(cache)The revolution was getting our own bank accounts, being able to own o…

Every time I see some gamerbro edit of a female video game character to make her 'prettier', I always see something I have mentally dubbed Cockroach Wife Syndrome (in honor of the guy who accidentally conditioned himself to only be aroused by a fantasy of his cockroach wife Ogtha).

That is to say, there is a certain subset of gamerbro who interacts so rarely with real women, that his primary touchstone for how women look is fiction: often video games and anime. So when a video game woman looks too realistic--too close to having traits that one might find in real flesh and blood women--this is foreign to them. This is unattractive. They have been jacking it to hentai and blender animation porn for too many years, and have inadvertently conditioned themselves to only be sexually aroused by the exaggerated cartoonish traits of animated women.

So now every time I see one such edit, I can't help but think. My. What a coincidence you've made her look more like an anime waifu. Truly dedicated to your cockroach wife.

magical-grrrl-mavis

You can’t just breeze over something like “the guy who accidentally conditioned himself to only be aroused by a fantasy of his cockroach wife Ogtha” without at least linking a 20 minute video breakdown of this man’s descent into madness.

kunosoura

Oh is Ogtha not common knowledge? Eight years ago this was posted on reddit:

Two years ago, we got this update on the life of this roachfucker:

TLDR it's a guy who became obsessed with human-sized roaches with human intelligence after reading Kafka in high school, an obsession which eventually came to monopolize his romantic interests (and has sporadically had catastrophic impacts on his life ever since).

grawly

what the fuck happened to my post

milf-adjacent

Shh... We're reading about the cockroach wife tulpa

mariacallousI've finished the two John Dickson Carr mysteries I got recently (The Corpse in the Waxworks and It Walks by Night) and I'm going to start Gladys Mitchell's Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (one of the Mrs. Bradley Mysteries)

mariacallousRebloggedonceuponawhineFollowthe actual reason men "stopped reading" (itself actually more complicated than the tweet about the headline you read would indicate) is that women started reading more, but we're not supposed to talk about that i guessparentheticalasideA very slight increase in diversity in publishing with a broadening of who receives awards and a bigger comfort among women with showing the reading they were always doing (romance has subsidized the rest of the publishing industry for decades) and so many men immediately pivoted to getting stupider and meaner. They really hate sharing.

mariacallousRebloggedmariacallousFollowokay sorry for clogging your dash with news and doom and also occasionally menmariacallous

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mariacallousReblogged mockiatohtributaryFollowi think the nazi swastika is still the modern-day nazi swastika actually

mariacallousRebloggedaint-love-heavyFollowALTView on TwitterWhere to even begin with this lmaoparentheticalasideIt was such a sad day when every other book disappeared and we were left with 23 books total and no idea how to create more. Life was bad and we cried.

mariacallousReblogged glorianasfeldfrogFollow“This is what they took from you” and it’s a blonde family cooking barbecue in the suburbs? Brother you are racist and fascist over hot dogs? You know you can still do that. Also if you befriend other ethnicities, they will bring cool other food to the potluck. Stupid ass

mariacallousOutside Sudan, the RSF also wants to be seen as a force for democracy, not as a rapacious militia engaged in ethnic cleansing. This past spring, together with allied militias, a group of RSF leaders announced plans to form a Government of Peace and Unity, and to issue passports and currency. All of these efforts evoke a lot of scorn. In Adré, Asaad Bahr Al-Din, the brother of the sultan of the Masalit, told us that although some Masalit might return to El Geneina to trade or collect belongings, few were returning for good. “There is discrimination,” he told us. “No freedom.” Perceived enemies of the RSF were still intimidated, sometimes beaten, even just for looking insufficiently sad upon hearing the news of RSF battlefield defeats. In Port Sudan, I asked the finance minister, a Darfuri himself, what he thought of the RSF’s Government of Peace and Unity, and he dismissed it immediately. “They know nothing about democracy. Actually, they have been used by others to talk about democracy.”I heard the use of the word democracy differently. Think back, again, to the decades that followed the sack of Rome. Long after the empire was too weak to exert real power, Latin remained the language of scholarship, of the Church, of universal communication. In much of the world, the terms democracy and civil society now function in the same way: They signify that the user aspires to something better—to legitimacy, to statehood. Warlords can rule by brute force for a time, but eventually they want recognition, acceptance, maybe statehood and UN membership.The path to all of those things still runs through international law, even in a world where international law is scorned, dismissed, and ignored by the countries that invented it.One day toward the end of our stay in El Geneina, we planned to leave early to travel to Zalingei, another town about 100 miles to the east, and to return the same day. The desert road between the two cities is one of the best in Darfur, which simply means that most of it is paved. Even so, the route requires a detour across a dried riverbed to avoid a bombed-out bridge, passes through more than a dozen RSF checkpoints, and runs through a region without cellphone connection and only loose RSF control. A daytime drive was said to be safe, but everyone advised us to get home before dark: Not only are there no taxes and no government regulations in Darfur, but there are also no highway police, no rescue services. No one will come help you if anything goes wrong.The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

