iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

But how do we in that case stop the state's extraction of resources that are needed for that community worldmaking, to stop the community worldmaking from being, while necessary, a subsidization by everything good of the parasitic war-monopolists? (not something that will be solved on Bsky,

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Paulina Borsook wrote a bit about this, yeah?

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Also like, sorry for being just fixated on gender dynamics right now, which don't cover ever problem in political organization, but if we just all agreed that rape is disqualifying for any position of power and consistently enforced that, the vast majority of abusive potential power-holders

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Now that I'm thinking about it, Annihilation's meditation on ego-death might be an interesting compare-contrast with a lot of the 'canon' of Jungian psychedelia-adjacent sci-fi with a dark night of the soul / ego-death sequence, for how it manages to do so WITHOUT having to metaphorize this brutal

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Oh, I definitely don't; I dislike the first category at best and really adore The Weird as a genre. But! My understanding is that many of the "movers and shakers" of neoreaction, if they did not work in the Weird, was involved in discourse of greater or lesser sophistication with Weird authors, and

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yeah. You'll understand these people /much/ better by getting to know the literary genre of the Weird - which has many virtues, and many progressive artists in the tradition - and its descendants, tracing VanderMeer through his collaborations with Mieville (we like them both, of coruse, and are

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The ideology and subcultures that developed in and around nuclear and AI, respectively, have so many interesting and important parallels; however the way both use ludicrous in-group aesthetics, personal unpleasantness, and sexual harassment to insulate themselves from challenges to the political

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Through fandom (not HP or anything to do with LessWrong) I ended up socially on the fringes of what call themselves the "post-rationalists", who largely consider themselves progressive, but who continue to maintain social ties to Insane Racists and rape apologists / the "government provided gf"

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Truly a moment of substituting 'volkish', by way of social conservatism, signifiers and stereotypes for /actual class analysis/ to assume that the American working class can regularly have one adult opt out from wage work.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

And one would think many eloquently-put anti-militarist arguments might be adapted for the current pass, if not only because many of the AI capitalists so openly seek to merge with the security state. "Humanity hanging on a cross of iron", etc.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I don't think these people were by and large smart enough to be reading Gene Wolfe, Mary Doria Russel, or Walter M. Miller Jr., but I've always wanted a deep study of these authors' ... complicatedly reactionary politics. (Especially relevant to the "tradcath" movement but I'm not sure /they're/

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Sorry about the - jeez - two week's delay! Anyway I am curious about what scholars you know of who might be doing - like - broad-based surveys on this involving its political economy? And/or any whistleblowers, more about industry propaganda than hunting for big scandals? There's not as much of this

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The sense I get on my own campus is a sheepish acceptance of the inevitability lie, and now that so many faculty have done so, their epistemic arrogance (I'm in a very male department) and their affective attachment to cynicism and being right in the end prevent them from making any moral stands

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I mean I don't disagree but also as a commuter cyclist I do have to point out that we can weirdly discount heat, stickiness, and dehydration if we're thinking of cycling primarily recreationally; if you're biking a /lot/ to and from, say, an office layers might be easier to do.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I was just reading the foreword in Gene Wolfe's 'Sword and Citadel' (by Ada Palmer) and going, 'this digression on theopsychology seems pretty on the nose'. (I mean there's also the Identity Weirdness and also /rampant/ misogyny in the text, which have some connection to transhumanism and -

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

... Do 54% percent of people exist in centrally air conditioned suburbs, or gentrified areas of cities, and only travel by centrally air conditioned car, and only work in centrally air conditioned offices and not at manual labor, and only stay in resorts, and don't read magazines?

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

About carbon capture in general. I've recently been a little bit spinning my wheels about my own research in nuclear, and have been a bit disheartened / discouraged by what's seemed to me less than entirely frank and engaged discussion from faculty re: engineering for responding to the climate

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Not to quote post your random response, Bsky user, but could we chat maybe because I'm an engineering trying to suss this thing out.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Which is, of course, the desire of the Christian nationalists.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It's also worth noting that while I've been chased by medical bills from deliberately obfuscatory processes from surgery from traumatic illness, or seeing specialists, /vaccination appointments/ have never caused me a single problem, really a stellar instance of one-and-done medical intervention.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I keep feeling like the 2020s is something like Cain standing up, announcing he's killed Abel, so please can he have his brother's allowance, and now Daddy has more time to pay attention to him, and help him clean up his room.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The most useful thing I've read here is a single chapter from Jean Guerrero's Hatemonger, about the racist conspiracy theories adopted by a farmer who was clearly sublimating a wide variety of traumas and moral injuries heightened by the polycrisis and slow death of the biosphere. When a lot of

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The Ken In Yellow @kenlowery.bsky.social · 24/04/2024

TikTok shouldn't be illegal but it should be illegal to show it to me

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

We’re stuck doing deep textual analysis on Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer, to discover if he said something offensive. Then the actual Secretary of Defense is gleefully picking out random Canadians and mocking them for being overweight, and it’s like “Well Trump will be Trump!”

