Help that isn't coming
It's not like we haven't known for a long time that there was no such thing as a real opposition party in this country but it is nonetheless still kind of jarring to see the fact made plain.
Again.
"I have great respect, by the way, for what Schumer did today," Donald Trump said. "He went out and he said that they have to vote with the Republicans because it's the right thing to do. I couldn't believe what I heard, but, you know, I think he's going to get some credit for it."
I swear these elected Democrats are like the guy in the parable of the drowning man. God has sent them another somehow even more odious and villainous piece of shit for them to fight righteously against and save themselves and save us all and they're refusing to take the fucking hint. Waiting for a different kind of help that isn't coming.
I thought this was a pretty good description of where we stand from How Things Work.
Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush Jr. and Obama all to varying extents did awful things and all to varying extents are responsible for the progression of the state of our politics to this point, but they also all believed themselves to be constrained by a set of guidelines, norms, and political realities that no longer exist. Even their most immoral policies were shaped to maneuver through public opinion and economic demands and historic traditions and laws that have now, effectively, disappeared. The playbook that political veterans used to operate in that old world is a set of directions to a house party that is already over. If you show up there you will only find an empty house. The action is elsewhere now. Chuck Schumer continues to pull up in front of that empty house each morning, blinking vacantly, knocking on the door with a bottle of wine in his hand, wondering what is taking so long.
As I've been saying there are only three paths left out of this which are 1) massive and sustained country wide strikes and protests 2) international capital getting burned enough to do something or 3) a third funny thing. Which have you got your money on?
The other day in here I shared a piece by Gareth Watkins titled AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism. It perfectly encapsulated my feelings on this fucking con artist garbage.
"No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that ... is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it."
Today Watkins writes for Hell World on a related matter: The proliferation of AI-generated "deepfake" pornographic images, Melania Trump's (perhaps) well-intentioned efforts to address them, the domineering masculinity of the "traditional" conservative family structure, and the inevitability of the right using such a law to only harm their critics.
“And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”
You can guess who said that I'm sure.
This piece was originally for paid subscribers but I'm making it free to read today. Chip in anyway if you like what you read here and want to support independent media while you still can.
More from me down below on the metaphor of the week, my current favorite songs, the poem of the week, Luke's Movie Corner, the worst headlines of the week, and a quick story about using poppers.
Jeanette Winterson too?
The most gullible (or easily bought off) motherfuckers alive are really jumping the gun on having the "do androids dream?" debate for an advanced spell-checker software.
Listen I love sci-fi about whether or not robots and clones have souls or whatever. Are they capable of appreciating or creating beauty? All that shit. I'll guzzle that piss down. But the idea of any of that being relevant right now or any time soon is so fucking stupid. That's like 50,000 things down the line if we even make it there.
Does Microsoft Word mourn deleted files?
Is Ask Jeeves trapped in Hell?
Does my smart dishwasher have a soul?
No but let me ask something of the purveyors of this "AI" nonsense: Do you?
Deepfakes and the Right’s War on Women
by Gareth Watkins
The sexual psychology of right wing males is dull and predictable. Conservative parents, fathers in particular, are encouraged by the vast ecosystem of religious child-rearing manuals and their own suspicion of empathy to be strict, emotionally remote and often physically abusive. The family home is the nation-state or God’s kingdom in miniature, and the father is head of state and God’s representative on Earth. He isn’t fun, he doesn’t joke around, he won’t play dress-up, won’t have a dance party in the kitchen, and he won’t engage in any recreational activities that aren’t competitive or cruel (sports, hunting etc.) He is, as he should only be, a stern authority figure. One assisted by the mother, who acts as his executive officer. It’s important, parenting manuals say, that the mother not be too compassionate or it will turn male children “sissy.” Her role is to make sure that bruises don’t show up at school and to explain to children that their father “forgets himself sometimes” but that he “still loves you.” (He does not).
The child of conservative parents grows up seeing that their father’s power is intimately connected to cruelty. And so he must be cruel to maintain his power and he must maintain his power in order to continue to enjoy cruelty. Whether that cruelty takes the form of emotional neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse, a female figure is almost always close, able to help but unwilling. When the conservative child is an adult, he will continue the cycle. It’s hard to imagine a world without power, and harder still to exist in this one while renouncing a simple way to have one’s needs met. That could mean expecting free domestic labour from a woman maintaining a “traditional” household, or feeling powerful by hurting somebody weaker than you. The child of conservative parents has no choice but to Be A Man, and will grow to fetishize male power and cruelty while despising the entire gender that failed to protect him from it.
Compounding matters, the child of conservative parents discovers when he is older that, providing he is heterosexual, women have an incredible, visceral power over him. He despises them for their silliness, their Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Eras Tour, but he will crawl over broken glass to get their attention. If he doesn’t get their attention then the people he actually respects, other men, will think less of him, but he nonetheless must court women in a way that enforces gender hierarchies or he’ll be dismissed as a “simp.”
