iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"the phrase 'this matters' .. appears .. 116 times more often in AI-generated content than in the human-produced samples used for comparison." gizmodo.com/this-matters...

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Found a note from the cute neighbourhood possum, which began: "I have eaten the parsley that was in the terracotta pot ..."

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Speaking of another "Neither Left nor Right" magazine promoting rapists. I hope Tracey lives out the rest of his life in excruciating pain, abject poverty and silence. bsky.app/profile/just...

Compact magazine, Michael Tracey, "The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology" [100%, all creeps]

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Every iteration of "Neither Left nor Right."

Scooby gang unmasking panels, "Neither Left nor Right," "The Right."

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Perhaps Brand will reprise his interview with David Sirota in Jacobin. Published a mere few months prior to reporting of those (already well-known) rape and assault charges.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Actually-existing "cancel culture." Pauline Borsook was clearly blacklisted for "discerning in the tech utopianism of the era a dead-eyed, woman-hating social malevolence—what the subtitle called the “Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech." www.wired.com/story/paulin...

What had happened to Paulina Borsook? The question was haunting her, peven on a day when she’d gotten such good news. It’s haunted her for a quarter-century now. In 2000, after years writing about Silicon Valley, she published a book, Cyberselfish, that discerned within the tech utopianism of the era a dead-eyed, woman-hating social malevolence—what the subtitle called the “Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech.” It was smart at a moment when the whole of the tech industry had gone dumb, and it was funny where Silicon Valley was at its most self-serious.

And then … nothing. Editors stopped taking her calls. No fellowships materialized, no second book deal, no regular MSNBC spots for the dotcom Cassandra of the boom times. Borsook couldn’t get work. She began to wonder if she had been blacklisted. Her health, always wobbly, only worsened. She was living in other people’s houses. She went broke, a process she likened to a fire in which everything burns to the ground, and was getting by on a GoFundMe and support from friends. She’d taken to calling the book TDB. That damn book.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Have begun replanting the herbs and greens that were lost to heatwaves. Freshly picked herbs and salads are a joy.

Mint, thyme and parsley in terracotta pots.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A great dessert, tart and sweet, with a little bit of sourness.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Not only did quite a few actively enable mass deportations. There is a lot of self-induced amnesia about support for Trump's border policies.

Bernie Sanders, October 2025:
“So, has historically the United States done well under Democrats and Republicans protecting the border? The answer is no. Trump did a better job,” Sanders said on the podcast. “I don’t like Trump, you know, but we should have a secure border. And it ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it. Those before him did not do it. We should have a secure border period. I think most people in the Congress agree with that.”

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Fresh from promoting Platner, a record of supporting some of the worst candidates & political operatives, and a long-standing history of claiming Trump's border policies are the best ... Now, Bernie Sanders is to share a stage with Bannon. To argue for govt investment in AI.

Gizmodo fluff piece on AI and the Future of Life Institute, where Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are going to share a stage.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

A cowardly, electorally futile, insulting and deeply unscientific backdown from Talarico. Suggesting intersex people are "abnormalities" would be bad enoigh, but it also points to a broader normative (and false) doctrine about binary sex (and gender). Still won't appease fascists.

Talarico holding forth about "genetic abnormalities," ignorant of biology and pandering to fascists:

"I've missed the mark on some of my past statements. I will be the first to admit it," he said. "What I meant is that there are two sexes, and then there's a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities."

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A timely reboot of that 1936 film classic, Reefer Madness.

Poster for the 1936 film, Reefer Madness. "Women cry for it – Men die for it"

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I've been cobbling together a Douglas Sirk retrospective. But I've not been able to find Lured (1947), starring Lucille Ball in an early, dramatic role. Is there a #filmsky that might know? 🎬 🎞 📽

Still from Sirk's film, Lured (1947), showing Lucille Ball and others standing at a bar.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

On cue, from the US Dept of Labor, "One Homeland ...". A mantra that ends with an exhortation to nationalism, implicitly for class collaboration (and against solidarity between workers, across borders).

US Dept of Labor, on X:
"One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American."

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Acquainting myself with 287(g): the very lucrative outsourcing program which dispenses a bounty for hunting migrants across the US.

ICE will fully reimburse participating agencies for the annual salary and benefits of each eligible trained 287(g) officer, including overtime coverage up to 25% of the officer’s annual salary.

