Against Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism

A friend shared a social media post to me:

Liberalism is not anti-fascist as it is coupled with an economic system (capitalism) that leads to fascism. Dems are certainly not anti-fascist as they are half of the corporate government. Liberals can become anti-fascist if they are willing to ideologically develop beyond liberalism.

For a stronger and more thorough version of that argument, I like Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime, which points to some chilling real history of capitalist “liberals” aligning with fascists which has unhappy parallels in our present moment. (Though I will eventually get to a key critique of its telling of history.)

To summarize the Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism thesis — DALA for short —

• The core of liberalism is capitalism, private ownership of the means of production. The high-minded claims of liberalism are ultimately rationalizations, evasions, or supports for the injustices emergent from capitalism.
• Fascism is also capitalism, stripped of the mitigations offered by liberalism.
• Liberalism faced with the crises inherent in the capitalist order — loss of popular support, which tends to produce a leftist challenge to the political & economic order — cultivates fascist movements as a way to secure the place of capitalism with theatre and violence.
• In those moments of crisis, liberals reliably align with fascists rather than than leftists.

I reject that analysis as dangerously confused about liberalism, about fascism, about capitalism, and about the relation between the three. This post originated as a capture & refinement of my rant-y text conversation with the friend who offered me that post, and it has grown and evolved since, because this keeps coming up.

Liberalism ≠ capitalism

To understand the problems of DALA, we have to face how broad American political discourse understands neither liberalism nor the Left.

Anyone serious about political ideas recognizes how slippery the terms “left” and “liberal” get. Each has a few distinct meanings, and each of those meanings are hard to describe crisply.

Most Americans use the term “left” and “liberal” interchangibly in a simple reduction of politics to positions on a single spectrum from very “liberal” on the left to very “conservative” on the right. While anyone with any sophistication registers the inadequacy of trying to describe all possible political positions by placing them on a single linear scale, the left-right spectrum is the best simple model available. One can distill a lot by locating different political ideologies at points on this spectrum, and in many situations it is useful to roll everything into two huge categories, which I tend to refer to as the “broad left” and “broad right”. I have a long post about using the spectrum as rigorously as possible which includes this summary diagram:

Thus unsophisticated Americans tend to think of the Democratic Party as “the left”, but less left than the “radical” left; the terms of my diagram, establishment Dems occupy the positions from the “moderate” to “hard” left.

My diagram also registers different relationships with institutional politics. In the US, this means presumptive commitments to democracy and capitalism. The Democratic Party is institutional and therefore capitalist. The radical and extreme left want profound institutional change including the overthrow of capitalism; adherents and politics nerds confusingly call those folks … the Left. The capitalization is common but not universal; I like it as a signal that one is not talking about the broad left, and sometimes further emphasize it with my idiosyncratic expression “the proper Left”. People referring to “the left” may referring to the broad left or the proper Left, which is very confusing.

(For what it’s worth, on those terms I am pretty much a radical leftist … though I find that I cannot completely let go of progressive engagement with the cut-and-thrust of politics within existing institutions.)

It is differently confusing that — unless one is on the right and either ignorant or deceitful — “leftists” does not refer to all people on the broad left, it means only people on the proper Left. Leftists use the term “liberals” or “libs” to describe people on the broad left who are not leftists — the “hard” to “moderate” range reflected in the Democratic Party, and political science types generally accept that as a legitimate usage. So:

• liberals or libs want policy victories toward greater equality, but do not want institutional change at the level that would overthrow capitalism
• leftists of the Left see such a profound need for institutional change — including the overthrow of capitalism — that they consider liberals’ attention to policy within existing institutions as practically pointless

The long post I linked above has a section further exploring this lib-leftist distinction. In this sense, DALA is correct to say “libs are committed to capitalism”, though it should already be apparent that liberalism is defined by a lot more than just capitalism.

One can also see that the things we talk about when we talk about positions on that spectrum are mostly policy questions. F’rinstance, in the US considering healthcare policy:

• the moderate left favors retaining of the existing system of private insurance, hospitals, et cetera, with government regulation and a bouquet of government programs funding some people’s medical insurance, though they may want a number of particular refinements to the system
• the left wing does not want to completely change the existing system, but does want much stronger government interventions in regulating and funding healthcare in order to deliver better care to more people
• the hard left wants significant change to the existing system, with government provisioning health insurance for everyone — perhaps by simply making everyone eligible for the existing funding system of Medicare — but not transforming everything, such that there might still be privately-owned hospitals and pharmaceutical companies et cetera
• the radical and far left rejects any privately-held healthcare institutions — hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, et cetera (though that does not necessarily mean direct state control, it could mean things like hospitals owned by their workers, or other arrangements)

Notice that this exemplifies how moving further left can imply stronger state control, but contrary to the claims of the right it is the vigor of efforts to ensure equity rather than state power which defines how far to the left one stands.

We must contrast “liberal” as the “lib” cluster of policy positions from a very different sense of “liberal”, naming an ideology of society & governance, summarized in a familiar way in the Declaration Of Independence:

all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

That is not the policy agenda of the Democratic Party! It is a complex vision of universal rights, democratic institutions, rule of law, reason, et cetera. For clarity I often refer to “liberalism” in this sense as “liberalism as in Isaiah Berlin” or “liberalism as in liberal democracy” or just “libdem” for convenience. Libdem does not contrast with ideologies addressing policy like movement conservatism, it contrasts with ideologies addressing the social & political order like feudalism; movement conservatives are (or at least pretend to be) committed to libdem.

Looking at the history of libdem raises hard questions about how well it delivers justice & equity in practice. The Declaration articulating libdem principles was hypocritically an instrument of people securing an order of brutal racist colonial exploitation. Libdem’s emergence as a challenge to monarchism in the West was deeply entangled with capitalism’s emergence as a challenge to feudalism & mercantilism in the West. The “liberal democracies” — nation-states grounded in libdem principles — have capitalist economic orders.

Leftists commonly assert that in light of that history, capitalism is at least integral to “liberalism”, if not liberalism’s true singular defining characteristic, as we see integral to the DALA analysis; that often implicitly conflates the two different senses of “liberal”, as if the cluster of policy positions and the governance ideology were just the same thing.

This is just plain wrong. Not only can we distinguish liberalism from capitalism, we must in order to understand either one. When the Declaration was written, industrial capitalism had not yet been invented. Ideological commitment to the governance order of democratic institutions, universal rights, due process of law, et cetera is orthogonal to the economic order — one can have liberal governance without capitalism and capitalism without liberal governance.

Fascism ≠ “liberalism laid bare”

When DALA takes fascism as what we get when the capitalist core of “liberalism” sheds its false pretenses, worse than misunderstanding liberalism, that misunderstands fascism. I have given the nature of fascism a lot of thought and study, and DALA is dangerously confused about the relationship between the two, offering misleading half-truths.

• Yeah, capitalism can lead to fascism … but as a stupid reaction to capitalism’s failings. Fascism is an anti-capitalism of fools with right-leaning sensibilities, not-coïncidentally paralleling how “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”.
• Yeah, democracy can lead to fascism … but as authoritarians’ praxis for undermining democracy.
• Yeah, libdem can lead to fascism … but as an expression of authoritarians’ disgust at libdem values like equality, rights, even reason.

Fascism is emphatically opposed to libdem. 20^th century fascists said so explicitly.

