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updating my priors
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Today, it comprises 69% of my total URLs served. (Nice.)
Normally it feeds junk after a few seconds delay, but in "high-load mode" it bans IPs for 30 days instead. High-load mode is entered when the free-worker count is low, and ends when it has been calm for 15 minutes.
This month it has been in high-load mode 50% of the time: 15 out of 30 days of traffic.
"The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman."
"Sex is gay”
"Sex? It was rape.”
"Epic”
This text exchange is part of the cache of messages sent in a Telegram group chat by Young Republicans. In these messages, exposed by Politico reporters Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo, hundreds of racial and homophobic slurs are used by leading Young Republicans, including a Kansas state senator, along with joking references to Hitler and the Holocaust.
A lot has already been said and written about the deeply racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+ exchanges from this group chat. But I wanted to focus on this exchange because I think it helps highlight some crucial aspects of the sexual politics of the new young right.
I’ve argued in the past that the new right has endorsed a politics of rape, one that is in keeping with a longer tradition of rape and domination as keys themes in right-wing, authoritarian politics. Here, I want to elaborate on this argument by stressing how a fixation on the male form, homoerotic ideas about strength and beauty, and a contempt for women’s bodies plays into this right-wing politics of rape.
It’s important to note that “sex is gay” is an idea found among the incel—or, involuntary celibate—community, most notably from neo-Nazi and self-styled incel Nick Fuentes. In 2022, Fuentes went on a rant on his show, in which he argued that his lack of sexual experience with women “actually makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.” As Fuentes explained:
If we're really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay, having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay. Really it's all gay. And if you want to know the truth, the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel. That's it. That's all there is…Having sex in itself is gay, I think. I think that it's really a gay act to begin with. Think about it this way: What's gayer than being like 'I need cuddles. I need kisses…I need to spend time with a woman.’
This is classic incel thinking: self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, and revulsion at the very thing they also claim to have been denied—sex itself. As Laura Bates puts it in her 2020 book The Men Who Hate Women, “Incel logic seems to reveal a hopeless contradiction: women are simultaneously reviled for sleeping with men and for refusing to do so.”
Incel thinking is fundamentally misogynistic, but that doesn’t quite capture the intensity of hatred and disregard for women among many. To turn to Bates again:
The incel community is the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere. It is a community devoted to violent hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities, and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes. A community in whose name over 100 people, mostly women, have been murdered or injured in the past ten years.
It’s tempting to shrug off the language in the Young Republicans’ group chat as the pathetic humor of pasty losers. But the danger is real. As Bates stresses, we have seen incel ideology drive heinous acts of public violence, most notably in the cases of Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista and the Toronto van attack committed by Alek Minassian. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an expert on right-wing extremism and terroristic violence, argues in her new book Man Up: The New Misogyny & The Rise of Violent Extremism:
Such violence is also fueled by the constant dehumanization of women online, along with the casual celebration of violence and harassment directed toward them. One of the neo-Nazi men arrested for plotting an antisemitic attack in New York City in 2022 had previously shared online that he had violently attacked a transgender person and described himself as "most proud of being 'good at raping women,' " according to an assistant district attorney on the case.
In other cases, women are not just targeted with rage as a means of punishment; they are attacked violently as a strategy of elimination. The six Asian women and two others gunned down in a rampage at three Atlanta massage parlors in the spring of 2021 were killed because the 21-year-old gunman believed he deserved to live in a world without the sexual temptation he believed they created for him. It's hard to think of a clearer example of how mass violence can be generated from a sense of entitlement and male supremacist reasoning. Violent attacks against women in cases like these—as well as in domestic and intimate partner violence and misogynist incel attacks—are not only or even primarily about sex. Rather, they are rooted in what Kate Manne describes as "some men's toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly-and to target and even destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so."
Supremacy is an all-consuming logic on the MAGA right today. Christian supremacy, white supremacy, male supremacy, almost every corner of MAGA is marked by one or some combination of supremacist logic and a desire to subjugate some other group. This fixation on domination is precisely why I argued back in March that Andrew Tate has natural appeal to many younger Republicans and that rape as an ordering principle defines MAGA politics.
