlanteans spread their oh-so-superior culture far and wide. He also claimed that Atlantis was the home of the Aryan people, because of course he did.

The idea that all of the world's wisdom can be traced back to Thoth/Hermes goes back to Hermeticism, a product of Greco-Egyptian syncretism. Hermeticism produced a fascinating body of mythology and an interesting way to consider the divine and its role in shaping human history, but that doesn't mean it was right. And the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a modern text that has fuck-all to do with ancient Hermeticism and more to do with HP Lovecraft.

This idea that the conspiracy uses pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for evil also has roots in Nazi Germany. The Nazi government, wanting to reserve real medicine for their soldiers, told the general populace that said medicine was the product of evil Jewish science and prescribed alternative healing modalities instead. (Said alternative healing modalities did not particularly work.) It also echoes the old conspiracy theories about Jews spreading the Black Death by poisoning wells.

The idea that the conspiracy uses genetic manipulation to create subhuman beings or sever humanity from the divine is a permutation of the Nazi conspiracy theory that Jews are trying to destroy the white race through race mixing. The idea of evil reptilian DNA goes back to the ancient serpent seed doctrine, which is indeed old, but no less pure hateful nonsense for it.

"But there's got to be somebody up to something rotten out there!"

Oh sure. But these people aren't skulking around in the shadows. They're acting pretty openly.

The Heritage Foundation has been working to push this country into Christofascism since the early 1970's. They're the ones responsible for the rise of the Moral Majority and the election of Ronald Reagan. They're also the ones behind Project 2025, which intends to bring us deeper into Christofascism. (Among many other horrible things, they intend to outlaw trans people as "pornographic.")

The Seven Mountains Mandate is another movement pushing for Christofascism. They intend to seize the "seven spheres" of society, which include education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and media.

There's also the ghoulish American Evangelicals who support Israel because they think that current events are going to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus and cement the formation of a global Christofascist empire. Don't let their apparent support of Jews fool you - they believe that the good Jews will become Christians and the bad ones will go to hell.

All of these people are working toward monstrously horrific goals, but none of them are part of an ancient megaconspiracy. In fact, these are the kinds of people pushing the myth of the ancient megaconspiracy. From the witch hunts to Nazi Germany to the American Evangelical movement, if history has taught us anything, the people pushing the conspiracy theories are always the bad guys.

[creature-wizard]

Friendly reminder that:

The concept of starseeds promotes ableism by minimizing or denying ADHD and autism.

The ancient astronaut hypothesis promotes spiritual colonialism and destruction of other cultures by twisting other people's mythologies and sacred texts to fit their narratives.

The reptilian alien mythology is based on conspiracy theories historically used to justify oppressing and murdering real people. Loosh/blood/adrenochrome harvesting is just repackaged blood libel.

New Age mythology is chock full of repackaged right wing conspiracy theories, the same kind pushed by QAnon.

It's also full of repackaged racist pseudoscience about genetic superiority/inferiority and the function of evolution.

Ascension to 5D was supposed to have happened back in 2012, and the prediction failed.

New Agers are recycling their predictions over and over to catch new waves of people who don't know the movement's history.

Belief in Atlantis is strongly motivated by white supremacy.

For more info, see:

Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.

How the mythology of starseeds, indigo children, crystal children, rainbow children, etc. harms kids

New Age YouTube channel caught recycling claims of imminent "first contact" for three years

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

What is spiritual eugenics?

