Kulturkampf

[Alpacx]

[DavidCroquet]

https://laurenhough.substack.com/p/who-the-fuck-is-ana-mardoll

If you are somehow unaware of Ana Mardoll, save yourself. Close this window. For the love of god, read no further. Go enjoy your not very online life that I envy. Send me a postcard.

Still here huh? Alright then. The first thing you need to know about Ana Mardoll is that Ana Mardoll is not real. I know he’s been the main character of twitter for a couple days. I know his defenders are saying he was doxxed. I know half of twitter is dunking on him because he works at War Crimes inc. But Ana Mardoll isn’t a real person. Ana Mardoll, the innocent, ever so earnest, kissmate loving, cat hoarding, twee trans boy of twitter fame is the online persona of a near-40 year old person who is a software engineer at Lockheed Martin. There is no Ana Mardoll.

Ana Mardoll, the character, has been a scourge on the internet for years now. He developed his character on tumblr and moved on to twitter where he perfected it. His craft was harassing and terrorizing authors who did what he could never do, that is, write a thing anyone would want to read. But Ana Mardoll found another way to make a name and sell his self-published books. He weaponized his carefully crafted identity and used it as a cudgel against anyone who crossed the imaginary line he made up in his head that morning.

He’d change his story about his past and his ailments and financial situation constantly. He’d post takes so outrageous—“the word ‘humane’ is insensitive to people who identify as animals”, and, “reading is ableist”—they could only be described as bait, then he’d wait for the mockery. As soon he found a large enough target, almost always a queer author, he’d attack. He never said “go harass this person until they delete their account or have to check themselves in for suicidal ideation.” Few of his followers would have rallied to the cause.

What he did instead was claim the author was attacking him, sending their thousands of followers to harass him, threaten him, misgender him. The myth of the attack followers, while absolute bullshit not supported by any evidence whatsoever because authors generally aren’t running shitstirrer accounts, was nonetheless easy to believe since it’s exactly what Ana was doing.

Because Ana Mardoll needed a lot of help. He had medical bills. He needed a 3D printer. He needed cat food (I shit you not). He needed to escape Texas and move to Chicago. He needed to qualify for a house. And his followers were glad to help. Of course they’d help.

When he wasn’t fighting, he was burnishing his identity. Just a smol twitter busker who liked gaming and cats and kissmate, his partner. Ana Mardoll is disabled and autistic and frequently ill with a smorgasbord of diagnoses. Ana Mardoll’s had it rough. His parents disowned him. Then they paid for college, then loaned him the money for college, then paid his medical bills. His parents are wealthy and supportive. But they threw him out. He grew up in a cult. He got a concussion when a pack of toilet paper fell on his head. He had a fall. And needs a new liver. And his parents got him a job at a major corporation he won’t name.

But it’s a part time job, according to Ana Mardoll. The only job he could get with his degree and 15 years of experience as a software engineer at fucking Lockheed. It’s only a part time job. But he had to take three days off work to read a book. Though he can’t read because of his many medical conditions. And he only works part time.

Boo on this article for not actually telling us who Ana Mardoll is. I was promised hot doxxxxx

[HaughtyFrank]

What really blows my mind is that she announced this on facebook not only in German but also in Turkish. Like which country is she representing here? Apparently she also has connections to right wing Turkish political movements, big surprise

[Nintex]

If you don't have a Russian or Erdogan party you're not a real European country

[Besticus Maximus]

There was a big thing in the 90s about a trans author who wrote this angelas ashes style confessional that went gangbusters, all the rubes of the era piled in, Billy Corgan is on camera talking about how amazing and powerful and special this book is. Anyway would you believe the author was a woman and it was all fiction! For some reason this was an awful crime and when it became widely known her career was basically over, to the point where I can't even remember the name of the book.

iirc there is a storyville doc about it all

[HaughtyFrank]

The self proclaimed leader of the left everyone

[boreform]

[Alpacx]

What exactly is Kash Patel's job?

[HaughtyFrank]

You think he wakes up at night and remembers he really said "See you in Vallhalla" at a press conference?

[Ribosome]

[Alpacx]

You think he wakes up at night and remembers he really said "See you in Vallhalla" at a press conference?

Not to be an Era poster, but I i think he wakes up proud of that.

[Alpacx]

Potential leader of Canada's social democrats

[Ribosome]

"Many Canadians, especially members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community"

This is the same shit the Biden administration would do.

[HaughtyFrank]

Amazing unforced error

[DavidCroquet]

First they (the mexican cartels) came for the Canadian two-spirits…

[Uncle]

many canadians are there, it's just that the 2SLGBTQIA+ canadians are more there, they have a greater spiritual presence, their existence can be measured more strongly than the other canadians who are there (who, let's face it, aren't really worth as much)

[Ribosome]

It's a popular destination for DINK open marriage circuit party gays not the rest of that alphabet soup she tweeted out.

[HaughtyFrank]

Interesting that 2S somehow got the top spot in the ever lengthening acronym. Until now every newcomer was slapped onto the back

[Alpacx]

Interesting that 2S somehow got the top spot in the ever lengthening acronym. Until now every newcomer was slapped onto the back

Not putting the fake indigenous identity invented in the 90s first would be another ongoing Canadian genocide.

