Tl;dr on all my Twitter threads today is that Nate Silver-style hot takery is actually incredibly fucking dangerous and it is high time we stop letting these assholes deny the existence of fascism just because they're mad it interferes with their Moneyball grift
Moneyball grifts depend on people believing that politics work like baseball, with a strict set of rules and parameters that are always followed
Acknowledging the existence of popular fascism is a mortal threat to that grift because fascists ignore institutional rules/parameters
We need to be very clear on the fact that Nate Silver and other Moneyball types have a vested financial interest in pretending fascism isn't real and minimizing its existence and impact at every turn.
The more we collectively acknowledge that we are living in an era of widespread popular fascism, they less relevant Moneyballers become.
Fascists have no problem clubbing an umpire to death with a bat on a whim.
All the math in the world can't model a game played like that.
Fascism propagates itself by sowing chaos and undermining existing institutions.
It is fundamentally unpredictable.
When your moneymaker brand is Nostradamus, you have a vested interest in pretending that it simply does not exist.
The truth is, our country has never been so stable or rule-abiding that the Moneyball model made sense as anything more than a parlor game.
It's fantasy football, not serious political science.
Nate Silver smugness helped convince people that Trump wasn't a threat in 2016, and instead of people learning our lesson the NYT went ahead and made his bullshit an institution.
It's basically denialist disinfo at this point and I am disgusted that folks keep legitimizing it.
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Any time you meet a white person with even half an ounce of decent racial justice politics, you are almost certainly looking at the product of several or more likely dozens of BIPOC folks who showed that person dignity and grace despite their (many, inevitable) fuckups
For white people, the work of racial justice is learning to see all the myriad injustices that we have been trained our whole lives not to notice.
It's our job to educate ourselves, but all the books in the world aren't enough to make us see the whole picture.
White folks can never understand white patriarchy fully, because seeing it fully would mean seeing it from an angle inaccessible to us, the perspective of BIPOC experience.
"White tears," for those unfamiliar, refers specifically to the phenomenon of white people who cry when BIPOC folks name their racist behavior.
It's a highly feminized phenomenon that works because it deploys white patriarchy's notion of white feminine serenity (a.k.a. passivity) as something to be protected and held sacrosanct.
For folks who are unfamiliar, blood libel is the very old and still alarmingly common myth that Jewish folks murder Christian children.
Antisemitic opportunists used the Epstein story as a way to shore up the overlap of Pizzagate/QAnon pedophile ring conspiracy theory with older blood libel conspiracy theory about supposed Jewish Illuminati child sacrifice rituals.
My hot take of the day is that nonprofit direct action community organizing is on its deathbed because it saw radical foundations dry up and decided to beg for scraps at the table of the Democratic Party instead of focusing on creating its own sustainable revenue streams
Most nonprofit "community organizing" these days is just half-assed shit that EDs cobble together to keep their c3s busy and above water between GOTV campaigns, and oh boy does it show
In blue cities they end up toothless and unable to fight for real change because doing so would mean potentially pissing off the Dem establishment and Dem-linked grantors they depend on to keep them afloat in the long term.
One way to be superhelpful in getting us out of the woods is to blast the internet with hot takes about how the woods never existed, actually
There has been & continues to be only one responsible way to combat the fact that we have a totalitarian fascist in the White House, and that is to loudly declare that fact and prepare to actively counter a wide range of possible fascist and totalitarian overreaches.
There is a whole entire fecal rainbow of ways that fascists secure & consolidate power, from coup to paramilitary revolt to just... winning elections.
Fascists could not care less about norms or laws, so you if you only plan to counter the things they're allowed to do, you lose.
In case folks have forgotten, those chuds managed to come out against mutual aid (bevause Food Not Bombs is bad for election work, according to them) and Mariame Kaba (because CTH thinks cops and prisons are good, actually) in the course of less than a month this past summer
It's not just the Gamergate harassment that makes them poison, they are such a plague on the left.
Reactionary dipshits cosplaying as socialists, all of them.