I think what you have here is that Trump is incredibly useful as a stick to bash the Dems with. If you think the Dems are too neoliberal OR too woke, it's great having Trump on the ballot because you can say "if you don't veer sharply to the left/center, you'll get Trump!" A game of chicken.

The DoorDash discourse is related to this take, from the ebike discourse. There is a form of Leftism which angrily rejects any proposed social reform on the basis that X group of people (poor, disabled, large families) need things just like they are. Cars, single family housing, smoking...

Quoted for truth. The Labour Party would be overjoyed if the Greens and TPM simply ceased to exist. Meanwhile, National kept minor Right-wing parties on life support.

Die Linke almost catching up to the SPD, after jettisoning the BSW Red-Brown filth, who are dropping off the bottom? Silver lining on the cloud here

The "we are the 99%" framing was populism, not socialism. It was deliberately designed to gloss over who the "1%" were, to just mutter something about "elites". A lot of people in Occupy pronounced that (((elites))), and they're now in the Trump administration. We have to refocus on class.

There's something fascinating and magical about the way some sorts of people, reasonably opposed to LLM use on reasonable grounds, nevertheless think that LLMs can definitely be used for one thing: detecting LLM use. Like thinking the undercover cop has to admit it if you ask directly

I like this theory & it dovetails with my pet theory: the end of ZIRP also killed the millennial lifestyle subsidy. So you had a double whammy of rising working class wages & less patience for apps to lose $$ that made these services increase their prices far above what you’d expect due to inflation

Here is an instructional video on how to create what some might call "a much classier version of prison toilet wine" or others "Terry Pratchett's scumble" for less than US$12 of ingredients per gallon Cued up to the taste test. It's hilarious. youtu.be/SpdSwW_F3Ls?...

The sick and sad thing is that most trans rights happened because normies weren't paying attention. Or, if they were paying attention; they thought there were about 99% fewer trans people than there actually are so it wouldn't affect them. Now, normies are paying attention, and they like gender.

Doctorb

Huh. This sounds like the same mistake the rotten parts of the US Left are making re: M. T. Greene and Thomas Massie. There are worse things than Trump. www.newarab.com/opinion/iran...

Does anyone remember why Trump's numbers started going up again after November 2017? And give an explanation of why that won't happen again? danieldrezner.substack.com/p/a-taxonomy...

I'm descended from people who were sick and tired of being cattle drovers in Nottinghamshire and decided to become, er, cattle drovers in the Manawatu instead, but at least there was a future in the latter

This is where it will inevitably go if the Coalition get away with their redefining-gender act. Inevitably. Once you start saying at *any* point "you are not the gender you say you are", there is no point to stop trans identity being delegitimized altogether. The TERFs have been open about it.

Trans men get it worse. In TERF-world, trans women can play sport on men's teams. Trans men can't play sport on ANY team, because testosterone is a performance-enhancing drug

8 hours work 1 hour commute 2 hours housework 11 hours poasting someone who is good at time please help me budget this. my family is dying of sleep deprivation

I cheated

This goes to what @theophite.bsky.social was saying about Islam's five moral categories. Surely Pigouvian taxes are the right response for something coming in the category of "makruh"

We weren't afraid of the OG culture war in the 1990s - you remember, when the Right freaked out about the Simpsons and Murphy Brown being a single mum - because, back then, we thought we would win

With the (sadly) unsurprising revelation that the San Diego mosque killers directly cited the Christchurch terrorist as inspiration, I am resharing my 2021 essay on the Serb nationalist roots of the proto-genocidal 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory. newlinesmag.com/essays/the-b...

Chuck Tingle's new blockbuster, _Not Pounded In The Butt Because Where I Come From, The Eastern Himalayas, We Have No Buttholes_

I think I've mentioned before that a lot of Socialists actually do argue for abolishing all those Pigouvian taxes "Cigarette taxes are anti-working class. If cigarettes are bad, and they are, they should be banned. Simple." A real statement made by someone I respect

Right without a militant labor politics or a party infrastructure it’s really hard to point to anyone and say like “Ah yes, these are socialists” there are a ton of confused Yeoman Jeffersonians and other reactionaries who have adopted this label for whatever reason.

it's actually true that you cannot fund good government entirely by taxing the rich, which is why slopulist proposals to gut the tax base are a bad idea but taxing the rich at punitive levels is a goal in and of itself, billionaires are simply too dangerous to public policy to exist

People need to stop reading internet Marxists and start reading Marx

This re: US liberals not getting that "ultra-orthodox" Jewish Israelis are split between the bloodthirsty annexationists and the quietest (Hmmmm. Just realised that Western liberals have the same brain block about Salafis.)