mariacallousWe crossed over the border into Sudan near the Chadian city of Adré, a place literally built on shifting sand. Devoid of trees, grass, and water, Adré now hosts more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees. I visited its main camp—a real one, not a converted school—which looks from the outside like a fortified prison. The border itself is now a noisy no-man’s-land, crowded with transport trucks, tiny wagons, cars, pickup trucks, camels, and donkeys. If gold or weapons were wrapped in someone’s blanket or hidden beneath the seats of a van, no one would know. I encountered no customs officials or formal border posts as I crossed into Sudan from Chad, because there isn’t a proper government on the Sudanese side.The RSF maintains order in West Darfur (or does for the moment). Men with machine guns patrol the markets. Pickup trucks carrying more soldiers park in front of the dilapidated local administration buildings. But the men who control the city can’t provide much else. One might call West Darfur a libertarian paradise: There is no income tax, no government, no regulations—but also not many roads, hospitals, or schools.The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

mariacallousThe UN was slow to react to the civilian revolution in 2019. Only after an unforgivably long time, in January 2021, did the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, appoint a diplomat, Volker Perthes, to head the grandly named UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan. But after the military coup overthrew that government, Perthes told me, “we didn’t have any transition to assist.” He stayed involved, and tried to negotiate the return of the prime minister and to mediate between the two armies. But the Sudanese military accused him of partiality because he insisted on speaking to both sides, and finally declared him persona non grata.The UN’s relationship with Sudan never recovered. Guterres periodically issues declarations (“We must do more—and do more now—to help the people of Sudan out of this nightmare”), but he hasn’t been to Sudan himself. His envoy to Sudan, a former Algerian foreign minister, is widely criticized for perceived bias, because the UN, in practice, treats the SAF as the legitimate government. UN staff in Sudan repeatedly point to the bureaucratic obstacles all combatants create to hamper the distribution of aid. In a briefing to the UN Security Council, Christopher Lockyear, the head of Doctors Without Borders, said that the “delivery of humanitarian assistance in Sudan remains exceedingly and, in some cases, deliberately complex.” He also warned that both sides were using aid, and aid agencies, as a source of legitimacy. One former UN diplomat told me, more bluntly, that the Sudanese army was “using starvation as a weapon of war.”That kind of criticism comes from real frustration. But it doesn’t build warm feelings. The Sudanese army’s finance minister, Gibril Ibrahim, told me that the “international community” is largely irrelevant, and that “mainly Gulf countries” are providing help for victims of the conflict. Though this was untrue—as of last year, hundreds of millions of American dollars were still flowing to Sudan—the comment was revealing. In practice, Sudan’s leaders, on all sides of the conflict, have already turned away from the U.S., the UN, and international aid and international law, because in their world, these things mean nothing.The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

mariacallousIn the past decade, refugees have slowly disappeared from American public debate, except when they figure as unwelcome immigrants, or as fodder for far-right memes. But they have not disappeared from the world. On the contrary, their numbers are growing. The wars of the 1990s produced a steady population of about 40 million refugees and displaced people. But in 2011, the numbers began to rise. In 2024, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, at the UN, counted 123 million people around the world who were refugees, displaced, or seeking asylum.The larger numbers reflect a deeper problem. If there are more refugees because there are more conflicts, it is also the case that there are more conflicts because international consensus has weakened. In the 1990s and early 2000s, an era of multiple peacekeeping missions, the Chinese were inclined to neutrality and the Russians were interested in cooperation. Americans, together with their European allies, enjoyed a degree of power and influence over international relations that they utterly failed to appreciate at the time.That era is now over. The United States used UN resolutions to justify the invasion of Iraq, which helped delegitimize the UN and its procedures in the eyes of the rest of the world. Russia and China grew richer and more assertive. Now both of those countries and their network of allies—from Cuba to Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe—mock or undermine the language of human rights altogether. So does the MAGA wing of the American Republican Party. Meanwhile the humanitarian agencies of the UN, never models of functionality, became so “bureaucratized,” in the words of Alex Rondos, a former European Union special representative for the Horn of Africa, that officials “refused to take risks, even to prevent deaths.”The UN Security Council became contentious, then dysfunctional. Independent UN negotiators lost their backing and clout. Finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine pitted one security-council member directly against three others for the first time since the Cold War, ending, perhaps forever, any role for the UN Security Council as a serious place to debate matters of war and peace.Thanks to this shift, the UN has not launched a completely new peacekeeping mission since 2014—and even that one, to the Central African Republic, was possible, as Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International put it to me, only because it concerned a country “no major power really cared that much about, strategically.” The international negotiators and UN envoys who might have once persuaded all of the players to seek peace in Sudan have faded into the background.The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

