Hanania May Have Changed His Mind On Trans People, But He Also Tweeted "These People Are All Animals,

Matt Yglesias’ curiosity about the rationalist movement was apparently pretty serious; he sounds more and more like us all the time.

I pity them and am perfectly willing to forgive them of their sins, but I also want to democratize their property with every fiber of my being so they can stop this system before we all die from it.

tfw you don’t know whether to be envious of the upper classes for having a bunch of utilities provided for free-or-below-market by venture capitalists trying to boost growth before they find a profit model, or to pity them for relying on platforms that are doomed to ineffably disappear because they have no sustainable model.

“ (Also, I’ll grant you there’s something to *the basic idea*, but “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is actually untenable.)”

Could you elaborate more on this? I’m curious how you arrived to this conclusion when we produce more than enough food to feed the planet and when we (in the United States, at least) have more empty homes than homeless people. If those kinds of surpluses can be achieved with only small parts of the population engaged in agriculture and construction, what could we achieve if everyone worked to the best of their ability? Even with marginal returns on labor.

I genuinely mean it; to me, nothing is more untenable than the idea that allowing a small percentage of people to control nearly all resource and labor allocation will benefit humankind in the long run, except maybe the idea that unchecked productive activity in a competitive system will somehow miraculously save us from the ecological catastrophe caused by that activity.

funny thing about talking about capitalism/communism is if you don’t explicitly say ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ and take out the marxist jargon people will agree with you 90% of the time

Against the Logic of the Guillotine

Fetishizing the guillotine is like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.

148 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an immense crowd. This was a popular action arising from the grassroots, not a spectacle coordinated by politicians. At the time, the Commune controlled Paris, which was still inhabited by people of all classes; the French and Prussian armies surrounded the city and were preparing to invade it in order to impose the conservative Republican government of Adolphe Thiers. In these conditions, burning the guillotine was a brave gesture repudiating the Reign of Terror and the idea that positive social change can be achieved by slaughtering people.

“What?” you say, in shock, “The Communards burned the guillotine? Why on earth would they do that? I thought the guillotine was a symbol of liberation!”

Why indeed? If the guillotine is not a symbol of liberation, then why has it become such a standard motif for the radical left over the past few years? Why is the internet replete with guillotine memes? Why does The Coup sing “We got the guillotine, you better run”? The most popular socialist periodical is named Jacobin, after the original proponents of the guillotine. Surely this can’t all be just an ironic sendup of lingering right-wing anxieties about the original French Revolution.

The guillotine has come to occupy our collective imagination. In a time when the rifts in our society are widening towards civil war, it represents uncompromising bloody revenge.

Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome.

"Faced with devastating declines in government services, many have stepped in to provide basic social services and natural disaster training. This is particularly notable in rural counties in states like Oregon, where the combination of long-term collapse in timber revenue and dwindling federal subsidies has all but emptied the coffers of local governments.

In this situation, the Oath Keepers began to offer basic “community preparedness” and “disaster response” courses, and encouraged the formation of community watches and full-blown militias as parallel government structures.

While filling in the holes left by underfunded law enforcement in Josephine County, for example, Patriot-affiliated politicians were also leading the opposition to new property tax measures that would have allowed the hiring of more deputies.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions...often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support."

-Phil Neel, Hinterland

Boots on the Ground

Anti-government organizations are filling a disaster-response gap — and using it to spread their message.

For nearly a decade, the Oath Keepers — which formed in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency — have responded to disasters like hurricanes and floods by administering rescue operations, serving hot meals, and doing construction work. Disasters provide the Oath Keepers with opportunities to fundraise and gain the trust of people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to their anti-government cause. By arriving to crisis zones before federal agencies do, the Oath Keepers take advantage of bureaucratic weaknesses, holding a hand out to people in desperate circumstances.

This all serves to reinforce the militia members’ conviction that the government is fallible, negligent, and not to be trusted. And every time a new person sees the Oath Keepers as the helpers who respond when the government does not, it helps build the group’s fledgling brand.

[…]

“There’s a long-standing conspiracy theory among the far right that everything that FEMA does is dual use,” Jackson said. “It has this surface-level purpose of responding to emergencies and disasters and all that kind of stuff. But also it’s building up the infrastructure so that one day when martial law is declared, there are these huge detention camps and there are deployed resources to be used by troops who are enforcing martial law.”

Many Oath Keepers subscribe to that belief, but they’re not vocal about it. Publicly, Jackson said, they portray themselves as supplementing FEMA’s efforts and even working in tandem with the agency. It’s part and parcel of the group’s founding ethos — understand the system, work within the system, and be prepared to defeat the system when the time comes.

I'm certainly not a Hamas supporter, but the idea that Israel has ever been interested in working towards a peaceful 2-state solution (and that their relation-building with Saudi Arabia has anything to do with that) is laughable.

