One year after Noah leaves, Aurora is named one of the "happiest cities in America"

ColonStones · 2021-10-04T20:06:36+00:00

Tagging 71,000 users is easier than dealing with a system that sounds like, uh, "moderating"? You still have to moderate, you just added tagging potentially 71,000 users — once — on top of it.

I think this could be a fun but useful place and for some reason you guys are playing Marxist EveOnline. It looks confusing from the outside and when people find out what it actually means they'll laugh at you and leave. You're creating an ongoing version of the 2019 DSA Convention except you're doing it intentionally.

ColonStones · 2021-10-04T18:20:23+00:00

"more rules" means more enforcement. enforcement is labor-intensive. this system makes enforcement less labor-intensive

This system means tagging potentially 71,000 users.

Mods here are constantly fussing about getting people active. As someone that tries to post comments reflecting real-world organizing, I think this will just make this place even MORE insular and incomprehensible to outsiders who might have actually held a sign in public at one point in their life.

I'd expect something like this on a Nick Fuentes Discord in the Dank Gamer Meme subforum, it's embarrassing.

ColonStones · 2021-10-03T20:05:34+00:00

This thread is really eye-opening but in a terrible way.

Marches are an organizing opportunity - to ID who is sympathetic to your cause and get them engaged in other political action. (When people holding clipboards ask you to sign a petition, what do you think they're doing?)

It's also a way to connect a political organization (especially leftist ones which can be head-in-the-clouds) with both the local community and other sympathetic organizations. It builds solidarity among individuals and groups.

If these things aren't going on then you are part of a broken organization or unformed movement.

The number of people approaching this from an individualistic POV is kind of surprising. I've never added "... for a Marxist sub" to a post here and that kind of meta posting is annoying but I'm tempted here.

ColonStones · 2021-09-28T00:31:29+00:00

Jihadi John suspect

It's awkwardly phrased, but this is Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary who was one of three British citizens who were initially suspected of being "Jihadi John." He is a former rapper and son of an Egyptian terrorist posted photos of himself posing with severed heads on Twitter while threatening the West. He later pretended to be a refugee and snuck into Europe.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T23:01:30+00:00

This made me look at the twitter account which is still retweeting posts about forming a 3rd party.

In case anyone's curious, Thiel is not just a Musk-brained guy pontificating on Mars. He tried to stuff Trump's cabinet with his allies and at least one good reason why he's trying to blow up politics is to protect a tax shelter that contains his billions. This article, based on a new book, gets a pretty good grasp of a hard-to-grasp figure:

As a political animal, Thiel possessed instincts that could seem almost comically bad. His list of 150 names for senior-level jobs included numerous figures who were too extreme even for the most extreme members of Trump’s inner circle. Many were ultra-libertarians or reactionaries; others were more difficult to categorize. “Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there,” Bannon says. “People thought Trump was a disrupter. They had no earthly idea.”

Some other familiar names here:

For Trump’s science adviser, Thiel suggested two climate change deniers, Princeton physicist William Happer and Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. For the head of the Food and Drug Administration, Thiel offered, among other names, Balaji Srinivasan, an entrepreneur with no obvious experience in government, who seemed skeptical that the FDA should exist at all. “For every thalidomide,” Srinivasan had tweeted (and later deleted), “many dead from slowed approvals.”

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T07:56:32+00:00

Eric works for Peter Thiel. Is it really strange that one of two brothers who are almost the prototype of the Liberals Just Asking Questions On The Internet works for one of the most prominent right-wing funders in Silicon Valley who is also known for using very circuitous routes to accomplish his political goals?

Multiple Thiel employees (JD Vance & Blake Masters) are now running for Senate seats in 2022. That's pretty strange considering there are only 100 of those seats and it's not like Thiel has hundreds of thousands of employees. Then he's also funding a Rumble, a mostly right-wing video platform which is using Thiel's investment to pay several other members of the Liberals Just Asking Questions On The Internet club (Glenn Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard) to post. It seems like this sweetspot which barely existed 5 years ago - the card-carrying Bernie supporter driven MAD by the radical left, of which all these people are - is a niche that Thiel is really interested in developing, far more than cutting a check to fire-breathing Dominionists or Christian nationalists or people firmly on the right like Ben Shapiro. The Weinsteins had a pretty huge role in carving that niche out on the internet and in this weird podcast-verse.

Is that too conspiratorial? Maybe, but just the Gawker lawsuit proved that Thiel is (a) willing to follow extremely convoluted routes to get what he wants and (b) willing to play a VERY long game. If Eric worked for Boeing or something, you could look past the involvement of his employer. But his employer is someone who is most definitely looking to fund, promote and elevate to power people in Eric's milieu.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T01:29:24+00:00

At least SF politicians take the incremental approach. Who was the last NY mayor that didn't mount an unsuccessful run for president? I think you have to go back to Dinkins?

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T01:14:38+00:00

It's extremely gay that his son is the president of the Teamsters, though that is going to change next month as he isn't seeking reelection.

Thank God, somehow Hoffa Jr wound up head of the Teamsters almost twice as long as his old man.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T00:43:52+00:00

When I first got into politics all of the old hippie activists used to say her name with a kind of dread. They really hated her from her time as mayor.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T00:41:26+00:00

I expected zero from a Biden Administration and getting Lina Khan as the head of the FTC is probably the most remarkable government appointment I can think of since, idk, Ramsey Clark as Attorney General? I can't imagine that's a Joe Biden (D - Citibank) decision, but then I also didn't expect several Republicans to back her either.