This gets slippery in the US because fascists lay claim to representing the essence of the nation, and libdem rhetoric is so integral to our national myths and political discourse. But one can easily see how American fascists pervert libdem rhetoric with a mix of irrationalist confusion about what words like “freedom” mean … together with deliberate bad faith lies.

Fascism ≠ capitalism

DALA also misunderstands the relationship between fascism & capitalism. Even if one misunderstands libdem as nothing other than capitalism with a thin candy coating, fascism is not capitalism’s true nature stripped of deception because fascism is not capitalist. Yes, historically fascism has found its way to power in an alliance with the owners of the means of production. But the agents of capitalism do not create fascist movements, they emerge as organic popular movements discontented with libdem and the consequences of capitalism. Fascists are confused about the “elites” that animate their rage, not pretending. The rich see fascists’ popular support and disdain for libdem institutions, then arrogantly assume that they can support fascist movements to use them as pawns who will destroy the libdem institutions which act as a brake on the rich exercising power. But history shows that fascists bloodily betray many of their rich sponsors whenever they actually seize power.

It is worth noting here that people often point to Mussolini supposedly defining fascism as support for capitalist corporations. They are wrong about Mussolini and the nature of fascism on several scores. Actual fascist regimes produce weirdly mismanaged mixed economies because fascists have no investment in capitalism and no loyalty to their rich sponsors. Fascism is defined by a fantasy of violently purging the nation of corruption; fascists assume that boring nerd stuff like economics will just sort itself out once they do.

Antifascism

Liberal antifascism

Understanding fascism and liberalism clearly demonstrates that both libdem and liberalism-as-in-the-Dems are fundamentally anti-fascist … but bad at it. That is how fascism happens. Libdem always inspires fascism as a form of opposition. Fascism gains traction when liberal policy & libdem ideology are weak: in the face of crisis, when libdem institutions break down, when the public does not understand the case for libdem. We are having a moment of reälignment in American politics, which gives MAGA fascism the opening to seize power.

The institutionalism of the Democratic Party makes them fundamentally opposed to the revolutionary transformation of society which fascism pursues, but actual Dems are bad at both kinds of liberalism, which makes them bad at anti-fascism. Libdem outside of the Democratic Party in the US is also bad at anti-fascism because it is simply weak: the long-windedness of this post emerges from how few Americans understand what libdem is at all, much less know how to fight for it.

This weakness of libdem in the US is part of why DALA imagines that liberal antifascism is a contradiction in terms and cannot recognize libdem antifascism when it does appear.

Left antifascism

DALA assumes that leftism is inherently effective antifascism and that antifascism is necessarily leftist. I would love to believe that, since I am a leftist antifascist, with leftism & antifascism entwined in my heart. But I do not share DALA’s confidence.

To explain the Left’s current weaknesses in combatting fascism I have to put my hand in the lion’s mouth and point to something which merits a much more sophisticated analysis than I can fit into this already-rambling post. We need to understand two elements of the contemporary Left: opposition to capitalism and advocacy for social justice.

Anti-capitalism ≠ antifascism

DALA casts the anti-capitalist aspect of the Left as the only legitimate ground for opposing fascism by a sort of transitive property math:

1. leftism = anti-capitalism
2. fascism = capitalism
3. liberalism = capitalism
4. therefore liberalism = fascism
5. therefore Left opposition to liberalism = opposition to fascism
6. therefore leftism is the only legitimate antifascist position

But points 2 & 3 are wrong.

I hope that the anti-capitalist aspect of leftism proves antifascist in the long view because people living in fully automated gay space communism would be too happy to turn to fascism. But we don’t have that to work with. There is no reason to think that a movement which has failed to overthrow capitalism has compelling power over fascism. Indeed, since fascists have no investment in capitalism, take protean policy positions in pursuit of power, and love to take a pseudo-populist stance for the “real” people against corrupt “elites”, leftist anti-capitalism is vulnerable to fascist appropriation and entryism.

Anti-liberal social justice ≠ antifascism

At the most fundamental level, any form of social justice advocacy is inherently antifascist, since fascism finds egalitarianism disgusting. But the dominance of the identity politics school of social justice in contemporary leftist culture complicates this. Identity politics rightly faults libdem as unable to deliver true equity — “the law in its majestic equality” — which deters alliances between leftist antifascists and libdem antifascists.

“Soft” identity politics embraces libdem commitments to equal rights et cetera as good, but considers them incomplete in creating equity and demands counterweights to those failings. “Hard” identity politics opposes libdem as nothing other than an instrument which sustains injustice, often marrying with leftist misunderstanding of libdem as nothing other than a defense of capitalist injustice. The hard school therefore hesitates to ally with libdem for any purpose … and can even cede ground to fascists in rejecting the libdem toolkit of rights, institutionalism, proceeduralism, reasoned argument, et cetera.

A popular front

All this presents a bitter irony. Up at the top of this essay, I registered how leftist antifascists argue that history shows that when the chips are down, liberals refuse to join a popular front with leftists against fascists, siding instead with the fascists against leftists. We know from the 20^th century that this can happen … and we also know from the 20^th century that it can cut the other way. The Counterpunch article I linked at the top of this post as a good articulation of the DALA argument inverts the story of how the Nazis seized power in Germany, claiming that “Social Democrat leaders [⋯] refused to form an eleventh-hour coalition with the communists against Nazism”, when even many leftists recognize in fact the leftist KPD called liberals of the SPD “social fascists” and refused to work with them. When leftists tried to take on both fascists and liberals in the Spanish Civil War, they lost catastrophically, resulting in generations of authoritarian rule.

So no, liberals (in either sense) do not need to “develop beyond” liberalism to be antifascist. Leftists who insist that they must are the ones refusing solidarity, making the exact mistake history teaches us to avoid. This is a three way fight. I think the Left must always prioritize opposing fascism as the greater threat, and certainly must set that priority now.

In this moment in the US, what do DALAs expect to gain from dismissing the possibility of liberal antifascism? Leftists are weak in the US. Do they plan to convert all of the liberals into leftists first, and then defeat fascism? The wolf is at the door.

I’m a leftist on the merits. And to fight fascism, I think the Left is the best place to stand. But I sure do want to stand with gormless Democrats in antifascism. I even want to stand with conservative antifascists. Leftists need to get our heads straight … and my sibling post against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism argues that the liberal establishment has an even greater obligation and opportunity to get over themselves and reach left.

What defines fascism?

Bret Deveraux on Bluesky makes a similar point to my own, focusing on distinguishing definitions from analysis:

Yeah, see, there’s a reason we do not define ideologies or historical movements as “a thing which happens as a result of causes X and Y” because that is assuming the conclusion. You define ideologies and movements by their ideas and principles and then ask why those emerged when and where they did.

There is certainly an argument to be made that the bourgeoisie, specifically the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ — that is, the lower middle classes — had an outsized role in the rise of the Fascist and Nazi parties, but that can’t be assumed as the definition and it raises all sorts of follow-on questions.

For instance, terming the lower middle classes an embattled ‘capitalist’ class is tricky — some of these households (small businesses, etc) were significant capital holders, but others (clerks, civil servants, etc.) were not. You can see the same interaction in the modern MAGA movement (which I would argue is fascist in nature): it sure draws a lot of true petite bourgeoisie capital holders (e.g. car dealership owners) but it also draws an awful lot of non-college white working class voters who do not hold much capital.

