I always put it like this.

In my daily life, 90% of the time when I talk with people they, in general, agree with my politics. And this includes supposedly controversial opinions like Luigi did nothing inherently wrong. The other 10% are split into two categories, 8% of it are other leftists who disagree on multiple aspects of my particular interpretation of leftism and the other 2% are hard-core conservatives who often still agree with my diagnostics, but not my cure. Now, maybe you could argue that I am in a cloistered environment, but the district I’ve lived in has been a purple swing district for the last 4 election cycles. If anything, other places are more viewpoint cloistered.

However, if you were to consult pollsters, you would find that my ideas are wildly unpopular and supposedly ‘extreme and radical’. Now, they would argue this is revealed preference, but I argue that most people don’t like discussing the actual particulars of their beliefs over the phone to strangers. Not only that, but surveys are pretty crap at revealing what people actually believe in.

No offense, but you are still stuck in a liberal mindset, and it is affecting your analysis.

Elon can’t ‘waste political power’. That concept is based on the idea of ‘political capital’, which is based on the idea that political power is based on a mandate from the masses. Our political economy just doesn’t work that way, Elon doesn’t really have a mandate outside of what Trump gives him, which means he has effectively unlimited political ability because he doesn’t ever have to answer for what he does. Not only that, but everything, and I mean everything, he does to the federal government will have downstream effects on us, and much of it, especially stuff fucking with public education (something the Valley has been trying to reduce or get rid of since the 90’s) will fuck us. He can waste time, but unless he actively fucks over Trump, he can’t waste political power.

If you have been watching what Elon is doing with the USAID, it is not getting rid of it, it is placing it and what it does more directly under the executive branch’s control and purview. As some would say, ‘taking off the mask’. This is of course, because he is too stupid to understand how politically useful having NGO slight-of-hand is for the U.S.

It does make sense if you believe the era of U.S. soft-power domination is completely over (or is in-efficient/woke/ineffective, take your pick of the buzzwords). What we are seeing is a complete buy-in on traditional fascist ‘efficiency’ propaganda, without the savvy that the neo-liberal post-fascists displayed in earlier times. As far as I can tell the belief is that the facade costs money and has no benefits so it must be discarded. No good will come of it, but it was no good to begin with.

It’s just fascists shooting themselves in the foot because they don’t actually understand where modern fascism gets it’s power and stability from, the obfuscation of power. They seem to have this deep need to not just be recognized as powerful by the silent elite, but to be seen as powerful by people on social media platforms (who they likely see as ‘the masses’). The follow-up question is if they will try to run with the old fascist ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative after shooting themselves in the foot, or if they will just content themselves with just fucking things up for workers and bullying their reluctant allies. It is unclear at this point.

That is because ‘laissez-faire markets’ under capitalism have never been a thing. And that is besides the fact that historically speaking, ‘laissez-faire markets’ without capitalism or governments to control them are less of a market and more of a system of reciprocity, that doesn’t value the maximization of profit. Markets are mostly imposed, not evolved.

It is incredible to me that this particular nugget of propaganda “That capitalists like competition and laissez-faire markets.” from french liberals has continued into the modern day with such a strength that even supposed leftists pay lip service to it as if holds any kind of reality. What makes the capitalist formation superior to the feudal model is that the concentrations of productive capital and labor are larger, and more directly focused on the development of that productive capital and labor, as opposed to cultural capital or power over individual workers, in particular the decoupling of people from the land and into fully labor-value and market-intensive methods of living. It’s never been because of ‘competition’ or ‘laissez-faire markets’.

And in that instance, this is, of course, more of the same capitalist schtick as always. This is just Reagan again, who is just Coolidge again, etc. It would be more surprising (and actually unprecedented) if Elon was actually implementing efficiency without reducing output, and implementing laissez-faire economic policies.

I’m sorry but this article is awful. Nearly slop quality. It is so narrow that it could go anywhere. Not only does it think that Democrats are “the left” but he refers to them as “leftists” as if most socialists were ever confused about the nature and weaknesses of Kamala Harris. It leaves wide open the possibility that you look at the Democrats situation and think they should go even more right-wing, just with a “competent woman without baggage” this time.

I get that he is addressing mainstream politics watchers, but this kind of hyper-online person is just as out of touch as the Democrats he is critiquing if he thinks “the left” (if he is including Democrats in that category) maintains an echo-chamber, because the progressive/leftist side of the movement (that he assuredly thinks is “too left to win” again holding to the “conventional wisdom” that he himself decries) was telling them how bad and unappealing their candidate was the whole time. Just because they refused to listen doesn’t mean it’s an echo chamber.