mariacallousUntil this year, the U.S. nevertheless remained the largest donor to Sudan, not only providing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid but also supporting the logistics for UN and other aid operations inside and outside the country, and for Sudanese refugees around the world. In Sudan, the U.S. still had the clout to insist on some aid getting to both sides of the conflict, even if that meant dealing with the RSF over the objections of the SAF. “The one thing that still remained of U.S. soft power was USAID,” Perriello told me. “I do think we were mitigating the worst famine on Earth.”But that scale of support was made possible by the dedication of a previous generation, especially of older congressional members and staffers who still remembered the former U.S. role in Sudan, even if they rarely spoke to constituents about it. Now Washington is run by people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to aid policies that had bipartisan acceptance only a few years ago. In February of this year, I spoke with one USAID official who had been directly responsible for humanitarian aid to Sudanese refugees outside Sudan. She told me that although she had known that the Trump administration would make cuts, she had not anticipated the catastrophic impact of Elon Musk’s assault on USAID and other aid programs, or the new administration’s utter lack of interest in how these unplanned cuts would reverberate across Africa. At the time we talked, she had been cut off from her email and from the systems she needed to process payments, unable to communicate with people on the ground. Theoretically, emergency food supplies of the sort she managed were supposed to be preserved, but all of the support around the delivery of food and money—the contracts with trucking and security companies; the institutions that gather health statistics, anticipate famine, help farmers—had been cut, along with their personnel. This affected everybody: the UN, other charities, even grassroots groups like the Sudanese Emergency Response Rooms.I asked her how much the American contribution mattered. She started to answer, and then she started to cry. “We do so much, and it’s all being taken away, without a moment’s notice,” she said after she had recovered. “There is no transition planning. There is no handover of this assistance. The U.S. has been the largest donor to Sudan since forever, and to Sudanese refugees for so long. And it’s just a disaster.”The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

mariacallousWhat, Exactly, Is the ‘Russia Hoax’?To start with, it’s not a hoax.The AtlanticOne of Donald Trump’s tells is his talk of the “Russia hoax.” When that phrase passes his lips, it’s a sign that the president is agitated about something.In the past two weeks, for example, as questions about the administration’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein have dominated headlines, Trump has been talking often about “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, and many other hoaxes too,” as he put it in an interview with Newsmax on Friday. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, also released documents last week that her office said shed new light on this “Russia hoax.” Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly ordered a grand-jury investigation into claims that Obama-administration officials broke laws while investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.The DNI’s office doesn’t explain exactly what the “Russia hoax” is, and for good reason. First, although the phrase has achieved talismanic status in Trump world, it has no set definition, because Trump keeps changing the meaning. Second, and more important, it’s not a hoax.Keep reading

mariacallousIt’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

mariacallous"The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it."

mariacallousThe Most Nihilistic Conflict on EarthSudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.The AtlanticIn the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians. If their soldiers lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the militia’s commanders would turn their artillery on residential neighborhoods at night. On several consecutive evenings in March, we heard these attacks from Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile from the Sudanese capital.From an apartment that would in better times have been home to a middle-class Sudanese family, we would hear one explosion. Then two more. Sometimes a response, shells or gunfire from the other side. Each loud noise meant that a child had been wounded, a grandmother killed, a house destroyed.Just a few steps away from us, grocery stores, busy in the evening because of Ramadan, were selling powdered milk, imported chocolate, bags of rice. Street vendors were frying falafel in large iron skillets, then scooping the balls into paper cones. One night someone brought out folding chairs for a street concert, and music flowed through crackly speakers. The shelling began again a few hours later, probably hitting similar streets and similar grocery stores, similar falafel stands and similar street musicians a couple dozen miles away. This wasn’t merely the sound of artillery, but the sound of nihilism and anarchy, of lives disrupted, businesses ruined, universities closed, futures curtailed.Keep reading

