It really doesn’t matter if you have a degree in economics or not- if you think that the majority of bourgeois modern economics is about showing material reality instead of warping it for propaganda purposes and to create justifications for business policy you are very stupid

like, I know people get mad when you say liberals prefer fascists to leftists but they keep saying it

life comes at you so so fast

Whats worse... A single Democratic loss in a statewide race to a right-wing governor? Or a Democratic Party win in Ohio that uses transphobia to get there, teaching dems across the country that this is a new acceptable tactic? The latter results in no party left to fight for us.

This is why there is a trust gap now with Democrats on this issue btw. Biden actually did promise to do these things when he spoke to Arab Americans in 2019-2020, and then he didn't do any of it. Harris promised nothing. What will the next presidential nominee promise, and will they back it up?

No no it’s perfectly fine that millions of people in the US are in debt for going to school and are underemployed and are downwardly mobile. It’s fine that medical and credit card debt and car loans keep going up. It’s fine that more and more of are wages are captured by capitalists and that

"I understand you're upset in our proposal to throw you into a woodchipper if elected. But why can't you look past that to see the good things we plan to do? Besides, you can't let those other people win, can you? They'd put you in a woodchipper."

Reading about HB2 in North Carolina today feels like it happened on another planet. Every major musical artist canceled their shows there! The NBA *pulled* the All-Star Game from Charlotte!

A hill I will happily die on every time: Your opinion about what the Constitution means is just as valid and important as any judge's. Judges are just Guys (non-gendered). They are not special, they are not smarter than you, and their rulings are not automatically entitled to your respect.

This is not at all correct. Supreme Court justices are not scientists. They are nine lawyers trading arguments about what they think a famously vague 230-year-old document ought to mean. You are not obligated to treat a given argument as objectively correct just because it got to five votes.

Tulchin Research poll | released 7/20 US Senate Michigan Democratic primary 2026 🟦Abdul El-Sayed 56% 🟦Haley Stevens 40% (El-Sayed aligned poll)

Interesting to note though that this article has a lawmaker off the record saying that if Jeffries did not write that letter to his colleagues, roughly 150-160 would have voted for the amendment. This is actually what I had initially predicted.

At any rate, "fear" of public backlash for your votes is literally just verbatim the democratic process.

I am endlessly fascinated by right wingers' obsession with Sparta. I can understand an initial vibes based appeal I guess - like if you opened the first page of a book on timocracy and were twelve. but the thing about history is you can find out what happened to those guys

“Jill Stein is a grifter“ is not only like seeing the sky is blue but it’s pretty rich coming from people whose idea of a Sage political voice is James Carville and Neera Tanden.

if, instead of organizing around rallies or campaigns, if the democrats ever wholeheartedly re-embraced the labor movement specifically and formal organizing like this around housing and similar material aspects of american life, my god just imagine

how is this supposed to make me feel | patreon.com/lubchansky

this is why NASA blows up all its rockets on the launchpad and elon musk is taking us to mars O wait hang on, the opposite. the opposite of that

"why does the UK change leaders so often?" there are diminishing returns wrt how long each vessel can house thatcher's spirit. by the end of the century we'll be getting through 1000 prime ministers a day

my extremely brilliant and surely successful political strategy of allowing "former" republicans into the "big tent" but not the DSA

A lot of people don’t realize the dust bowl wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It happened when agrobusiness interests dramatically transformed the plains without regard for drought, and created vicious dust storms that choked whole families to death. That’s what I think of when I read about data centers.

I don’t think we’ve seen such a scorched-earth level of sociopathy in Michigan politics since the Hillary 2008 campaign. This person is taking $50 million in undisclosed donations from a foreign lobbying group and paying influencers who are ordered to sign NDAs while demanding “full transparency.”

I, a lifelong republican, am extremely committed to democrats winning and don't care about policies at all! However it just happens to turn out to he the case that the only way democrats can win is by adopting all my policy preferences and becoming 2003 republicans.

The obvious answer to this question is that no one in the Odyssey is white, because "whiteness" and race as a way of conceptualizing human difference did not exist in that world. But recognizing that would require acknowledging that race itself is constructed and not natural, so...

nobody is giving fox news more headlines about how democrats can't win general elections than moderate candidates and their supporters in the media

Fun fact: While Jews made up less than 1% of the population of Argentina, they comprised up to 12% of those disappeared during the Dirty War, due to the antisemitism of the right-wing junta and the association of Jews with leftism. More Jews were killed in the Argentine Dirty War than on 10/7/2023.

One side: “Drowning babies is wrong!” Other side: “Drowning babies is great!” Sensible Centrists “Drowning babies is the correct thing to do as long as you do it with a sad face “

Actual people with sense: Left wing people complain because the BBC *does* now have a demonstrable right-wing bias. Right-wing people complain about the BBC because you can never be right-wing enough for right-wing people.

Accusations of bias actually have specific content that can be assessed. The left attack the BBC for justifying a genocide, the right attack it for having too many black people on screen. These aren't equivalent extremes that cancel each other out leaving only the enlightened centre.

the morally correct politically moderate platform for 2028 is "summary executions for anyone who can't definitively prove that they didn't rape, kill, or torture anyone while working for ICE 2024-2028, and didn't oversee anyone who did so"

Real preference: the US and Israel be forever exempt from any rule, ever, for any reason, at all times Exculpatory reasoning: Uhhhh the rules are fake anyway, and really it's all about power. But also anyone else using power against me is against the...uh....the rules!

This is a good example of people having preferences that they implicitly know are bad or unpopular and so they have to come up with constantly-shifting explanations

you get the exact white people who make better things impossible cheering "see? black people think better things aren't possible, too!!"

seems to me like a lot of black americans are fairly pessimistic about how much political change white people will accept before turning on them (usually for *very* good reason), and a lot of white democratic-party superfans look at that and say "see! black people like exactly what i like!"

One thing I often see these centrist pundit types say to justify the "you've got to moderate!" stuff they're always pushing is that "voters view Democrats as too far left." They never seem to grapple with the fact that adopting more conservative positions doesn't actually seem to change that.

They fight the left with an intensity they never show for the right. They'll be like, "lwe need a big tent party!" to encourage anti-abortion and anti-trans Democrats, but then be like, "Those freaks need to start their own party!" the second someone to the left of Bill Clinton shows up.

It's really been clarifying to watch how the "centrist"/"moderate"/mainstream "liberal" Democratic establishment has reacted to a handful of people to their left having some electoral success.

Anyway it’s awesome to see all the “I’m not a racist I just hate woke DEI nonsense” pivot to “actually now I’m opposing the secret affirmative action” seamlessly and without consequence.

I found this quote from Riley Gaines to be really striking. Straight-up conceding that the purpose of trans sports bans is to normalize transphobia, and to give "ordinary" people "more cover" expressing it in public. ballsandstrikes.substack.com/p/anti-trans...

The "defund the police" cost Democrats countless elections claim always sits awkwardly with the fact that peak "defund" activism was 2020, the year that Democrats won their first federal governing trifecta since 2008.

Consensus Anglo elite opinion however is that you build a moderate amount of mass detention and terrorist paramilitary and this remains not fascism, somehow.

What 'moderation' really means is adopting the views of a very small group of loud, centrist writers and their big business backers, and is increasingly out of step with (a) the big problems in the US and (b) the polling on what Americans say are the biggest problems they want government to fix.

Yglesias thinks he's shrewdly cynical, but really he's just an unprincipled dolt with mean impulses. Democratic candidates gain absolutely nothing by adopting conservative bigotries, they just signal to their base that they're not worth voting for. The net result is always negative.

Thing no one wants to admit is that the most influential pundits in DC, the guys who were seen as “must read” in the White House and among self-styled anti-establishment types are pretty openly anti-Black racists and this bias has been guiding their thinking for years.

Affirmative action was ended by the Supreme Court years ago. Somehow it’s still an obsession of the “anti-woke” crowd. Funny how that works.

Eighty years of American science is bleeding out from bullet wounds on the sidewalk and these mfs are sitting inside talking about whether we should force 18 year olds rake leaves in national parks

Before sports betting was legalized everywhere, I was neutral about it, thinking that it was a personal choice. Now that it exists everywhere I have been radicalized against it like a 19th century suffragette

Now, morally speaking, the worst Encyclopedia Brown story is the one where he goes to Latin America to rescue the US Ambassador from "anti-government criminals" who are holding him hostage to exchange for the release of political prisoners.

About sums up the USG policy position for 30 years: give the Israeli prime minister everything in advance in order to appease a non-American domestic political audience that is lurching rightward anyway