To be clear, I am not saying that the argument that fascism emerges out of an effort by middling capital holders to backstop their social position is wrong — there’s a good argument for this being a major factor. But you cannot assume it as a definition — it is the thing to be proved!

This is also part of why I find assertions that the CCP cannot — as a definitional matter — be fascist unpersuasive. I do not, in fact, think the CCP should be defined as fascist — while it is a revanchist authoritarian ethno-nationalist regime at present, it doesn’t check enough other boxes. That said, if [one] cannot observe, “wow, it is striking that a communist party morphed into a revanchist ethno-nationalist authoritarian regime, the thing some folks insist is definitionally its opposite” you are closing off useful avenues of analysis.

Again, I have a post considering ways of defining fascism.

One more question

Fascism aside, I ask leftists who reject not just liberal policy, not just capitalism, but also the whole libdem governance ideology of rights, rule of law, et cetera — what do you propose instead? The 20^th century does not just teach us to dread authoritarianism from the right.

Links

I’m delighted to have this post re-published on the Left Renewal blog in support of their superb manifesto for a consistently democratic and internationalist left.

Daphne Lawless’ A Vision for Radical Recomposition: Post-neoliberal and Anti-fascist Perspectives addresses some of the distinctive difficulties an leftist antifascism in this particular moment.

I think of this post as part of a matched set with my post against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism.

Treading carefully & the feminist project

I caught this Actors Being Charming trifle and I have been thinking about the bit at 0:22 where DeVito jokes about being sweet on Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992).

I watched it bracing myself a little for the moment it would turn sour.

To my eyes, it didn’t. Farrell & DeVito conspired to joke at DeVito’s expense rather than at Pfeiffer’s. I could easily be wrong when I imagine most women watching that bit and having a similarly generous read; I’m just a fella who tries to pay attention. Nor do I want to give the guys a gold star for Not Being Utterly Terrible; that is too low a bar. F’rinstance, it seems unmistakable to me that respect for Pfeiffer as an actor animates the whole exchange, but in the world we have they would have done well to name that more explicitly.

But still — I enjoyed the silly and innocent note.

In a sexist world, I imagine most women cannot enjoy it the same way, suffering a much stronger version of the dread of the joking taking a bad turn … and I expect that some women are raw enough from countless wrongs that the bit does not land as fun.

Social justice advocacy culture sometimes forgets how high a bar this sets for navigating these waters. I want us able both to admire the ways Farrell & DeVito were graceful and to examine what they might have done better. To do those in the same breath, in a generous spirit.

Anti-feminists bemoan doing any thinking about this at all. Such a bummer, can’t we just enjoy lighthearted banter? They grumble that taking care to avoid Doing Sexism blunts our ability to take pleasure in what I read those guys trying to do, and I have to grant that there is a little something to their annoyance. But they draw the exact wrong conclusion. A sterile, sexless, That’s Not Funny public sphere — in which DeVito cannot clown about how pretty Michelle Pfeiffer is — is not the goal of the feminist project. Reflection on micro-aggressions et cetera, and taking care to avoid those harms, is an instrument toward a deeper goal.

The feminist project pursues a world in which DeVito could joke safely about being sweet on Michelle Pfeiffer because women are not raw from constant harassment, from constant dehumanizing judgment about their looks, from having the substance of their work ignored, et cetera. That is a world I want to inhabit.

Regional cuisine in these United States

I have San Franciscan pride in the unique magic of the Mission burrito. But I have the good grace not to claim it is the Only Good Burrito. Tex-Mex does not appeal to my California palate but it is legit; if you think it is the best Mexican food in Los Estados Unidos, I respectfully disagree.

Texas style wet brisket is my favorite American barbecue, but Americans have the good grace to know that we are engaging in joking chauvinism when we claim that Our BBQ Is The Best. This is how we keep the Union together.

To that point, I respect New Yorkers’ smug enthusiasm for their disgusting pizza because they have that little bit of grace to claim that it is the best pizza, not the only good pizza. We are humoring you when all we do is roll our eyes over it. Take the win on having a terrific local style of “Chinese” and the best bagels and the only real pastrami.

Some time ago a colleague of mine rolled over to my desk at work and said, “Hey JK, you know about This Kind Of Thing so I hope you can help me.”

“Already I am flattered. What are you wondering?”

“I just got back from NYC and while I was there I had this pastrami sandwich …”

“Oh yeah. That’s the stuff, Brother.”

“I couldn’t believe it. This pastrami sandwich was a religious experience.”

“No lie. Nothing better in this world.”

“So where do I get that here in San Francisco?”

“Oh my Brother, I am so very sorry. Your average pastrami sandwich in San Francisco is not even going to qualify as a real pastrami sandwich. I can point you to several places where you can get a real one, and a few where you can get a good one. But that sandwich? The one you had in New York? That sandwich is not available in exchange for love or money anywhere closer than Los Angeles, and even there you have to be smart enough to go to Canter’s Deli to get it. There is nothing to be done.”

I also love the regional stuff that does not properly exist at all elsewhere. The weird, delicious toasted ravioli of St. Louis. The gross-yet-magnificent Italian beef sandwich of Chicago, which is Just Not The Same if you get it somewhere else. (Also gotta love the deep dish pizza, though I insist that the best version in the world is weirdly only found in Berkeley.)

But, uh, Cincinnati? If you are going to brag about that … stuff … fine. Call it “chili” if you want, whatever. But you have to warn people that it is a completely different dish, fergawdsake.

The state of UX design, and a job I did not take

An old colleague reminded me of a story about a job I did not take. It’s partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2010, partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2025, and partly a story about professionalism & org development.

I interviewed to become the First UXD at midsize company making niche consumer electronics which had superb industrial design capacity but did not have a UX design practice at all, and realized they needed it. It was a good org in a lot of ways. I liked the people I met. They did not understand UXD, but they mostly knew that they didn’t know.

They gave me an offer. It was Grown-Up Money, but the number was weak, rolling back the odometer on my career by a decade.

I told the hiring manager that I would not take the offer. He was unsurprised, had warned HR that the salary was inadequate, and was confident that he could get them to improve it significantly.

I said:

Look, more money in itself won’t change my mind. That number reflects a different conception of what this job is than I thought we understood. That number is low for someone to do UX design, and you need someone to pioneer a UXD practice.

He replied:

You’re right. We don’t have a commitment to go heavy on UX design. We are adding a UX designer to the team as an experiment. If that works out, we want to build a practice.

I said:

That sounds reasonable. And it is doomed to fail.

If you don’t address how UX design connects to your design & development process, you won’t get much leverage even from a great designer. With the pay you offered me, people in the org will smell on the person in that role that they are not worth listening to about the process & organizational elements of turning good UX design into actual products with good UX.

It is even worse if the person in this job manages to drive some product improvements in spite of that problem. The org will learn the wrong lesson. They will expect modest gains without org change. They will never invest organizational juice into supporting UXD properly.

This position is set up for failure. I don’t want that job, even if you pay me more to do it.

The hiring manager said:

That is very clarifying. I only half-understood that problem. I know I cannot address it from where I am sitting in the org.

I said:

You really need someone who has made it happen before, but there are all of a dozen people in the world with that on their résumé, and you’ll need a crowbar to pry them loose from where they work now, so the best move available to you is to roll the dice on investing a lot of trust in someone like me, who does not have that experience but has the skills and a fundamental understanding of the process & org challenges. But it is obvious why it is so hard to make a commitment to that. You need executive air support.

