This might be old news but it's kinda wild to me.

You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)

Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left "YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism" or "One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU" style of slop. Y'know, the stuff where it's super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it's super serious marxist critique when it's actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.

Yeah, that sort of stuff. He's good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.

Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he's uncritically buying into the whole "woke ideology" narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin's #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn't handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn't really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.

In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn't faze him - doesn't matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it's kind of a weird pivot.

I think Peter Coffin's angle is pretty apparent - he's just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.

But it's still weird to me. Maybe they're proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they're all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.

But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I'm not surprised if he doesn't give a damn, doing a similar thing and he's broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It's giving Strasserist vibes tbh.

Luckily it's online and not the real world, I guess?

It's gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because "tankie redfash", only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:

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We live in interesting times.

Interesting times ahead.

I was wondering what you all see happening from this point and what sort of timeframes you think these things will play out on.

Looks like Operation Gladio C is moving ahead at a respectable pace.

Apparently it's not a human rights issue to engage in political repression by target an ethnically russian population of civilians with indiscriminate violence.

This is a war on pride.

They'll literally tell you "Happy pride!" instead of "Merry Queersmas!" because they want to destroy our traditional queer values and I am not gonna take it anymore!!

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888? The jokes write themselves.

Disclaimer: before you post anything ask yourself if you are going to dox yourself or someone else and if you are going to get anyone put on a higher priority watchlist than they're already on, yourself including. If the answer is yes, do not post it.

Some things are better talked about in an oblique way (and referencing Minecraft after the fact is about as useful in this regard as posting an image on Facebook saying that you do not consent to them using your personal information), some things are better off whispered in person, some things are better off not talked about at all. With that out the way...

What are some interesting things that you have come across? What are you surprised about not being adopted more widely?

Shits getting real and it's worth having a discussion about what can make protests more effective. I'm talking group strategy, personal tactics, protective gear - anything really.

If you ever feel hopeless, just remember that in the course of time barely longer than a few years things have gone from a situation where being critical of the system and using the term capitalism would get you derision and you'd be marked as some sort of radical communist and people would shut off to your message while hurling red scare bullshit at you.

These days everyone shits on things like capitalism and imperialism.

They even name it directly.

The best part of it is that what used to signify very specific in-group values is now so widespread that it's incredibly common to find average "I hate the system" sentiment that is framed by using terms like capitalism.

Average people do not use the term "rat race" anymore, unless they are boomers. People just call it out directly. People rarely use terms like "the 1%" unless they're turbolibs like AOC who are trying to euphemise their message to garner votes.

Out in the wild, I have trouble identifying who is genuinely based and a comrade these days because everyone is out there openly shitting on capitalism directly on the regular. It's like the irl version of queerbaiting that happens in the media except it's comradebaiting and instead of it having cynical motivations it's really, really encouraging.

This stuff is completely normalised these days. Over the course of a few short decades the mainstream discourse has gone from "Globalisation bad" to "The 1% is bad" to "Actually it's just capitalism and it plain sucks".

This isn't some ephemeral fashion trend either - this is something that has gradually gathered momentum and it's a long-standing undercurrent in society.

If this can happen with a dirty word like capitalism or socialism, where decades upon decades of red scare indoctrination can simply be swept away in a matter of years, then take heart because it means that change is possible and that it's happening in real-time. The same thing is happening with decades of post-9/11 islamaphobia - I know it's part of discourse in places like this one to use terms like inshallah, mashallah, and alhamdulillah but this is not the only pocket of the world where Arab and Muslim cultures are being embraced.

Things are changing very rapidly and there's no sign of this pace letting up.

¡Venceremos! 💪

I'm pretty partial to calling it the Model Why but I feel like name Panzer Jank is better at getting the message across verbally.

An interesting amount of geopolitical insight, in between the apologism for the Imperialist hegemon and its running dogs. I think that a popular mainstream musician openly talking about how Israel was seeking the bomb "for defense" deserves a modicum of respect.

(Although that fell entirely flat some 5 years later when Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the Ukrainian who held a Palestinian passport and decided that she had divine right to colonize the land of Palestine and beyond, threatened to use nukes in order to coerce the US into interceding on behalf of Israel to shift the tide of the Yom Kippur War. Remarkable that Joe Biden is to the right of Richard Nixon, of all people, on the matter of foreign policy, of all things. What zero countervailing force to the liberal hegemony does to a geopolitical MFer. May Gorby Rot In Piss for all of eternity for what he unleashed upon the world.)

Anyway Tom Lehrer is an interesting figure, being a bit of a renaissance man who was a popular musician in his era, a satirist, and a mathematician. It seems like he actually worked on the bomb himself.

