Hello all! Since we only ever moved Christine off the site to make room for Boys in Their Dresses, and since that project has faltered while 
she keeps absolutely killing it, I thought it would be a good idea to put her back on the site.
More personally, as you probably don’t know if you don’t read my Twitter, my family has recently made the decision to legally adopt Christine, having already helped her relocate away from her abusive family and to Ithaca so she could transition safely. Christine is currently looking for housing, which is exciting for a trans woman in the middle of a pandemic. She’s also disabled and working through some pretty serious trauma of the sort you might expect when your story is “an abusive family so bad you moved across several states and were adopted.” We’re trying to give her some space to heal so she can go back to school and become the amazing and badass woman that anyone who has read her work can blatantly tell she’s going to be. But, well, there’s only so much we can do.
You have all been incredible in supporting me and letting me have the ...
In order to understand Moore’s transformation it is necessary to fully understand precisely what Watchmen was and what it did. And to understand this it is necessary to appreciate one of its major thematic concerns, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. This aspect of the War entered the scene approximately one picosecond after the creation of the universe, when the electroweak force, unable to cohere once the universe cooled below 1015 K, split into the electromagnetic force, which would go on to underpin more or less the entirety of communication, and the weak nuclear force. This latter force was responsible for a phenomenon called beta decay, in which a neutron can transform itself into a proton by expelling an electron, along with other forms of radioactive decay. Together, along with gravity and the strong nuclear force, they create a delicate mathematical balance in which matter and life are possible. And yet within that crucial weak force is a terrifying implication.
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| Figure 1109: The equipment upon which Hahn and Strassman first generated nuclear fission. |
This implication (and indeed the weak force itself) went unnoticed for approximately fourteen billion years, until German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman first achieved nuclear fission ...
Fascism isn't socialism. This isn't the sort of thing that one should have to say, but apparently it is.
Politics has content as well as form. It is not, as fascism always tries to make it, a game of aesthetics. No matter how superficially similar fascist and antifascists may be - and I contend that, with a very little good-faith scrutiny, they are not actually very similar at all - there is a world of difference, so much difference on every level that equivalence of any kind is a gross falsehood, a catastrophic failure of understanding. It is the content of political action which gives it meaning, not the form. And the content always ultimately derives from the class content, which ultimately derives from the class basis. The class content and basis of fascism, whatever the rhetoric, is bourgeois, based on the defence of capital either directly or via the defence of those divisions and oppressions which are both generated by and bolster the rule of capital. They don’t need to be generated by or to bolster capital to be wrong, but they are and do. The class content and basis of antifascism, by contrast, is found in defensive reaction ...
Bowing to necessity, this week Daniel and Jack talk about the Boogaloo, the shortcomings of the current discussion around it, and the reality.
CONTENT WARNING
Notes/Links:
Bundyville Podcast https://www.opb.org/news/article/bundyville-occupation-podcast/
Robert Evans; Jason Wilson: The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/
Robert Evans guests on Qanon Anonymous, on the Boogaloo Boys https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-qanon-anonymous-30956096/episode/episode-96-the-boogaloo-boys-feat-63994902/
And what of Moore? Where was he as the company he forsook remade itself in what they imagined his image to be? How did the Prophet of Eternity respond to what he had wrought?
At first, retreat. As he told an interviewer around the time he was finishing the script for Watchmen #12, “I’m going to take a couple of months off and basically not have a single creative thought in my head for that entire period.” This was both unsurprising and necessary. By this point it would have been clear to him that Watchmen was going to leave him in a vastly changed financial situation (he suggested in 1991 that it had” made me hundreds of thousands of pounds” though noted “that's not a fraction of what DC made out of it”). On top of that, he was understandably tired. Since his career had taken off in earnest in 1981, he’d been working at a staggering clip across multiple publishers. V for Vendetta, Miracleman, Watchmen, Swamp Thing, The Ballad of Halo Jones, The Killing Joke, and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow had essentially all come in a five year frenzy of productivity with ...
This week, Daniel and Jack are honoured to be joined by Prof. Megan Squire, Antifascist data-miner. Geeking-out ensues. You're gonna love it.
CONTENT WARNING
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Megan's Twitter: @MeganSquire0
https://facstaff.elon.edu/msquire/
https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/fellows/megan-squire/
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-antifa-data-mining/
Spoilers: probably not.
Content Warning / Contains Clips
Notes and Links:
Matt Heimbach SPLC. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/matthew-heimbach
SPLC article 'Two Prominent Neo-Nazis Recant, but Their Actions Sow Doubts' https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/05/14/two-prominent-neo-nazis-recant-their-actions-sow-doubts
Everything You Love Will Burn. https://www.amazon.com/Everything-You-Love-Will-Burn/dp/1568589948
Vice White Student Union documentary (from 2013). https://youtu.be/GJ_MHp8iqtQ
Matt Heimbach assaults woman at Trump rally 2016. https://youtu.be/-YeYZtXHo8E
Kelly Weill article on Night of Wrong Wives. https://www.thedailybeast.com/matthew-heimbachs-traditional-workers-party-implodes-over-love-triangle-turned-trailer-brawl
Matt Heimbach joins Light Upon Light. https://youtu.be/w4DGkvsJLP8
Light Upon Light Upon Light (independent blog critical of LuL.) https://lightuponlightuponlight.home.blog
Take A Walk On the Right Side podcast. https://anchor.fm/take-a-walk-on-the-right-side
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Relevant previous episodes:
Episode 8: The National Socialist Movement
Episode 28: The Siege Pill, Part 1
Episode 29: The Siege Pill, Part 2
Episode 3: Unite the Right, Part 1
Episode 4: Unite the Right, Part 2
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Jack's splenetic ramblings on J. K. Rowling, Part 1, Part 2, review of Fantastic Beasts 2
The core of the problem was that from DC’s perspective, the lesson of Watchmen could only ever be one thing: things like this sold. And within the post-Crisis reality of the direct market, what DC specifically cared about was what fans said. The simple reality is that what the vocal fans who showed up and bought Watchmen in their specialist comic book stores liked most about the book wasn’t the moving explorations of sexuality in “A Brother To Dragons”; it was Rorschach being a moody badass in “The Abyss Gazes Also.” And so this is what DC imitated.
This, of course, was not unique to Watchmen—the kind of hard-edged and violent antihero represented by Rorschach was, to DC’s mind, part and parcel of a trend of dark and violent superhero comics that also included Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Mike Grell’s Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters. This, in other words, was something they already knew how to imitate, and that Moore was always one of several writers capable of providing. Indeed, in most regards Moore was always an imitator in this regard, putting his own spin on a foundation that had been laid down ...