Because I like what y’all do and want to see y’all build a real UXD practice even if I don’t get to be the one to do it, I’ll offer you a bit of free consulting time. Put me in front of someone who can drive org change, and I will lay it out the case for them, like I just did for you.

The hiring manager was enthusiastic about that being the Right Thing. They said that they would communicate my offer, but predicted that leadership would not bite. I was unsurprised that I never heard from them again. I needed a new job, but I felt relieved that I had dodged a bullet.

In the 2010s, we saw a lot of orgs became enthusiastic about the importance of user experience. They hired a bunch of designers, then just sprinkled them into their organizations without changing any of the structures or processes.

My prophecy for that organization I interviewed with happened across the industry. User experience design “didn’t work”, as in the famous parable we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

The fanatical proponents of baseball tell us that it is a very exciting game, fun to play and fun to watch. They are clearly either stupid or evil or both, because we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

First of all, the requirements for the game are stupid: it does not scale. They say you need at least nine players on a side. That’s stupidly inefficient. The minimum number of players is clearly four: three men on and one batting. That’s how we played: four people on a side.

With only four players, we didn’t need all those bases ⋯

[⋯]

The thing that finally condemns the entire “baseball” idea, however is this: even with all these improvements, the game is no fun at all.

We tried baseball, and it didn’t work.

Frankly, the UX design profession bears significant responsibility as well. We have not delivered clarity about what we need or even what we do, because we lack it as a professional community. Too many of us were insufficiently skilled. Too many of us accepted doomed positions because we felt we had to.

Now we have a lot of capable UX designers leaving the profession or having trouble staying in it … and a lot of crappy products & services. A tragedy.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”?

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

I want to never lend strength to Israel apologists who disingenuously find antisemitism in anything anyone ever says and does in the name of Palestinian liberation. All people of conscience must vigorously oppose the escalating genocide in Gaza, must not settle for merely ending that horror, must support an end to countless forms of oppression for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, inside Green Line Israel, and in the diaspora. We must ground commitment to Palestinian liberation in the rightness of the cause, not make it contingent on the movement using the right slogans. We have a genocide to stop.

But I confess to weariness with people saying bad things and then brushing off criticisms by saying “who cares while there is a genocide?” I hope we would agree that saying “kill the Jews” would be unacceptable, so it is possible for slogans to matter.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is a far cry from “kill the Jews”. Most who use it mean neither more nor less than a call for Palestinian liberation. I do not fault them.

But the slogan itches at me. Rhymes make good chants, but the alchemy of combining “from the River to the Sea” with “Palestine will be free” gives this particular slogan unsavory implications which are not obvious to gentiles. We must closely examine it as rhetoric and see how that lands with Jews not because those are overwhelmingly important in themselves, but to contextualize the movement for Palestinian liberation choosing it as the slogan they promote.

From the River to the Sea

Defenders of the slogan dismiss Jews’ uneasiness with the expression “from the River to the Sea” as disingenuous, for good reasons. We have decades of both Palestinians and Israelis using “from the River to the Sea” as a call for solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis. But that usage emerges in dialogue with other history.

The phrase “from the River to the Sea” can be found in print well before the founding of Israel, used in aspirations to claim the whole territory for an ethnically homogeneous nation. Both Arabs and Zionists did this.

It also brings to mind the expression “push them into the Sea”, used — again both by Arabs and by Zionists, again dating back to even before Israel was founded — to name intent to expel people from the territory. Most Jews recognize it first from Israel hardliners who rationalize the Nakba — the genocidal expulsion of Arab Palestinians at the founding of Israel — with a claim that Palestinians fled their homes at the direction of Arab leaders who told them to flee in order to clear the way for Arab armies to “push the Jews into the Sea”. Reasonable people could once believe that story, since the founding of Israel was chaotic with conflicting accounts on all sides, but decades ago scholarship conclusively established that it is a pernicious lie, inverting how it was Israeli brutality rather than Arab hostility which sent 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes.

So saying “from the River to the Sea” is not a call to commit horrors, but it is not simply disingenuous to register that the more history one knows, the more hearing it summons such calls to mind. That does not disqualify use of the phrase in itself, but those ambiguities combine with ambiguities in the other half of the slogan ….

Palestine

“Palestine” can mean several different things —

1. The loosely-defined region extending far to the east of the Jordan River, including both what we now call Israel and Jordan (archaic, since this usage was typical of the late Ottoman Empire)
2. The current quasi-sovereign Palestinian Authority comprised of Gaza and the West Bank
3. A hypothetical truly sovereign successor to the Palestinian Authority with the same borders, no longer subject to Israeli military interference or settlements
4. The territory of British Mandate Palestine which between WWI-WWII included the whole area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, now broken into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
5. A hypothetical egalitarian unified state with equal rights for all, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority
6. A hypothetical secular Arab ethnic state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered
7. A hypothetical theocratic Muslim state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered

This ambiguity confuses many conversations about Palestinian liberation.

Naming Palestine in the same breath as “from the River to the Sea” excludes ^#1-3 … which rejects the legitimacy of a two-state resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There are good reasons to oppose a two-state resolution. I favor ^#5, a unified democracy, as ideal. But two states are a legitimate alternative one could regard as preferable on the merits … or just as more achievable.

Not only Zionists say this. The PLO publicly accepted a two-state resolution in principle back in the late 1980s. Hamas have at least nominally accepted it for about a decade; there are good reasons to doubt their sincerity, but they did say it.

It is weird to use a slogan which takes the two-state option off the table.

The slogan has room for “Palestine” to mean ^#5, ^#6, or ^#7. Most people using the slogan unmistakably intend to it to mean ^#5, the democratic, egalitarian version.

But many real advocates for Palestinian liberation demand the genocidal, undemocratic options ^#6 or ^#7. The original PLO charter called for ^#6, a secular Arab state denying citizenship to Israelis. The original Hamas charter called for ^#7, a theocracy. Plenty of people still take those positions today.

It is weird to use a slogan which excludes a two-state resolution while not excluding the displacement or genocide of Israelis.

Palestine will be free

With genocidal visions of Palestine on the table, what does “free” mean? The slogan does not say Palestinians will be free, it says that Palestine will be free. To Arab ethnic nationalists, a “free” Palestine means a state only for Arabs. To Muslim theocrats, a “free” Palestine means a state dedicated to Islam.

Plus Jews cannot help hearing a rhyme with the Nazi dream of a “Judenfrei Reich”, a Nazi slogan for the utopia they wanted to create through genocide. Will Palestine be free of Jews?

A cocktail of allusions

Again, we know that most people do not mean the expulsion of Jews when they use the slogan. But it evokes the prospect in several ways in the space of just ten words. Knowing what most people mean does not prevent feeling a sting from that.

I would say that Jews have an obligation to just handle how that spooks us, but yet more context complicates things further.

Antisemitism

Assuming universal or inherent antisemitism among Palestinians & Arabs is a racist fantasy. Contrary to what Israel hardliners claim, the movement for Palestinian liberation is not fundamentally antisemitic. Those hardliners’ use of big platforms to misrepresent any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” makes it harder for everyone to think. It tempts advocates for Palestinian liberation to dismiss all concerns about antisemitism as nothing other than Israel apologetics.