Law enforcement agencies will be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards based on the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE and overall assistance to further ICE’s mission to Defend the Homeland:

90% - 100% - $1,000 per eligible task force officer

80% - 89% - $750 per eligible task force officer

70% - 79% - $500 per eligible task force officer”

If it sounds like our government is running a quota-based rewards program encouraging local police to round up more people for ICE, it’s because that’s exactly what is happening.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

As this letter notes, Cofnas is opposed to the academic freedom of those he calls "woke fanatics." And wants to "snatch it away from them" — that is, redefine and restrict academic freedom to white men. It's a well-thumbed fascist playbook.

A photo of three guys, with the pompous mediocrity Yarvin in the middle, his arms around someone and Cofnas on the left.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Jeffries is not driven by some electoral calculus to denounce the spectre of communism, as it were. And it's the movements against ICE, not Jeffries who just stands in the way, that result in these shifts. Positions are not fixed: 19% of Republicans somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE.

YouGov poll. One bar shows that 19% of Republicans somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

John Heartfield, "Mimicry" (Workers' Illustrated News, 1934).

Heartfield's 1934 photomontage, "Mimicry," shows someone in a suit putting a beard, wig and makeup on Hitler, to make him look like Marx.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Paywalling possibly life-saving information is not good. Here's the relevant paragraph:

Crucially, the GLOVE has limitations, chief among them that for the device to work effectively and deliver its restraining pain shock, it must come into contact with the subject's bare skin. According to Compliant Technologies, the gloves won't work through dry clothing or thick hair. The gloves will work, however, if the subject is wearing thin, wet clothing, such as soaked T-shirts or blouses. The GLOVE also does not like being dunked in water and will likely be rendered inoperable if this happens.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I don't think so. A lot of Trump's and Musk's posts during the presidential election were like this. It very much is the Spectre of Communism.

Trump post with Harris in a military uniform, backdrop of hammer and sickle.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I've not seen the film, will at some point. What I would likely enjoy far more is a retelling from the perspective of a minor character. Along the lines of Sally Potter's Thriller (1979), a rereading of Puccini's La Boheme.

Movie poster for Sally Potter's 1979 film, Thriller. A rewrite of La Boheme.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

In philosophy, Odysseus has often been juxtaposed to Plato as emblematic of pragmatism and idealism. cf. "Art of War, Art of Life." www.e-flux.com/journal/90/1... As Whitehead noted of Odysseus' bloodsoaked homecoming: "the bones of his companions are strewn on many a reef and many an isle."

There are fewer, more emphatically mythic accounts of the link between the “art of life” and the “art of war” than those found in philosophical juxtapositions between Plato and Odysseus—in other words, fewer epic and aristocratic versions of the phenomenological dichotomy between ideally solid objects of life whose properties are known and enclosed, and seagoing circuits where the hero sets off from the noble home to war and tribulations and returns, eventually, to a proper homecoming of being known. In a series of lectures in the late 1920s, the English mathematician Alfred North Whitehead proposed that “the function of Reason amid the welter of our mental experiences, amid our intuitions, our emotions, our purposes, our decisions of emphasis” is to “promote the art of life.” Whitehead distinguished between two kinds of reasoning: Platonic and Odyssean. According to Whitehead,

In a series of lectures in the late 1920s, the English mathematician Alfred North Whitehead proposed that “the function of Reason amid the welter of our mental experiences, amid our intuitions, our emotions, our purposes, our decisions of emphasis” is to “promote the art of life.” Whitehead distinguished between two kinds of reasoning: Platonic and Odyssean. According to Whitehead, Plato’s rationality is absolute, speculative, and “enthroned above the practical tasks of the world.” Odysseus, by contrast, is a “pragmatic agent,” whose decisions are determined by experiential and situational knowledge. Without the latter, Whitehead contends, there is no impetus to creativity, including in the techniques of reason. Whitehead does, however, offer a fleeting warning: “the bones of his [Odysseus’] companions are strewn o

The Odysseus of Homer’s epic is polytropic, a person of “many turns,” who becomes lost and for ten years endures storms at sea after undertaking the war on Troy; he takes multiple forms, encounters monsters and temptation, returns initially unrecognizable, murders the rivals for his wife’s affections, and finally regains his proper place at the head of the royal Ithacan household. Whitehead is not alone in ascribing to the mythical figure of Odysseus an iconic status in philosophy as the legend of a practical, seafaring reason juxtaposed with that derived from transcendental knowledge—one that, more or less explicitly, treats the well-defined, patrimonial property of the sovereign household (or oikos) as the normative condition of formal, categorical reason.