New Age beliefs that derive from racist pseudoscience

[theworldthroughfiction]

Friendly reminder also that the first point of Umberto Eco's 14 Points of Ur-Fascism is about this:

The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages — in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia. This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

[jodiefosterwallace]

salmon in the river

my favourite piece of "AI art" is something that was not intended to be AI art at all, and was made and posted online as a joke. which is "salmon in the river", from 2023.

this is how the AI apparently understood the above prompt. salmon filets jumping in water.

in this case, not only do i think this is interesting art, but i think it is interesting art only because it was not made by a human. like, this reads to me as art about alienation and commodification, right? obviously we all know that under capitalism products become separated from the labour and processes that created them. you buy a shirt and you don't think about the hands that sewed it, and so on. the commodity form hides its own origins. and food in particular hides not just labour, but life. the animal disappears. like, if you think about how meat reaches you at a western supermarket, typically it arrives on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, cut into shapes that don't resemble the body they came from. a chicken breast doesn't look like a chicken, and likewise a salmon filet does not look like a salmon. many times people actually find it gross or distasteful to see the animal! the filet is literally the shape that says don't think about it.

so the art, then. the filets are appearing in the river, which is where the living salmon would be. the commodity form is occupying the space of the creature. the erasure itself is swimming upstream. that's sick!!! and the wrongness of it, the visual absurdity, is exactly what reveals how much work the commodity form normally does. We're used to seeing filets in kitchens, on plates, in supermarkets. In those contexts, they look right. they look like what salmon IS! it's only when you put the filet in the context of a living animal that you suddenly see how strange it is and how much has been removed. it's good art!!!

AND YET if human artist had made this image, i don't think it would be very good art. filets swimming upstream as a commentary on commodity food culture is fine but it would feel very on the nose in a banksy, makes-u-think kind of way. this would be a human saying "here's what I think about how we relate to what we eat." like imagine this as a political cartoon, right? immediately the exact same image would make me want to fucking roll my eyes. it would be kind of insufferable!! and to me i think that's because it is making an argument. the artist has to be visibly making a point and the finger is always wagging. we live in a society, bottom text. UGH!

whereas, when an AI produces filets in the river, it's not making a claim. it doesn't think and it doesn't care. it is just outputting based on what it's been trained on and based on the prompt. it's saying "here's what salmon actually means in the aggregate of human visual culture." it says something in and of itself that an AI image generator was asked to create salmon swimming in a river, and it produced filets. boneless, skinless, ready-for-the-pan filets, floating serenely through the rapids. and that's because the AI was trained on us. it was clearly not primarily trained on, e.g Coast Salish art like on carved salmon with eyes and spirits or more generally on cultures that really focus on holding the sustenance and the creature together. instead it was trained on an aggregate blob of the internet, including the very massive and alienated western commercial relationship to food. our images, our photographs, our stock photos and food blogs and recipe sites. and in that corpus, salmon is overwhelmingly a filet. when you throw everything into the pile and ask "what is salmon," the commodity form rose to the top.

thus when the model produces filets in the river, it's not really making an error in the same way we would; it's just accurately reflecting what "salmon" means in the aggregate, and putting it in a context that makes it seem incredibly absurd. it literally works as art because it's not A Guy saying eyy, look what you've done, it's just showing what we've done, without commentary or judgment and without even knowing it's showing anything at all.

but then ALSO. was this really an "error" generated by an AI? or was this a human who prompted it to make a picture of salmon filets in a river and posted it as a glitch for internet points? i don't know!!!

and at first this bothered me, because I've been so hard on arguing that the image only works because it wasn't made intentionally. like, that the lack of human intent is what gives it evidentiary weight and what transforms it from trite political cartoon into Good Art.

but i literally think that's still true. if a human made this, if someone deliberately prompted an AI to produce filets in a river and then framed it as an accident for heckin reddit updoots or even legitimately to make a political point, then what they created is a piece of art about the difference between intentional and unintentional meaning. they used the AI as a medium, but more importantly, they used our expectation of AI failure as a medium. The art isn't just the image; it's the image plus the caption plus our willingness to believe it.

either way, the image only works as art if we believe an AI made it, because that belief is what transforms "salmon in the river" from a heavy-handed political cartoon into a piece of evidence about how we see. but only a human could post it and have it work, because the act of posting it as a mistake is also an artistic gesture, regardless of whether it actually was one. the AI can't do that part. it doesn't know what it made or why it's either profound or funny. but a human couldn't do it alone either, because a human making this image deliberately would just be making a statement, and statements are easy to dismiss. the art exists in the gap between the generation and the framing, and that gap is where the human goes.

