Katherine Alejandra Cross

@quinnae

Sociologist, Mistress of Information Systems || Techy TransLatina Ph.D Candidate @UW iSchool || The Saturday Paper VG Columnist || Contributing Editor Liberal Currents ||📍Seattle || 🏳️‍⚧️ || Author of LOG OFF; order here!

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Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir quinnae.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· 15d

The first is this commonly cited statistic that comes from a recent poll by PR's largest newspaper. Two things are true: 1) This is a dishonest way of framing support for "independence." Look at Quebec to see how messy things can get when you use "sovereignty" and "independence" interchangeably.

A recent poll by El Nuevo Día has revealed a remarkable shift in Puerto Rico’s political landscape: For the first time, sovereignty options — independence and free association — are tying statehood in voter support.

According to the survey, 44 percent of Puerto Rican voters support statehood, while a combined 44 percent favor sovereignty, with 25 percent backing free association and 19 percent supporting independence. This development represents a significant moment in Puerto Rico’s political evolution and challenges the long-standing dominance of statehood as the primary alternative to Puerto Rico’s current territorial status.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· 19d

An X-Files "I Want to Believe" poster but with Ms. Met's head crudely photoshopped over the UFO.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· 22d

Me being annoyed when I have to stop watching the game in order to do housework:

A still from a TV program of a young man in a brown dress shirt, speaking, and subtitled "Just when Spain is gonna teach Argentina a lesson in football."

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· 26d

Shoutout to @jeremystahl.bsky.social for writing an article that was so thoroughly resigned to the fact that England would win the World Cup (a possibility he despised) that he jinxed them into losing this Semifinal, despite explicitly disavowing his ability to do this. Teach me your ways, sir.

I’ve shared this theory with a friend and colleague who supports England. “JINX NO JINX JER,” they text-shouted at me.

I don’t think that by writing this, though, I can jinx England. If I could, I would, mind you. I’m writing this in a Kylian Mbappé jersey. I want England to fall. As proved by IShowSpeed, though, you can’t jinx a team you actually want to see lose.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· 27d

James Bond getting electrocuted by supervillain Gustav Graves, Bond gritting his teeth while a speech bubble point to him, putting Faine's words in his mouth. From Die Another Day (2002)

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jul 10

It's incredible to me that half of my critics are insisting that the other half, people like Norton here, do not exist.

A quote post of my recent Graham Platner essay by Anne Norton which reads: ‬
"Why I so dislike liberals: rule bound, censorious, gleefully repressive, unforgiving, elitist, Puritans. I’d vote for Platner before I’d align myself with that."

The pull quote from my essay, to which she's responding so critically, says the following:

"They want desperately to believe that the burly white man cosplaying as a working class Ron Swanson, a bit rude, crude, and something of a bad boy, is the formula for winning back America, because it validates everything they prefer to be true."

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jul 6

Like I said, there's no small amount of finger-pointing that's going to happen as a result of this. But Platner was a creation of Ryan Grim, Bernie Sanders, and Matt Stoller, as much as he was of Pod Save America and Matt Yglesias. That's what has to be reckoned with.

Anonymised skeet saying "Beg pardon. Dems/liberals are not the left of anything except capitalism."

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 30

Baseball is back, it's good again baby, awoo wolf howl!

A photo of TMobile Park after the Mariners won.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 26

Not trying to put anyone on blast here, but these sentiments are just straight up dumb. Not only does it require getting spun by Axios/Politico ragebaiters, but it also presumes that the far right has *ever* needed "cover" or permission to go after the left.

Skeet reading "DSA has won a handful of national elections and the democratic party establishment are already providing cover for the far right to start cracking down on the left"

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 23

I didn't even make the joke! I thought it was too easy!

"To The Unknown Joke" memorial marker from a Monty Python skit.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 13

Manny Torres, as played by Diego Calva, in Babylon (2022) trudging up a hill to help deliver the iconic set piece that starts this rollicking, dark gritty reboot of Singin' in the Rain. Moar like singin' in the Poop amirite?

(I actually love this movie, don't @ me).

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 11

So here's the thing about this part of her statement/Platner's alleged excuse: this is *verifiable,* and if it's true, it's a scandal that Platner's CO enticed his whole unit into getting Nazi tattoos (and knew where to do so in a country that bans Nazi symbols). But I suspect he lied here too.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 11

Sports app baybeee.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 10

Chat, I did it.

