Today's post is ICHH's "Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting." Gare and Mia take a deep dive into what is, superficially, a comparatively minor issue—that of conspiratorial thinking on the left. They take as their jumping off point a tweet from the Gestapo featuring John Gast's "American Progress." It's an overtly fascist tweet because the artwork itself celebrates the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the text reinforces that the poster thinks that this genocide is a good thing, and also because an overtly fascist organization that is currently carrying out a genocide tweeted it. If they'd tweeted a picture of kittens, it would still be a fascist tweet, because it is a fascist organization posting on a platform owned by fascists. Nevertheless, certain segments of the extremely online left and liberals have convinced themselves that there are also secret fascist messages in the tweet.

The basic thesis of the episode is, "no, you fools, they don't need to dogwhistle anymore because they are in power and doing fascism." But there's another, even more important point here, which is that we're all still basically stuck in 2016-7 and we need to be updating both our thinking and our strategies. I feel a certain way about this because for all that I mocked it back in the day, conspiratorial thinking worked very well for the right, and I sort of disagree with Gare and Mia that it won't reach a particular type of low-information voter who likes to feel privy to exciting secret knowledge. But also, it is counterproductive and has people who might otherwise be useful and productive chasing their tails playing numerology on X, the Everything App.

At any rate, it's an interesting psychological insight and as someone who is not immune from Extremely Online Thinking, it's a useful check-in.

 I'm behind on my podcasts as usual but "AI Minstrel Shows" on It Could Happen Here aired a few days ago and was really good. Apparently there's a whole genre of AI video that I'd managed to avoid but should have guessed at. Racist buffoons on the internet now have the technology to generate completely fake Black people saying things that conform to white supremacists' ideology, which means that they can now do minstrel shows again. For free. Because AI content creators are the worst people imaginable so of course they have to do the worst things imaginable and this is one of them.

Bridget Todd does a great public service in not only making us aware of this shit but in tying it to historical uses of blackface and the ways in which punching-down "comedy" was used to create propaganda, enforce white supremacist institutional power, and transmit ideology. It's truly horrifying stuff and yet another reason to oppose the use of so-called AI in any creative space.

Just finished: Bread and Stone by Allan Weiss. This was really good, and filled a much needed niche both in Canadian historical fiction and working class historical fiction, which is to say there just aren't enough strike novels out there. The ending felt a bit abrupt—things are going downhill and William just...books it, albeit with some vague plan to continue the struggle elsewhere, but we don't really see the aftermath or what becomes of anyone else. Which is admittedly very true to life but it felt like it was either begging for a sequel or an afterword or something.

Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I have been looking forward to this and have had an advance hold on it at the library since she started posting that it was coming out. This is a big thicc chode of a book, nearly as long as it is wide, and the very sight of it (ebooks weren't available for holds so I got it in hardcover) delights me.

It begins with a wholehearted defence of Machiavelli so I kind of knew going in that Palmer's Renaissance Opinions were likely going to align a lot with my Renaissance Opinions, which admittedly are not as informed as hers but still pretty informed. From there, she takes us all on a fucking Journey, complicating the various facets of the Renaissance—chronology, geography, ideology, and so on. Humanist, in the context of the era, doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't a clear division between the Bad Middle Ages and the Glorious Renaissance the way we conceive it—that is an invention not just of Renaissance thinkers but of later historians. As dedicated to puncturing myths as Palmer is, she loves this era more than anything and interrogates it with humour and passion.

It's very hard to be doing things that aren't reading this book right now. I'll probably buy it in ebook form later so that I have a searchable version.