My piece in Jacobin published today on Peter Thiel's apocalyptic geopolitics w/ Rory Rowan (just 17 years after we agreed to write something together on the End!) jacobin.com/2025/11/pete...
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Apocalypticism and Millennialism edited by Tristan Sturm and Andrew Crome
Fresh off the press, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Apocalypticism and Millennialism edited with Andrew Crome. Filled with brilliant chapters by the world's critical experts! An exploration of how societies make sense of their Ends and their hoped for new beginnings www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbur...
This fucking madness is all too much. Forget the center will not hold, Yeats. There is no center to hold. We are spinning in a centrifuge created by a madman egged on by apocalyptic evangelicals. He is determined to leave his piss marks on a tree one last time even if it means the end of us all.
So much this. Reminds me of @mcopelov.bsky.social's dictum: “Neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party."
One must swim the Strait of Hormuz seven times, beginning and ending from Khasab, Oman. Then,while standing on the shore, one must recite Second Isaiah 45 three times while spinning counter-clockwise with arms extended. Will only work after Gulf is renamed Trump Eastern Gulf. Everyone knows this.
You know about the tulip mania in the Netherlands in the 1630s, right? That's the US since 2016, but with noxious weeds. At least tulips are pretty.
The US is now a fascist state, which is unreliable to former allies, governed by an ineffectual Congress, judged by a corrupt Supreme Court, administered by a sycophantic cabinet, and w/ significant population waiting for a magical disappearance while singing hymns to an orange-headed zombie.
One must swim the Strait of Hormuz seven times, beginning and ending from Khasab, Oman. Then,while standing on the shore, one must recite Second Isaiah 45 three times while spinning counter-clockwise with arms extended. Will only work after Gulf is renamed Trump Eastern Gulf. Everyone knows this.
The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.
Black and white sketch ink sketch of what one artist envisions of Captain Ahab of Herman Melville's great novel Moby Dick. I know what the sketch is a close-up of Ahab who is holding a long scope in both hands,. His pants are lined as is his face. He looks haggard and insane like he hasn't slept in days. Behind him in the sketch is the main mast of the Pequod in various sailing ropes and lines going to and fro.
One reason Moby Dick is one of the great novels of the Americas. In particular, the US. It is a constantly changing and yet apt metaphor.
In our time, he is Ahab, and the whale is his own psyche.
We are all on the Pequod, as prisoners and idiot crew...
"My sadness has scabbed over into rage." — Ilija Trojanow, 'The Lamentations of Zeno'
Cold War: mutually assured destruction. It worked (barely), because decision-makers were relatively sane persons.
What happens when a sociopathic narcissist hands a psychopath the keys to the most powerful military on Earth?
It's a movie trope: I may go down, but I'm taking you, all of you, w/me.
As a big fan of this work I can recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s ‘Why Read Moby Dick’. Written pre-trump, nonetheless insightful and relevant
'From Hell's heart I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!' is not, however, directed at the whale, but at all of us, his followers included, or perhaps especially.
But don't call me Ishmael. Because no deity will hear.
Black and white sketch ink sketch of what one artist envisions of Captain Ahab of Herman Melville's great novel Moby Dick. I know what the sketch is a close-up of Ahab who is holding a long scope in both hands,. His pants are lined as is his face. He looks haggard and insane like he hasn't slept in days. Behind him in the sketch is the main mast of the Pequod in various sailing ropes and lines going to and fro.
One reason Moby Dick is one of the great novels of the Americas. In particular, the US. It is a constantly changing and yet apt metaphor.
In our time, he is Ahab, and the whale is his own psyche.
We are all on the Pequod, as prisoners and idiot crew...
Cold War: mutually assured destruction. It worked (barely), because decision-makers were relatively sane persons.
What happens when a sociopathic narcissist hands a psychopath the keys to the most powerful military on Earth?
It's a movie trope: I may go down, but I'm taking you, all of you, w/me.
Everyone such watch or listen to this latest episode of The Rest is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxX5...
Their contradictory apocalyptic world view — which blends end times divine violence, a magical rapture, and a bizarre late-stage capitalism materialism — is sending the world into a paralytic frenzy.
They have a death wish for the very society that allowed them to prosper and it may kill us all.
Absent the white evangelical vote, none of this would be happening.
Once a subculture, they took over the Republican party and we are experiencing the consequences...
“I didn’t vote for THIS,” say the manosphere podcasters who simply had no way of knowing that Trump would lie about being a populist to get into office and then govern like a autocratic lunatic once in power, other than the fact that he did it for 4 entire years before that.
Tell me again about the ethical and moral high ground, you vile evangelicals who elected a sociopath who appointed a psychopath to run the Pentagon, who the sycophants in the Senate waived on ahead with nary a sound as he passed through their corridors.
So if the 'STDs were my Vietnam' and 'some people are going to die' Magaist supreme leader restarts the military draft, watch mindless Magaist millions suddenly stop their cheerleading for the Ninth Holy Crusade to bring about the mythical Armageddon.
It just keeps accelerating. The Republicsn-Magaist fascist regime is like Nicolas Cage in 'Leaving Las Vegas', and determined to take the entire country down with it in a narcissistic-self-destructive rampage. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8sp...
You got to have some R & R after lighting the fuse for WWII.
Subpoena all of it. And him, too. The FBI found this witness credible enough to interview her four times. Enough with this cover up.
He really is as detached from reality as his evil Christian evangelical acolytes like Albert Mohler, Robert Jeffress, and Franklin Graham that put him in power. Fundamentalism, like fascism, destroys everything in its path. Both have the final aim of destruction itself.
"...and military service he sees principally, indeed exclusively, in terms of a training to achieve maximum physical potential.
"For Hitler, the development of character quite explicitly has to take second place..."
- Victor Klemperer, Language of The Third Reich, Introduction, 1946
So much for Saint Augustine's just war requirements.
Boy, Tom Holland, you really nailed that one with Dominion, didn't you? (This is sarcasm.)
It is a truth not universally acknowledged, but nevertheless factually so, that without Rupert Murdoch's evil media empire, the sequence of events and personalities that have led to the current US madness would not exist at all.