While MSF is more progressive than your average NGO, they are still part of the western NGO complex, and individuals are easily sacrificed towards that end, ‘mistakes’ forgiven, as long as they don’t go after their funding.

To be a pedant, but not to dog-pile, if you want to boil communism down to a statement, that statement is (as Marx points out in the Manifesto) to paraphrase ‘Human development would be best if all lived by the maxim, from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.’ Which is, of course, why reading theory is important.

There is a difference. It’s not ‘just’ ‘everyone is equal’, as liberals claim their society provides with legal equality, and that from legal equality stems liberty. It is a statement that strips liberals of their claim towards the ‘maximization of human liberty’, and posits that the giving of real materials to the people who are in need of them, not just ideals in a vacuum, are what maximizes overall human development and liberty.

I’ll see if I can actually find it, I only know about it second-hand myself.

Good explanation, clearly it’s horseshit, but that is what I hear being pushed.

Look I haven’t received my check in years George.

They are usually talking about ant-colonies or other micro-ecologies. Tbf, there is likely alot of unaccounted CO2 production from those areas, but there is no way that it comes even close to the amount of CO2 industrial processes (particularly farming) create. It’s just throwing chaff and is horseshit, but people want to rationalize it as not our fault, so they will grasp at even bullshit explanation.

They aren’t ‘universal’ (other than the studio, yuk yuk) enough, as apocalyptic as they should be. Already seeing people just blaming California state government, and not connecting it to the awful smog and fires coming down from Canada, because memory is basically a month for most.

Small correction imo. They have billionaires literally funding everything they do, which translates into political power. The left, especially in the U.S., have no billionaires on their side, which means that we are without the means of production of political power in this country. The sad part is the Democrats who also have billionaires on their side and are still outmaneuvered, but the stakes are much less for them so they don’t really care that much.

They are doing that one abit more subtly. They can’t challenge it directly, as that combats their opinions of themselves as ‘scientific’ but I am seeing papers coming out of Midwestern ecology schools (which are subsequently pushed hard on social media), that are pushing forward a hypothesis that ‘we just don’t know enough about the carbon cycle, there are lots of unaccounted carbon creating beings that could be helping with the warming’, as well as people saying that because there have been no apocalyptic universal Hollywood spectacal collapse that ‘the climate scientists got all their predictions wrong’.

It’ll creep into mainstream thought over time, especially as it becomes too late to change.

I guess the institution cannot reflect on itself if you ban the word ‘institutional’.

I miss when these libertarian types believed in the NAP. It was always cope, but at least it mitigated the harm they purported to cause.

Np, it’s an easy mistake to make.

Well, it’s because smart people are rug-pulling after the inauguration because there was a lot of crypto hype after the election, but the reality is that the banks and institutional investors will never allow crypto to become an independent (bailed out by the government) asset to the degree that the bros need it to be in order for it to actually take off in the way they promised. I’m pissed because I literally predicted this would happen but I have no money to gamble atm so it was wasted.

We’ll see if it rebounds, but since Trump has taken zero steps towards fulfilling his promises of officially tying crypto into the central banking system, I doubt it, even though there is little else to invest in. If he does do it, the crypto people will have pulled off the largest scam in world history, even bigger than the stock brokers, literally turning on the money faucet for garbage code.

Completely disagree. Delay, Deny, Defend are specifically legal tactics companies use, whiile expropriation, exploitation, and appropriation are, in Marxism, specifically two economic terms based within how one both proves and discusses the contradictions of capitalism, while appropriation is a much more widespread cultural and sociological phenomena, which in part derives from the economic base of capital markets.

Delay, Deny, Defend is a tactic that encompasses both expropriation and exploitation, but it isn’t an actual description of the economic metrics occuring and how it relates to labor-value and use-value.

Not disagreeing that the way we use them tends to be a shibboleth.

Even worse, it was invented by western academia, much like ‘totalitarian’, and has never actually had a solid definition that didn’t also apply to western countries (and the only real arguments that it doesn’t are the west both pardoning and the giving back the property of literal Nazis, many times people who were directly responsible for the Holocaust, effectively meaning that authoritarianism is when liberals actually adhere to the legal systems they pretend to hold as sacrosanct).