We must resist a paranoid temptation to find antisemitism in everything. We must resist naïvely dismissing antisemitism as irrelevant. Antisemitism is tricky, subtle and complex and hard even for well-informed people to think about. Most gentiles are not just poorly informed — they rarely know what they don’t know, they don’t have a sense of how complicated the territory gets.

Many people — Palestinians, Arabs, and otherwise — have antisemitism woven deeply into their thinking about Israel-Palestine. As exemplified in the subtle problems with the slogan inspiring this post, most of that antisemitism reflects ignorance or confusion rather than bigotry.

Fascists and other overt bigots often pose as “anti-Zionists” or supporters of Palestinian liberation. Sometimes they just use that pose as camouflage, to make their antisemitic propaganda sound reasonable. Sometimes they try to bend the movement for Palestinian liberation into an instrument of their efforts through entryism.

There are even Jewish cults muddying the waters with disingenuous opposition to Israel motivated by disgust that Israel is not the theocracy they dream of having.

With all that chaff and more in the air, “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is only one among a host of examples of antisemitic rhetoric Jews encounter while trying to stand for Palestinian liberation.

Social justice praxis

I cut Palestinians a lot of slack for intemperate language & ideas. One must respect Palestinians’ experience of their own oppression.

But accepting confusions and bigotries without comment plants landmines in the road to a more just future.

It is profoundly unfair that the movement for Palestinian liberation bears this extra burden of avoiding & addressing antisemitism. Worse still navigating so many bad actors working in all directions. But rising antisemitism creates an obligation which frankly the movement has not met. Too many refuse to admit any antisemitism at all.

I was prompted to finally assemble this post by people telling me, “Golly gee, there is no good reason to feel spooked by the slogan. Your grumbling is no different from white people rejecting the slogan ‘Black lives matter’. You obviously will never accept any slogan because you just oppose Palestinian liberation.”

Of course there are plenty of people who object in bad faith, but I hope I have made clear how I speak from solid support for Palestinian liberation and have substantive reasons to object to this particular slogan. It is maddening that so many people serious about social justice praxis seem to forget it when gentilesplaining to Jews about antisemitism.

How much does this matter?

In the current moment, few concerns in any domain rank with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Jews’ feelings about clumsy slogans do not remotely make the cut. Support for Palestinian liberation rests on justice, not on the conduct of the movement. We must avoid tone policing which says, “Golly, I would support the cause if you were nicer about it.”

But we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and this slogan connects to the broad relationship between Jews and the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Jews do not bear a special obligation to speak out about Israel-Palestine but we do have an opportunity in our voices bringing a different weight than gentiles’. But the more vigorously we support the cause, the more we encounter its large & small manifestations of antisemitism. We feel raw. It throws grit in the gears. The slogan is one more damm thing, doing antisemitism even when innocent of bigotry or malice.

The point, at last

It’s not about Jews’ feelings, or the reasons for Jews’ feelings. But one cannot understand what is important without having that background. Here’s the real thing:

The leaders of the movement study the history of the conflict. Many of them do know all of this context. They have heard these objections before, from other supporters of the cause. They know how this particular slogan lands differently with Jews than with gentiles.

Why do they encourage people to use this slogan despite that?

Indeed, they have plenty of other slogans. But we hear this one a lot. So they prefer it. Why? I find it hard to resist the conclusion that they choose this slogan because of the reaction Jews have to it.

At best, that choice is antisemitically callous toward Jews, a signal that those leaders do not want our support.

At worst, it maliciously uses dogwhistles which gentiles do not register to provoke Jews into seeming unreasonable, compounded by them gaslighting us by saying “don’t center your feelings, you have no good reason for them”.

With so much nonsense which the movement cannot control, I cannot imagine a charitable explanation for them embracing this heartache.

I will continue to grit my teeth and accept the slogan among countless other microagressions from the movement. I encourage Jews who feel as I do to do the same. The cause is more important than our feelings.

But solidarity does not require that I pretend not to see a problem.

Wouldn’t it be better if the movement did Jewish allies the kindness of abandoning this slogan for any of the countless better alternatives?

FREE PALESTINE

PALESTINIAN LIBERATION NOW

Arizona Public Service killed my mother

This has now grown beyond what a post can or should hold, so it has its own website:

APSKilledMyMom.com

Andor

Andor : Star Wars
   ::
The Wire : cop shows
   ::
Deadwood : Westerns

It uses Star Wars as a setting to talk seriously about how authoritarian governments actually work, and how to actually fight them, without getting hung up on any historical or contextual specifics. And like those other series, it as well-crafted and entertaining as it is serious. And of course now timely.

Nemik’s Manifesto

Of course it’s my favorite thing. I am very fond of this little adaptation with some very graceful allusions to Star Wars at large.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And …

Remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

A wise internet acquaintance says of it [spoilers]:

I’m sort of a cruel cynic because while that monologue is genuinely stirring, I can’t help but remember the incredibly cynical beat where the idealistic little “read theory!” guy writing his manifesto is literally crushed to death by money (the real power of a rebellion) after achieving very little. Like yes, the monologue is great, but Andor is also cold enough to recognize that what sparks the rebellion after decades of Imperial oppression, is a theft of cold hard cash deliberately conducted to provoke reprisal, not just stirring words alone.

Despite being someone sentimental about the stirring words, I agree. It’s part of what I love about Nemik’s story and Andor more broadly. The series insists that revolution against authoritarianism is no one thing. It warns of the danger of resting the movement on any one thing. Some moves just won’t pay off.

I assume that Star Wars lore will eventually succumb to making Nemik’s Manifesto the rallying cry of the Rebellion. But at least as of today, while we just have Season One, Andor is wise enough to hint that Cassian Andor — Nemik’s “ideal reader” — is the only person who read it and no, the Manifesto didn’t radicalize Cassian Andor.

At first.

By itself.

But even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

A hero

Rescuing a thread from the Bad Place which explains why I caught feelings from a glimpse of a tiny little street sign in the background at the 15-second mark in the first proper trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I will never, ever locate and re-read Marvel Two-In-One Annual ^#7 because I want my memory of it from when I was twelve to remain pristine, because when I think of a hero, I think of that comic and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing.

In the comic, this big blue zillion-year-old alien guy The Champion comes to Earth. He loves to box and travels the Cosmos challenging people to boxing matches. So when he arrives at Earth, of course he teleports a bunch of Marvel superheroes to his boxing gym.

The heroes are like, dude, we are not getting into the ring with you for your entertainment. The Champion is like, I am not asking, I am telling. Defeat me in a boxing match or my spaceship will blow up the Earth. So it’s superheroes vs. The Champion for all the marbles.

Cut to a huge stadium. The boxing match will be simulcast on all the TV channels.

One by one, The Champion squares off against various brawny superheroes. They get quickly dispatched or disqualified. The Hulk cannot keep his composure and obey Queensbury rules. Thor refuses to put down Mjolnir. Wonder Man probably just got KO’d with one punch because he’s such a doof. I do not recall all of the details.

The important thing is that the last hero left is The Thing.

The Champion soliloquizes: Woe is me, I have traveled from one end of the Universe to the other seeking a worthy challenge, but I am just too good at boxing.

The Thing asks do ya plan to win the fight by boring me to death?

Fans of The Thing know what time it is. But alas, it is immediately apparent that it is not The Champion who will get clobbered. The Thing is outmatched!