mariacallousThe chances, unfortunately, are that further purges of the civilian professoriate await. The Russians and Chinese can only rejoice. A historical data point: The famous Kriegsakademie, the war college of the German General Staff, was overwhelmingly dominated by officers, except in subjects such as language instruction. This helped foster a belligerent and strategically obtuse military culture in the years before the First World War. Meanwhile, the greatest German military historian of the 19th and early-20th centuries, Hans Delbrück, was shunned by the German army for his insightful critiques of the General Staff’s views. It would have done far better to have hired and listened to him before the General Staff led their country to disaster in the First World War.William Francis Butler, a Victorian British general who served from the plains of Canada to the Coromandel Coast of India, was a talented commander and no less talented a writer. In his biography of that strange military genius Charles Gordon, he lamented “the idea prevalent in the minds of many persons that the soldier should be a species of man distinct from the rest of the community” who “should be purely and simply a soldier, ready to knock down upon word of command being duly given for that purpose, but knowing nothing of the business of building up.”He concluded: “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”That, unfortunately, is the direction that the Pentagon’s decisions are taking the U.S. armed forces. There is a certain kind of soldier who can be comfortable only in the company of those just like him in outlook and prejudices. As these latest directives indicate, in Hegseth’s case, that would appear to be Butler’s fools.Hegseth’s Headlong Pursuit of Academic Mediocrity: His military-education reforms seem designed to ensure fighting men can’t think and thinking men can’t fight.

mariacallousHegseth’s Headlong Pursuit of Academic MediocrityHis military-education reforms seem designed to ensure fighting men can’t think and thinking men can’t fight.The AtlanticThe Trump administration is right about many of the failures of elite universities, particularly when compared with character-oriented institutions such as the United States Army. Consider the case of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was admitted to and graduated from prestigious degree programs at top universities but resigned from the Army National Guard at the lowly rank of major. The Army, unlike Princeton and Harvard, knew a petulant, insecure mediocrity when it saw one.For whatever reason—perhaps Hegseth had a rough time in freshman calculus or was embarrassed while parsing a difficult passage of Plato—he seems determined to bar academics or anyone who faintly resembles one from contact with the armed forces. He has prohibited officers from attending the Aspen Security Forum, presided over by well-known radicals such as my former boss Condoleezza Rice. He has extended this ban to participation in think-tank events where officers might meet and even get into arguments with retired generals and admirals, not to mention former ambassadors, undersecretaries of defense, retired spies, and, worst of all, people with Ph.D.s who know foreign languages or operations research.The latest spasm of Pentagon anti-intellectualism has come in the shape of efforts to remold the military educational system. To its shame, and apparently just because Laura Loomer said it should, the Army has meekly fired Jen Easterly from her position on the faculty at West Point, even though she is a graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, a three-tour Afghan War veteran, and a bona fide cybersecurity expert. In this case, at least, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll seems to have given up on the honor part of West Point’s motto, “Duty, honor, country.”Secretary of the Navy John Phelan—whose nautical and military experience is admittedly nil—has directed his acting assistant secretary to purge 60 civilian professors from the U.S. Naval Academy, Fox News reported, and to replace them with military faculty to “promote fitness standards, maritime skills and marksmanship as essential component of the warrior ethos.” (Note: That should be components—plural—but lethal guys don’t need no grammar.) The humanities, he ordered, should be particularly targeted. The U.S. Air Force Academy is headed in the same direction.Perhaps this order results from Phelan having read too much C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian and believing that the key to naval leadership is ordering your gallant tars to back topsails, giving the enemy frigate two broadsides at point-blank range, and boarding it in the smoke with cutlass in hand. In that case, he may wish to read up on advances in naval technology and tactics since 1800.More likely, Phelan is toadying to his boss, who likes to huff and puff about warrior virtues as a way of avoiding the hard work of fixing the backlog in ship maintenance that is wearing the Navy out, or plunging deeply into the complexities of integrating missiles, cyberattacks, space reconnaissance, mines, manned aircraft, and subsurface drones in an extended campaign near Taiwan. Like other formerly respectable officials such as National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, last seen justifying with a feeble grin the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for producing inconvenient numbers, Phelan may be going along with something he knows is stupid to appease his ignorant and dyspeptic boss. Not quite warrior virtue, in that case.Keep reading