in my mind, all we have is the future

ending car dealerships would cut the heart out of Republican suburbia a million little fiefdoms for the biggest asshole in town, spreading poison all across the country

what's funny about the epstein class discourse is that if we use the term properly as an analysis of the impunity that rich men (esp white ones) have, it immediately and obviously applies to hasan piker

This is in fact the political platform that would fix the country. The thing is I increasingly have a hard time seeing it accomplished. For all his faults Mao's greatest accomplishment was breaking the interlocking parasitic status ladders strangling the Chinese economy. That's how bad things are.

As an IT guy this warms my heart. I've seen so much waste on outside consulting that would've been done cheaper and more efficiently in house

Those long-term contracts outsourcing maintenance on government systems are nightmares, and they're the major reason why many of those systems are gigantic 40 year old piles of shakey technical debt. This is a pattern from the municipal to the federal level.

The theme of public excellence is something Mamdani emphasized in his inauguration address. One big potential he mentions here is inhousing tech talent rather than spending too much on contracts that don't deliver.

yep, the base are terrified & furious & they care much more about having someone who'll fight than a specific faction

Israel is distinctly unpopular with the Democratic base and pretty unpopular with independents. this should help clarify that Newsom isn’t trying to move away from *unpopular* lefty positions, he’s trying to abandon the left entirely

Funny thing though is it’s not the worst bet to be the absolute best model at coding and to count on the rest of the use cases for LLMs being bad businesses

if the 'normielibs' you hate are matt y or klein, fine, good even but that's not it - i think they mean the pussy hats, the warren voters, the grandmas protesting ice & fuck off - they've done 1,000 times more than edgelord posters

We need masculinity to be masculinity instead of masculinity, in the same way that we needed South Africa to be South Africa instead of South Africa.

Your life sucks because your family and better off friends are sacrificing your well being for the imaginary 401k number

The Soviet Union was never leftist for a single second of its existence. Bolshevism, from the very beginning, was Tsarism skinwalking socialism while creating the same structures pf domination but even worse. Krondstadt alone is damning, and the evidence, and the bodies, stack high.

Lenin was bad actually

after a certain point in one's life, one ("Marxist"-Leninists) must wonder why everyone else in the USSR got dogshit planned economics and the party elite got a literal slush-fund and dachas and resorts on the crimea.

if your 'marxist' revolution ends up killing and exiling more marxists than your capitalist, tsarist enemies could have ever dreamed, one must wonder if they're actually left-wing or not!

these guys convinced themselves that things like "the rule of law" and "free elections" and "free speech" were bourgeois used to enslave the masses to capital; thus they avoided them, deliberately, and in so doing created a government that was not constrained by its people

Important context for this. Laws of this type tend to pop up when a smaller number of people want to control the population and the general population isn't doing what they want. So the huge boom in laws is scary but also a sign that most people don't support it. It's BAD and fighting it is vital.

this talking point is at best hilariously outdated (when the study was done, Claude Opus didn't even *exist* outside Anthropic's labs) and at worst actively misleading (doesn't account for cognitive load gains, doesn't account for preference of review over repetitive coding, etc)

No matter what you think of Trump voters it is still too kind and generous to them by far

If you mean misogyny/sexism, yes. It's the Original Sin, and is a loadbearing pillar of racism through the Patriarchal Bargain.

For men, it's easier to imagine an end to capitalism than an end to patriarchy.

People keep saying “oh so you want OPEN BORDERS” as some kind of gotcha and like. Yeah. When I was a kid you could just drive into Canada. On accident, even. It was great, and I think we should do that instead of kidnapping children. Normalize being normal instead of being kidnapping weirdos

I am going to become the joker. We've been screaming from the rooftops that this was never about sports or trans youth healthcare. Instead, we were ignored and browbeaten by a bunch of idiot centrists who took the concerns of people who want us eliminated in good faith. archive.ph/xgwCd

in a very real way Miller and Trump have created the Great Satan of the leftist imagination and it's going to be a hell of a lot of work to put it right again

It’s fun to do a little comparison case here There was essentially nothing on Mamdani to indicate anti-Jewish prejudice on his part yet the media dogged him for it anyway There is quite a lot to indicate anti-Jewish prejudice on Platner’s part yet the media goes out of its way to apologize for him

The cost of housing comes mostly from land values, which are shaped by the work society does around it. It's fair for that value to be shared with the larger society that created it.

a problem for "moderation won it for labour" is their freefall started *before* the election they had massive support as "not the tories" - but when the campaign started, their message *lost* them votes

The thing is I don't think this can change. Conservatives are irrationally associated with troops and economy the world over. A large percentage of people don't actually care about efficiency and productivity, they just care about nationalistic feelings, about looking down on a constructed lesser.

"The economy doesn't suck even though every economic metric says we're in a two tier economy and things are hard for the lower tier" *is* rejecting data.

Wasn't one of the obvious criticisms of communist central planning that they were so focused on Graph Line Go Up that their economies didn't actually work

So while there is a truth here, actual scientists also constantly check whether their instruments are actually measuring reality. If your thermometer reads 70 F and it's snowing you look kind of silly saying "but the data"

The issue is really that tons of people *are* doing well. The top two quintiles are doing fantastically. The bottom two are eating shit, and the middle is keeping up with inflation. The amount of people in the top two quintiles is as many as the bottom two. There’s tens of millions of them.

because traditional masculinity is irredeemable, because it was always tied to hierarchy. The great irony of Good Men is that every Good Man indicts manhood as a construct, because it reveals patriarchy as a choice.

If either state lived up to their nominal founding ideals, who they played for would be ideologically relevant but the U.S. government is hostile to liberalism and the PRC are closer to Reagan's McWorld with red paint than Marx's utopia, so I just hope both girls stay safe and have fun careers.

Basically what has happened is that the ultra wealthy have convinced Americans making $100k or less that there’s a narrow band of people making $100k to $500k who are the only people who should pay taxes.

If one of the political quagmires the Ds have is that a society-wide decline in social trust is causing people to get increasingly swindled into right wing extremism, they probably shouldn’t be supporting policies that actively undermine the idea that we should have responsibilities to each other.

Yeah it really comes down to "do you reject the Devil and all his works"

I would suggest reading this before assuming a moderate Dem is a better or different choice than a Republican www.independent.co.uk/voices/biden...

Gas prices need to go higher

gas prices need to go higher

The end point of fetishizing "the white working class" was always going to be treating the concerns of whiteness (esp white men) as inherently more proletarian

"Working class" has been a very vague term for a very long time, but we've hit a stage where it's a self-chosen label for any white man who is openly racist and/or has a beard and some muscles, which is inevitably going to lead people to some completely stupid conclusions.

Absolutely world-class bit on the part of the Sanders left, Yglesias center, and Trump right to pretend for over a decade straight that this was somehow a point of contention between them

Imo the clear implication is that Dems should say whatever it takes. No honesty or decorum constraints. Pedocon + eat the rich + M4A.

basically, conservatism isn't an idea, its a set of power relations, and that set of power relations *produces* ideas when challenged.

i hope by "institutions that generate moral and social substrate" you don't mean the rape factory that is the patriarchal nuclear famiily