ben chambers 🏴

remember, fascists are small men who want to feel big, dorks who want to look cool, simpletons who cant handle complexity theyre losers who embrace a low effort ideology that lets them win, playing on easy mode to feel like theyve conquered something

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 Even aside from the gross dismissal of contemporary Arab achievements, it could hardly explain the decline of MENA wealth and science relative to the West -- which began like 400+ years earlier?

Ppl should not analogize Brazil's PT to the US Democrats or worse, Lula to Biden The Workers Party has won every presidential election this century "Other than 2018, the Workers’ Party is 6/6. You start to understand why the Brazilian right longs for a return to authoritarianism. They can’t win."

Not telling anyone what to do, but I really don't think people posting the hideously racist RFK stuff onto everyone's timeline to dunk on it are doing what they think they're doing

I fervently hope the American people take a stand against these bigots, charlatans, and grifters.

The bigotry coming from Trump and his minions makes me really angry.

it's really, really fucking infuriating to be ruled by public officials so unbelievably, unfathomably, stupidly fucking racist such that you can't really finish your thoughts on the matter out loud because they are in fact public officials

It’s just so appalling and enraging how casual and commonplace this has become. I’m out of words.

Much like a world with fake-ass corporate Pride merch, I would much rather live in a country where both sides at least pay lip service to everyone being an American over a mask off one like this because taking the mask off is a sign something has gone wrong.

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

This is most of the Republican Party today in a nutshell

I see no real difference between this and the segregationist argument that advocating for racial equality was equivalent to "black domination." Their entire view is, someone must dominate, and someone must be dominated. They can't see others as their equals, so they assume no one can.

The American rise of HOAs also mirrors this. People didn't want to pay taxes towards efficient civic services and amenities if it meant black people could enjoy them too. They rather pay more for a shitty residents only pool in their own mismanaged little fiefdoms.

Now their descendants refuse to believe their beloved family members could really be racist enough to immiserate the country, the entire planet, just to hurt black people worse. No, it's just rich people brainwashing, no way gutter bigotry is grandma's bedrock politics bsky.app/profile/mc-h...

A load bearing mythos of pop leftism is that the Dems used to be good and for the working man and then embraced neoliberalism so the working man got sold out, instead of "white America as a whole turned on the Dems after the Civil Rights Act and began tearing down their own commons and prosperity"

Wallahi I will make this fukken website know what happened in this country between 1966 and 1972, I have tolerated “the Dems just sold out for no reason one day and all became Big Money Uniparty Reaganites because they hate the pure and noble workers” for too long

The story of 1964 to 1984 was blue-collar whites (especially in the former Confederate states) deciding they didn't want the New Deal anymore, if it meant sharing it with women and non-whites

Color revolution theory is great because it isn’t actually meant to give you a strategy as much as an alibi for why you got your ass kicked These guys destroyed the NED/USAID/CIA deep state they feared and are still getting their asses beat, so dammit do they need to rationalize and shift blame

I get they're inextricably intertwined but I kind of feel like leaning so much into how he was the longtime best buddy of the world's most notorious sex criminal has given it something of the feel of a political gotcha rather than the important part, which is that the president raped people.

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

I know it’s really distasteful and dispiriting and gross to think about, but you won’t understand Trumpist politics or the status of women if you don’t understand that a lot of people aren’t just in denial about the prevalence of rape; they are affirmatively pro-rape.

That’s also why Vivek isn’t exactly lying when he says he didn’t mean to say Acton lied about being raped as a child. He doesn’t think she lied; he thinks that being raped disqualifies her from office, because she belongs to the class of people power is wielded against, not the class that wields it.

I don’t think this is exactly what’s going on, or all that’s going on. It’s not that Republicans are constructing an elaborate psychological defense against evidence that Trump is a rapist. It’s that they like that he’s a rapist, and they like rape: it enacts the power of the strong over the weak.

But culturally, they need a world in which sexual assault claims are presumptively false. Because if you acknowledge that the great majority are true, it becomes pretty much impossible to maintain that the dozens of accusations against Trump are all fabrications.

The vile attacks on Amy Acton need to be seen in the context of a party that *needs* people to believe women fabricating sexual assaults is common as rainwater. Because it’s pretty much the only way to evade the conclusion that the president is a rapist.

When fighting fascism, debate is not an anchor for discourse and inquiry, but a cement block, drowning reality. People of bad faith do not deserve debate; their messages must be drowned out.

bluntly this is also what destroyed LBJ and led to the nixon landslide, yes vietnam also mattered and was probably #1, but the white working class was infuriated that black folks would also benefit from the great society programs

"something" being the white working class deciding they'd burn the country down before letting the n*****s get equality with them

"other people should not be allowed to judge me by the content of my character"

the fact that trump is an ultra rapist and apex sex predator should always be juxtaposed with the fact that he launched his campaign slandering immigrants as rapists and a staple of his filthy rhetoric is raising the specter of the beastial man of color menacing white women

when those like orwell, arendt, klemperer, ionesco, etc talk about how the intelligentsia enabled the rise of fascism theyre talking about these guys--left-bashing, high-society-groomed pseudo-liberals whose fluency in academese and debate club mindset glamorizes or rationalizes fascist ideology

It's really damning. The accusations are numerous and well-supported. But I was really struck by the descriptions of Trump's behavior -- the name dropping, strong-arming, and attempts to buy off silence. His gross rivalry with Epstein. It's all so familiar. It's shit he's been doing his entire life.

A serial rapist was elected twice as President, a fact we don't reckon with nearly enough. Now one of two major political parties has been molded in his image, run for and by violent sexual abusers who hate women.

Beyond disgusted by even more rape allegations against the President of the United States. "In total, more than 25 different women...have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Report w/ new details: democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

its insane how not many people are talking about how republicans with the help of several moderate democrats are building out the largest abusive medical conversion therapy operation in modern american history

This also explains why it is that the people you keep seeing shoved in your face as "liberal thought leaders" are always pushing moderate conservatism and placating reactionaries: -Steven Pinker -Matt Yglesias -Noah Smith -Malcolm Gladwell -Jonathan Haidt -Ezra Klein ...

odysseus is literally this meme. hes shifty and irreverent. the reason his voyage home becomes a ten year slog that costs him his crew is that he just cant help himself and keeps trying to get one over on the gods

It's funny how the Defenders of Western Civilization really want Odysseus to be this heroic patriarchal figure when he is canonically kind of a dirtbag.

I'm not sure I'll ever forgive the AI-LLM boom for forcing me to gain expertise about it.