A lot of people in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania thought they were firmly in the blue state camp until 2016.

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-23 06:28:00)
"There are asteroids floating around in space that can make the entire world wealthy."
that's supposed to be elon musk?uziq wrote:
lol, lmao even.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ … base-texas
more kitschy and grandiose than anything dreamt up in a stalinist fever dream. bioshock-ass aesthetic.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10 … is-fascismOn the face of it, the balm offered by far-right populism seems mild in comparison with interwar fascism, which promised to transcend class divisions and bring nation, state and leader together in a single body – the ‘corporate state’, as Mussolini called it. Far-right populism, by contrast, offers what Seymour calls ‘muscular national capitalism’. Although its tools are those of orthodox economic policy – privatisation and welfare cuts for Modi; protectionism via tariffs for Trump; increased state direction for Orbán – they are being put to a very different end. Muscular national capitalism treats the economy ‘as a moral space in which it is argued the wrong people have been losing’. (The problem with globalisation, J.D. Vance said recently, wasn’t that it was unfair, but that it was causing rich countries such as America to lose their place at the top of the international pecking order.) Yet, as it turns out, its real economic benefits can be relatively meagre (average incomes in Brazil fell under Bolsonaro), since the true payoff is psychological. What far-right populists really have to offer is revenge: India’s frustrated Hindu middle classes will reap the benefits of growth if life is made intolerable for their Muslim neighbours; men in the Americas will become winners again when traditional gender roles are restored; cities in the Philippines will be regenerated if a war is waged on drug addicts; economically depressed regions of Europe will be revived by the mass deportation of refugees. The rhetorical tactics of far-right populism – the denigration of critics as traitors and Lügenpresse; the lurid claims about immigrants eating dogs; the obsession with ‘woke’ forms of social etiquette – are all ‘programmatic’, as Seymour puts it. They aim to channel the multifarious resentments of a population into a ‘revolt against liberal civilisation’; in other words, into ‘barbarism’.
Last edited by uziq (2025-05-29 03:30:35)
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2025-05-29 04:01:35)