Like, an Arya vehicle is *right there* as a concept.
Jun 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
People need to realize is that every inch of ground you give in the name of being “reasonable” or “respectable” validates the castigation of the people who don’t give that ground, while doing nothing to save you when the goon squad finally comes.
Respectability politics are a tool created by oppressors to drive a wedge into marginalized communities, and to get as many people as possible on the same page about how Those People are a problem. They exist to create the equivocations in which genocide can foment.
Sep 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Am apparently like 20 months late to the party on learning that Gareth Roberts has taken up a columnist position at "UnHerd" being a complete fascist cockwomble, and I'm SO EXCITED to read this terrible shit.
Right off the bat, "trans people are a bigger threat than Clause 28"!
THIS IS A FUCKING GOLDMINE, EXCEPT FOR STUPIDITY INSTED OF GOLD!
Sep 7, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Reading Catherine MacKinnon’s latest War on Porn boosting column in the NYT, and it’s genuinely stunning the sort of unsupported and flimsy bullshit that you can get away with publishing as long as your position is “porn bad.”
Like, the amount wrong with this paragraph is mindblowing. Calling the term “sex work” gaslighting, as if it wasn’t coined by someone working in the industry. Acting as though the plural of anecdote is data. Just appalling, C- high school essay writing here.
Sep 6, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Without thinking that assassination is a particularly effective political tactic, I suspect that its presence serves as a decent marker for the degree to which society considers the status quo inevitable.
If it's widely believe that the world can quickly and radically change some number of people will go for the quick fix, overly simplistic approach of just killing the guy at the top.
Aug 30, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Is there a term, roughly equivalent to “new wave” or “cyberpunk,” describing the current dominant trend in SF/F? (Markers of the style: diversity assumed as baseline, clear influences from romance novels, genre fluidity.)
I suspect the answer is “no” because the initial attempts to define the style were pejorative attempts by fascists, but there’s clearly A Thing that is now happening very loudly in SF/F and is worth theorizing from the inside.
Feb 13, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to. nytimes.com/2021/02/13/tec…
Major oversights in it as I see.
First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.
Feb 13, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Just had a really good meeting with my editors for the mysterious Project Hecate, and man am I glad sometimes for my ability to treat writing as a technical problem that can be engineered.
(I had a really interesting conversation with Penn along these lines a bit ago. I'd implied that I was treating a piece a particular way because I had a rhetorical need, and he asked for my real take about it.)
Feb 12, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I greatly love the fact that I transitioned and was immediately like "and now I will get a bunch of tattoos."
(Huh. I don't actually have a photo of my finished leg piece. Will have to get one of those later along with the one I'll be getting in about ten minutes.)
Feb 11, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Just had someone assert that the heart of sci-fi was white English-speaking men while boasting about a project to cover “all” of SF “from H.G. Wells to the MCU,” and my dude, do not confuse the contours of the ass your head is up with the horizons of the world.
Advice for literally all media critics: if you start from the premise that the stuff you grew up liking is representative of the world you will end up with work that supports white supremacism.
Jan 10, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
We’re going to have to be careful, in the short term, to actually be precise in our use of the word “fascist,” a word that describes specific approaches and aesthetics and is not coextensive with “conservative” or even “extreme conservative.” Trump absolutely was one.
But most of the GOP was only opportunistically so. Rubio, McConnell, Graham, and their ilk are not fascists. Cruz wasn’t before but might have become one. Hawley 100% is. The House GOP generally skews more fash than the Senate.
A thing I legitimately don’t think I made clear enough in NAB but that is crucial to understanding the current moment: Trumpism is an upper middle class movement.
While working poor Trump supporters exist, they are mostly a useful smokescreen to pretend that Trumpism is about the white working class. It is not.
Jan 9, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I have complex and mixed feelings about Trump's Twitter ban. On one level it's obviously good, in the sense that it makes the world a tangibly, measurably better place. But oof, what a precedent.
It's not, obviously, a free speech issue. Free speech is meaningless if it does not include the freedom to exclude people from your platform. It's as insane to demand Twitter host Trump as it is to demand Eruditorum Press do so.
Jan 8, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I love that the treasonous chuds all went through the capitol unmasked and easily identifiable. Dipshits are so horny for cool looking tactical gear they never once considered the virtues of anonymity when you're doing crimes.
Like, four years on nobody ever doxed the guy who punched Richard Spencer. Widely circulated video, tons of eyes on it, but nobody ever IDed him because he wasn't dressed like a goddamn viking clown or wearing his fucking work ID.
Jan 8, 2021 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
Someone told me it’s my ten year anniversary of starting TARDIS Eruditorum. So, a follow up to my thread about getting writing careers started and how I’m a useless model. This time related specifically on writing about Doctor Who from a me-influenced perspective.
First advice: don’t. It’s an oversaturated market that’s past its peak. Maybe in 5-10 years if the show has a huge spike in popularity again, but right now you’ve got too many people doing the same thing.
Nov 27, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
OK. This isn’t worth my or indeed anyone’s time, but you know what, it’s worth covering the basics occasionally, so let’s take five and unpack why this and its follow-ups are fucking stupid.
First of all, to make a very obvious point, there’s not actually an alternative to using money in 2020. A girl’s gotta eat, capitalism has material power and thus I am stuck using money despite money’s evident stupidity as a concept.
Nov 27, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Thinking about this again, and it occurs to me that the ugly truth a lot of people on the left don’t want to face is that a successful leftist political network would want to take its cues from people like John Oliver and Wyatt Cenac.
That’s not to say successful leftist news would be comedy programs; Oliver and Cenac are basically very good short-form documentary producers who work a very comedy-heavy style within that.
Nov 27, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This is a deeply flawed article on a number of levels (most obviously its basic framing of “look at these rich people who are good guys!”), but it’s stirring a lot of emotions about economic privilege and the responsibilities thereof. nytimes.com/2020/11/27/sty…
I spend an awful lot of my time thinking about the economic privilege I’ve stumbled into, and exactly where the guillotine line is. And like, my family is never going to go beyond upper middle class. Our money comes from professional-class wage labor, and there’s a ceiling there.
Nov 27, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Speaking as someone who had a lot of sex despite being a dysphoric blogger, this is extremely bad advice.
I have absolutely no idea what good advice is because frankly my sex life makes as little sense as everything else in my life but I'm really confident this ain't it.
Nov 14, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I've got a bewilderingly good landlord, and every time he texts I have an emotional reaction that's kind of the leftist equivalent of when a sullen goth teenager gets hugged by their parents as the school bus comes.
(He's an engineer focused on sustainable buildings and appears to just buy up properties, do a bunch of ecological improvements, and then rent them out while being super low key and proactive about making sure tenants know he'll be flexible if need be.)