Adorno and Horkheimer describe Odysseus melancholically. For them, he is the exemplary homo oeconomicus characterized by self-mastery and (self-)sacrifice, the condition of a bourgeois aesthetics that is all ears but incapable of taking pleasure in beauty, the alienated “homesickness” of an Enlightenment rationality both set adrift from and destructive of normative foundations in a euphemistic nature. If Whitehead was less scornful of Odysseus’s adventurist entrepreneurialism than Adorno and Horkheimer, he nevertheless deals, albeit tacitly, in a similar structural analogy between the patrilineal genealogy of a well-ordered oikonomia and the coherent properties of classical, categorical reason by suggesting that “reason is the self-discipline of the originative element in history,” without which “this element is anarchic.”

The oikos has long-furnished philosophers with a naturalized, patrimonial aesthetics of the selective preservation of heritable, unique properties.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Nate Silver discovers that "college degree" is not a proxy for class. No mention of context: increase in enrolments by women, Black people, children of w-c backgrounds. Or the Right's subsequent efforts to devalue degrees. Or the false claim that w-c (defined as non-college degreed) support Trump.

Note Silver post: "Income and education are usually positively correlated. But sometimes the relationship breaks down. What's the most Democratic voting group in America? People with post-graduate degrees but lower-to-middle incomes."
Below the text is an attached data table from the "Silver Bulletin" titled "How income and education affect presidential voting." The subtitle reads, "Share of two-way vote going to Democratic presidential candidate, 2016-2024 elections."
The table displays a grid with income brackets as rows and education levels as columns. The cells contain percentages, shaded in light orange for lower numbers (leaning Republican) and light blue for higher numbers (leaning Democratic). The data shows that as education increases, the Democratic vote share generally increases, but it decreases as income increases within the same education brackets.
A prominent red circle highlights the number 70 in the table. This is the highest percentage shown, located at the intersection of the "$30K-$60K" income row and the "Post-grad" education column.
The bottom of the table notes the source as the "Cooperative Election Study, 2016-2025."

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Photo of antifascist militia in Spain, July 1936 — at the onset of the Spanish Civil war, 90 years ago.

July 1936 Spain, a small group of antifascist militia during Franco's rule.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

From recollection, the film's colouring was based on the 2009 dust storm in Sydney, AU. (Ofc, dust storms and fires on this scale are due to climate change)

2009, Sydney Harbour Bridge in a major dust storm, engulfed in orange light

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

The Platner campaign illustrates an upper middle class aesthetics *about* working class men. In a queer vocabulary: rough trade. Re Platner, also the supposedly exciting insinuations that authentically working class men have a propensity & enthusiasm for (intimate and military) violence.

From the Wikipedia entry on Rough Trade:
In the term's historical usage, rough trade is a variant describing partners with characteristics stereotypical of extreme masculinity. This may include physical strength, roughness, and calloused hands. These men are usually laborers in physically demanding occupations, such as factory work, construction, and farming.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

SSPX don't name any of those schools. But they do run several childrens' camps in the US. (Maybe some schools can be inferred from the camp names?) Either way, the uniform for the girls' camps are pink; the boys' camps, military green.

SSPX-run childrens' camp, Los Gatos. Picture shows children in uniforms, with flags and a military style jeep.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

German Nazi policy on motherhood in the early 1930s:

Nazi leaders were obsessed with increasing the size and health of the so-called "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft") so that the German nation could dominate Europe. During the years of Nazi rule, Nazi authorities and German medical professionals tried different policies and initiatives to increase the sinking German birth rate.1

Shortly after the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, the new regime enacted legislation that increased existing criminal penalties for abortion among so-called “Aryan” Germans.2 The Lebensborn (“Fount of Life”) program was designed to discourage abortions by providing discreet maternity homes and adoption services to single “Aryan” women.3 Although Nazi policies encouraged these births outside of marriage, Nazi propaganda urged young “Aryan” Germans to marry early and have many children. Large families were the Nazi ideal, and they were promoted through written articles, visual propaganda, and the introduction of military-style awards for motherhood

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Every time this comes up, I'm reminded of the list of "unorthodox medications" found in Hitler's bunker.

