Imo classical economists were generally more clear-sighted and honest than modern ones. Of course they had their biases and perspective based on their class (and their audience), but at that point economics was so poorly understood that theorists were legitimately trying to figure stuff out, moreso than trying to produce propaganda. Of course, the industrial proletariat and threat of socialism wasn’t really present yet either, so the class conflict was more about new money bourgeois vs old money aristocrats and landlords.

Marx and Smith are a lot more similar than most people think, because Marx was writing in the context of various economic assumptions that come from Smith, such as the labor theory of value, which is usually attributed to Marx but actually comes from Smith.

The thing about Smith though is that his writing style was very dry and repetitive so nobody actually reads him, at best, they might read abridged versions which cut out any inconvenient parts like that. So he just kinda became known as the capitalism guy and is thrown in the same category as Ayn Rand.

Bulls on Parade (Hell Yeah Cover)

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes (Hell yeah!)

Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal (Hell yeah!)

I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library (Hell yeah!)

Line up to the mind cemetery now (Hell yeah!)

What they don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin’ (Hell yeah!)

We don’t gotta burn the books we just remove 'em (Hell yeah!)

While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells (Hell yeah!)

Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells (Hell yeah!)

There’s a long history of anarchists who oppose voting

https://libcom.org/article/why-anarchists-dont-vote-elisee-reclus

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aotearoa-workers-solidarity-movement-why-we-don-t-vote

https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/debatedemocracy/anarchism---anti-voting

I live in Illinois. If somehow the heavens and earth move such that Illinois turned red, then there would be absolutely zero chance it would be the tipping point in the presidential election. The vast majority of people in the US live in safe states.

And for the record, I do vote in down-ballot races, the ones that actually matter, but none of you care because it’s all about genuflecting before the leader of the blue tribe. Which, frankly, just gives me more reason to refuse to.

“Democracy” doesn’t need our help to be sabotaged, it’s falling apart on it’s own. Every time someone says that the voters have to change en masse to meet the policies of politicians rather than politicians having to respond to what their constituents want, they are the ones taking the axe to democracy. Why the hell would anyone care about upholding or defending a system that we have no say in? Somehow, insisting on popular demands and trying to turn the will of the people into policies that protect the rights of the vulnerable gets translated into “trying to sabotage democracy” equating Anarchists and Marxists alike with fascists.

Reabsorption of bone is fairly common place in non unionized fractures that don’t end up getting good blood flow. Osteoclasts will breakdown the bone fragments that don’t unionize

This is why it’s so important to talk to your coworkers and get organized, if those bones were unionized this never would’ve happened.

Purple is a fine color to use while employing alternative methods of holding people accountable when they control the courts and the senate

“In fact, we don’t want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”

Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution:

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

Trying to remove any and all trade barriers in order to prevent trade.

A man rubs a lamp and a genie comes out and says, “I will grant you one wish, anything you ask for, whatever you can imagine, your wish is my command.”

The man shouts, “I want a dragon!”

The genie responds, “I’m sorry, but a dragon is just too much, it’s just not possible for that to exist. Can you think of something else?”

The man thinks for a minute and says, “Well, in that case, I guess I wish for the rich and powerful to face significant legal consequences within the existing system for the harm they do to regular people.”

The genie sighs and says, “What color did you want that dragon?”

One easy trick that makes you immune to propaganda - simply respond “not sure” to every question you’re ever asked. It doesn’t really even save you though because they’ll just lump you in with the people who chose the wrong answer. The site repeatedly uses the phrase, “failed to identify as false” to group the “not sures” in with the incorrect responses.

There’s an almost endless way to present poll numbers and survey results to support whatever conclusion you like, you could say that “fewer than half the respondents were able to identify this claim as false,” or you could say, “80% of respondents avoided incorrectly labeling this claim as true,” depending on what narrative you prefer. And that’s assuming that the raw data itself, which comes from an internet survey, is reliable and representative.

