marx was anti-capitalist in the sense that he longed for what (he thought) would come after; these days it seems many anti-capitalists are anticapitalists insofar as they long for what came before

or i guess more relevantly here, karl marx recognized capitalism as a *new and distinct* phenomenon, something radical and different which was sweeping away an old shitty order these days you ask people what capitalism is and they'll give you a definition indistinguishable from feudalism

Because a lot of people don't consider statutory rape or rape via dubious consent, manipulation, economic or social pressure, etc, to be that bad. That's why there's this made up version of Epstein where he was keeping 8 year olds in cages for a "sex ring," versus what we know he did

that's your voter base you idiot

uhhh this actually reminds me a lot of how LLMs function at a basic level too - predicting tokens based on proximity & context, etc 😬 ...so we're teaching kids to read like AI & saying AI level is good enough

Literally tries to defend the left against the center, gets called a centrist sellout by her own people anyway. Can’t make it up.

"Events have their own mysterious logic" yes, wow, who could have imagined that "we must purge our beloved volk of the communist profiteers and race traitors who use cosmopolitanism to degrade the Fatherland" would just end up being antisemetic, truly just the world-spirit moving as it will.

*maximum alpha at 1.25x speed* continuously lives on in my head, unfortunately.

From a Washington Post story titled "How women feel about Trump’s presidency"

Despite what Trump wants you to think, he was president during Covid, he issued checks with his name on them as stimulus, and then he lost the 2020 election.

My last word on the matter

every single week they're throwing this guy a special oval office love-in that appears to be the presidential equivalent of letting your dog scarf an entire big mac and fries before that last trip to the vet

so joyce carol oates owned elon so hard he's been taking out ads on X saying he has in fact read a book and watched a movie and he's clearly spiraling and unable to recover from such a vicious own i say to my wife as she frantically pulls out of the driveway

Most of what this shows is that costs of labor have risen. Goods are cheap, services are expensive, because paying people costs more.

If "of COURSE the gop is the primary author of our collective discontent" is such an obvious truth that it hardly bears saying out loud, how come there isn't a torture devised that could get some of the folks on this website to admit it? Do they all just have that much of an aversion to the obvious?

shutdowns becoming to bsky what covid lockdowns were in 2020-2021.

its really wild that the deal Schumer doesn't support and voted against as unleashed a full blown antisemitic melt down against... Chuck Schumer 🤨

RIF protections and funding snap thru next year make the January fight a bit easier so harder to reduce to a cave/fold hard binary, but overall a good perspective. Something that can't go on forever, won't.

For people saying that Democrats were on the verge of winning the shutdown, I'm going to note that last week when Schumer proposed a deal that would have given Democrats what they wanted in exchange for opening up the government, many of the same people were decrying it as a sellout.

Come here, honey, you'll never believe this shit! Reactionary centrist commentators keep criticizing the Dems!

There was two years of nonstop viral outrage over the fact Biden wouldn't make Subway footlongs be $5 again.

This is a great repurposing of a servile 60 Minutes interview.

the liberal version of The Heritage Foundation doesn't exist but it should we need a Reconstruction 2029 plan that half of our candidates have to disown for its extremism

the thing about this is that a) small states do not have any interests that are inherent to their size (no less than james madison understood this) b) the senate is organized along party lines which makes the small/big distinction almost irrelevant and c) the filibuster has never been used this way

“woke” is when you acknowledge that black people have contributed to the united states

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

Folks, loony Zohran is going to make our beautiful Sunnis mention Ali in the adhan, it’s true, Ali—great guy, but I like caliphs who don’t get assassinated—and Zohran wants us to make him almost equal to the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH, you can’t do that, it’s not right!

It’s cool that they’re euthanizing the economy for Christmas

things that arent the future of civilization - chatbots - crypto - robot butlers - cars that sorta drive autonomously as long as youre paying attention for when they fail and almost kill a bunch of people things that actually are the future of civilization - free clean energy

There's something really fascinating about pre-19th C. style racism. "Well if you live in a hot lowland climate, you'll be forced to take off your shirt, which will lead to masturbation and, of course, a general weakness in the limbs. And that's why the Bengalis shouldn't be soldiers."

apropos james watson’s death i had an idle thought today about how stupid race/iq stuff sounds. “buh if your skin is darker you are biologically less smart” is a thing only a dumbass can believe

Now I’m just a simple country lawyer but it seems to me that if you use a predictive text generator to send people to prison you and everyone in your supervisory chain should get disbarred. www.sacbee.com/news/local/a...

Sorry I just got a mental image of Robocop testifying "I felt the impact on my chest" and everyone looking at his titanium-steel chest plate. A tiny fleck of mustard mars its pristine surface.

Whiplash how fast they went from sadistic triumphalism to pants pissing

“I spent the past 25 years making my personality entirely ‘u mad bro?’ and can’t believe people are actually mad at me”

Still drives me fucking bonkers how much of a thing this became

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week. @wired.com #ICE www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

The problem with a lot of pop leftism is it doesn't give the impression it wants to be part of a victorious bureaucracy, it gives the impression it wants to be part of a perpetually frustrated and powerless counterculture simmering in resentment in decaying flats.

LOL, naturally the NYTimes, engaging in just the most open self-parody, has a big homepage video for Ross Douthat "Mamdani's victory is less significant than you think" so you have to scroll down to see anything else, because they have to be sullen and bitter about it.

@lastpositivist.bsky.social We're all thinking along similar lines. publiccomment.blog/p/the-revolt...

but of course also on a wide array of other forms of psychic wage, including just the basic sort of self-conception of status and privilege. elites suddenly got yelled at online and generally *not treated like elites,* and they really turned out to hate that

What happened in 2024 was a reaction to rising real wages for the bottom of the American working class, their concomitant greater bargaining power, and, yes, a general feeling that workers (including middle class professionals) were now dictating workplace policy. Hence all the rage at "HR"

"the revolt of the bosses" is a good way of framing the elite reaction to woke 1. what's particularly interesting is that this isn't a reaction to an attack on profits--it's a reaction to changes in workplace culture-- which is to say, the psychic wage of hierarchy

Had to share this from twitter just because

dawg not the steakhouse wedding font

2026 Primary Woke Wave

It's hard to say that any of the Texas amendment issues are disappointing, because I mean what do you expect voters are going to do, but one result that might suck the most is the bail one. The judicial board one will suck as long as the GOP maintains control of the governor seat, too.

The winning Democratic message in 2025: