The historian in me feels the need to note that contests between cities and their rural hinterland are not new things and they do not generally go great for the rural folks.

Hello darkness my old friend

Pop goes the weasel

All of you need some Zhou Enlai in your life whether he was talking about ‘69 and 1789, it is too early to tell was probably the right answer. So don’t try to call the future today, the past hasn’t even been settled yet

"What we see, I think, are a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowtorched their brains into a smoking pile of ash on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X and in various group chats." prospect.org/2025/11/04/a...

Comrade Silwa, stand down, operation Molto Mario has ended, I repeat, operation Molto Mario has ended

MAGA is blowing it so hard that even the milquest toastest Dems are doing better than I predicted in places like GA.

Georgia Democrats had not won a statewide race that wasn't for a federal office since 2006. They won two races tonight, both against GOP incumbents. The margins? 62% to 38% in both.

Some of them aren’t manufactured on this case and I am not talking about the tattoo.

One more time for the people in the back: if a campaign is nationalized by controversy and you are seeing a flash pan cottage industry defending or condemning at candidate you can’t vote for, It’s about getting funds to go into consulting and lists. /1

Totally unsurprising but also a way to build a death spiral

what is it that makes the fascists of today different from yesterday? who are they? why do they seem to love america so much? the answer is, ANGLOFASCISM. The answer is in Britain and in Austria and in Engelbert Dolfuss. lets learn

A reminder and a paraphrase of Pat Buchanan (of all people): political movements that fail to seize power but also aren’t totally defeated mature from a movement to a business or an academic discipline and rot into a grift.

A reminder and a paraphrase of Pat Buchanan (of all people): political movements that fail to seize power but also aren’t totally defeated mature from a movement to a business or an academic discipline and rot into a grift

If you claim to be a social democrat in 2025 you are larping as much as people who think you can bring back the Carolingians. This is also true for: classical liberals, Keynesians, pre-Deng Marxist-Leninism, libertarians, left populists, most anarchists, etc

None of you know how a senator is likely to vote once elected if they have no track record, but you do know they will have to find patrons to keep their seat, which means you know what they aren’t likely to do.

The young people in Democrats speaking as populists are mostly mad at hoarding of power of the boomers” By young people, you mean 50-year-old professionals

What you are actually seeing that supposedly a debate on the left is just which part of the 20th century project you want to be hoodwinked by which you have no means of bringing about. A lot of people benefit from such a project.

I mean if Gen Z men (and some women) were also blackpilled by the Biden admin on pretty much the same thing. Where do they go now?

If people are concerned about what Chorus and Sixteen-Thirty find was astroturfing, or what the various PACs around the Abundance movement are doing, they should look at what Middle Seat has done for the Justice Dems and Leaders We Deserve, their biggest victory: Fetterman.

You realize when populist write for the New York Times and rail against “elites”—it is an inter elite battle right? Are do you actually think a bunch of Ivy Leaguers have the true pulse of common people because they are mad at rad libs who got tenure in 1990s?

I have been reading a lot lately, so here are some actual useful theory recommendations on ecomomics: 1) Cory Doctorow's Enshitification book with the caveat it thinks the tech people conned the rest of the economy and it is not that simple, 2) Endgame by Jamie Merchant/1🧵

Dear social democratic friends, or democratic socialists, or left populists: You must admit your project has been circular and thus also subject to elite capture if you want to save your policies. People are making money off of you & your electeds keep tagging right or failing

The current state seems to lack the capacity to even strangle itself: www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

If you think they (including the Democrats) don't realize they are hurting 12% of the people on food stamps (I see M*sk has been making chud backlash to that "go viral"), the shut down is about to collapse regional banks who had low margins like its 2007.

I don’t give a fuck about Platner, especially defending him, but I give a fuck that ”workerist left populism” is just as much elite captured as the shit they criticized which means their function of an honest internal opposition is over, and this is about consulting and media careers/1

how I am supposed to take a lot of center left political-economic theorists seriously, when they make the same mistake as capital news saying "record profits" when they can't tell profits from capital gains from outright wealth transfers done through investment schemes/1

We recently went on @varnvlog.bsky.social to chat about tariffs, Mexico, the poverty of the left, the refusal of easy answers, and our next issue, dropping soon. Watch or listen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQVl...

"Can X do Y?" "Are things labeled X doing Y?" "Yes" "So you got three options, descriptively, admit X can do Y, normatively, police X doing why because you don't like it, or categorically, admit that your definition for X or category of X is invalid. I don't make the rules."

Watching a guy who said he doesn’t care if his products literally end humanity call skeptics of the products he pushes the antichrist is even more supervillain than the literal vampirism he was promoting a decade ago

Honestly, "The Long Walk" (2025) which is an inferior movie to "One Battle After Another" in a myriad of ways, had more meaningful critiques and understandings of radicalization than "One Battle..."

When people complain about magical thinking, given how many of the serious answers to complex social and economic problems fall apart enough for 20-something YouTubers to point it out, we shouldn't be surprised that people turn to magic outright.

Sometimes contemporizing things doesn't work. "One Battle After Another" is interesting, but it doesn't really work set in the vague aughts to now, even with changing Vineland's focus on Reagan either DEA to something seeming like ICE (although it is not that). Also, the timeline doesn't work./1

In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another.

"The problem with the left is its proximity to bourgeois art," says an academic theorist on a podcast. Sure, but why did all the engineers and the like leave? We didn't start that way. Hyper-voluteerist explanations like that masquerade moralizing as sociology and are neither.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a farce since its inception as a means to assuage the guilty conscience of a bourgeois explosives manufacturer.

If Marjorie Taylor Greene inadvertently saves democracy it will be like an inverted version of Gollum causing the destruction of the One Ring on Mount Doom