In the context of sex, this comes down to a wholesale rejection of sex as a consensual act for the enjoyment of both parties. This is something that Gillian Branstetter articulates in a piercing 2023 essay titled “The Rape is the Point.” A man’s sexual prowess isn’t so much about pleasing or wooing women. Instead it’s one more act of domination and will, an expression of masculine self-assertion. But that isn’t sex. That isn’t intercourse or love or passion. It’s rape. Branstetter puts it this way:
To [Trump’s followers], Trump’s sexual violence represents the very patriarchal power they seek to enforce. His appeals to a history that never existed are both amoral justifications for his own actions and nostalgic yearnings for a time when consent, of the governed or the raped, was irrelevant. His inability to feel shame is a promise they, too, can be freed of psychic guilt or societal consequence for grabbing what they feel entitled to by birth or accumulated power. What Trump is selling is an absence of virtues or protections—a life where every man is a king free to reign among the stars.
I think it’s noteworthy here to observe that the original exchange in the Young Republicans’ group chat was about Spanish colonists and soldiers coming to the Americas and raping native women. It’s a misogynistic joke layered within a racist view of the description and, yes, rampant rape of the colonial period as a good thing. Western men came and took what they wanted. And, in the MAGA view, it helped give us a Western, European America.
Rape is a tool for conquest and cleansing, just as sexual connection is for liberal lushes. As far-right commentator Jack Murphy, on whose podcast JD Vance was a guest in 2022, once wrote, “Feminists need rape… It is our duty as men to save feminists from themselves. Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.”
I don’t think we can discuss contemporary right-wing misogyny without spending some time on the musing of Costin Alamariu, better known as Bronze Age Pervert (or BAP), as well as the policies of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
BAP began as Alamriu’s username on forums like Salo and then became a trolling, vulgar X account, all the while sending missives about masturbation and dispensing lots of opinions about beauty and masculinity. In 2018, Alamariu parlayed the growing success of his online persona into a book. In Bronze Age Mindset , he spends considerable time praising the lost masculinity of the ancient past while relentlessly denigrating women. He fixates on the body, especially the male body, and presents physical appearance as essential to a thriving society, arguing “Only physical beauty is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit as well.”
In another passage, he compares them to dogs, writing:
We love dogs because they express so honestly and without dissimulation what we also are and want. They and other pets calm us because promote a kind of carelessness normal to animal life, unencumbered by thoughts of the past or worries about the future, none of which actually exist. Women are, in their natural state, close to this condition as well, or closer on the whole, which is where they get much of their charm and power from (the modern education, that teaches women to be hyper-aware, anxious for the future, abstract neurotics, etc…
As Rosie Gray observed for POLITICO, BAP is obsessed with male relationships—asserting his own heterosexuality while also insisting that most men are actually gay, which he sees as natural and conducive to a world in which a small group of alpha males are responsible for sexual reproduction. Women, as Gray summarizes, are reproductive machines, lower beings, whose liberation has been a disaster for society. They cannot match the perfection of either the male physique or provide the cultural value that male-only friendships afford.
BAP is eccentric, but he is not obscure. Vice President JD Vance followed him on X, and he’s proven popular among young MAGA politicos.
Pete Hegseth has not, to my knowledge, expressed any direct connection to or inspiration by BAP. But it’s easy to hear echoes of BAP’s thinking in Hegseth’s constant discussion of war fighters and their need to be trim, beardless, exceptionally muscular killing machines. Hegseth made clear that he doesn’t want to see overweight soldiers or generals in his new, MAGA military. As I noted at the time, Hegseth’s vision conjures to mind the rippling, hairless pectorals of the Spartan soldiers in 300, an image that radiates raw sexual masculinity and a facile understanding of history and war. As for women, Hegseth seems determined to make them unwelcome in the United States military. He recently ended a longstanding office dedicated to providing support for women in the armed forces, a program that Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson (a woman) described as “advancing a divisive feminist agenda.”
Hegseth himself has a troubled record with women. He has been married three times and has been the subject of multiple complaints by women, including a 2017 rape allegation. I’ve already compared Hegseth’s ideal of frenetic, hyper-physical and hyper-masculine politics to Mussolini. It is perhaps worth adding here that Mussolini committed his first rape at age 17 and led a life of reckless violence well before becoming the father of fascism.
The throughline here is a regard only for men, to the point of fetishization. It’s one that leaves women to the side to be coddled at best and demeaned and abused at worst. The men themselves are supposed to be ideals of beauty and violence, lustful war fighters and brotherly philosophers who make society worth preserving.
