QOTD: "Suicide Rightism"

 

Max Read, writing in his Substack post, with an important take on the unhinged Malignant Fascist and his cult's nihilist philosophy, and how the "suicide right" tag applies::

"Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation. What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it--and then ended. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is school-shooter ideology.

And the Suicide Right case for Trump is that he gets this. The D.H.S. tweet of the penguin meme belies any positive vision of MAGA. The reward for supporting him isn’t an American renaissance, it’s universal oblivion. He and I.C.E. and the C.B.P. are the armored bulldozer giving you the chance to kill immigrants and liberal white women and male nurses before you put a gun in your mouth. His administration is the plane, just waiting for you to get inside. I guess 2024 was a Flight 93 election, after all. Turns out we got the certain death."

When you read his entire article, many pieces of the fascist right puzzle come together and are chilling. The penguin image is explained there, too. The sick and twisted MF has no problem taking us all on his flight to oblivion. 

(image: White House)

QOTD -- Zuck Rhymes With Schmuck

 

"... One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest--walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts[]--has given way to a 'reset' marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like 'tcot' and 'tpot,' has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.

"News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context--as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2 I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like 'legacy media' and 'virtue-signaling'--but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do. (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)..."  Max Read, "Read Max" substack, on the aggressive "vice-signaling" of techbro Mark Zuckerberg.  Read's analysis of the emergence of Zuck-up as a sort of right-wing junior Musk (along with the execrable Jeff Bezos) seems on point.  Good read (no pun).