Digital Manticore

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope the news is not making you completely insane this week (but that may be asking too much). I, personally, am crashing out about it (keep reading to learn more lol).

Before getting into the heavy stuff, might I once again recommend you join me on chess.com (website or app!)? I’ve been learning to play chess with my friend Lacy and we are gradually recruiting more people to play with us. It’s actually a lot of fun. Playing chess on my phone has the added benefit of keeping me from scrolling social media too much. Why scroll when I could be improving my chess game? You can add me as a friend! My user name is linzmatic.

Current Events

I’ve recently witnessed a rash of online commentary on various accounts to the tune of “I liked you before you got political!” Leaving aside that comments like this betray an utter lack of literacy when they appear as, say, responses to an environmental activist drag queen (how in the world could this be read as apolitical?), there is no action on this earth that is not political. If you think you’re “not political,” this is a sign that your politics completely align with the status quo. The status quo, too, is political, but it has been rendered invisible to many. As Ursula Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” That is to say, choosing to not engage with politics is a way of ignoring the inescapable-seeming nature of the status quo. It is easier to close one’s eyes and tune out.

Unfortunately for all of us, the world’s wealthiest assholes are political beings. They are spending their time and immense resources on manipulating the world in ways that support their political goals. That’s not necessarily news, but the Department of Justice’s recent publication of another set of the “Epstein files” has furnished receipts that suggest all manner of political manipulation, far beyond the normal rich people activity of simply donating money to politicians. While the files do give us a lot more information, before we continue I must note that we have known Epstein was trash for a long time. However, to reckon with that, our culture would have to take women’s accounts of abuse seriously and we don’t really do that here.

Journalists and researchers are starting to piece together information based on the latest releases. One of the most succinct and damning pieces I’ve read so far about Epstein and friends’ political manipulation comes from a recent edition of Garbage Day titled Here’s how Epstein broke the internet. Epstein seems to have convinced Christopher Poole, the founder of internet hellsite 4chan to have a board for political discussion. This may sound harmless, but 4chan has long been the patient zero for basically all of the worst things that worm their way into the wider internet (for example, Gamergate, probably all of the incel subculture, and Q Anon). It’s truly not an exaggeration to say that 4chan is the backbone of the worst of internet culture. Hearing that Epstein may have been involved in stoking the anger of disaffected young men online is completely wild and, indeed, very bad news.

Not to sound too conspiracy-brained myself, but let us reflect on the fact that the conspiracy theory of Q Anon arose from 4chan, on the very portion of the forum that Epstein convinced Poole to keep. In case you forgot about this, Q Anon is, per the BBC, a “completely unfounded” theory that “President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.” We know Trump is the king of projecting; he loves to attribute his own wrongdoing to his opponents, like when he sued Hillary Clinton, “accusing them of trying to rig the 2016 US presidential election by linking his campaign to Russia.” Yet, we have evidence that the Trump campaign interacted with Russia in an attempt to swing the election. So it does feel plausible to me that he might be in league with political operatives that would seed a conspiracy theory that the Clintons and the Democrats are committing depraved sex crimes to create cover for his own depraved sex crimes. We spent the last ten years like “man, these people sound nuts! There’s no pedophile sex ring being run out of a D.C. pizza parlor!” But, uh, “Buried in all the email correspondence was a detail complicating the cultural archaeology of Pizzagate: The word pizza appeared 911 times as of February 2, though 60 references have since been removed.” That Vanity Fair article quotes a Reddit user who says “QAnon was an op to hide this shit in plain sight and make anyone who said anything about it sound like a lunatic.” and I’m frankly inclined to agree at this point.

Of course, Epstein’s activity was not limited to manipulating sad boys on the internet. The newly released files allegedly (everything here is alleged; don’t sue me) connect Epstein to huge number of influential people, to the point that I’m wondering how much of our culture was not created or influenced by sex offenders of the worst order. Wired has a rundown of some of the tech elites apparently involved with Epstein (not merely mentioned in the documents) including Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Peter Thiel (creator of PayPal and Palantir), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (creators of Google), and Reid Hoffman (founder of cursed website LinkedIn, among other things). Beyond technology, noted linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky is involved in some way and, in one of his messages, he stated that there is a “hysteria that has developed about abuse of women.” Ah, yes, we’re hysterical about the fact that “Nearly 1 in 3 women … have experienced partner or sexual violence during their lifetime.” Matt Groening, the man behind The Simpsons, took a ride on Epstein’s private plane and got a massage of his “crusty” feet. New-age author and University of California professor Deepak Chopra has a number of sickening exchanges with Epstein on the record. Famed author of Harry Potter Joanne Rowling also seems to be entangled in some way. There’s also Jay-Z in there and even Stephen fucking Hawking is one the record as participating in an “underage orgy” on the island (though the Hawking news came out some years ago now). This is to say nothing of the many politicians mentioned in the documents.