Israelis may disapprove of Netanyahu, but from the polling data I've seen, it has more to do with his attempted subversion of democracy than his treatment of Palestine. So the idea that popular opinion in Israel was about to result in a sudden relaxation of the political and economic repression of the Palestinians (if only those no-goodniks in Hamas hadn't ruined it for the rest of them! Ah well, maybe we can try again in 50 years) is bullshit.

Israel (it's voters, state, and institutions) has had decades to do something to end the cycle, and they are indeed the ONLY party that can end this cycle. If the Palestinians' only choices are: 1. Give up and accept total defeat on Israel's terms or 2. Rage impotently and drag a bunch of innocents down into hell with you out of spite, maybe Israel should consider offering them a better set of choices?

Obviously Hamas actions are abhorrent and the rise in antisemitism is uncalled for. What is the proper the response to 75yrs of apartheid though? Something has to be done about that or his cycle will never cease.

So you came from the post in which I explicitly named three organizations working for a two-state solution. And didn’t think… to look into… their proposals for a two-state solution…

As a reminder, before Hamas’s attack, Israel was working on normalizing peaceful relations with Saudi Arabia. That’s dead in the water because Hamas broke a ceasefire and killed a thousand Jewish civilians.

Before Hamas’s attack, there were massive, frequent, and often daily protests among the Israeli public, speaking out against an administration comprised of anti-Palestinians. Those are on hold now, because a thousand Jewish civilians were killed, and the country is at war. But Netanyahu’s coalition of asswipes is built like a house of cards, and they’ll suffer in the next election. That much is clear.

Hamas wasn’t looking to gain territory, win, or free Palestine on October 7th. Israel has never lost a war in its modern history, and it has overcome far worse odds than a couple thousand terrorists. There’s no feasible way for Hamas to have won. They broke the ceasefire and killed civilians anyway. Why? Why waste those lives and those resources, knowing that Israel would retaliate against Gazans?

Because Hamas looked around and saw something that horrified them. They saw Arab nations, once their allies, walking away from the idea of killing millions of Jews in favor of normalization and peace with Israel. They saw the citizens of Israel, rallying in unprecedented numbers for peace and democracy. They saw Fatah, their Palestinian enemies since 2007, ready to come back to the bargaining table for a peaceful two-state resolution.

Hamas broke a ceasefire for a media ploy. They did it, knowing that it would stop the normalization process between the Saudis and Israelis. They did it, knowing that it would bring an abrupt halt to Israeli protests. They did it, knowing that Israel would retaliate, and that the world would be watching as Hamas put Palestinian civilians in the line of fire and blamed it on Israel. They were looking to propagandize a dying movement, and friend, it seems like you bought into it.

Something does have to be done about Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians. Something does have to happen to end this cycle of violence. And plenty of things were being done about it, in the Knesset, on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But Hamas considers peace without genocide to be a failure. Peace without genocide leaves Hamas out of a job. So they put a stop to it, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives.

And you don’t gotta take that from me. Ask them. They aren’t trying to hide it, they’ve been saying it all month. It’s in their founding charter.

I understand the point this person is trying to make, but Star Wars has always been mass-market safe entertainment. Tom Shone in his book Blockbuster described how A New Hope was largely successful because it appealed to so many people- the Germans could pretend the Empire was British, the British could pretend it was German, and the French pretended it was the Americans. Luke is an uncomplicated everyone that any viewer can relate to. Etc.

And the new Star Wars movies absolutely have an ideology, but its the (badly integrated) ideology of #Resistance liberalism instead of Lucas' milquetoast liberalism.

i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.

None of which is to say that strikebreaking is *admirable* per se. But analyzing the material precursors of our actions is the absolute bedrock of any materialism worth the name. Treating people who betray the cause – any cause – like they’re infected with some nebulous evil rather than responding to the incentives they’re presented with is magical thinking.

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

I first encountered the idea of "pay politicians more to reduce corruption" in college in the context of economic development in the global south. IIRC, there is evidence that this is true.

The problem is that in a liberal/capitalist economy, what people describe as "bribes" or "corruption" are part and parcel of the system of governance, as much as taxation or lawsuits. We can ban all the symptoms of this relationship that we like (steak dinners, exceptionally unethical agreements, outright fraud/collusion) but it isn't going to change the fact that if you want political power in Texas or Montana, you are going to have to satisfy the largest and most powerful of your constituents- oil/gas and ranchers, respectively.

Anyway now that all that dress drama has faded: members of congress are underpaid, and creating a less corrupt congress means paying them and their employees more (while banning all sources of outside income and making them divest from individual stocks).

As a separate matter, future pay raises beyond the new standard should be indexed to median wage growth- their incomes won’t grow unless their constituents’ income grows