In 2020 the democrats were calling the border wall racist and they won, then in 2024 it was “we’re the ones who are actually gonna build the wall, Trump’s all talk.” They literally tried to position themselves to the right of Republicans on the issue in order to win over the mythical centrists, and predictably what happened was that their support among Latinos broke down.

A lot of these people are religious and conservative, but were willing to vote for Democrats as long as there was substantial differences on race/immigration. But even if they were the “lesser evil” on immigration from a pro-immigrant perspective - something which they denied as hard as they could, by the way - if the difference didn’t appear substantial any more, if it was framed in technical arguments about how to do it rather than moral arguments about what to do, then many of them no longer saw it as damning and voted based on other issues where they’re more aligned with Republicans.

This is often what swing voters actually look like, by the way, and why pivoting to the right to capture them is often counterproductive. It turns out pivoting right on an issue where doing so directly harms millions of people so you can appeal to the dozen or so people who like Dick Cheney loses elections. Swing voters are a lot more complex than the idiotic “conventional wisdom” that just has everyone at a different point on a one dimensional left-right scale.

Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.

If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”

Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."

So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.

[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]

If you define everyone you feel like doing violence towards as “an other church” then sure, but then the distinction is completely meaningless. Plenty of the examples I mentioned such as the inquisitions were used against people who were longtime, faithful members of the church. No one was safe.

Well, if it didn’t, then perhaps there’s no way to get them to do what we want and in that case it is imperative that they be replaced as soon as possible, a goal that is also furthered by voting third party.

The thing to fight for is ranked choice voting, or some other method without a spoiler effect. Until you have that

No. The thing is for candidates to endorse ranked choice voting and implement it, and until they do that, they are going to have to deal with the spoiler effect.

This shit is so stupid. “You have to fall in line unconditionally forever, until, out of the kindness of their hearts and against their own interests, the party decides to let you out of that situation.” That’s just saying we have to fall in line unconditionally forever. They’re never going to just give us systemic change, it’s designed this way on purpose and is working exactly the way they want it to.

The only way to actually apply pressure towards getting necessary policies is through setting conditions on your vote based on those policies. This ideology of “lesser-evilism” is completely illogical and incoherent, and the whole reason we’re here is because it’s such an egregious failure. There is no incentive for politicians to implement RCV if they know they’ll have your vote either way. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

I’ve considered it, but I might have to go back to school to get the qualifications. I’m also trans and nervous about what that future might look like.

And yeah, there’s also the issue of just training people to work for defense companies. At least you could maybe warn them? Tbh, if did go back to school for teaching, I feel like I’d want to teach history instead, it’s much more of a “study of everything” than physics is (and is more relevant to politics). Like tbh I kinda lost interest in physics after graduating, for me, it was tied to a lot of things that I’ve left behind.

I have a BS in physics that I never used, I chose it because I had no idea what I was doing and discovered afterward that most jobs involving physics are less “figuring out how stars work, for the joy of discovery” and more, “figuring out new and exciting ways to kill brown people, for profit,” which I did not sign up for. So, I’ve wound up doing grunt work at warehouses instead. “Learn to wash your own vegetables and you won’t have to pay court to kings,” as the story goes.

A lot of people go into STEM because they just want to solve problems and the issue with that is that if you just solve any problem that’s put in front of you without regard for who’s problem it is and whether solving it will actually make the world a better place, then you belong in the same category as the guy who developed the Blitzkrieg doctrine, who claimed afterwards that he didn’t really care about “politics” and was just doing his job as best as he could. Just because you’re capable of solving a problem and someone’s asking you to doesn’t mean that you actually should.

I know I’d be a lot cooler, especially around here, if I just put on the Che Guevara shirt and say revolution is the only answer.

Not what I said. Revolution is not the only mechanism for change that exists outside of voting, there are other forms of mass action such as strikes and protests.

