Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
There are two things here in my opinion:
* I don't want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami's recent words: "For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty". HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn't actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don't need to hide it, they don't need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I'm sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it's proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.
i'm a bit conflicted here: on the one hand it's true that the american fascists are now escalating, buyoed by the feeling of being virtually untouchable, but on the other hand, this is not a distinct change of behaviour, it's that they basically widened their target group to include white people too.
the blm protests were fueled not by new knowledge or radically changed police behaviour after all, but by the wider availability of documentation (mainly phone videos).
(and on the gripping hand, extending brutal repressions to a majority group is a sign of escalation. but that only means that a large population of u.s. residents, i.e. the non-white ones, live and have always lived in a totalitarian state; the totalitarianism just wasn't evenly distributed until trump.)
This is what I disagree with. The theatrics of justifying police brutality don't change the outcomes of police brutality -- people still die -- but the fact that the theatrics can now be dispensed of in favour of paramilitaries directly using violence to terrorise the people is a distinct change of behaviour towards fascism.
And I think it's important to recognise that because, as many scholars of fascism have warned time and time again, this is not a binary where a switch get flipped and haha, since today you're in a fascist state. It's a progressive erosion of the social contract. ICE as deployed by the Trump regime right now is a basically textbook run: create a paramilitary force, recruit from existing criminal militias to select for loyalists and violent personalities, normalise them as keepers of order, push out or integrate any other enforcement structures so that the paramilitary becomes dominant. Basically the only difference is that Trump didn't have to create ICE, it was already there just waiting to be pushed through the pipeline.
Does this event fundamentally change how you and I perceive America? No, if you were paying attention you knew the rot inside, and you've been shouting that Trump is a fascist since the very beginning. It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes "shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare" then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.
oh, i'm not a pitchfork purist. anyone is welcome to grab one at any time.