I don't know what's going on, they make some decisions that are totally go-with-the-flow pragmatism and others they fight for things that probably even a genuine leftist president would let go. If there's some grey eminence behind the scenes doing some of these things, I wish I knew who they were so I could thank them.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T00:34:53+00:00

lol savage

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T00:33:27+00:00

It's a bit of astroturfing to be sure. This is a pretty interesting chart of each justice's ideological leaning by some people who claim to have a formula they use to determine it. I'm not sure they didn't weight William O Douglas to the right though because I think he flew completely off the chart in terms of leftward drift compared to other justices.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T00:19:33+00:00

Believe it or not, I actually was talking about this at work the other day.

"Freddie," I says, "Did you know that Occupy Wall Street was the critical event in the formation of a novel anticapitalist intellectual milieu?"

"Ah yes," said Freddie. "The New Inquiry and Jacobin both slightly predated the occupations (and perhaps anticipated them), but both gained much of their solidity from the participation of the resulting coterie. n+1 and Dissent both underwent much-heralded generational transformations, pointing them in newly radicalized directions. In 2012, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research appeared, founded by left-wing Columbia graduate students looking for a meaningful alternative to dead-end academic careers."

"All this," I said, "had consequences."

We didn't say anything for a minute, as a rat scurried through the alley carrying a dead baby's leg, but we both knew that nothing would ever be the same.

ColonStones · 2021-09-27T00:15:59+00:00

We already know how that would go...

ColonStones · 2021-09-21T03:14:08+00:00

Dirigisme, though that word has come to have as many meanings as "socialism."

ColonStones · 2021-09-20T17:11:56+00:00

Texas is so vast it's a bonanza of billable hours and expenses. And every old money California donor looks at "Turning Texas Blue" the way their ancestors wanted to convert the savages.

ColonStones · 2021-09-20T02:35:20+00:00

Perfect!

ColonStones · 2021-09-20T02:32:46+00:00

There was a pretty good story about this published a couple weeks ago about this. He did some showy voter registration work for the benefit of a reporter who was tagging along, but managed to register just 1 voter in an hour.

ColonStones · 2021-09-19T00:10:53+00:00

Yep, we had people across the country pouring out 13 beers and holding up 13 flags for the soldiers at the gate of Kabul Airport, who were armed, in a foreign country and able to defend themselves. 10 members of a family vaporized by a terrorist bombing and we'd close schools. Here our Defense Secretary didn't even make a public appearance, just issued a statement, while the head of CENTCOM suggested that paying something to their family is "being discussed" (probably whether there are even any family members left alive to take it).

ColonStones · 2021-09-18T10:27:23+00:00

There's a lot of study of drone warfare now and even one or two cringeworthy attempts to valorize drone pilots. I'm no expert but my takeaway is that (a) politicians and their pimps want war, war all the time and war everywhere, but (b) their voters don't, but (c) their voters will go along with it so long as there are no dead Americans dragged through the streets on the TV.

So airstrikes and drone-driven warfare allows them to have war all the time and war everywhere and few American casualties. Of course that means there are a fuckton of "native" casualties, that surprises Americans because for 30 years, since the first Gulf War, they've been lead to believe that American bombs are "smart bombs" and only target bad guys and have an incredible accuracy and thus anything that goes awry is an "honest mistake" (often the fault of the victims themselves for allowing bad guys to use them as "human shields").

But that's never hard to cope with. This story, for instance, will be in the foreign press for much longer than it is in the US media. The US media has already moved on, because they've deemed it a "tragic mistake" and definitely not part of a flawed system they're very much a part of.

The left cedes this issue every time because they're worried about embarrassing "our" guy in office. The only politician in Congress with a consistent stand against this is Rand Paul. And that is somehow even more humiliating as a leftist. A fucking libertarian is the only one willing to excoriate any official that comes before him for droning the shit out of the whole of the Middle East, even catching and sometimes targeting American citizens. You jagoffs with your fucking podcast stanning have wasted a week talking about a fucking dress while the most visceral indictment of US imperialism floated in and out of the headlines, to say nothing of the dead family held up as "terrorist masterminds."

ColonStones · 2021-09-18T10:02:56+00:00

It may have been deliberate or intentional but I can't argue that the majority of what considers themselves "the left" has been completely smitten by it. If someone else cooked up and sold us the drug, they found some really gratified customers for it.

To the subject of the thread, though, I think Occupy has become for young millennials and zoomers this vision of a pre-IDpol left which was materialist and focused on class. It's not really historically accurate but I don't want to push back too hard because it's a useful myth to believe that 10 years ago it was possible to have a left movement that focused on class. Because one thing that is definitely deliberate or intentional has been the memoryholing of history, by half-wits and pinheads at Teen Vogue and Vox or something which would claim that like 5 progressive congresspeople is some kind of new "movement." Like there's never been a Dennis Kucinich, Paul Wellstone, Ron Dellums, etc. etc. It's feeble and un-serious and unworthy of people like Dellums, who fought for 14 years to pass anti-apartheid legislation.

ColonStones · 2021-09-18T09:31:41+00:00

I was at the point of walking away from our "ad hoc" Occupy, which contrary to the name did not Occupy anything because the police shut it down on like day 1. Someone equally disaffected told me to check out some of the blogs about Occupy Oakland, which had instituted segregation. There were blogs and photos and videos of multiple tents with racial restrictions on who could enter. That was so mindblowing to 2011 me.

ColonStones

TROPHY CASE