What’s doubly concerning in the Young Republican messages is just how pervasive this thinking seems to have become on the right. After all, these are not sun-starved, basement-dwellers chasing a fantasy of power on the corners of the web. These are ambitious Republicans in their 20s and 30s. As Jonathan V. Last put it at The Bulwark,
These Young Republicans have never known any other type of Republicanism. I assume Trumpism will persist as the dominant feature of Republican politics at least to 2028 and almost certainly to 2032. By that point we're talking about a full generation of Republicans who only understand politics in the context of an authoritarian project.
I made a similar point about the wider electorate back in January for MSNBC. One of the most challenging aspects of turning this ship around is the fact that we have been heading in one direction for so long it is all many younger people know.
I don’t have a clear answer here. But I do think that, on the issues of sex and gender, we have to get young people off the internet and into the world. Many great and edifying relationships are built online, but the internet is also where misogynistic rhetoric and violence subcultures are doing the most damage to the next generation.
Objectification is simply harder to do when one is out in the world. And the effects of loneliness, dislocation, and anomie can only be detoxed from our minds with real, human love and connection.
These might sound like soapy platitudes, but they are also true. And it’s up to men, including men like me, to meet these boys and manchildren out in the wild and show them a better way.
Featured image is Peter Giunta and Andrew Giuliani
This article is about 34 tons of plutonium that the US government doesn’t know what to do with. The current suggestion is to use it to power nuclear reactors to run all that AI nobody wants. The article lacks historical grounding and thus gets a lot wrong.
There’s a story about that plutonium, but it’s not the one that the reporter, Zack Coleman, tells. And others have forgotten, or never learned, large chunks of the story.
When the Soviet Union was coming apart, President George H. W. Bush moved to convince embattled President Mikhail Gorbachev that the US wouldn’t take advantage of his country’s weakened position. Bush took out of service all of the US’s “tactical” nuclear weapons. Later in the decade, Russia also took a large number of weapons out of service. Each country had about 34 tons of plutonium they didn’t need any more.
They agreed to dispose of the plutonium in some way that would not allow it to be recycled back into weapons. That was the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement.
I have a personal stake in this – I worked in a program to convert the nuclear weapons parts to a storable form of plutonium. My team designed the storage cans – three levels , the outer two welded shut. As far as I can tell, that design is still in use.
The Russians intended to use their plutonium in reactors. That was a possibility for the US, but we had a very vocal faction that wanted deep geological disposal of the plutonium. Deep disposal was far too expensive, and the insistence on it stalled the program.
The Russians moved ahead and produced fuel for reactors. The US was stuck. In 2016, partly because he was generally pissed off at the US, Vladimir Putin suspended the agreement. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable on his part. This week, the Russian Duma formally withdrew from the agreement.
But the 34 tons of US plutonium didn’t go away. A committee formed by NNSA recommended that the plutonium be diluted with a magic powder that would make it unusable and stored in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The composition of the magic powder is classified. I have my doubts, although I have been assured by someone in the know that it will work. Whatever. If we put it in WIPP, it’s pretty much gone forever, swallowed by the salt.
BUT
The processing of the plutonium would have to be done by Los Alamos and Savannah River, which are supposed to be ramping up to make more plutonium parts for nuclear weapons. WIPP’s license with the State of New Mexico would have to be modified. All that takes time. So we’ve still got the plutonium. Enter the Trump administration.
Colman’s article is confused, because he doesn’t understand that history. There’s more history, too. There have been many attempts to use plutonium in the fuel for nuclear reactors, and none has been successful. They’ve worked, more or less. Russia has the most experience, and they use plutonium regularly.
The problem is that manufacturing and handling nuclear fuel containing plutonium is more difficult than for uranium alone. That makes costs higher. The plutonium doesn’t add anything to energy generation to offset those costs. That’s been true in the US and other countries.
A gaggle of new nuclear reactor companies have new ideas on how to design nuclear reactors. One of them, Oklo, is interested in the plutonium. Chris Wright, Trump’s Secretary of Energy, was on the Oklo board. Oklo wants to provide power for AI. Sam Altman was also on its board, so we are at the intersection of new reactor design, AI, and conflict of interest.
AI looks like the next big economic bust, exacerbated by the nuclear reactors that will not be built.