Me touching grass in SF's Washington Square Park.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 10

Hannibal Buress "Hahahaha this sucks, man" meme.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 6

I could only follow that game by refreshing the Google tracker and my sports peeps on here, and my heart was in my goddamn throat. What an unbelievable bit of b-balling. In short, the New York Knickerbockers.

Google's scoreboard for Game 2 of the NBA Finals showing the Knicks over the Spurs 105 to 104.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 6

The ever-essential @polphilpod.bsky.social makes a solid case for how the structure of the anti-trans panic in the UK's establishment provides a template for going after other small minority groups, and shows how it's happening to British Sikhs. It's as eerie as it is infuriating.

I predicted, in sketching an anti-Sikh panic, that political parties would cave to pressure “Enthusiastically in Reform’s case, awkwardly and abjectly in Labour’s.” Just as I was finalising edits to this article, Andy Burnham, currently the party's preferred successor to Starmer, was asked about removing the exemption that allows Sikhs to carry small ceremonial knives. “I think it needs to be looked at” the supposedly centre-left alternative replied. He even managed the “awkwardly and abjectly” part, waffling about how forcing a minority to choose between a religious duty and leaving their homes would have to be done “carefully.”

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 2

He was not, however, a throwback to another age but a man so perfectly of his own. Like his reactionary descendants, they are steeped in the illiberal dilemma of nourishing on the very culture they wish to destroy. Maistre was modern. And so were his bigoted obsessions.

Dismissing the 1795 French constitution as a “schoolboy’s exercise,” he lays out a series of reasons that this constitution does not, in the parlance of our time, have the mandate of heaven. He does so in a conveniently numbered list. For instance, point 6 (78).

The more that is written, the weaker is the institution, the reason being clear. Laws are only declarations of rights, and rights are not declared except when they are attacked, so that the multiplicity of written constitutional laws shows only the multiplicity of conflicts and the danger of destruction. This is why the most vigorous political system in the ancient world was that of Sparta, in which nothing was written.

These arguments seem to reach back to the antiquity he fetishizes, but the call to RETVRN here is as contemporary as that very reference. Save for a few rhetorical flourishes, his essay could easily be the script to a YouTube video. In the breezily worshipful sophistry of his never-happened history, we see the fundamental elements of a deeply contemporary obsession: the hatred of democracy. For a man who so despised the 18th Century, he was deeply embedded in the logics of the future it sired.

In the centuries since, Fortune has rolled her dice and found GREAT REPUBLIC on her d6 loot table many times. Would that this were enough to dispose of the likes of Maistre; but his progeny have a vote too, for they dearly wish to ensure no one else will, ever again. Even their list of enemies comes, more or less, direct from Maistre and this, too, is strikingly current.

Maistre saw himself as the enemy of an eclectic cast of characters he called ‘la secte’ in his native French; la secte was devoted to the destruction of his beloved world order, dominated by the beautifully irrational mystery of the Church and Crown, which could keep the great unwashed in their place. Who was la secte? See if you find a familiar thread in the litany I recite from Berlin’s lecture: “Jansenists and Calvinists, and…

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· Jun 2

What links Maistre to his hateful progeny is the unshakeable conviction that democratic movements of any sort are fundamentally at odds with humanity's violent, degraded nature--and that pretences to virtue and freedom were hypocrisy. His descendants are just less eloquent about it.

Maistre loved nothing so much as the Executioner, save perhaps God Himself, whose perfected representative—the “sword of justice [that] has no scabbard”—is this bloody-handed man. To pretend otherwise was hypocrisy, and to protest for fear of the innocent falling beneath his axe or being broken upon his wheel was to miss a fundamental truth: all innocents die, it cannot be helped. And, in any case, “a man punished for a crime he has not committed has actually merited it by another completely unknown crime,” (193).

Two hundred years later, a gaggle of anonymous internet users would coin the word “moralfag,” defined by DayumNiggaDude on Urban Dictionary as someone who joined 4chan and “is typically this relatively new member that think [sic] he is part of the community but shit his pants when he gets out of his safe space.” Wiktionary defines it a little more soberly as a pejorative for “A person who expresses moral disapproval or moral opinions.” The term took off as 4chan turned on its famous Operation: Chanology protests against the Church of Scientology, which would forever associate the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask with a certain flavour of dipshit edgelord protester. But the original protesters, organizing on 4chan, at least had an ethos.