Enter Melania Trump. Traditionally, First Ladies launch blandly inoffensive, unobjectionable programs while their husbands handle the transfer of wealth to the already wealthy. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No, for example, or Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move. (Admittedly, Republicans did manage to find something objectionable about youth fitness coming from a Black woman.) Melania Trump’s initiative is the Take It Down Act, initially introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar after the former met with 15 year-old Elliston Berry and her mother. Berry had to wait a year for Snapchat to remove sexually explicit, AI-generated deepfakes of herself, and very understandably she would like to spare other women and girls from this ordeal.
While it sounds completely justifiable and even necessary on its face, like so many other ostensibly well-intentioned pieces of legislation it is likely that the Take It Down Act, now that it has passed the Senate, won’t just be used to tackle non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already sounded the alarm on how it can be weaponized to censor legitimate speech, calling it a “poorly drafted bill that would create a powerful system to pressure removal of internet posts, with essentially no safeguards.”
“There is nothing in the law, as written, to stop anyone—especially those with significant resources—from misusing the notice-and-takedown system to remove speech that criticizes them or that they disagree with,” the group argues.
“As they often do, the politicians and pundits pushing these Bad Internet Bills are exploiting legitimate fears and grievances, but pedaling false solutions,” Evan Greer of Fight for the Future wrote on a spate of similar bills for Hell World a while back.
Luke O’Neil
But one doesn't need to be any kind of expert on such matters to predict what this is all about. Does it seem more likely to you that ghouls like Trump and Ted Cruz are earnestly trying to help women and girls or do you suspect they're more interested in devising a means to punish their critics?
“Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law,” Trump said. “And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”
When addressing Congress, Mrs. Trump did not choose to disclose that her husband had been chosen as the mascot of the world’s biggest repository of NCII, MrDeepFakes.
Out of all the people alive or who have ever lived, out of all the things that could potentially represent your website, they chose Trump. Talk to Trump voters and it’s not hard to see why. Let us not forget the president was found liable of sexual abuse in 2023, has been accused of many acts of sexual misconduct over decades, and was elected the first time, perhaps not in spite of, but because of, being caught on tape boasting about what famous men can do to women. This time around he has appointed an unprecedented number of men with likely or proven sexual violence allegations of their own to his government. He has also pretended to pray with a megachurch pastor sentenced to a century in prison for abusing a child.
In his own life and in his political career he maintains one of the most important hierarchies of cruelty in the reactionary worldview, the supremacy of men over women. That cruelty naturally extends to people seen as insufficiently "manly" as well, especially trans and non-binary people.
The only academic study of the MrDeepFakes community, currently available in preprint here, identifies three reasons that users of the site request images of specific women. The first is nonconsensual sexual gratification, which usually involves depicting targets in extreme or racialized sexual acts. The second is an attempt to contribute to the community – “I know TONS of folks want deepfakes of [redacted]” etc. The third is expressions of power and masculinity. The paper states that “one buyer clearly expresses violent attitudes toward women, stating that the creator would get ‘bonus points’ if they can make it ‘rough’ or ‘painful,’ tying the buyer’s sexual gratification to violence against women.” Requests for deepfakes involving children aren’t uncommon in the site’s forums either, although they are technically banned, and many of the most popular videos on the site involve actresses who are known for playing teenage characters, such as Millie Bobby Brown, Kiernan Shipka and the recently deceased actress Michelle Tractenberg.
The site has hundreds of thousands of users, and undoubtedly some would class themselves as being from the political left or center. There are of course predatory men in leftist spaces, and likely many more nursing secret predilections for things that other leftists would deeply disapprove of, but you could not talk about watching AI-generated porn of Millie Bobby Brown at a DSA or Momentum meeting, or really anywhere in the political left to center. It’s fairly unlikely that you could talk about it openly at an event like CPAC, on the stage or convention floor at least. Move further right, into Groyper discords and 8chan, and nobody would bat an eye. Go further right still, into truly fringe groups, and extreme sexual violence, usually against children, is expected of members. (As an aside, there’s a possibility that one of Musk’s Doge Teens was a member of The Com, which is connected to the literal Neo-Nazi Satanist Pedophile group 764.)
In another world, the Take It Down act would be a piece of legislation that Democrats would have proposed and we would have seen the right contort itself to defend the practice of creating deepfakes and sharing revenge porn. First amendment, probably. Because it’s being proposed from the right and by the God-Emperor’s own consort it will likely go unquestioned and unacknowledged. Right wing news sources, streamers and podcasts haven’t mentioned it, and even on the MrDeepFakes forums it is barely talked about. When legislation banning deepfake porn was first mentioned in 2024, one of the site’s own staff practically welcomed the ban, saying “if [abusive deepfakes] get banned then I’ll finally be able to pursue other things in life…other creative work that I can actually show off to people and be proud of making instead of porn.”
