Month: September 2025

Categories
Opinion

Noticing Fascism

I saw a very recent tweet on Bluesky by Eli Valley, which goes: “This is the culmination of a longstanding demonization campaign against a Jewish professor—advanced almost a year ago by AIPAC Congressman Ritchie Torres, who shared a graphic produced by his friends at the fascist Canary Mission harassment group:” and then he links a picture. Here’s a link to the tweet. It’s not the link or the image I want to talk about, though, or even the situation. It’s the tweet itself.

It’s not like that. I’m pretty sure that I know what you’re thinking now and that’s not what I mean. I’ve got no issue with Valley’s sentiment or even his message. It’s more that it picks at something that I want to talk about.

“AIPAC Congressman Ritchie Torres”. “fascist Canary Mission harassment group”. That’s what I want to talk about.

Continue reading “Noticing Fascism”
Categories
Opinion

Ten Songs: One-Offs

In lieu of a more “substantive” blog or a “finished story”, let’s do another music blog. This time, I grabbed ten songs that I really love but which wouldn’t be expected picks if you knew what my favorite bands are. Also, this is songs specifically, not albums; these are times when the album (or artist in general) actually doesn’t click with me that much, but this specific song has a special hold. I know the other music blog was a similar theme; I’ll do “songs I like from bands I like” soon, but for now I wanted to kinda cut down the amount of things I’d have to listen to as prep.

There’s also a bonus eleventh song, which is not really a promise of extra value because this is a blog but it does exist so there’s that. Also, I will be adding links but only for the songs that I listen to primarily on YouTube. The others are probably available but this feels more authentic to me, so this is what I’m doing. I invite you to check them all out however you can, though. Like before, this is in a rough order of how much I like them, but it’s only rough.

Continue reading “Ten Songs: One-Offs”
Categories
Opinion

Chain of Death and Profit

“A strong rhyme to step to.”

I didn’t mean to not post last week, but I was busy writing a story. A fiction story. It’s set in a fictionalized West Africa involved in a multi-sided war. It’s about how the decisions of profiteers, focused only on their profits, can translate into widespread death and destruction.

Read “Chain of Death and Profit” on nearzone dot com

My goal is to get at least a couple blogs together this week, but I’m working on another story which will hopefully be done by the weekend, so we’ll see what happens.