Ding. The first round ends and The Thing staggers back to his corner. The Champion soliloquizes some more about how sad he is that his might is peerless. The Thing tells the Champion I’m just gettin’ warmed up.

Ding. Round two. The Thing keeps taking a pounding. The Champion brags that the fight is a foregone conclusion. The Thing says my Aunt Petunia throws a better punch than you.

Ding. The round ends. The Thing is bleeding. The Thing. Bleeding. Twelve-year-old Me was very not okay with this. I had seen him take hits from wrecking balls, kaiju, howitzers, lasers, and what have you … and just dust himself off. This is scary.

As The Thing catches his breath in the corner, the Fantastic Four are there. Reed is like, don’t do this to yourself, Ben. The Thing is all, sorry Egghead but ya know I am just too dumb ta know how ta quit.

Ding. Round three. The Champion continues to mock The Thing while beating the tar out of him. He moans once again I have been denied the glory of a real fight. The Thing tells him I’m from Yancy Street so I know more about a real fight than you ever will.

The Champion lands a punch on The Thing which lays him out on the canvas. People in the stadium and around the world gasp. The ref starts counting.

Just as the count is about to run out, The Thing stands back up and puts up his fists, of course. But he looks bad.

The Champion mocks him some more. Why get up? You are bleeding and your ribs are broken and you can barely stand, Loser. I’m not even winded. It’s over.

The Thing says: The deal here is that when the fight ends the world ends, right?

The Champion says: Yeah, that’s the forfeit since you are such a loser.

The Thing says: Then I’m gonna keep gettin’ up, no matter how many times ya knock me down.

Ding. The fight is back on. But the Champion lowers his fists.

The Thing is all are we gonna fight or what?

The Champion tells him: No. The fight is over. Sure, I could knock you out, eventually. But you will not be defeated, will you? Not really. Not ever. I travelled billions of light-years seeking a worthy opponent and never even knew what one was.

Superheroes are silly. That story is silly. And of course that story is in no way original. It’s older than the written word. But I first got it in the form of The Thing.

I got teary retelling it.

So it was good seeing a little sign announcing “Yancy St”. I know a hero from that neighborhood.

Israel’s “right to exist”

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Many commentators allude to the question of “Israel’s right to exist”. Noah Berlatsky calls shenanigans on that turn of phrase in his post The Right To A State And State’s Rights:

Only individuals can have rights. Nationalist projects, however, are addicted to claiming rights for themselves.

Just so. His post lays out the ugly implications in asserting that nations have “rights”, not least in apologetics for the Confederacy and Jim Crow in US history.

That said, most people addressing Israel’s “right to exist” are not really engaging with any such theory. People generally reject IRTE in response to Israel hardliners referencing IRTE to rationalize wrongs Israel has committed. People generally defend IRTE in response to the common and ultimately antisemitic suggestion that Israel is a uniquely (or at least extraordinarily) illegitimate nation-state.

As Penitent observes:

The reason that people keep asking “does Israel have a right to exist” is that until fairly recently the line from much of the Arab world was a resounding “No! DEATH TO ISRAEL!”

It’s basically maneuvering around what is seen as a historical rhetorical dogwhistle.

That’s a context that many people don’t have, of course, so it ends up looking like a weird rhetorical quibble — but it’s not really a position of abstract principle but a very visceral & concrete question of “is there any circumstance where you would accept Israel existing if its conduct changed?”

Attacks on Israel’s legitimacy are not a fantasy of Israel hardliners. The original PLO charter in 1964 — three years before Israel’s occupation of Gaza & the West Bank — asserts:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate [which includes all of Israel], is an indivisible territorial unit.

[⋯]

The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

[⋯]

The liberation of Palestine [⋯] will safeguard the country’s religious sanctuaries and guarantee freedom of worship and of visit to all, without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion.

Most of the 2½ million Jews in Israel in 1964 had no other home — they were refugees from the Shoah, refugees from other states in MENA, Zionists who moved between WWI & WWII, and their descendants born in Israel. That charter sought to deny them citizenship in the Arab state of Palestine which the PLO wanted to displace Israel to create.

The PLO went on to recognize Israel’s legitimacy three decades later, demonstrating that one can both stand for Palestinian liberation and accept that the state of Israel has fundamental legitimacy. But not all advocates for Palestinian liberation have done the same; implicit (or even explicit) rejection of Israel’s legitimacy remains common, carrying with that the suggestion that one wants to see the displacement of Jewish Israelis. Asserting Israel’s “right to exist” is a bad way to respond, but it does address a real point in contention.

I avoid the expression “Israel’s right to exist”. I recommend that others do the same. We must talk about Israel-Palestine as crisply as possible. But I find it a lot more forgivable than many rhetorcial moves people make in this space which have bad unintended implications. And I embrace the extremely modest defense of Israel which it tries to offer:

• I reject claims that a state has a “right” to exist while seeing millions of Israelis who have never known another home as cause for recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I reject the Westphalian order of nation-states as the right way to structure geopolitics while accepting it as the reality of the world we have now, which compels recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I consider Israel’s government illegitimate because of their longstanding apartheid policies and current genocidal attack on Gaza, while distinguishing that from my recognition of the state of Israel as legitimate.
• I consider a single democratic state of Palestine vastly preferrable to the liberal Zionist dream of a soft-ethnonationalist Israel — more just, committed to inviting immigration by diaspora Jews, recognizing a truly sovereign neighbor state of Palestine in Gaza & the West bank — and even consider that liberal Zionism unworkable, while still counting liberal Zionism as a respectable position out of recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.

Starship Troopers

In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.

Yes it is fashy

One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a delicious satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.

But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.

In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars.

According to Dubois, the teacher of the required History And Moral Philosophy class taught in high school (who speaks in Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece Voice), their political order emerged after ruthless brownshirts arrogated power to themselves to replace decadant liberal democratic governance, in an echo of the history of You Know What:

⋯ With national governments in collapse at the end of the XX^th century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi, especially the P.O.W. foul-up — and they knew how to fight. But it wasn't revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917 — the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.

The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first — they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice in a generation or two.

Dubois explicitly rejects our political order of universal human rights when he talks about the prior order, the world of the 20^th century:

But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights’. The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature [⋯] And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture [⋯] a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ … and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

The novel’s protagonist embraces the fascist reading of the world as an arena of endless violent competition between peoples, devoid of any other moral considerations.

Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics — you name it — is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is — not what do gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.

The universe will let us know — later — whether or not Man has any “right” to expand through it.

In basic training, Seargent Zim tells recruits that they have neither the obligation nor the right to refuse immoral orders:

It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how — or why — he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people — “older and wiser heads,” as they say — supply the control. Which is as it should be. That’s the best answer I can give you. If it doesn’t satisfy you, I’ll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can’t convince you — then go home and be a civilian!

These are fascist principles & dreams. Considering them plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.

David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.

But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.

Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird

Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.

Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20^th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.

Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.

Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.

What I read RAH trying to do

The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.

The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:

• Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
• The military must accept all volunteers
• People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise

I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).

Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:

1. Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
2. Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
3. People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
4. Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.

But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.

Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.

I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.

Heinlein’s good heart and shortsightedness enabled this bad idea

If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20^th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work.