Because every example of that sort of thing just leads to more fascism under a different name

That’s completely ahistorical. Even if you write off all the biggest and most famous examples, like the Russian, American, Chinese, and French revolutions (which you shouldn’t), the world is a big place and you wouldn’t be making that kind of sweeping generalization if you’d actually looked into it.

The reason people say this shit (aside from propaganda to discourage doing revolutions) is to signal that they themselves aren’t interested in participating in a revolution. But the actual history is a lot more complicated than is allowed by this sort of sweeping proclamation about every country in every time that has ever existed.

It’s funny because this position of “revolution is always bad” is literally to the right of neocons. Neoconservatives are always fantasizing about the people of rival countries (Iran, Cuba, China, etc) rising up to overthrow their governments. They’re allowed to be pro-revolution because they’re sufficiently wedded to the establishment that they don’t feel the need to disavow every revolutionary action ever to avoid suspicion, which allows these conservatives to be to take a position to the left of the average self-proclaimed anti-communist leftist who is desperate to make sure everyone knows they’re not one of those kinds of leftists.

But as for making it a red line for supporting democrats, sure. I mean honestly, credit to you for proposing something that might actually work. I think if there’s a big enough movement to do that, every Democrat would get behind it.

Yes, and the same is true for setting red lines on other issues, such as Palestine. If enough people actually stood by it, the Democrats would be forced to change their position, or they would end up being replaced by another party.

To be historically accurate, the catholic church only liked to kill its popes and other churches.

What the fuck is this shit. The church conducted brutal campaigns of terror hunting down religious minorities or those accused of heresy and tortured them to extract confessions which they then used to justify more torture. Jews were frequently criminalized and forced out of countries in mass deportations at their own expense. And then there were, oh yeah, the Crusades military campaigns that brought death and destruction even to their own lands as crusaders looted and pillaged wherever they went, in one case even sacking Constantinople who they were supposed to be protecting.

Like yeah I guess “Believe everything we say and defer to our authority and we probably won’t kill you” is technically better than just killing people, but that’s not exactly a high bar.

That being said, I am fully aware of the flaws in my ideology - and there are many - but I enjoy libertarianism because it allows me to tell people like you to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” and not feel morally wrong for it.

Lmao I’ve never seen someone so explicitly accept that they picked their ideology out at the supermarket.

See, ideas generally fall into two categories, which I call “manmade” and “natural.” “Manmade” ideas are ideas that are specifically crafted to have mass market appeal, to fulfill some psychological urge of some demographic, whereas “natural” ideas are just reflections of the world as it actually exists. Libertarianism is a perfect manmade ideology, it allows you to tell “the man” to fuck off, to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” Who cares if the ideology is actually correct or capable of producing a functioning system? All that matters is that it makes you feel good. It’s no different from people who believe in quack medicine or crystal healing or whatever, it’s “I want to believe.”

People just want to go down to the supermarket and look through all different brands of ideologies until they find the one that really suits their own personal style, and then they bring it home and put it up on the mantle and polish it every day and keep it there, they would never dream of actually using it because they might get dirt on it, and anyway it would probably break since it’s not designed for that, it’s just there to look pretty. A proper ideology should be used so often it’s kept in the toolshed, where it’s rough and worn and not pretty to look at, but it’s designed to actually get the job done, and that ideology should be just as suitable whether you’re a nuerodivergent trans software developer or a Guatemalan dirt farmer. Because the truth is the truth no matter who you are or what your style is.

If you recognize that you only like libertarianism because it makes you feel good to believe in it, then you need to reject it immediately. You don’t just go through live believing whatever makes you feel good regardless of reason or evidence… do you?

Supporting this, the Dems have literally funded far-right Republican candidates under a “pied piper” strategy, on the assumption that they’ll be easier to beat and to motivate voters to come out to stop them. Donald Trump himself benefited from this strategy, the Dem leadership loves Trump because he gets people so angry and they know they’re the only alternative.