[gael-garcia]

Foragers (2022, Jumana Manna 🇵🇸)

Za’atar and akkoub are popular herbs in Palestinian culture and cuisine. In 1977, however, Ariel Sharon declared za’atar a ‘protected plant’, rendering its foraging, possession or trade a criminal offense. Akkoub suffered a similar fate when it was labelled protected in 2005. Those who pick za’atar and akkoub subsequently became lawbreakers and in many cases were indicted and convicted. The picking of za’atar and akkoub, nonetheless, continues while many regard it as an act of resistance. (src)

[xbox-nun]

Me as an art critic: this piece really explores the… Misogyny of the artist 🤔

[counttwinkula]

hey did you know that uhh

i. the monster's body is a cultural body

ii. the monster always escapes

iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis

iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference

v. the monster polices the borders of the possible

vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire

vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming

[duckbunny]

media literacy includes understanding why a media product was made, to whom it's being sold, and the assumed preferences of its marketing demographic. narrative is not produced or sold in a vacuum.

[thefugitivesaint]

Charles Rafferty, 'The Problem with Early Warning', 2026

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

economists really took the divine right of kings and turned it into billionaire CEOs

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

“it’s kinda fucked up to reject the business practices of jeff bezos when he rightfully earned his position under capitalism”

[acti-veg]

“About twenty years ago, I attended a lecture by a Harvard professor who talked about how corporations operate like modern-day kingdoms. At one time, she said, people believed kings ruled by divine right, and today we seem to believe the same thing about corporations. Toward the end, she asked, “Do you know what it is that allowed people to let go of, overcome, and reject the notion of the divine right of kings?” I held my breath and got ready to take some notes. Her answer: “They just stopped believing in it.”

- Frances Moore Lappé

[mothdogs]

- Ursula K. Le Guin, speaking at the National Book Awards, 2014

[discodyke-dogthing]

When you start saying shit like “We need to put every pedophile in concentration camps” any person in power can convince you that any demographic they want you to hate is a pedophile. You need to kill that shit at the source and stop caring about other people’s thoughts.

[ofi-tvsembo]

start supporting & caring about victims of childhood sexual assualt/abuse more than you fantasize about torturing people who hypothetically harbor inappropriate attraction to children. yall have got to kill the cop in your head, grow past you're knee-jerk urge to punish.

[star-anise]

So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.

[georgeboleyn-againstovertime]

Did you just say emotional straight men are qu*er? Did you deadass just say that cishet men are part of the lgbt community? And y’all wonder why so many people hate it?

[star-anise]

(sigh) I’ll repeat myself:

For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:

Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”

It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.

(more discussion here)

[mathamaniac]

To reiterate: One way that toxic masculinity is kept as the default pattern of behavior for straight men is that they are punished, quickly and efficiently, for any show of vulnerability. Dismantling the structures that enforce traditional gender roles is one way to ensure that LGBT people are welcomed in society. 

The world would be much more accepting if Joe Cishet didn’t feel the need to correct every single deviation from the toxic behaviors he believes are required.

[fierceawakening]

The curb cut effect is good y’all. Not bad.

[ad-hominem-sappies-deactivated2]

I’m stuck on “the great queering project”

[star-anise]

Queer theory uses “to queer” to mean “to interpret in a way that causes something to depart from cisheteronormative societal standards” or “to interpret as queer”. It originated in literary and cultural criticism, but it can be used to describe the tangible social inroads LGBTQ+ people have made in dismantling cisheteronormativity itself.

[elfwreck]

Once again:

Queer is a coalition, not a demographic.