Oklo’s design is a metal-fueled, liquid-metal-cooled, fast reactor. Plutonium is better adapted to a fast reactor than to today’s commercial designs. But the history of such designs is not as sunny as Oklo makes it sound. Oklo probably doesn’t have the facilities to manufacture plutonium fuel. They would take years to build and install.
Contrary to the quotes in Colman’s article, NNSA does not need this plutonium for its pit program. There are gobs of plutonium around. That is what the agreement with Russia about the 34 tons was intended to address.
So the article is a mess. We seem to have consigned the history of the 1990s and the response to the end of the Soviet Union to the memory hole. I don’t know why.
The post A Guy Walks Into A Reactor Shop With 34 Tons of Plutonium… appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
WASHINGTON—In response to legislation that would ban officers from obscuring their identities during arrests and raids, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed Thursday that beneath their masks, agents do not have faces.
Tom Homan, the U.S. border czar and chief enforcer of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, warned that Democrats “may get more than they bargained for” with transparency initiatives like the Senate’s VISIBLE Act, because the agency’s more than 20,000 members wear neck gaiters, hats, and sunglasses to cover a terrifying void where their eyes, nose, and mouth should be.
“The truth is, just underneath their masks lies an infinite abyss of total and complete darkness,” said Homan, adding that ICE officers concealed themselves not only for their own benefit, but also to protect others from seeing the hideous, unknowable horror beneath. “Liberals can accuse this agency of constitutional violations all they want. But we both know that seeing a man in tactical gear is far better than seeing a man without a face, staring deep into that empty chasm, and instantly going mad.”
“Mere mortals cannot survive what lies beyond the cloth,” Homan continued. “Whatever you do, don’t go towards the dark, don’t go towards the dark, don’t go towards the dark.”
According to Homan, anyone who went within even a few feet of an unmasked agent, including protesters, government officials, and lawyers, would experience debilitating full-body chills, hear sharp ringing sounds in their ears, and experience visions of death so intense they would immediately fall to the ground and claw out their own eyes.
In addition, the border czar warned that bystanders who attempted to take photos and videos of unmasked ICE agents at raids on workplaces, government buildings, or public parks would be sucked into a dimension of darkness, never to return, and nothing would be left behind but a charred, cracked camera and footage corrupted by static and ominous whispers.
Scoffing at what he called the naivete of Democrats, Homan told reporters the terror that lay behind agents’ masks was only the beginning, and that it was nothing compared to what could be found inside the agency’s unmarked vans and warehouses. He then looked off into the distance, unleashed a scream, and said, “They are coming for me, the men of the night, they are coming for me!”
In a post on Truth Social, the president argued that Americans should thank ICE agents for hiding their faces, contending that several months spent in a detention center was much safer than the prospect of accidentally catching a glimpse behind their masks and having one’s mind imprisoned for all eternity, floating forever between the valley of life and death.
“The BRAVE Patriotic Men and Women of ICE deserve to keep their masks and also when they remove them they are Very Scary,” Trump wrote in a late-night post defending his immigration policies. “They risk their lives arresting rapists and murderers. Also, when I stared into the void, I saw a baby version of myself being eaten by an adult version of myself while a faceless man watched. Then, my face was on his face, and he LAUGHED!”
“I don’t know what it means,” the president added, “but ICE and the faceless man who spoke in my mother’s voice will Make America Great Again!
At press time, Trump confirmed that he’d set a new goal to deport at least 65 million migrants to the shadow realm.
The post ICE Confirms Agents Do Not Have Faces Beneath Masks appeared first on The Onion.
If a Democratic lawmaker and her husband are gunned down, it’s an isolated incident carried out by a lone wolf.
If a right-wing activist is gunned down, it’s part of a coordinated effort by the radical left to incite violence.
If a gunman murders nineteen children at an elementary school, it’s disgusting to politicize the tragedy by talking about gun control.
If a Republican presidential candidate is targeted in an assassination attempt, it’s fair to blame it on left-wing rhetoric before the shooter has even been identified.
If a Christian Nationalist shoots up a synagogue, his values don’t reflect Christianity as a whole.
If a transgender woman shoots up a Catholic school, it’s because the entire LGBTQ community is conspiring to destroy Christianity. RuPaul probably ordered the hit.
If a man with a knife is arrested a block away from the home of a conservative Supreme Court justice, it’s a heinous act brought on by the radical feminist movement’s anger toward him.
