materobscura.bsky.social
Queer Chumash woman living on her Nation’s land in SoCal.
Indigenous, scientist, educator, advocate, liaison, crone, storyteller, artist, satirist, theosophist, moral particularist, La Marquise de Là, a warning to others, and searching for redemption.
140 posts
80 followers
151 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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I saw this headline & didn’t blink b/c we’ve crossed the Rubicon of absurdity. We live in an era where satire & policy are indistinguishable. The horror isn't the mistake of believing this headline, it’s in the plausibility. The Onion didn’t write a clever joke. They wrote a future headline. #Resist
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If they were insulated, privately funded, & openly discriminatory as a matter of doctrine, fighting them may feel like forcing a 🟡 into a 🟦. B/c they swim in public waters while trying to build private moats, they can’t pretend it’s about sacred values. It’s about power, image & structural leverage.
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MAGA is gutting programs that feed kids & keep the sick alive while Trump cosplays an authoritarian autocrat in palaces over gilded bribes from petro-states. This isn’t fiscal conservatism, it’s austerity for the poor, indulgence for the wealthy, and impunity for the powerful.
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It's a world tour of elite self-dealing wrapped in palace linens & shielded by private jets paid by the world’s most unaccountable wealth. In truth, it's The American Grifter’s Roadshow, sponsored by authoritarian opulence & glazed in oil money. Not diplomacy, but influence-peddling in a gold suit.
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It's a world tour of elite self-dealing wrapped in palace linens & shielded by private jets paid by the world’s most unaccountable wealth. In truth, it's The American Grifter’s Roadshow, sponsored by authoritarian opulence & glazed in oil money. Not diplomacy, but influence-peddling in a gold suit.
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Simulation Hypothesis Meets Grumpy Realism
If this were a sim:
❌ The resolution is weirdly high for rocks, but very low for customer service empathy.
❌ No patch notes. No admin contact.
❌ Terrible RNG: why do some people get 3 yachts and others get 3 autoimmune diseases?
Or... we're playtesters.
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Propaganda laced in nationalist sugar: “Bring jobs back! America First! Protect our own!” Then SB owners, who rely on China for base materials because no other pipeline exists, realize it's only the tech oligarchs & legacy corps who offshored everything & hedged supply chains being protected.
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It’s not even about cost-cutting. It’s about ideological purification: clearing out career scientists, public health defenders, & experts who won't bend the knee/kiss the ring. A state-sanctioned intellectual purge, w/ life & death consequences disproportionately hitting the elderly, poor, & sick. 🤢
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Firing Shira Perlmutter & Dr. Hayden, 2 of the most credentialed, principled guardians of American intellectual infrastructure, because they refused to let Elon Musk rummage through the national IP vault like it’s a clearance bin? That’s not just unethical. That’s a State-sponsored epistemic coup.
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Cinco de Mayo is a microcosm of what happens cuando una victoria anti-imperialista gets reduced to imperialist marketing. A holiday born from resistencia y soberanía, hollowed out y rebrandeado as cerveza promos, tequila shots, y fiestas sin contexto. ¡Que lo goces... pero sepas lo que gozas! ;)
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Cinco de Mayo is a microcosm of what happens cuando una victoria anti-imperialista gets reduced to imperialist marketing. A holiday born from resistencia y soberanía, hollowed out y rebrandeado as cerveza promos, tequila shots, y fiestas sin contexto. ¡Que lo goces... pero sepas lo que gozas! ;)
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Cinco de Mayo is a microcosm of what happens cuando una victoria anti-imperialista gets reduced to imperialist marketing. A holiday born from resistencia y soberanía, hollowed out y rebrandeado as cerveza promos, tequila shots, y fiestas sin contexto. ¡Que lo goces... pero sepas lo que gozas! ;)
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How does one "enlarge" a building that is build from wall-to-rock's edge, and sits on a boulder that doesn't grow by executive order? Up? Does he plan on enlarging it UP? What's he going to do? Stroke it with his double-fisted "Trump Dance" and hope it gets excited? Buffoon.
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This is just another rerun of the same script: populist economic theatre, dressed up in xenophobia and sold as patriotism. But this time, it targets the very industry that turned Reagan into a president and gave Trump The Apprentice. The irony writes itself. Buffoon :P
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How does one "enlarge" a building that is build from wall-to-rock's edge, and sits on a boulder that doesn't grow by executive order? Up? Does he plan on enlarging it UP? What's he going to do? Stroke it with his double-fisted "Trump Dance" and hope it gets excited? Buffoon.
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This is just another rerun of the same script: populist economic theatre, dressed up in xenophobia and sold as patriotism. But this time, it targets the very industry that turned Reagan into a president and gave Trump The Apprentice. The irony writes itself. :P
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This feels like LARPing a Dan Brown novel while on bath salts. Trump AI-popes himself post-Francis, Graham suggests the conclave "keep an open mind," & the Church replies: "Do not mock us." Theocratic cosplay isn't clever, it’s desecration-as-marketing.
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The fall of Rome was a series of desperate efforts to consolidate power by invoking divine right, even while moral erosion, and factional rot spread like mold. When a populist demagogue backed by militant traditionalists starts eyeing religious power for control, you’re watching an empire's death.
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RFK Jr.'s plan for a national “disease registry” to track autistic Americans is medically baseless & ethically catastrophic. It’s eugenics masquerading as science - treating neurodivergence like contagion. This echoes Nazi-era tactics of eugenic governance through surveillance and dehumanization.
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DHS never made commercials - until now. And their debut? A racist threat featuring Noem & ICE arrests for the world to see. These ads are not just dehumanizing & disgraceful - they’re state-sanctioned weaponized intimidation masquerading as policy communication aimed squarely at Latinx communities.
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I don’t support the Church, but Pope Francis was a rare Pope of the people: humble, compassionate, trying to make a brutal institution kinder. He wasn’t enough, but he was something. That still matters. He’ll be missed. I fear what comes next - especially with the Right gaining ground globally.
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The entire Abrahamic theological tradition treats suffering like currency to be traded for holiness. This form of Imitatio Christi is a physical expression of a theological idea that penitential suffering brings you closer to the divine.
The Sacred should not need your pain. It should ease it.
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Alcohol doesn't change a person's core values/personality. It's a disinhibitor. Straight men don't become gay after a six-pack, and a bottle of Jack doesn’t cause good people to start spewing hatred. If the slur is in the chamber, sobriety may keep the gun from firing, but the ammo was always there.
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Using AI to create entire publications, while insisting this doesn’t signal a shift in labor, creativity, or journalistic value? That’s not complementary use. That’s testing full automation under the guise of playful exploration. It’s also a stress test of reader trust.
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What’s happening here isn’t just bureaucratic confusion. Trump is using ambiguity & escalation to exert dominance, with DEI & antisemitism as the pretext.
Authoritarian textbook:
Gaslight timeline
Punish pushback
Frame dissent as overreaction
Re-center power
Harvard's response is clear: resist.
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What’s infuriating is how these companies manage to cloak themselves in patriotism & innovation while building tools that dehumanize populations. We're in an era of extreme patriotism as the only patriotism. Anything not supporting cishet white males in power is "woke" and "unamerican."