But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry, and expressed mortifying opposition to civil rights policy. An instructive taste of that last echoes the logics offered by DuBois and others in Troopers:

To a man of humane instincts there is a great temptation to be uncritically all-out on the Negroes’ side, to support him in anything he asks for. We are aware that the poor bastard starts out with two strikes against him; we feel a strong inclination to want to give him a break. Such have been my feelings — and are my feelings — and such, I gather the impression, are your feelings, too.

But, damn it, more harm is done by uncritical do-goodism than by almost anything else. I find myself opposed to most of the current civil rights drive on several different levels—while painfully aware that to be opposed is to invite identification with the faceless murderers who bombed that church and killed those little girls. It is tempting to be publicly pro everything the Negro wants just to be sure that one is not mistaken for a KuKluxer.

But I am still opposed to most of what they are demanding. On one level, it is no favor at all to the Negro to invite him to think that he can become the equal of the white man in money, in social prestige, in education, or in anything else where he is clearly not equal, simply by passing a law or laws. The result is bound to disappoint him and leave him still more bitter. (For the depth of that bitterness and the hopelessness of it, on both sides, try James Baldwin’s Another Country — Baldwin hates us as intently as any Black Muslim.)

⋯

(However, I do not recommend patience to the Negro of South Africa. He outnumbers his white neighbors about four to one, or more. His proper solution is to arise some dark night and cut the throats of his white oppressor—which they richly deserve. But I don’t intend to help him with the job; it is his job. Freedom is never bestowed; it is earned.

(Which—and not “incidentally”—is the reason the American Negro is not yet free: He hasn’t earned it yet. The simple route of throatcutting is not open to him. But he won’t get it by shoving the white man around in any fashion; he’ll just get us sore at him—and we outnumber him something dreadful. He must either do it the hard way, by commanding our respect— which he doesn’t have yet—or emigrate to Liberia.)

⋯

“Rights” have no existence other than in the society in which they are found. They exist in the societal structure, as law or custom or belief (frequently all three); they are constructs of a particular society, rules inside the group for the behavior of individuals toward each other; they are agreed-on procedures only and have no existence other than in the minds of men who practice them.

The full letter I drew from there offers familiar libertarian crap about the right to private property & free association meaning that golly, we cannot actually do anything about the massive injustices of pre-Civil-Rights-Act America. It suggests that he might not have registered a racist version of the Troopers political order as unjust.

And on the other hand, he’s ready to applaud a bloody end to South African apartheid when most white Americans gave it no thought at all. Civil rights legislation as a bridge too far while also embracing violent revolution connects to the weird moral framework around violence offered in Troopers.

Heinlein’s unimaginative blindspots well-marbled with fecund imaginativeness suggest to me that he would have objected to a racist version of the Troopers world, but the possibility just did not occur to him.

Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being should have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically helped hobble his imagination.

These kinds of mistakes are why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.

I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. He probably would have voted for GWB in 2004 as the “lesser evil” had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump. But as he said to describe his mouthpiece character Jubal Harshaw, “he had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American”.

I think Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.

The skeptical, satirical Heinlein

Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.

Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.

Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.

There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose. Here, see what you think:

I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid.

Implication: troopers are hypnotized before every drop.

each of them is mentally competent to take the oath and that neither one is under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, other disabling drugs, nor of hypnosis.

Implication: hypnosis can coerce agreement.

I understand, with each of them under orders and hypnotic compulsion to suicide if necessary to avoid capture.

Implication: hypnosis can coerce people to act directly opposite to their will.

I wasn’t in good shape at the time you enrolled. I was seeing my hypnotherapist pretty regularly — you never suspected that, did you? — but we had gotten no farther than a clear recognition that I was enormously dissatisfied.

Implication: Rico’s father was convinced to serve through hypnosis.

That linked post describes that reading to reject it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate how counter-readings are very available.

That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….

How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?

Having argued that depicting the world of Troopers does not mean that Heinlein thought it was a good society, we still have to grapple with him considering it a plausible society, which depends on invoking a lot of fashy ideas.

Dubois mocking the decadent failure of 20^th century liberal democracy as a result, in part, of failing to beat children:

Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

[⋯]

Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

[⋯]

the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’

Disgusting. For the recored, research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book.

Earlier I quoted Dubois rejecting universal human rights. In the context of the novel, it connects directly to the point above:

“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’

“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.“

[⋯]

Librety is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes.

[⋯]

“⋯ There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenille criminal there are always one or more adult dilinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.

“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Repellant.

And yet.

In that same passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:

⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.

[⋯]

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Later, in the version of History And Moral Philsoopshy class taught to military officer candidates, the instructor expects students to do this.

Very well, is one prisoner, unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war? [⋯] This is an exact science. You have made a mathematical statement; you must give proof. [⋯] Bring to class tomorrow a written proof, in symbolic logic ⋯

Oh, really?

This science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals is asserted by propagandists for the state. In moments like that — as when Heinlein gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher recruiting revolutionaries on the Moon, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it, asking us:

”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”

I sure do not. And I suspect that Heinlein was not confident in them, either.

Bad and complicated

So. I want to embrace a nuanced reading of Heinlein’s relationship with the world of Troopers without brushing off problems with Heinlein’s thinking by calling him “complicated”.

Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.

And complicated.

Feral Historian and civic virtue

Added in September 2025, together with some refinements of the post above

The Feral Historian is a videoessayist who talks about the political implications of science fiction worldbuilding. He has a liberarian-ish sensibility which bubbles up in stuff like using the word “statist”, but he is neither stupid nor a crypto-fascist. I think of him as the not-evil-but-contrasting twin to left-ish Damien Walter (who suggests that in Verhoeven’s film at least, the destruction of Buenos Aires was a false flag) and I enjoy and recommend checking out both of their commentaries.

Feral has a wry videoessay The Federations: It’s The Same Picture which asks whether the worlds of Troopers and Star Trek are really all that different. I think they are different, or at least should be if we are doing Trek correctly, but it’s exactly the kind of playful, astringent challenge which I talk about admiring from Heinlein at his best.

I want to look closely at his videoessay Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point, which raises some points worth digging into. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but here’s most of his punchline at the end:

1. It’s asking us to consider that maybe voting — exercising political force — isn’t a right but a responsibility that should be earned by demonstrating in some way that it won’t be squandered or used to the deriment of society as a whole.
2. This is illustrated perhaps most directly in the History And Moral Philosophy course that officer candidate Rico must attend late in the book. Unlike the public school version of it earlier, he must pass to the instructor’s satisfaction. [quoting the novel]: “If he gave you a downcheck, a board sat on you [⋯] deciding whether to give you extra instruction … or just kick you out and let you be a civilian.”
3. Simply giving a few years of your life to the public good isn’t the point; it’s about molding responsible citizens. The whole thing is a civics course wrapped in an enlistment …
4. … to make most people not bother, the uncommitted drop out, and the stubborn but genuinely unfit fail.
5. It’s a process of tempering the politically active class to be worthy of the power they wield based on an understanding that people exercising that power without the commensurate responsibility and restraint brings slow ruin to their society.
6. Instead of saying that citizens must be infused with virtue if the republic is to endure, Starship Troopers asks “what if only virtuous people can become citizens?” [⋯] Exercising the power of the state is a responsibility that must be earned, not a right that one simply acquires thanks to an accident of birth. It’s a story that says voting is not about having a voice but about directing state force. While today disenfranching people is seen as a grave injustice, the book shows us a world that views enfranchisement as a grave responsibility and filters its people to determine who will have that power and who will not.
7. The overall point is that a healthy republic requires its citizens to have civic virtue. The book uses military service as the mechanism for presenting people with a choice […] It doesn’t have to be military service per se, but the mechanism requires that the choice be one that has a significant short-term downside commensurate with the power they receive on the other end.

