Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Remain In Hell Without Despair

@daphnelawless.com

980 followers 260 following 12K posts

What you're saying now is what you would be saying in 1933. Accurate analysis is not despair. A renaissance woman trying to start a renaissance www.daphnelawless.com at the same username on mastodon.social

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · Nov 21

A thread of some of my Greatest Hits in political writing.

2 3 15

Reposted by Remain In Hell Without Despair

Nora Reed (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 27m

im listening to this while i do my little work tasks and realizing that we DID a cultural shift around a new technology that accelerates climate change and makes everything suck before and it's cars!!! and we should figure out what we can learn from the anti car people about killing "ai"

Cancel Me, Daddy Podcast @cancelmedaddy.bsky.social · 2d

This week we're collabing with the co-hosts of @thewaroncars.bsky.social to chat about how pro-car propaganda works, its history, and how it shows up in our politics today, especially in this year's NYC mayor's race! www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN-e...

Why Car Propaganda Is Destroying Our Cities (ft. The War on Cars Podcast)

YouTube video by Cancel Me, Daddy - Media & Politics Podcast

www.youtube.com

2 12 38

Reposted by Remain In Hell Without Despair

No Mods, No Masters @julieofthespirits.bsky.social · 55m

Every English-language article about the Nobel: "Well-deserved win by brave freedom fighter!"
Every Spanish-language article about the Nobel: "Lmao remember the time she asked Netanyahu to invade Venezuela"

1 26 60

Reposted by Remain In Hell Without Despair

strigix @sovereignbeast.bsky.social · 14d

It's pretty wild to me that investigators have uncovered that anti-trans campaigns are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry, and that the presumed motivations are pretty directly to redirect the public conversation away from climate change... and that this isn't bigger news.

Brooke @brooklynmarie.bsky.social · 15d

Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement

An investigation shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED finds that 80% of anti-trans organizations receive fossil fuel funding.

heated.world

28 2.4K 4.1K

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 4h

You familiar with a certain creep by the name of Caitlin Johnstone?

1 1

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 4h

The woman angrily defending "AI is true" is an astrologer, and I don't think this is a coincidence

Cohen is a Ghost @skullmandible.bsky.social · 8h

"even if it's AI, it's at least true" hard to overstate the damage this stuff is doing to people's brains. we're gonna be cleaning the slop out of archives for decades

1 6 9

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 18h

Yes. Read Foucault. Social workers also too.

(this is what anarchists actually believe)

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 18h

On the turnout issue: I 100% understand why the Left didn't stand a mayoral candidate. But there seems to have been no comment about the depressing effect on turnout of having no real mayoral contest to speak of. I mean, even Wayne being challenged by a cooker would have concentrated minds.

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 18h

As far as the rest of the Council goes - one of the hardest Right-wing councillors in Albany defeated by a Wayne Brown ally? Does that mean a very small Leftward or at least YIMBY-ward shift?

1 1

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 18h

As to the Waitematā councillor election, I didn't even know that Genevieve Sage was running, which wouldn't have changed my prediction of the outcome but seems to have been a terrible case of electoral self-harm for progressives

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 18h

Congratulations @cityvision.bsky.social on an excellent result in the Waitematā local board election.

I maintain that the electoral system makes a total mockery of the Albert-Eden local board election, though.

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 19h

I mean, my main gripe with disinfo research has always been the concentration on "supply" rather than "demand" (i.e. WHY do people WANT to believe fascist memes?), which leads to its only outcome being proposals for censorship and/or a return to elite gatekeeping of information

1 6

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 19h

This argument would make a lot of people I respect very angry, which is why it's worth grappling with

1 2

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 19h

Nah. The PRC leadership promoted Esperanto in the 60s and 70s because Esperantists will read literally anything in Esperanto, but it was never a grassroots thing

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 19h

I knew the inventor of Toki Pona when she was an Esperantist!

1 1

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 20h

Hate to depress everyone, but one of the reasons I dropped out of Esperanto activism is that the ethnonationalists had gotten their hooks into it

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 23h

We talk about the shitty tankies cheering on Assad, but I also remember the shitty tankies cheering on the downfall of Morsi because "oh noes Islamist"

Reposted by Remain In Hell Without Despair

your #3 source for absurdist true crime 🔨 @davidgerard.co.uk · 1d

LLM AI exists to crush labour. That's not even my surmise, the people paying billions of dollars to fund this stuff are extremely open and explicit that this is their goal.

There are no ethical use cases for LLMs at this point in time. Maybe when the bubble has popped thoroughly. Not before.

11 88 260

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 1d

I've spent a decade rejecting tankie nonsense and trying to refashion a Marxian socialism in dialogue with liberal and anarchist ideas, but the Marxists just see me as a traitor, and the libs and anarchos will never stop seeing me as a morally depraved psycho. Shouldn't have bothered.

1 1

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 1d

This is true in terms of bare facts, but "doing something about the insane ones" is rephrased as "being Life of Brian splitters, shooting at your own side". And bad faith smug libs laugh at you even harder for that.

So you might as well preserved the subculture.

Sam (ABeardedPanda) @abeardedpanda.bsky.social · Aug 29

I get the distinct feeling that within a lot of left communities the ones who are not insane are reluctant to earnestly try to do anything about the insane ones and somehow also believe this doesn't reflect poorly on them

2 1

Reposted by Remain In Hell Without Despair

Reverend Jesus "H" Christ @reverendjesus.com · 1d

Blessed are the frogs, for they keep making authoritarians look incredibly stupid

Three persons in inflatable frog costumes. One of them is holding a nicely painted sign with two little cartoon frogs holding hands, below the text "FROGS TOGETHER STRONG"

97 2.9K 13K

Reposted by Remain In Hell Without Despair

Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 1d

“The problem with billionaires isn’t that they’re hoarding money that would otherwise pay for a Scandinavian social utopia. It’s that their money has become a source of wildly distorted political power that allows a few men with extremist views to wreak havoc on the rest of us.”

Billionaires Are Hoarding Power, Not Money

Billionaire money has become a source of wildly distorted political power that allows a few men with extremist views to wreak havoc on the rest of us.

www.liberalcurrents.com

160 700 2.6K

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 1d

I honestly thought they'd give it to him out of fear

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 1d

Machado? Lol that's almost stupider than Trump would have been

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 1d

Not sure why this guy is so popular BTW. He's now trying to tell everyone that the 2026 midterms will not take place, as if trying to make up for being edgily unconcerned 4 years ago by dooming now

Remain In Hell Without Despair @daphnelawless.com · 1d

Really? What you heard from the Dirtbag Left/Edgy Commie universe was "this would be COOL and BASE if it weren't fascist chuds doint it"

Behemoth & Leviathan, LP 🎃 @harkov311.bsky.social · 2d

This genuinely was the line you heard out of the Weird Twitter/Dimes Square Expanded Universe about Jan 6th. It was insane. Student debt was a 4-alarm fire but an armed attack on the Capitol was just a bunch of rednecks getting a little rowdy

Lord Businessman II @lordbusinessman.bsky.social · 3d

I think if it took you to October 5th, 2025 to realize that maybe this 1/6/21 business was maybe a big deal I think you shouldn't be allowed to comment on politics

1 2