[TylenolJones]

[benji]

The self proclaimed leader of the left everyone

Anti-imperialism is when you want to conquer your neighbor. And the local superpower backs you.

[HaughtyFrank]

Guy defends peeing on the subway but also retweets this

[Ethan]

Must have been awkward when he started undressing to hit the showers with the team.

[HaughtyFrank]

[Ribosome]

[boreform]

[TylenolJones]

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

[Chumbawumbafan69]

[benji]

Not going to embed it all:

Posts like this are a painful but useful case study in what we disability scholars call “carceral sanism” which is a kind of maximalist fusion of “mental health stigma” with punitive social logics. It frames visible crisis as a breach of public order, not evidence of abandonment

Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination

Carceral sanism is what happens when that hierarchy is organized around removal as the ultimate solution for “how to deal” with people dehumanized by sanism.

The underlying assumption is that people in crisis do not belong in public space and restoring normalcy requires containment, whether through policing, forced hospitalization, or displacement.

This logic is not unique to any one side of the political spectrum. On the right it shows up as hunger for sweeps, arrests, institutionalization. On liberal/left side, it’s routed through therapy speak—“this is traumatizing,” “ppl deserve to feel safe,” “something must be done.”

The rhetoric is different but the argument is actually the same. In both cases, the person in crisis is cast as a crucial problem to be managed, rather than a signal of systemic failure, and never as a human in need of compassion and grace, let alone protection or dignity

Carceral sanism does scary ideological work, training ppl to feel proximity to suffering as injury, narrowing moral attention to feelings of bystanders while absolving conditions that made scene inevitable. Once it calcifies, carceral solutions feel intuitive, or compassionate

The durability of carceral sanism has to do with how we manage insecurity. When organized abandonment is so widespread public breakdown becomes visible. Tather than confronting that, we are told to interpret disorder as failure, crisis as deviance, proximity as trauma.

A non-carceral reading doesn’t romanticize suffering or deny that seeing distress can be unsettling. It refuses to treat that discomfort as central. It asks questions: what might this person need? Why are basic bodily needs met in public? How to respond w/ provision not removal?

Basically carceral sanism persists because it is convenient, not because it is coherent. It protects the psychic innocence of spectators to structural violence and preserves the “legitimacy” of systems producing abandonment in the first place, while positing the PIC as solution

If you’d like to dig deeper into this, I was honored to have a long conversation about resisting carceral sanism with Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris at the 2023

“carceral sanism” is not an epithet or insult, it’s a term for a logic. nowhere do I claim it’s unreasonable to be upset by this. the issue is how it is framed—a woman gets turned into trauma, that's dehumanizing but takeaway is what is carceral i.e. "this shouldn't be tolerated"

Posts like this are a painful but useful case study in what we disability scholars call “carceral sanism” which is a kind of maximalist fusion of “mental health stigma” with punitive social logics. It frames visible crisis as a breach of public order, not evidence of abandonment

the carcerality is in the logic that takes us from "this is upsetting" to "this kind of person/behavior must be removed from public"—one person's distress is elevated as valid trauma while the other's distress is coded as "anti-social" deviance where the only solution is removal

it's a shift from personal reaction to normative claim "this isn't normal or OK," "we deserve functioning cities," "public displays of antisocial behavior are not tolerated" that displacement is how carceral sanism operates & organizes political energy around restoring "order"

you can want public spaces that are safe, clean, accessible—functioning public transit. the question is: if "functioning" means the removal of people in crisis so others don't have to see them, then that's a carceral answer.

cohost
@deathpanel_
| coauthor Health Communism (Verso); All Care For All People (forthcoming Haymarket) | health, debility, class struggle & the state

A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel”

In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.

Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel” podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.

Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy.

Capital, it turns out, only fears health.

This book changed the way I think about health, power, state capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and filled with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism.
Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.' Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength.
Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant have been a lifeline for many during the COVID-19 pandemic through their Death Panel podcast, deconstructing the failed American response with a knife that cuts like truth. Here, they do something even more remarkable: imagine a better future. Health Communism doesn’t tinker around the edges. It makes a direct assault on the idea that health can survive under capitalism, where the sick are simply disposable, while the system making a killing along the way. No one talks like Adler-Bolton and Vierkant do - those in public health and medicine are too deeply embedded in the status quo to even acknowledge the searing logic of their words. They stake out the far edge of what is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that horizon will make us free.
Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School

Wonder if these people have ever read anything Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, etc. said about the "surplus" who are unfit to work. Or what China said about the "surplus" number of girls that were being born.  

The root word in socialism in SOCIETY, that doesn't mean any individual gets to have their wants prioritized, it means they're subservient to what society wants. How do these people come to see socialism as a narcissist system in which everything they want is prioritized over everyone else's wishes? You literally cannot read any of the greatest socialists without them articulating mass militarized labor for the benefit of a single class over everybody else. "Those who do not work, do not eat" is in all the writings because the objection against capitalism is that some people don't have to physically labor for what they need, they can benefit from returns on capital. You're not against capital and capitalism if you want everybody to live in leisure!