There’s a lot going on in there.

Where does Feral think the society of Troopers locates civic virtue?

As I hope is clear from my original post, I agree with his read that the novel is, among other things, a thought experiment in how one can guarantee that an electorate has the necessary civic virtue to govern well. But there’s an ambiguity in how Feral describes the world of the novel doing that.

Feral titled his piece “service isn’t the point” and points 2, 3, and 5 suggest that he reads the society in the book believing that citizenship requires not just a process for identifying people with civic virtue, but a process which creates virtue in citizens.

But in points 4, 6, and 7, Feral suggests that Heinlein thought the choice to serve was a filter which demostrated the civic virtue of willingness to commit to the common good which the book’s society considers necessary for responsible citizenship.

Either way, Feral says in 7 that “it doesn’t have to be military service per se” that performs this function. But he underlines how the society presented in the book does require specifically military service.

I got a friendly note from Feral about this post, saying that this ambiguity reflects him seeing both things in play:

Whether one chooses to look at [service cultivating civic virtue] primarily as a mechanism of ideological conformity or just social stability is certainly open to personal interpretation.

I suspect that Heinlein would say that same … but I think the text of the novel clearly answers what the society it depicts thinks about these questions.

How the society in Troopers thinks about civic virtue

Before getting into where that society grounds the virtue necessary for voters, I’ll note again how their society is also interested in civic virtue short of what people need to vote responsibly. It talks about the virtue required to participate responsibly in society at all, holding that without beating children, society cannot be healthy.

Fashy.

I think the book offers clear answers to the ambiguities in Feral’s read. Their society grounds the necessary virtue for a voter not in the process of service, but in passing the test of choosing to serve. And they believe that only military service provides an adequate test.

The need to choose service

Consider this from Dubois, naming the need to identify people with the necessary virtue to vote rather than cultivate them:

“The unlimited democracies [of the twentieth century] were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority [⋯] No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.”

Dubois explicitly names this as “civic virtue” in another segment from that lecture which made its way almost directly into the film adaptation:

Suddenly, he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”

“The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”

“The exact words of the book,” he said scornfully. “But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”

When Rico takes his second History And Moral Philosophy course as an officer candidate — the only classroom experience from officer training described in the novel — his instructor Major Reid underlines the importance of choice over cultivation:

“Young man, can you restore my eyesight?”

“Sir? Why, no, sir!”

“You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue — social responsibility — into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is why we make it so hard to enroll, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination — devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues — which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. ⋯”

The specific necessity of military service

Reid walks through the many “failures” of history demonstrating that only military service provides an effective test:

“⋯ Throughout history men have labored to place the sovereign franchise in hands that would guard it well and use it wisely, for the benefit of all. An early attempt was absolute monarchy, passionately defended as the ‘divine right of kings.’

“Sometimes attempts were made to select a wise monarch, rather man leave it up to God ⋯

“Historic examples range from absolute monarch to utter anarch; mankind has tried thousands of ways and many more have been proposed, some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title The Republic. But the intent has always been moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government.

“All systems seek to achieve this by limiting franchise to those who are believed to have the wisdom to use it justly. I repeat ‘all systems’; even the so-called ‘unlimited democracies’ excluded from franchise not less than one quarter of their populations by age, birth, poll tax, criminal record, or other.”

[⋯]

“The sovereign franchise has been bestowed by all sorts of rules — place of birth, family of birth, race, sex, property, education, age, religion, et cetera. All these systems worked and none of them well. All were regarded as tyrannical by many, all eventually collapsed or were overthrown.

“Now here are we with still another system … and our system works quite well. Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb. Why? Not because our voters are smarter than other people; we’ve disposed of that argument. ⋯

[⋯]

“⋯ So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? We have had enough guesses; I’ll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

“And that is the one practical difference.

“He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.”

Fashy.

Implied virtues

I’m grateful to Feral Historian for pointing me back to the officer candidates’ version of the History And Moral Philosophy class, because it clarified a point that the society in Troopers finds choosing military service a necessary test for a voter, but not a sufficient test.

As Feral points out, instructors in that class can not just flunk a soldier out of the class; if the soldier does badly enough the trainers will “kick you out and let you be a civilian”, losing the franchise.

In basic training, we get an episode in which a recruit strikes the company commander, foolishly talks himself into a hasty court-martial, and — denied legal counsel — he narrowly escapes hanging to be sentenced to “ten lashes and a Bad Conduct Discharge”. This inherits from military justice, and there are obvious reasons to consider those systems necessary. But they carry an extra weight when a dishonorable discharge denies a person’s vote.

So apropos of my point above about it not occurring to Heinlein how this system could easily maintain racist aparteid or other inequities in access to the franchise — since voters who survived military service could run the military unjustly to maintain a majority which supports that injustice — we see again how volunteering for military service is not in fact sufficent to become a voter. One must survive service. While in service one must demonstrate both obedience and ideological alignment with the regime.

Fashy.

One demand

I have ambivalence about the memory of the breathlessness of the Occupy movement, but A Message From Occupied Wall Street (Day Five) still moves me:

Note: Our use of the one demand is a rhetorical device. This is NOT an official list of demands. Click Here to learn more about how you can participate in the democratic process of choosing the “one demand”.

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This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

On September 21^st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent.

Ending capital punishment is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more wealth than half of the country's population.

Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.

Ending police intimidation is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.

Ending corporate censorship is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.

Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.

Ending political corruption is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work.

Ending joblessness is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty.

Ending poverty is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance.

Ending health-profiteering is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countries.

Ending American imperialism is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America was at war with the world.

Ending war is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we stood in solidarity with Madrid, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Portland and Chicago. Soon we will stand with Phoenix, Montreal, Cleveland and Atlanta. We're still here. We are growing. We intend to stay until we see movements toward real change in our country and the world.

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, the people will speak. Join us.

We speak as one. All of our decisions, from our choice to march on Wall Street to our decision to continue occupying Liberty Square, were decided through a consensus based process by the group, for the group.

Comic book physics

A fragment I created thinking about worldbuilding for a superhero TTRPG setting. The rough idea was to identify every power as using a type of energy, so that characters using a particular type of energy would have advantages in dealing with other manifeststions of it.

Mundane

0. Pure
1. Kinetic
2. Heat–cold
3. Electromagnetic
4. Gravitational
5. Sonic
6. Light
7. Nuclear

Magic

0. Pure
1. Fey
2. Wild
3. Celestial
4. Arcane
5. Soul
6. Love
7. Black

Cosmic

0. Pure
1. Warp
2. Primordial
3. Quark
4. Dimensional
5. Ether
6. Negative
7. Void

Life

0. Pure
1. Animal
2. Plant
3. Microbial
4. Psychic
5. Evolutionary
6. Gaia
7. Death

Mushroom

Putting a little internet classic here for my convenience:

personsonable
me holding a gun to a mushroom:
tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom:
can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face:
I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

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miaislying
Hey OP? What the FUCK does this mean?

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personsonable
decay exists as an extant form of life

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miaislying
That’s a terrifying answer, have a nice day
#philosophy #mushrooms #you cannot kill me in a way that matters #perspective