Hot allostatic load. Even if this vice-signalling bill goes nowhere, can you imagine what every trans person in your life will experience hearing their very right to exist being "debated" in a select committee. Will Labour have the guts to stand up to this? www.thepost.co.nz/politics/361...

This re: Starmer and trans folk is a good insight

Thanks for the heads up, guys

I've read the manifesto and the San Diego mosque shooting is pretty clearly a Christchurch-inspired act of white supremacist terror

Patrick Stewart, Orville Reddenbacher, Jack Nicholson, Mr T, George H. W. Bush (who sees what I did there lol)

#Syria's province of #Suwayda has emerged as a narco state, run by remnants of #Assad's regime & organized crime leaders -- and protected by #Israel. My latest for @newlinesmag.bsky.social contains *a lot* of exclusive information. newlinesmag.com/argument/how...

netanyahu's not Hitler. he's just levantine milosevic if NATO was on the side of the Serbs.

Huh, what happened there?

What's a symbol to replace the hammer and sickle that symbolises the unity of the techies, the admin workers, the care workers and the precariat?

"deindustrialisation, precarisation, and feminisation of the working class have shifted the primary terrain of exploitation from the factory floor to the household, the neighbourhood, and the care economy... The [Left's] organisational practice has not followed" redmole.substack.com/p/find-them-...

Extremely interesting to socialists worldwide. Briefly: the Working Families Party started as a union-backed labor party, it was smashed by Andrew Cuomo, and is now a part of the "NGO left". The New York DSA is in contrast a grassroots left party.

Vulgar Marxism self-destructs faced with conservative Leftism and even fascism, because it can't process the fact that poor working people can sometimes have very bad opinions and incentives

On the current discourse: socialists realise there is such a thing as a Bad Strike. 1966, London dockers struck to support Enoch Powell, the Nigel Farage of his day. Socialists didn't scab but went ln the picket line with leaflets saying "why are we supporting a Tory racist, come off it, comrades"

okay just to be clear cop unions aren't bad because they're conservative/trump supporters/racist. they're bad because the purpose of cops is to oppress workers on behalf of capital and their politics are downstream of that

1977: Daryl Hall's record company, RCA, blocks the release of his solo album _Sacred Songs_ (producer and guitar player: Robert Fripp) and blocks Hall from singing on Fripp's solo album _Exposure_, concerned about the potential commercial impact on Hall & Oates

I was today years old when I realised I no longer have to follow people who repost the "COVID deadender" line that it's airborne zombie-AIDS (and therefore those of us who aren't COVID deadenders are brain-damaged zombies whose agency can be ignored). Yet another form of "radical" dehumanization

Frinkiac begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, May 18th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

The two types of anime fan are “As a rightist, I adore Gayqueer McTransmarx, a character I believe embodies conservative values,“ and “As a leftist, I’m a big fan of Hitlerhito Tokyonazi’s ’Manchuria Deserved It’ franchise.”

Shots fired at tankies

I hate to go Godwin's law, but you could see this in Hitler. Sociopaths have much higher risk tolerance, so they keep "rolling the bones", and if you do that, you'll sometimes get a winning streak. It was possible to believe that Hitler *did* have the mandate of heaven up to Barbarossa

My late comrade Tyler used to say this, to which I'd retort: to the privileged, equality feels like oppression; to billionaire oligarchs, basic labour rights feel like communism. Leftists thought the neoliberal settlement (equity for minorities/crushing labour as a class) was a durable deal, but no

Another one from the files of "where did this guy's hostility come from" (I also have a degree in economics FWIW. I didn't pursue it because I learned about "inflationary expectations" in final-year macro and realised it meant it only existed if you believed in it.)