• 11 Posts
  • 1.29K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 26th, 2023

help-circle






  • There is no definition of fascism that is exclusively that. Let’s take a list of key features defined by Umberto Eco, who was the expert on fascism and you can decide for yourself if Harris fits that:

    • The cult of tradition
    • The rejection of modernism
    • The cult of action for action’s sake
    • Disagreement is treason
    • Fear of difference
    • Appeal to social frustration
    • The enemy is both strong and weak
    • Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
    • Contempt for the weak
    • Everybody is educated to become a hero
    • Machismo and weaponry
    • Selective populism
    • Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak





  • I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers! I knew it was 1216. One after Magna Carta. As if I could ever make such a mistake. Never. Never! I just - I just couldn’t prove it. He - he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him. You think this is something? You think this is bad? This? This chicanery? He’s done worse. That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No! He orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof! And I saved him! And I shouldn’t have. I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He’ll never change. He’ll never change! Ever since he was 9, always the same! Couldn’t keep his hands out of the cash drawer! But not our Jimmy! Couldn’t be precious Jimmy! Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer!? What a sick joke! I should’ve stopped him when I had the chance! And you - you have to stop him!


  • It’s gone a bit viral on Mastodon but if you plan to leave the US, which is entirely reasonable given the circumstances, do not bother trying to claim asylum. No other country that is safe for trans people or queer folks in general considers the US unsafe and your application will be automatically denied and given the international power the US holds, this probably won’t change even in the most dire circumstances.

    Instead go for a normal travel or work visa, prolong it as long as you can and try to find friends that will help and hide you in case it expires.



  • It depends on your toilet and philosophy.

    In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. […] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. […] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.