And he is also credited with inventing the jello shot. If I didn't fact-check this myself there's not a chance that I would believe such a claim. Apparently the dude is still alive too.

(Wait, why am I historyposting in the Music comm..?)

Obviously it came out after 9/11. It feels like it came pretty hot on the heels of it, so maybe it dropped a year or two after or even less than that (at least that's what it feels like - I'm at about 50% confidence on that detail).

There was no music video accompanying it that I am aware of.

It was very Balkans-folk inspired. I think the accordion featured pretty strongly throughout the song, although that probably describes a whooole lot of Balkans music lol.

It definitely wasn't a traditional folk song. It drew upon pop music because it was fairly upbeat and high tempo. The production values were mediocre so it was probably released on an independent or small record label. It felt like it had some light punk or folk-punk influences, I think in particular the vocals but the instrumentation was definitely Balkans folk-pop.

I cannot remember a single lyric, it was not in a language I recognise and if I name any one of the Balkan languages and I get it wrong then I risk making more enemies in the region than Bill Clinton did.

I feel like the lyrics were sorta critiquing US foreign policy broadly in somewhat vague terms (think more like "and there hasn't been a single country that hasn't seen the shadow of your bombs" rather than, idk, a System Of A Down song listing specific US war crimes by name and date) and the chorus was sorta mocking in tone saying something that had the vibe of "And now on September 11 you ask 'How could this have ever happened to me'?" Obviously that is nowhere near an accurate representation of the specific wording, it's just the vague impression that I can recall.

The title of the song was not in English as far as I remember. I feel like I'd be able to say so definitively it if it was. I could have sworn that I saw at least one of those letters that was an S with the little ˇ on top of it but idk that's probably cryptomnesia filling in the gaps more than anything substantive.

This is absolutely all I can rack my brain for details on. I wish I had something more concrete than impressions and vibes and a broad geographical region to point to. If this post has left you feeling frustrated then i have an overabundance of solidarity for you because I feel exactly the same way - this has been like a recurring ulcer in my memory and it flares up every few months and I mentally poke at it and aggravate it but it only leads to more irritation rather than it ever kicking my memory into gear and producing some solid nugget of a detail that I can use as a lead.

Me, to my memory: !

Thanks!

[CW: for all the typical heavy metal health stuff]

I think this is going to be more of a vent post than anything. I'm not expecting anyone to provide me with a comment that will be a watershed moment for me.

Here's the backdrop:

I was caught in a bad long-term relationship and didn't know it.

A had a crisis of political beliefs that really shook my worldview to its foundations because what I thought I knew about things and the way that I understood and moved in the world was all through that political lens.

I had been dealing with poor mental health since forever but I reached a turning point where I finally acknowledged that I was autistic, which again shook my worldview because it was a massive shift in I thought I knew about myself and my interpersonal relationships, as well as my relationship to myself.

I got a curveball diagnosis of ADHD along the way, and one of the things that they don't tell you when you start on ADHD meds as an adult is that you can expect your relationships to others to change and that often if you have a bad relationship, ADHD meds can be the catalyst for change there. They also don't tell you if you have a significant history of trauma, especially if it hasn't been processed, that when you start ADHD meds your brain is going to find itself with a whole lot more presence and a whole lot of reserves so you're probably going to start dredging up and processing that old trauma whether you like it or not.

As I got things together and found some of the right meds, my long-term relationship deteriorated. I started to keep track of things a lot better and this helped me to realise what was really going on in the relationship.

Anyway, shit got really bad with my ex engaging in medical abuse, using the cops as leverage (e.g. physically assaulting me and then calling the cops on me) and lots of stuff like that.

I was already burnt out before she started becoming openly abusive of me. I didn't have anyone that I could fall back on for support. I was preparing to become homeless and to live out of my car, until my ex stole it. The stronger and more independent I got, the more of a threat that was to my ex and the worse the abuse got. Those who do not move do not notice their chains, and all that.

And meanwhile the ADHD meds were working pretty well but they were also making me much more prone to full-blown anxiety and I was processing old trauma while getting fresh trauma heaped on me. I needed them to be able to get my shit together but I desperately needed to not take them because for as much as they were helping me, they were also making things that much harder too.

Anyway, I get out of the situation and I start again basically from scratch. Except I have a pile of trauma to deal with, even more than before.