The purpose of the queer coalition is to end the practice of, “you must have [X list of traits] to participate in these parts of society.”

Can cishet men be queer?

Why does it matter?

Being queer isn’t about what specific identity or traits you have. It’s about saying, “HEY! Average isn’t the pinnacle of human existence! We didn’t build this world so everyone could strive to be just like their neighbors! People can be different and we can celebrate that difference, not shun it!”

Can a cishet man “be queer?” I dunno. I don’t think that’s important.

Can a cishet man “live a queer life?” Hell yes he can.

Can a cishet woman “be queer?” Wrong question.

Can a cishet woman “live a queer life?” Hell yes.

These aren’t “straight people appropriating queer culture.” They’re not taking it away from us, not picking and choosing bits of it to share with their cis het friends. These are people joining queer culture.

They’re not part of the LGBT community. They ARE part of the queer community.

[underestimated-heroine]

this is a long-ish, text-heavy post but please read it, especially the last addition ^

[quicksandblock]

Queer is a coalition, not a demographic.

^ This is why allies are part of the broader queer community while lesbian TERFs, exclusionists, etc. aren’t.

My mom’s friend who corrects anyone who gets my sibling’s pronouns wrong, who actively supports queer kids in her classroom, who welcomed her daughter’s trans girlfriend into her family? She is part of the queer community regardless of her sexuality, and anyone who says she can’t be needs to think about their definition of community. And by the same definition, TERFs aren’t part of the community because they choose not to be, because trying to control other people and justify their own bitterness and bigotry is more important to them.

[prismatic-bell]

“Can cishet people be queer?”

Listen. Listen. In 2007, I went to see a gay performance artist named Tim Miller. At that time he did pieces talking about the two major issues that had affected him as a queer man: surviving the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s as his friends dropped dead around him, and the fact that he wanted to marry his partner, who was Australian, and every time said partner came to the US there was a concern he’d be deported because his relationship made him “a risk for overstaying his visa.” Marriage would have given him a green card, but guess what you couldn’t do in 2007! Even if you got married in Maryland, it didn’t count for immigration purposes because it wasn’t federally recognized.

So one of the stories he told that night was about his high school German teacher, who was a butch lesbian. He ended the story with a line I have never forgotten:

“The queer kids, whether they’re gay or straight, have to stick together.”

This was a performance piece he’d first written IN 1994.

So: a man who survived a queer genocide says yes, you fucking well CAN be cishet and queer. I think he’d know.

(If you’re wondering: yes, he and the partner did finally get to get married. Assuming they’re both alive and well, they’ll celebrate 30 years in 2024.)

[aqueerkettleofish]

Ten years ago this October, I came out as Queer.

At the time, I identified as a cishet man, although I usually added some witty disclaimer like “but I’m not very good at it” or “but I don’t have a fucking complex about it” or something like that. Queer was my way of a) showing support to the community that had been there for me my entire life, and b) ditching the vague qualifiers.

It would be another eight months before the implications of this really kicked in. I had gone to see my mother on her deathbed, and taken all of the needful stuff out of my purse and put it into my pockets. When I got back to the car, I started putting everything back in my purse, and I was grouchy about it, because I hate having lots of stuff in my pockets. And I said to myself I should have said screw it and just taken the purse in with me, because the only surprise would have been that I had the audacity to bring it with me, not that I had one.

And that’s when it hit me that I was, in fact, Queer.

Since then it’s been… a journey. I now identify as trans/non-binary, and there are times I suspect I may just be a woman, but I have such a poor grasp on gender that I really don’t know. I’d never really thought about it before. I’ve come to realize that I’ve always had some level of body dysphoria, but I honestly don’t know if it’s connected to gender. (It… doesn’t feel like it, but again, still not clear on the concept.) I did one of those face-app gender swap things and there was a weird ache looking at it.

