many shades of disturbing

Also, "Byron Johnson" is very good

At the latest Drift party on Wednesday, I met that ultra-rare media object: a team of NYT employees who actually party party. Rachel and I (shortly after meeting to plan something fun for Deez Links’ 10-year anniversary — how’s that for some 2016 nostalgia :) tagged along with them to the Ripple Room but begged out of their 1 a.m. karaoke plans. But these NYT-ers were still going strong! The industry’s workhorses indeed.

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My go-to source for news about ICE’s foray into Minneapolis is Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, which has been reliably applying the necessary layer of internet-informed context and on-the-ground plainspokenness onto the surreality unfolding there. In a recent dispatch, Ryan expanded on how clear the connection is between the Trump administration’s show of force via and the vigilante-except-now-sanctioned “alt” right’s most violent impulses:

This weekend, I watched January 6th insurrectionist Jake Lang agitate crowds of anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis and I realized how strange it was that he wasn’t just, you know, officially part of ICE. He could certainly join them, seeing as how their standards are so low they’re accidentally hiring Slate writers. But that’s what ICE’s true purpose is — a state-sanctioned holding pen for Trump’s most violent supporters. Looking back at it, January 6th was likely Trump’s version of the Night of the Long Knives, or at least a first attempt. Just like when the ascendant Nazi party cleared out their paramilitary gangs and laid the groundwork for more official party enforcers, to too do insurrectionists and far-right militia members now have two easily-monetizable paths towards legitimacy. (That aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.) Join ICE and fuck up the libs and brutalize minorities, or film it for the internet.

I also found enlightening Jordan Salama’s New Yorker piece on a couple in California planning to self-deport, and the logistical challenges (as well as the emotional) of preparing to leave their children behind; in The Daily’s podcast interview with the Minneapolis police chief and in this NYT story about U.S. Citizens Joining the Military to Protect Undocumented Parents (by Greg Jaffe), I visualized a bleak three-way Spiderman pointing at himself meme in wondering which police element — city/state police, federal customs enforcement, or the federal military — we’re supposed to actually “rely” on as citizens now. Any ideas?

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Elsewhere in BuzzFeed News veteran news, Katie Notopoulous looked into how Heated Rivalry’s mania differs from your garden-variety internet mania, via a “sort of Cambrian explosion of a new fandom.” She talked to a USC doctoral candidate who has a focus on fanfiction, which, amazing, and it seems that the show is an embodiment of the rare monocultural-ish moment wherein disparate parts of the internet actually are coming together over the same thing (being horny on main). So that’s one way to unite the masses for mostly good.

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I didn’t totally follow Greta Rainbow’s piece, amazingly titled “Byron Johnson” for Dirt through all of its connections to One Battle After Another and the new Madeline Cash novel and the “dudebro” villains of our time, but I did just really love someone taking Bryan Johnson’s weirdo horny X screeds about his girlfriend seriously; his most recent one from last week is the most bizarre, like if someone obsessed with the “Bodies” exhibit learned about smut and then also made the interesting yet classic fanfic narrative choice to leave out the protagonist’s own embodied experience. Click only if you want to be disturbed.

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Out of my Saved folder and into your life…

• This video, amongst a few other points of evidence in my life, made me consider how much modern sociality depends on texting. Think about it: All those people “falling” in love with their AI bot aren’t doing it because the “companion” is offering them physical affection or even like, a sense of embodied company. It’s just because they’re the perfect text buddy!

• You ever see a waffle maker on turbo mode?

• Or a frog trying to leap on ice?

• I always knew those automatic car windows were dangerous…

• Between this and that viral speed-reading test, the people really yearn for academic assessment…