By this point I had been redlining it for a very long time and I was so focused on survival that my mental health went to shit. I started suffering bouts of catatonia and I had to rely on myself to figure out what was going on and to ascertain the cause of it, without knowing what it was. That took a heroic effort on my part because I was dealing with really intense suicidality, trying to work through the trauma, trying to rebuild my life, and between all of that I was getting pummeled by these periods where I was barely able to care for myself in the most basic ways. Then I had to try and scrape together whatever was left over to determine the etiology of these mysterious bouts where I was debilitated -I had to catalogue all of the symptoms and potential triggers and then I had to make a list of causes and to eliminate the easiest and most likely ones until I figured out what was happening to me.

And there was stuff that had to be dealt with in the court system and with police and other government agencies because my ex did shit behind the scenes like committing fraud in my name and stealing restricted meds (think Schedule II if you are in the US) and having to report this to the police because otherwise the risk was that my ex would have these meds with my name on the prescription and that this could possibly be used to either cause me legal trouble or that I could get my authority to be prescribed those meds rescinded because there was "evidence" of me giving them to others/selling them. I hate dealing with the cops but it was a situation where I couldn't afford to risk my access to the meds and I couldn't let my ex exploit this potential vulnerability if the theft wasn't reported immediately. So I had to compromise on my principles. Hooray! 🎉

Anyway, I determine that the most likely candidate for those debilitating bouts is catatonia and so I scrape whatever I can into researching this for myself. I had to do a medication review for myself because I suspected that some meds were aggravating the suspected catatonia because if you go to a pharmacist or doctor and request a medication review because you suspect you're catatonic they're going to look at you like you're completely unhinged.

Stuff falls into place and the catatonia hypothesis fits - it explains some anomalous responses to other meds and it has a lot of explanatory power.

I make my case to my psychiatrist but unfortunately the gold standard for diagnosing and treating catatonia is the lorazepam challenge (a benzo) and I didn't want to come off as drug-seeking so I had researched alternatives to this and had a breakthrough with treatment when I requested a different drug to use as a trial. A couple more positive responses to the drugs and taking them once when I wasn't catatonic, yielding a completely opposite response, made the catatonia diagnosable.

I get through the legal stuff. I start dealing with managing the difficult side effects from the ADHD meds through the same sorta process as above, except it required more of a self-inflicted crash course in psychopharmacology. My life becomes stable.

And since that point I've been so, so pervasively tired. I was ready to give up before any of all this shit started.

I'm dealing with immense (autistic) burnout coupled with crippling depression and it's hard because half of the advice for dealing with depression is contradicted by half of the advice for dealing with burnout and vice versa and because I just don't have the energy to do much or to make positive changes in my life, so I feel completely hamstrung.

The things that give my life meaning are hard to participate in because I am very often too tired to engage with them.

I have to swallow my outrage at the state of the world because I am mostly incapable of contributing towards change (e.g. going to rallies for Palestine.)

I almost never have the energy and focus to read and so I'm basically stuck in a holding pattern with regards to resolving my internal crisis of political beliefs until I'm able to sit down and go back over the things that I had read with a strong ideological bias.

Rebuilding interpersonal relationships is difficult because it's hard for me to be consistent at all and I just end up turning down invitations to do things because I don't have the capacity most of the time, and it's just plain hard for me on account of the fact that I'm autistic. Also it's hard because I'm exhausted and miserable, so it feels like a choice between bringing all of that to a friendship (which is a huge downer) or putting on an act to give people the impression that I'm fine (which makes me feel inauthentic and it tends to aggravate my feelings of isolation.) It's probably obvious but my trust is pretty broken too so this adds a layer of difficulty.

Rebuilding a positive sense of self is really difficult for me because my ex exploited my vulnerabilities, on account of being multiply-neurodivergent, and it's hard to feel anything but regret and resentment towards being the way that I am.

I barely have the energy to take care of my basic needs let alone to do anything else and I'm so anhedonic that even if I do have the energy to do something that I used to enjoy, I get nothing from it and then I just feel the need to grieve the loss of a thing that used to make my life enjoyable.

It's hard to find the will to persevere, especially when all of the things that could help me get well are out of reach to me and it feels like I've reached an absolute impasse.

I'm just so tired.

Truly the US is the greatest country in the world and we are blessed to live in a rules-based order

Posting this here because idk where else to post it. For legal reasons, I'm not sure what Palestinian song this happens to be a mashup of but it's weird that they mention the name George in the lyrics - what kind of a Palestinian name is George anyway? I can't think of a single Palestinian named George lol.

Anyway this song no longer exists on the internet since the original creator removed it post-October 7th. I thought I'd put it somewhere for posterity before it vanishes from the internet forever cos it's already an endangered file. Enjoy!

🟥🎏🔝