And I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I hadn’t started with Queer. I wouldn’t have gotten this far if the Queer community hadn’t bumped into the little sissy nerd and gone “Oh, hey, you can hang with us.” I wouldn’t have gotten this far if a huge chunk of the It Gets Better Project videos didn’t explicitly go out of their way to say “And all of this is for the nerds, too, and the weirdos, and the folks who are always told they don’t belong.”

You can have my Queer when you reincarnate as a quicker shot.

[naamahdarling]

Oh shit that last line.

Yeah, a lot to think about here.

[morphodyke-blog]

“If Latin America had not been pillaged by the U.S. capital since its independence, millions of desperate workers would not now be coming here in such numbers to reclaim a share of that wealth; and if the United States is today the world’s richest nation, it is in part because of the sweat and blood of the copper workers of Chile, the tin miners of Bolivia, the fruit pickers of Guatemala and Honduras, the cane cutters of Cuba, the oil workers of Venezuela and Mexico, the pharmaceutical workers of Puerto Rico, the ranch hands of Costa Rica and Argentina, the West Indians who died building the Panama Canal, and the Panamanians who maintained it.”

— Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (via katelouisepowell)

[politijohn]

Source

Source

Source

[theworldthroughfiction]

Now would be a great time to read White Skin, Black Fuel, which discusses the relationship between fascist regimes and fossil fuels. Unfortunately I don't have a link to read it for free, but Verso always has good sales.

[opencommunion]

"Colonialism in the United States was not an episode of history that ended hundreds of years ago. It is an ongoing process and set of institutions that continually infringe on the pre-existing sovereignty of Native people, sovereignty they never relinquished in the many treaties signed with the United States. A recent example is the debates over the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, which the Rosebud Sioux and the Standing Rock Sioux nations have vigorously opposed, the Rosebud Sioux declaring the routing of the pipeline through their territory as an 'act of war.' The structural nature of settler-colonialism means that any discussion of U.S. empire in the twentieth or twenty-first-century needs to acknowledge ongoing colonialism as the precondition for the existence of an expansive and powerful U.S. state. Historians have to avoid what Vine Deloria Jr. calls 'the cameo theory of history' wherein 'indigenous peoples make dramatic entrances, stay briefly on the stage, and then fade out.'"

Stefan Aune, "American Empire," in At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, 2018

[doe-eyed-disaster]

not many people know that sanity and insanity are legal , not psychological, constructs which are assessed in relative proximity to a consensus reality. and even fewer people truly understand the implications of this fact. sanity is, over everything else, the determination that you are entitled to a privileged legal status, one in which your agency is not compromised and in which your consent matters. the mad must be understood as a politically marginalized class because, among other more abstract reasons, our class is constructed explicitly as such by the letter of the law.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

it is no coincidence that the rise of Black radicalism in the US in the 1950s was closely followed by an abrupt demographic shift in schizophrenia diagnoses (typically treated with psychiatric incarceration, powerful sedatives, and a variety of experimental surgeries). which had once been a disciplinary label for inadequate white housewives was now assigned to black men whose politics often so happened to draw the wrong attention. but even now, the idea of a psychotic inmate whose conspiracies are proven true is a stock character - a twee bit of comic relief when aliens are afoot or a too-sincere premise of a syfy original - rather than a literal reality suffered by so many (typically multiply oppressed) mad people.

[theworldthroughfiction]

I really want to do a horror movie marathon with Dean Winchester and interview him after each one and then make a podcast episode analyzing everything he says. Dean canonically binges horror movies and said outright that it's because they comfort him and reinforce his worldview. Someone like Freddy Kruger being (sexually) dangerous to children would fit so neatly in Dean's worldview. Freddy is an Other, specifically a supernatural Other. He isn't even human; not-even-human Others are the danger to humans. The power structure of the patriarchal nuclear family remains an unquestioned good, and Dean's role as killer of enemy Others is validated. What does he make of the monster always escaping? How would he disagree with fear of the monster really being a kind of desire? I have so many questions!!!