Beyond the obvious horrors of the abuse Epstein and everyone else involved allegedly carried out, I am stuck on the idea that so much of our culture has been created and maintained by the most depraved people on the planet. Epstein and everyone in his network are just one cultural node (albeit one that is apparently very large and powerful); we see powerful cultural icons outed as sexual assaulters all the time. Just last year Sean Combs (aka Diddy) was tried for sex trafficking and more. In my neck of the cultural woods, Neil Gaiman was accused of awful sexual misconduct and Joss Whedon has been outed as a creep, for just two examples of this happening in nerd culture. This shit is happening constantly. Stories help us figure out what kind of people we want to be and these are people telling stories that we incorporate into our sense of who we are. And yet, so many of our stories are coming from people who have so little regard for people—women, in particular. How has building our sense of self on the cultural output of these people affected how we see ourselves? Each other? What stories might we be telling instead if all the world’s rapists, sexual menaces, traffickers, and various sickos (derogatory) were not so heavily involved in creating the narrative of who we are as a society? Who might we be if our biggest cultural influences came from people who respected the autonomy of others?

Coming back around, I would also like to know if anyone has checked in on Q Anon lately? You would think that this would be a big moment for them! After all, these people believed so hard in the Democrats, and the Clintons specifically, being baby-eating Statan-worshippers that some of them attacked the capitol building on January 6 in a failed coup attempt. However, The New York Times is reporting that “much of QAnon’s response to Washington’s Epstein excitement has been strangely muted, even dismayed,” which would be kind of funny if it wasn’t actually completely depressing. Unfortunately, as Mike Rothschild, the author of the book on the Q Anon cult notes, people who believe this will not change their minds when presented with new evidence that contradicts their narrative that Trump will save us from the cabal of baby-eaters, noting “They just sweep it away. There’s nothing Trump can do that will lose these people’s loyalty. Whatever his involvement is, they just pretend it’s not there.”

Part of the problem with getting these true believers to admit that their hero could be part of the pedophile sex cult that they’re so opposed to is that they are unwilling to cancel (if you will) their own guy. That’s why we see so many right-wingers online yelling at the rest of us “and what will you do if the CLINTONS are in there!!??” Man, I don’t fucking care if the Clintons are in there! If someone is committing atrocities, they are dead to me. That’s all I need to know to not support them. I will not support a rapist, sexual assaulter, pedophile, or baby-eater (Satan-worshippers I’m okay with though. They’re not hurting anyone). If that person was someone I looked up to or whose work I loved before I knew of their misdeeds? Well, I’ll be sad for what we lost and mad for being duped, but they’re gone. To me, this is the bare fucking minimum: don’t rape people. If we can’t stop engaging with and spending money on the cultural output of rapists, how can we expect them to stop? I can’t personally force them to face consequences but you can believe I’m never going to watch another episode of The Simpsons or buy a Neil Gaiman book again. I know this doesn’t hurt their bottom line very much but maybe if I tell my friends and they tell their friends, then a few people will join me and something will happen. If there aren’t legal consequences for doing literally the worst crimes we can imagine, then at the very least we can make shame great again.

This is also why it’s so maddening to see that the Biden had all of this information and, apparently or at least from the outsider’s perspective, did very little with it. Federal prosecutors had access to this information at least since 2020 when Ghislaine Maxwell was charged with crimes. Although we might assume they had access to it sooner since Epstein was charged with “multiple counts of unlawful sex with a minor” in 2006, which is back when Obama was president! We can’t say that the government did nothing because Maxwell is currently behind bars, although she was moved to a minimum-security prison after asserting in 2025 that Trump was not involved in any of the crimes. If Biden had truly wanted to prevent a second Trump presidency, why not use this information to start going after these people? Again, maybe he tried and we simply didn’t know but it’s hard to imagine that literally nothing came of the thousands of files the DOJ has on the subject of Epstein and his many associates. I think this also connects to why some people refuse to believe that this is real or serious. There’s a popular belief that, if it were true, someone in charge would do something (an idea that Sarah Kendzior has written about at length in They Knew). I’m not suggesting in any way that Biden was in on the scheme, but I do think it is important to ask why the top levels of government would ignore ongoing, systematic sexual abuse. It could be money. It could be that too many people from both major political parties are involved and the mess would ruin too many reputations. I don’t have that answer and I’m not sure it’s something we will ever get an answer for.

Finally, I’ve been reflecting on the question of whether being disgustingly wealthy makes people depraved, or if the type of people willing to do what it takes to amass a billion dollars were depraved to begin with (some are born depraved, some become depraved, and some have depravity thrust upon them?). This is really me asking: why does this keep happening? Maybe to start, we should make it illegal for any single person to have a billion dollars. Once you hit $999,999,999, the rest automatically becomes taxes and you get a lifetime achievement award for amassing wealth. They can have a bar mitzvah-like party about it and everything. Unfortunately, the lunatics are currently running the asylum so I know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but I can dream about at least carrying out the mildest interventions to prevent future horrors.

