It absolutely sucks that this will be reported as "all racists are fake illusions made up by libs" and a thousand low-information conservatives will echo this forever.
The SPLC deserves qualified support against FBI harassment. But also the chuds came for ACORN ...and ACORN was fucking evil.
I've repeatedly pointed out how the SPLC collabed with the state, slurred anarchists with the "hate" label, and stole tons of leads and reporting from antifascists.
Them paying 3 million to nazis to snitch on each other rather than doing hard investigatory work would be in line with that history.
Look, you can't believe anything the government says, much less Kash Patel, but also... we all know there's a lot of grifting in the "countering violent extremism" nonprofit space and antifa's been howling about how terrible the SPLC are for decades.
www.justice.gov/opa/pr/feder...
This is important and shocking news from NYT.
And it doesn’t mention the DRC third-country deportation program has already begun. ICE sent 15 immigrants from Latin American countries there five days ago.
gillianbrockell.com/breaking-ice...
Fascinating! Folks are launching a project to use Lean to mathematically verify the security of the Signal protocol.
www.beneficialaifoundation.org/signal-shot
The Ed Dept makes a few arguments in legalese here—but put simply, they say that student debtors shouldn't even be intervening in this lawsuit because this isn't about them. And if it *is* about them, well they should have read the WSJ to know they're too powerless to fight back.
They discontinued it (because it sucks). There's a recipe online but it's critical that you understand the whole wheat bun needs to be near ezekiel bread level unprocessed hard grains and the carrots are not optional -- put at LEAST two dense cups of shredded carrots on.
And one of the biggest tell-tale signs of a slop leftist is a total unfamiliarity with anything beyond slop leftism (and the far-outgroup). Slop leftism is an ecosystem that echoes "totalllllly" at one another, where everyone feeling like there's a universally accepted platform is core to belonging.
Oh yeah, this is super canonical in today's slop leftism.
bsky.app/profile/girl...
And I want to be clear: the issue isn't individuals grabbing from diverse ideological currents or influences that are arguably mutually contradictory in ways. It's fine to chew off one argument or analysis and conjoin it with another. The problem with slop leftism is the feel-good populist dynamic.
Today one of the biggest most noxious metanarratives packed into slop leftism is the forgiveness fetishism of liberal abolitionism. The whole "any negative consequences for people is carceral" nonsense that bastardizes anarchism's "fire to the prisons." But that's just one in a sea of slop.
I suppose this is a huge part of the story of postmodernism in the 80s as a broad movement or at least the base and the broad metanarratives that so many theorists were pandering to. Buy my book I guess?
But the make up of slop leftism changes decade-by-decade.
bsky.app/profile/rech...
And -- as a consequence of this disinterest in radical grounding and focus on populist feel-good coalitions and rhetorically positioning against the far-enemy (liberals, conservatives, whatever) -- slop leftism of any era inevitably goes astray in its metanarratives while fiercely protecting them.
The issue is that slop leftism is just not particularly radical, in the sense of probing to find deep roots or grow them. A slop leftist will get excited about points or arguments that seem useful to them but will grouch that they "just want healthcare" when conflicts or deeper issues arise.
Nor does this mean that actual slop leftists can't say intelligent or correct things. I love a few breadtube creators who are unquestionably slop leftists. When they're talking about the world beyond the left and radical circles they're often mostly on point. That's slop leftism for you: often right
Slop leftism can come with a giant pile of reading recommendations and those authors can be fine, good, smart people. Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy were beloved by the slop leftists of the late 90s and I think they're swell. That someone is read by slop leftists doesn't make them slop leftists.
Whatever a given era's slop leftism is, it's saccharinely optimistic in its loose metanarrative.
We're gonna orgy fascism away!
We're gonna organic farm / localize fascism away!
We're gonna forgive and uwu transformative justice fascism away!
So like pan-leftism, there's an instinctive campism driving slop leftism, but it's more like chirpy and naive, focused on the excited feeling of solidarity and commonality -- of having found one's people -- in contrast to the baddies, with very little examination or experience with said people.
The slop leftist has a magical utopian fantasy in their head where "the left" are the angelic Good Guys and will encounter critiques of something in "the left" from the left or from more radical footing and immediately pattern match it to a conservative, reactionary centrist, or democrat blue waver.
Pan leftism is actively hostile to "sectarianism" (never mind that anarchists keep protesting that we can't be "sectarian" to non-anarchists because we're our own thing not one sect within some "the left") but slop leftism often has NO CLUE that divisions and radically different perspectives exist.
This is kinda like "pan leftism" but with less bite. Like "pan leftism" is often a very conscious and intentional project of batshit evil leninists trying to make everyone subservient to them For The Greater Movement.
Slop leftism is the "go along to get along" feel-good collage.
Today I tend to think of "slop leftism" as being best represented by Breadtube. Creators are incentivized to create broad coalitions and primarily/mass recruit from normies who are focused on defeating the far enemy and are rarely aware of internal leftist divisions or critiques.
I think it long preceded social media -- the 90s were far far far worse than today -- and at least here some slightly better discourse can evolve in the cracks.
Like "human nature is good in the absence of institutions and if everyone just fucks more we'll defeat fascism" was the slop leftism of the 60s. And folks would make gestures at Wilhelm Reich, Kropotkin, Adorno, etc, but not in any coherent or very accurate way.
Slop leftism by its nature has no deep theoretical roots or radical philosophical commitments, it's more like "these popular nice-sounding things vibe together, right?" And so necessarily what constitutes slop leftism varies by decade. Slop leftism in the 60s, 90s, or today are quite different.
We feel a lot of regular frustration at the way that nonprofit liberals identifying with the term "abolition" water down radical anarchist concepts, conjoin with christian shit, and try to make pan-leftist alliances with batshit tankies. "Slop leftism" covers this but is far more generic.
My partner and I coined the term "slop leftism" a few months back and I've been meaning to write an essay describing it because I think it's a necessary and immediately obvious term for how contradictory ideological currents in the Left often get simplified and mushed together into a populist pablum
They were beaten, tortured, and later charged under multiple criminal articles for possession of weapons, arson of cars, a traffic police building, and the State Committee of Forensic Examinations. Initially, the court sentenced them to between 18 and 20 years in prison.
❗️Anarchist partisans: 2000 days in prison in Belarus
Anarchists from the “Black Flag” group — Dmitry Dubovsky, Igor Olinevich, Sergey Romanov, and Dmitry Rezanovich — were detained on the night of October 28–29, 2020.
This stupid once-ubiquitous sandwich simultaneously serves as the worst food from
1) portland cuisine
2) anarchist cuisine
3) vegan cuisine
If you know you know.