Abstract: For the last nine years of his life Adolf Hitler, a lifelong hypochondriac had as his physician Dr Theodor Morell. Hitler's mood swings, Parkinson's disease, gastro-intestinal symptoms, skin problems and steady decline until his suicide in 1945 are documented by reliable observers and historians, and in Morell's diaries. The bizarre and unorthodox medications given to Hitler, often for undisclosed reasons, include topical cocaine, injected amphetamines, glucose, testosterone, estradiol, and corticosteroids. In addition, he was given a preparation made from a gun cleaner, a compound of strychnine and atropine, an extract of seminal vesicles, and numerous vitamins and 'tonics'. It seems possible that some of Hitler's behaviour, illnesses and suffering can be attributed to his medical care. Whether he blindly accepted such unorthodox medications or demanded them is unclear.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. hard mode: no star wars, star trek, lotr, dc, marvel, disney, pixar, dreamworks, spielberg, cameron, wachowskis, or ghibli.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein (1925).

Scene from Battleship Potemkin, maggots and part of spectacles found in food

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Relatedly, I've been wondering about the money that's behind the rightward turns of previously Left journals. And the growing number of redwashing outfits — such as Compact, describing themselves as social democratic but, in the detail, fascist-adjacent. Just checking in on Compact ..

Compact article: Trump Should Declare Victory In Iran

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

State monopoly capitalism not doing so well in Hungary

Chart of 4jg's falling share price.

"The firm has become the primary face of Orban’s strategic goals and ties with President Donald Trump’s insiders, including billionaire Elon Musk and Richard Grenell, the US’s special envoy to the Balkans who became an adviser to 4iG last year"

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

All of Zizek's writing is redwashing though: radical Left verbiage, centre-Right conclusions. And so much confident ignorance about how borders and labour markets function. bsky.app/profile/jour...

Re Zizek.

In a piece written in the aftermath of New York’s recent mayoral race, he argues that “only a radical leftist can win over working-class Trumpians – a constituency whose distrust of the establishment remains entirely justified.”[3] Yet in another recent piece, he advances the argument – disturbingly consonant with right-wing populist rhetoric – that supporting undocumented migrant workers merely aids “big capital,” which profits from cheap labor and wage arbitrage, and simultaneously fuels “support for Trumpian populists.”[4]

These stances, of course, are hardly new. In his 2016 book consecrated to today’s “troubles with the neighbors”[5], he devotes considerable energy to attacking both humanitarian anti-border advocates and proponents of hardline anti-allochthon policies. And it is under the flag of a revolutionary break with capitalism that these alternatives are seen as a double blackmail.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Apparently Zizek has a new podcast, "Liberal Fascisms." I expect his Great Insight is that "liberalism is the real fascism" — ie, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, translated into Hegelese. Where dialectics is a fancy name for bombastic, fascist-adjacent contrarianism.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Musk supporting calls to "white solidarity" made me think of Ignatiev et al's "Race Traitor." I've not read the edited collection, but did come across a pdf of the first edition of the magazine "Race Traitor" (1993) to read instead. files.libcom.org/files/Race%2...

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

If I may add to this, from blog notes on Trump and fascism, Dec 2015: "Fascism is what happens when ‘domestic violence’ goes public and political, is justified through elaborate forms of victim-blaming and an inverted view of victimisation ..."

From s0metim3s blog: "Fascism is what happens when ‘domestic violence’ goes public and political, is justified through elaborate forms of victim-blaming and an inverted view of victimisation, enjoyed and encouraged without limit, spills out from the privatised spaces of the home and into the streets"

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure & Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. Published in 1942. [Disagreed with most of Neumann's theories. And, learned a lot — I'd become so bored with learning nothing new from more recent books on fascism.]

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Define: security. Contrast the extreme insecurity inflicted on Black and Brown people with Jeffries' and Sanders' lauding Trump for securing the southern border.

Fox News: Top Democrat says President Trump will be given 'credit' for border finally being secured. (Dec 3, 2025)

Newsweek: Bernie Sanders Praises Trump's Job on Securing the Border. (Oct 24, 2025)

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

From Nathan Bailey, Colonial Dictionary:

That corrupts or ruins women. Greek thelys, female + phthora, corruption. M. Madan in 1780 wrote a book entitled Telyphthora; or, A Treatise on Female Ruin, in its Causes, Effects, Consequences, Prevention, and Remedy. Fourteen years later Thomas Mathias inquired, in his poem THE PURSUITS OF LITERATURE: Must I with Madan, bent on gospel truth, In telyphthoric lore instruct our youth? The prefix thely-, female, is used in various scientific terms, such as thelytokous, thelygenous, producing only female offspring; hence thelytoky; arrhenotoky, q.v., is the production only of males. Nathan Bailey in his DICTIONARY (1751) lists thelygonum, 'an herb which, when steeped in drink, is said to make a woman conceive a girl' It is equally efficacious when drunk by the man.

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