Books and Other Words

I loved The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. It’s a story about two people being forced into a time loop by a would-be queen who is desperate to make history into a “past worth remembering” so their otherwise unremarkable country will have a “future worth fighting for.” The main characters are Owen, a historian who studies his country’s past, and Una, a knight from the country’s legendary age. Their stories become hopelessly intertwined as Owen is repeatedly forced back to the past to help make Una’s story as legendary as possible so it can be used to fan the flames of nationalism later on. I loved the story for its own sake—lovers bound to find each other through time and yet not able to remember each other—but I also loved it because it’s very much a story for the time we’re living through. Harrow’s clear point of view that the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what kind of country we live in shapes how we behave and what we are willing to permit from our leaders. Are we going to war in service of a glorious past? Or are we content to live well and find love without necessarily being heroes in a powerful nation?

Melissa Broder’s Death Valley is about a woman dealing with anticipatory grief over her dad’s death and her emotions regarding her husband’s disability. It’s also very funny. The protagonist heads from L.A. to Death Valley to get some clarity ostensibly to research the “desert section” of her novel but in reality to get away from her big feelings. On the recommendation from one of the employees at the Best Western she’s staying at, she goes on a hike where she encounters what can only be described as a magical cactus, although it’s unclear if the cactus is real or not. Actually, it’s unclear how much of the story is “real” at all, and the whole thing has a magical realism bent to it. I liked Broder’s writing style a lot but I guess I was not mentally prepared for the fantastical and mystical aspects of this book, so that felt a little weird and caught me off guard. Maybe getting lost on a wild trek through the dessert and hallucinating(?) is the way to come to terms with one’s grief and discover some empathy and compassion. Who am I to question these methods? Maybe more people need to get lost in the desert.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

• Understanding Comorbidities in Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: Could a Viral Infection Lead to a Diagnosis? via PubMed. I don’t usually share academic papers but this one is important! The authors found that people with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) were more likely to get long covid than people without hEDS: 3.99% of the hEDS versus 0.97% of the controls “had documentation of long covid.” I don’t have hEDS, but I am hypermobile and these conditions share a lot of similarities. This makes me glad that I’ve been doing my best to avoid covid; I may be at higher risk!
• ICE Agents Whine That They Aren’t Getting Their Massive Bonuses via The New Republic. You love to see it. It’s completely predictable that the administration that lies about everything also lied about handing out $50,000 to everyone who signed up to be a war criminal.
• “Everything We Do Matters.” Minneapolis’s Moon Palace Books is a Hub For Anti-ICE Resistance via Literary Hub. I was going to write about ICE this week too but I realized I only had it in me to take on one story at a time, so today please content yourself with this. Local bookshops are important! They are part of our community.
• Resolutionize Your Community Involvement via Group Hug! I really liked this piece on how we think about community involvement. Maybe if we treated getting involved like we did New Year’s resolutions (telling friends, taking time to reflect and celebrate), we might start to see “community participation as desirable and possible, not obligatory and amorphous.”

Media

Kirk and I watched the Chernobyl miniseries which is not quite a documentary, but it is very informative. It’s a historical dramatization of the events surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I quickly realized I didn’t actually know anything about Chernobyl other than the fact that it exploded, so I learned quite a lot about it and about how nuclear power and radiation works. It was quite unsettling to watch, so I only recommend it if you’re in a mindset to deal with that. The soundtrack they scored the show with generated this creeping unease that, coupled with the subject matter, made it difficult to get through at parts. I thought it was very well done overall and it is very interesting to see how humans and technology can work together to do something awful.

Rampant Consumerism

I have been enjoying my water aerobics class and am going to keep doing it (and indeed have signed up for a second class since there’s another pool exercise class right before the one I’ve been taking) so I had to get some stuff to make it easy and comfortable for me. I really like the towel I bought from Sand Cloud. It’s big and it dries really quickly. I also got some shoes to wear in the water. I found these from Astral that you can wear in or out of the pool, which I like because it’s one less thing to fuck around with when I’m coming and going. I never really wear sweat pants but it is very cold at night after getting out of the pool, so I got these awesome and cozy ones from Maya Kern and I highly recommend them. Finally, because the local pool is heavily chlorinated, I am now using this Suit Solutions stuff that you add to the laundry to get the chlorine miasma out of everything. It works really well! Now you know all the secrets and are ready to take water aerobics with me (lol).

Kitchen Witchery

This week, I made a very good baked potato soup that Kirk said resembled mashed potatoes (he’s not wrong). Then, I changed up one of my regular recipes, gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter, just a little to add some beans and round out the dish. It was good and I had that for lunch a few days this week. I don’t have a very good picture of this but we also enjoyed a beef pot pie (I forgot to take a picture of the inside but just imagine thick stew with a pie crust on top; recipe from The Harvest Baker).

I mentioned last time that I wanted to experiment more with the peanut butter cookie recipe and I did! I used a peanut-pecan butter and added candied pecans to the dough, which was just as good as the original peanut variation. I have some chocolate-almond butter in the cupboard, so I think I want to try one more version with that and some chocolate chips. Finally, because it felt necessary, I made some frosted brownies (recipe from 100 Cookies, same as the peanut butter cookies). It was so good. You might think brownies don’t need frosting and, sure, they don’t need it, but sometimes it is the right thing to do.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Just look at this guy.