This is the kind of thing I worry about with politicians like Platner, not the hyperbolic freakouts about him being Fetterman 2.0 or secret Hitler or whatever. Just the run of the mill bad policy you can get from eclectic left candidates without a strong grounding in organization and ideology.

I think a lot of this is downstream of trying to please two constituencies with very different priorities: the voters and the donors. This is a problem for all politicians in a capitalist democracy, but it's particularly intense for mainstream Democrats.

just in time for May Day, my column on what general strikes are, and what they are not, and why it matters to think in terms of power, risk, and strategy. progressive.org/magazine/str...

Thoughtful piece on questions of co-governance that NYC-DSA is navigating in relation to Z. @peterfrase.com is both candid and charitable about the viewpoints of the competing factions within NYC's chapter. The result is a piece that exemplifies the kind of revolutionary honesty he advocates.

It's corn based ethanol fuel, but for tech bros who think science fiction stories are business models

I wrote about Zohran, in the perhaps vain hope that I could add something beyond the tired DSA "left vs. right" debates about how we relate to our elected officials. jacobin.com/2026/04/mamd...

This was a great post, and I piggy backed off it by trying to put a more explicitly Marxist spin on Stross www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/marx...

When I started grad school 20 years ago, older faculty would tell us how many jobs there would be when the baby boomers retired. It simply did not occur to most of them that their good jobs would be replaced by shitty precarious temp jobs.

They're calling this dish "fragger's delight"

They say Eric Adams is the Eric Adams of Albania

"Democrats must denounce this Twitch streamer or risk alienating Nancy Reagan's speechwriter" is NY Times Pitchbot level dumb joke and also a thing people are seriously trying to argue

This kind of nonsense creates a paradox for me, because I don't believe in general intelligence as a concept, but whenever someone unironically treats IQ as a measure of it I want to call them stupid

My dad, a legal academic, loves to tell the story of some law & economics goon he saw give a talk about how there can't be systemic racism because it's economically irrational. To which his response as a decent enough white guy who grew up in Virginia in the 1950s was more or less "lol, lmao even".

On the occasion of No Kings Day, three things can be true:

Use petroleum to make fertilizer --> use the fertilizer to grow corn --> turn the corn into an inferior substitute for gasoline. This policy was always a stupid giveaway to big agriculture, but doing it to address a war that's causing a global fertilizer shortage really takes the cake.

My first experience with the Internet, in the early 90s, was playing Multi-User Dungeons, which were multiplayer fantasy games played via a command line, like a text-only precursor to World of Warcraft. Thank you for your attention to this MUDder

Rare inside look at the innovative methods used by horrible sociopathic billionaires to raise even more horrible and sociopathic billionaire children

To be fair to ol' conehead here, he's spent most of his life as what Marxists would call the bearer or personification of the capital relation, the vessel through which money flows and returns back to itself as accumulation, M-C-M'. Easy to lose all sense of one's humanity under such conditions.

Let's go Venezuela!

My new vice in these dismal times is enjoying anti-Trump neoconservatives having a bad time. Watching Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan commiserate about the self-immolation of their whole project is a small source of joy and comfort.

When I was spinning up speculations about a post-capitalist rentier economy, I didn't have the vision to think of human consciousness itself being enclosed, commodified and sold back to us as a monthly subscription. Mostly because that doesn't even make sense as a science fiction conceit, but still.

Of course for a lot of Zionists this is a feature rather than a bug. It's a lot easier to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism if the only anti-Zionists people hear from are in fact antisemites!

Say what you will about the @demsocialists.bsky.social electoral apparatus, I have to commend us for mostly successfully filtering out the weird viral influencer type candidates with like, nazi tattoos or a passion for US military intervention or whatever

At last, AI is allowing governments to achieve their goals of hollowing out public services, while also being extremely racist

This is our Kyle Rittenhouse, and Chuck Schumer needs to start acting like it. Not sure I can vote for the nominee if this kid doesn't speak at the 2028 DNC.

The ham sandwich stays winning

Viewers of Dan Olson know that this is an old scam, and the only "AI" angle is that an LLM has replaced ultra-low-wage ghostwriters: www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYc...

I guess maybe the sensibility will be liberal copaganda in the vein of The Wire, but I think (hope) we're past that as a culture

I'm not in Minneapolis and don't pretend to know the whole story here, but misplaced and paranoid "security culture" is a real problem in moments of upsurge, I see it cropping up locally again, after I encountered it during the George Floyd rebellion as well

May this be the first and mildest of many humiliations for all of these fascist ghouls

[ERIC ADAMS VOICE]: Minneapolis is the Gwangju of America

Glad to see this, signed by my dad along with many of his colleagues who I grew up around

OK, but maybe journalists could reconsider the norm of "uncritically repeat government claims, then fact check them later", when faced with a government whose first move in every situation is an immediate barrage of preposterous lies?

Oh you spoke with the white house? I'm sure that was fun for you, you twerp, you worthless piece of shit. Just resign and go away, if this is all you can do as the death squads roam the streets of the state you claim to govern.

Today allowed Minnesotans to do two of the things we do best: coming together in solidarity and smugly acting like it's no big deal to go out in extreme cold

Our most recent shot at prying open policing's cabinet of monstrosities was 2020, and liberal politicians responded by wrapping the whole thing tightly in "training" and consent decrees, and festooning it with body cameras. Time to take another run at it.

The @nytimes.com and @washingtonpost.com knew about this in advance, but chose not to report it in order to ensure the death of large numbers of Venezuelan people

This is our new baseline for how little Zohran is capable of smiling in a photo

"adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models", now that's the kind of cyberpunk dystopia I'm talking about

So, postliberal in just the same way Boris Yeltsin was postcommunist

Lots of good stuff here, but a key bit, missing from a lot of critiques, is that it attempts to wrestle with what the viable alternative is, given that you need to keep the cops from going into all-out revolt from day 1. I don't know if this is it specifically, but it's at least a concept of a plan.

I first encountered George Packer back when he was letting Paul Berman shit directly into his brain and then vomiting out liberal odes to George W. Bush and the war on terror. He's wack, and he's always *been* wack, is what I'm saying

Say the line, Slavoj

One of the coolest things about #TeslaTakedown is that it's not just about "sending a message." It's about attaching a stigma to driving a certain make of car, which is the one source of profit for a financial bubble that props up the most powerful racist alive. It's protest as direct action.

I was 17 when I reached a high enough level of math to hear my professor (a Republican btw) answer an eager grad student asking how he knew he had proved something by saying, "it's a proof if I believe it"

They're all lies, especially the truths

If I had a nickel for every time my TV asked me to confirm I was still watching during the world series, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but

My read on Kristol is that he's as much of a bloodthirsty imperialist as ever, but on some level he recognizes that one lesson of historical fascism is that, when you fully turn the tools of empire and colonialism inward, it pretty quickly leads to the collapse of the whole project

Post-bubble, this stuff is going to look like 2021-era crypto hype (it's the same terrible journalists doing it in many cases.) Ascribing "memory," or "planning," or "values" to an LLM is like talking about the rich emotional inner life of your toaster.

I'm watching the World Series and so getting rare exposure to TV ads, and they're really spamming the AI bullshit. Feels like that Super Bowl with all the crypto ads, good thing that turned out well for everyone involved.