When the Take It Down Act passes into law, which seems to be a certainty, many right wing men are going to find themselves in its crosshairs, and they’re not going to fully understand why. The right doesn’t have an intellectual culture to speak of, at least not one that does any more than, as Roger Scruton told a lecture hall full of smirking Young Tories, justify existing prejudices. That means that they can’t look clearly at how important sexual violence is to them and how this act of Congress threatens a small part of that. If they were able to see just how much deepfakes advance their agenda, hurting the people who are the source of their deep psychosexual problems, they would be a step toward understanding themselves and having some level of control over their actions.
“The cruelty is the point” has long passed into cliche, a stock reply for when anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton does basically anything. It shouldn’t be the end, but the beginning of how to think about the right. It needs to be the foundation of how we deal with them, in politics and in our personal lives. We won’t understand why something like the Take It Down Act is not a good-faith attempt to help women and girls, unless we come to grips with the depth of their moral depravity, how intrinsic sexual violence is to their worldview and how vital it is that we break the cycles that start in their deeply dysfunctional homes.
Gareth Watkins is a writer from the UK whose work has appeared in New Socialist, Tribune, The Fence, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Vulture, Commune, and MEL. He is one of the hosts of the podcast Death Sentence.
This is kind of on the nose huh? No shortage of hacky metaphors to be found in the real world of late.
Maybe this one is worse?
Here's a story that goes a long way toward explaining How Things Are Nowadays.
Shelburne police officer had YouTube video playing in cruiser at time of fatal crash, court records say
A Shelburne [Vermont] police sergeant had a YouTube video playing on a computer tablet mounted in his cruiser when he struck and killed a cyclist in South Burlington, according to documents filed in support of a felony charge against him.
Kyle Kapitanski, 41, is set to be arraigned Thursday in Chittenden County Superior criminal court in Burlington on a charge of grossly negligent operation with death resulting. Sean Hayes, 38, of Burlington, died at the scene of the crash, which took place early in the morning of Nov. 11, 2024.
...
A link to the last video was provided in the filing; it is titled, “Trans woman CONFRONTING Matt Walsh takes UNEXPECTED turn.”
There weren't many bigger evangelists for this book than me when it came out a few years ago. I used to say it helped me rediscover my voice in interviews about the first Hell World book. But then the movie came out and everyone said it sucked and so I put it off. Not wanting to spoil my experience of the book. Well I finally watched it and there is a lot to like but the thing is it just isn't funny. This kind of shit has to be funny to break up all that misery. No one wants to see that kind of bleak shit nonstop.
Definitely reinforced two of my main beliefs in life however which are 1) Don't join the Army and 2) Don't become a heroin addict.
Robbing banks I'm agnostic about.
It was the 30th anniversary of Radiohead's The Bends the other day (their first or second best album) and as everyone knows Black Star is the best song on it.
"What are we coming to? I just don't know anymore."
Despite also loving their music very much I don't think I had ever heard Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' cover of the song. My word. How beautiful.
Someone put me onto this dude the other day saying his internal rhyme schemes kind of reminded him of David Berman. That may or may not be accurate but this is Really Good Shit.
Mid-eighties in the rearview of a gold Mercedes
Midday sun make the crocodiles lazy
Money phone pocket dial, run come save me
Sweet old ladies poisoning pigeons in the park
For a lark, make mine strychnine, life is a zip line in the dark
Spare me the Hallmark Karl Marx
I was in the Dollar Tree break-room playin' cards with quarters
Stop loss posters on the wall, brick and mortar
I watched the planet from orbit, remorseless
It appears Trump administration are coming after poppers now too of all things.
Double Scorpio, an Austin-based poppers manufacturer, issued a statement on its website Thursday stating that the company had “stopped all operations following a search and seizure at our offices by the FDA.”
The reported raid comes after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer with a history of drug addiction and false claims about vaccines in particular, has erroneously suggested that poppers and other drug use, not HIV, cause AIDS. However, what led to the reported raid or whether Kennedy had any knowledge of it is unclear.
I only ever used poppers a few times in my life but I definitely remember the last time I did. It was when I slept in this goofy VEEP-themed room at the Hamilton Hotel in DC back in 2019. A buddy gave me some and a few bumps of coke and I had fun for like one hour then tossed and turned restless in bed all night miserable having to look at all this shit. Bad night!
God the kinds of stories I used to have to write as a freelancer to get by.
Regarding that let's do a real quick check in on the state of our newspapers.
Sorry but real quick question here: What the fuck are you talking about?
This shit is pissing me off so much. It's not fair. It's not fair! Others are saying bigoted shit now too!
What a fucking useless column. Baby shit. Should have just written poo poo mama mama pee pee and called it a day.
Hat tip to Leo and Poets.org for sharing this one with me.
Goodbye. Stay safe out there everyone.