throbbing light machine

Women’s Sports Happened By Accident, And Could Be Taken Apart On Purposeby Diana Moskovitz: "I think one of the best characterizations I’ve heard about Title IX is that it’s sort of like the guillotine out in the courtyard," Susan Ware, author of the book Title IX: A Brief History with Documents, told the Harvard Gazette in 2022. "It has an impact just because of its existence that is different from having complaints filed against the school and threatening to withdraw funds."

From "Mar-a-Lago face" to uncanny AI art: MAGA loves ugly in submission to Trump by Amanda Marcotte: Fascism, especially the 21st-century version practiced by the MAGA movement, is at war with reality. The hyperreality of the MAGA aesthetic is about power. Unable to create good or beautiful things, they express dominance by turning everything ugly. Journalist Kat Tenbarge argued Sunday on Bluesky that "looking 'better' is often not the point" of extreme plastic surgery. Instead, "It’s about looking different, looking strange, because it causes people to pay more attention."

Why Movements Fail: Horizontalism and its discontents by Samantha Hancox-Li:"The idea was simply that [protest] tactics will create disruption and more importantly create spectacle, the spectacle would create more protest and more disruption, and then the implacable structural forces of history would take over — no need for any Leninist vanguard party—and move society forward."


MEASURE ONCE, CUT TWICE: IN DEFENSE OF SELF-HARM - full body autonomy and full communism now; cutters, unionize; for a wholesale rejection of psychiatry, addiction models, the DSM, and all systems of oppression by Adam D.H.: "Using the rhetoric of “mutilation” often proves itself very useful as a justification for social control, especially against populations that are already disenfranchised or judged unable to make their own decisions: children, women, trans people, disabled people. So many discussions about body autonomy revolve around defining what is and isn’t self-harm; which self-harming behaviors are allowed, if any; and if they aren’t allowed, what methods can be employed to prevent them. We must reject wholesale this distinction, this rhetorical dead-end; the parsing of any act committed by one person on their own body as inherently harmful, regardless of context, is a violation against body autonomy everywhere."

-I've been using the Finch self-care pet app for about a month. Your little virtual bird pet gains energy when you accomplish self-care tasks. The app has a decent first-aid kit contained within: breathing exercises, stretches, soundscapes, reflections. And you get to put little outfits on your bird, and build it fancy houses.

-I'm going to stop keeping up with the news. We all tacked in to "staying informed" last time the Orange Menace was in power, and, if anything, it just convinced the media that he's good for business. The media space seems to me very full of gossip, fearmongering, and propaganda, and very devoid of seriousness or expertise. So, I'm not going to follow along with every twist and turn of what's to come at the federal level. I'll stay in touch with my local polity, and the greater city-state we're a part of.

-I've been following the news avidly most of my adult life. In order to fill that space in my brain, I'm going back to some old literature. I mean to work through the last Shakespeare plays I don't know well, and I think I'll read the Aeneid, which I've never done. Ancient literature is still with us because centuries' worth of humans passed it along. There's the merit of the work, and then the meaning created by that chain of transmission. If I want to study mankind, I'm going to turn in that direction for a time, instead of to the news.

-I'm putting more of my juice behind writing regularly. Maybe a poem a day? I know that when I write more, what I write gets better.

Black Alabama Man Thought He Was Mayor. White Folks Said 'Naaah.' He tried that in a small town. By Stephen Robinson. Eye-opening account of very small-town rural political structural dysfunction, racism in the Old South edition

via highlyeccentric, some interesting links on the term "heteropessimism":

On Heteropessimism, by Asa Seresin

from Heteropessism, by Ellie Anderson