And that was a problem. Morality was a cloak, a mere signal of one’s pretense to virtue that masked the true will-to-power beneath.

This is the red thread that connects a stalwart Catholic monarchist to a gaggle of miserable trolls who would move into the heart of government. A man who wanted to repeal the 18th Century became the philosophical father of a discrete byproduct of the 21st. Joseph de Maistre would hate his children, and that’s a fitting epitaph for him.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 30

NUMBER ONE IN THE WEST, BAYBEE! MID-TEAM! MID-TEAM!MID-TEAM! MID-TEAM!

AL West standings, showing the Mariners at the top with a .500 win/loss percentage.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 21

This is the core of the absurdity. The "guidance" is so small-mindedly cruel in its obvious animus, its obvious disgust with trans people as a class--and its legalese was inherited from the UKSC ruling. Note what I describe here: we are whatever sex disadvantages us most with respect to the law.

What the plain text suggests here is that even though—by dint of their own ruling!—transgender men are legally women, they cannot participate in women’s sports if they look too manly or have taken testosterone. So trans women must be excluded from large swathes of society because they are supposedly men, and trans men must be similarly excluded because they are trans.

Paragraph 221 of the ruling reiterates this idea, once again saying that discrimination is “proportionate” where a “reasonable objection” is made to their presence “because the gender reassignment process has given them a masculine appearance.” Suddenly, gendered appearance matters a great deal for defining gender, in a way that relies on wholly subjective judgment.

Far from introducing clarity, this ruling suggests that—by law—transgender men in Britain are two sexes at once: whichever one circumscribes their rights the most will be the legally salient one.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 19

Oh my Goddess they did the Looney Tunes meme, didn't they?

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 19

What is happening with this Mets game?!

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 15

Credit where it's due, KING 5 appears to have cleaned up the online report. We'll see what their live coverage this evening is like:

On Sunday night, University of Washington Police responded to the Nordheim Court Apartments, an off-campus student housing building, and found a woman stabbed to death in the laundry room.

The victim, identified by officials as a 19-year-old transgender woman, was identified by the King County Medical Examiner's Office as Juniper C. Blessing on Thursday.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 8

Right now, there *are* camps, but they're not for trans people per se. They're part of the evil infrastructure supporting MAGA's deepest passion: persecuting immigrants. Gare Davis, in the above essay, makes the consequences of misunderstanding this plain to their own community:

Most people engaged in this discourse genuinely don’t understand how the State Department policy on visa applications will actually affect trans immigrants and what we can then do to support trans immigrants. This whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most at risk of ICE which are undocumented immigrant workers. Lilith in Seattle with a 150k dollar tech job is not at high risk being detained by ICE. Believing otherwise prohibits people who are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and status to support others who do not have the same safety provided by status or wealth, whether they’re transgender, an immigrant, or both.

Misleading articles and the larger panic driven information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared to a concentration camp. This justifies a retreat from the world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security. Retreating solely into the role of the victim achieves a sort of emotional catharsis, but this also alienates you from the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 8

I saw "V for Vendetta" again recently and lamented how a lot of what was once seen as OTT in the film rang truer than ever. Still, we're still very far from that point. Vigilance is needed, but that's always been true. I will not be terrorised by a document meant to elicit exactly this reaction.

A skeet talking about the Trump Admin's bitterly anti-trans counterterrorism strategy document over a screen from V For Vendetta showing a lesbian woman sitting alone in her apartment as fascist goon squads charge in to snatch her, guns drawn. "It wasn't long till they came for me," reads the closed-caption.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 7

Okay, if we're going *that* route, spiritually I am this:

A Swallowtail Mech from Lancer, which looks like a tank with four legs, slowly shifting into stealth; its pilot, a tea-drinking sniper, sits perched below it.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 7

I have critiqued the precious darlings of BSky: the ATProtocol itself and composable moderation in particular, and I am a known hater of microblogging platforms in particular. They did not suspend or ban me. And this is my usual mode when talking about BSky.app:

A disc horse bot post saying "I'm here you fuckaas bitch" over an image of a neo-Classical Revival building labelled The Hater Building.

Katherine Alejandra Cross@quinnae· May 6

(Time for a deep cut Auspol joke, folks. We all love those!)