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Definitely a purely rhetorical counter-counter, unless someone has a new spin on thermodynamics I haven't heard before - ?

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Honestly, *this* is as far as I have figured out in all my reading the essence of Right-wing politics; the bodily politics of expansion, legitimacy, and storing value through extraction. Scratch any of their historical expressions (from the 'classic' imperialism they defend by defending e.g.

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August J. Pollak @augustjpollak.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

If establishment Democrats all stopped completely--cold turkey, right now, never mentioning it again--they will have wasted a third of the last 100 days before the election fueling the sentiment that Hasan Piker is the most important issue facing the country. Actually think about that for a second.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Reliance on meritocratic professionalism to protect against fascism doesn’t work if professional social cache in the public sphere is protected via masculinist omertas,

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

God help the GOP if "Nazi infiltration of the Republican Party" ever becomes an obsessive media discourse object the same way "antisemitism on the left" has. Even the world's laziest reporter could find three of these guys on every campaign. It'll be shooting gallery.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 27/08/2026

I have come to believe the way forward on this stuff is to just relentlessly pivot and stay on message when someone asks “do you disavow X” you just twist it into e.g. “I think the american people care a lot more about the corruption in the white house, don’t you?” don’t give them an inch

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Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

It also feels like a very on-point demonstration of the fact that all kinds of things are expected of - and inflicted upon - left wing politics that even their *very* harshest critics wouldn’t dream of applying to anyone from the centre to the far right.

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

AOC just mildly disavowed "woke 1" and it sparked a weeks-long, ongoing discourse cycle about radicalism on the left. The idea that prominent Dems "disavowing" far-left figures will stop the right from talking about them is laughable.

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Louis Peitzman @louispeitzman.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Hasan Piker is simply not famous enough to normies to warrant this level of attention! He does not demand these endless statements! Nick Fuentes dined with the president and Republicans just played the “I don’t know her” game. No reason to play into this bad-faith shit.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

And, I'm sure this isn't controversial here, but this man needs to be punished and removed from public life for the effect he's had on other people, not whatever 'authentic' person he'd be if he weren't 'subjected' to oh-so-tempting incentives to be a POS.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I cannot help but thing that a bitcoin guy might benefit from studying representations of other things that are used to conceptualize, practice, and legitimize relationships between those things and other things.

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professor tools for commensality (red scare edition) @inquiline.myatproto.social · 26/08/2026

instead of making things get worse all the time, how about we make things get better? has anyone tried this?

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Like every time the political establishment starts in on anyone left of Dick Cheney with "do you support Hasan Piker" could we perhaps counterpose "does every Republican cosign Father Coughlin, Rush Limbaugh, and Nick Fuentes?"

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I Do Not Care about Hasan Piker but people will always try to use individual Leftists with bad takes or tactics to destroy the Left, there's not a level of party discipline across the entire Left that will stop that process; so maybe we shouldn't play ball, if the person in question is not e.g.

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It is frustrating trying to be an honest, considerate, hardworking person, when many signs indicate it is much more lucrative right now to be a liar and a grifter with no moral core or ethical framework for daily life. I just hope these people eventually get what they deserve.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Yes. "Rurality" is for many Americans just a costume they put on! bsky.app/profile/mike...

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

true in America, too, which is why i continue to endorse the loud embrace of cosmopolitan elitism as a counterweight.

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

And now I'm observing tons of people younger than me who did NOT grow up in the 2000s get hooked on nicotine again

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vonvalancius.bsky.social @vonvalancius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

sorry, I think actually the historically appropriate response is to free those kids, their parents, reunite them, close the facility, and Nuremberg 2 everyone responsible for the phrase "new ICE facility for children"

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

the fact that john ossoff can kick off a two-day media cycle by saying that the president is uninterested in doing his job and is sleeping through meetings and traveling around with a young blonde, suggests that not enough of these guys are speaking plainly and effectively about these assholes

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It's all a massive industry-instigated effort to pedigree AI, which academics then perpetuate because we love declaring that the latest thing c h a l l e n g e s our e p i s t e m o l o g y

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