If a man nearly beats the husband of a liberal Speaker of the House to death with a hammer, it’s a running joke for the next three years.
If a man shoots a Democratic congresswoman, he’s a mentally disturbed individual.
If a man shoots a Republican congressman, it’s because Bernie Sanders brainwashed him and turned him into a sleeper agent who is activated by the phrase “tax cut.”
If a mentally ill Black man fatally stabs a woman riding the light rail, it’s a “nationwide failure” on the part of Democrats.
If an Islamophobic white man fatally stabs two people riding the light rail, there’s no reason to think Republicans have done anything in the past twenty-five years to foment hatred of Muslims. Some people just wake up one morning hating entire groups of people.
If a white man is murdered by a sniper, anyone who so much as suggests that the killer’s motive may have been related to comments the victim made in the past should be fired from their job, put on a watch list, and doxxed. How dare they say anything that could be interpreted as being critical of the deceased?
If a Black man is murdered by the police, anyone digging up dirt on the victim to explain why his death was justified—like crimes he committed twenty years ago, or claiming he actually overdosed—is just laying out the facts.
If a Democratic governor talks about punching people in the mouth, he is obviously filled with insatiable bloodlust.
If a Republican president talks about punching people in the mouth, you’re the violent one for thinking he was being serious.
If a Democratic president is moved to tears by violence, he’s faking it.
If a Republican president repeatedly calls for violence, it’s just because he’s so full of love for America.
If a congresswoman says “We have to fight” while speaking at a rally about government accountability, she didn’t mean “fight” as in “apply sustained political pressure,” she meant “fight” as in “stab those bureaucrats until they release their data.”
If a Republican president says “We have to fight” to a group of armed rioters after months of repeatedly claiming an election has been stolen, he didn’t mean “fight” as in “storm the Capitol,” he meant “fight” as in the Beastie Boys’ lyrics “fight for your right to paaaar-tay.”
If a Democrat calls Republicans “fascists,” he basically just signed their death warrants.
If a Republican calls Democrats “Marxists,” or “the enemy from within,” or “vermin,” or “human scum,” he’s just trying to fire up the crowd.
If a social media addicted billionaire says “The left is the party murder,” it’s an indisputable fact.
If a think tank founded by the Koch brothers combs through the data and concludes that right-wing terrorism is responsible for far more deaths than left-wing terrorism, they were probably just cherry-picking.
All political violence is wrong.
But some political violence is more wrong than others.
NABLUS, Palestine — Israeli settlers who are illegally stealing land from Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are urging U.S. lawmakers to ship any smallpox-infected blankets they have in storage to them immediately, sources confirmed.
“You can learn a lot about how to dehumanize and exterminate people by looking at the recent history of the United States. They did an excellent job at eliminating entire populations, and then corralling anyone left into undesirable land with no natural resources,” said Israeli settler Lavi Edri. “We don’t even need a lot of the smallpox blankets. We just need a few boxes. The people here have no immune defense against the virus, so it should tear right through them. Then my family and I can move right into their house. It’s so simple. We will just have to burn some of their belongings in the street out front, but that’s easy.”
Palestinians fighting against Israeli occupation worry that the requests of the settlers might be met.
“Governments around the world are sitting on their hands doing nothing as Israel starves an entire nation in front of their eyes, so why wouldn’t they offer a cheap and effective way to kill us? I know biological warfare is against the Geneva Convention, but they have no problem violating those terms,” said Mohmmaed Al Najjar. “Maybe we will get lucky, maybe those blankets aren’t as effective 250 years later. But they would probably spray them with some new super strain of the virus anyway. Shit.”
Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged President Trump to send the blankets with the next delivery of artillery.
“As much as we love American bombs killing Palestinians, we also love American diseases killing them. Please President Trump, use your giant brain and send us all the smallpox you can. Spray it on American flags and we will distribute them to all Palestinians living on occupied land so they can know how dominant America is,” said the Prime Minister. “We cannot wait to have our own Trail of Tears which we will call the Trail of Triumph for all the people of Israel. Our brave settlers will be able to watch people march to their own death and it will be a great honor to have America leading the way.”
At press time, RFK Jr. was seen personally ingesting the last few smallpox cultures being stored at the CDC.
The post Israeli Settlers Wondering if America Could Send Some of Those Smallpox Blankets They Used When Stealing Land From Native Americans appeared first on The Hard Times.
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