the irony is that the focus on this sort of rhetoric is exactly the same kind of myopic inward facing language games that it’s ostensibly supposed to be criticizing

if this was good, actionable advice politicians would be able to positively separate themselves by actually doing it instead of just constantly talking about how everyone else needs to be doing it

sometimes i think you guys don’t even want to hero born of woman to crush the serpent with his heel

i do think a lot of the time its just a fun little game you can play against marxist leninists who quote from capital like its the bible

addendum that this is probably pulling more from Gramsci than anything particular to Marx, but that's what imo makes (parts) of the marxist tradition so interesting

idk if thats the kind of thing you mean by “enamored with marxism” but it’s what i take away from marxism at least. the basic idea that our economic relationships in some part determine our values, and that those values are simultaneously used to legitimate the economic relationships they arise from

or when white proles hate their hr lady and so vote for trump it’s not just aimless resentment but a somewhat coherent rejection of pmc values, expressed by the boring diversity training or whatever, and of the power relations expressed by their having to sit through them at risk to their jobs

like the pmc doesn’t consciously try to increase their power as a class (bsky pmc vanguardists excluded), but being/becoming pmc give a perspective and values that lead to thinking problems should be solved in a way that just happen to require management by people who share that perspective/values

it’s not that everything each side does is solely in pursuit of their class interests, especially if that’s narrowly construed as solely economic, but their position in society inculcates certain values and assumptions which can then come into conflict

imo the most useful tool in the marxist toolbox is social-political conflict being fundamentally about power relations between classes.

ie idk how you can make sense of the pro or anti-trump coalitions unless you view trumpism as kind of class warfare waged against the pmc from above and below

Not sure this is quite what you're asking about since I Am Not Now Nor Have I Ever Been A Marxist, and idk if the kind of analysis gorbaechev is doing there is particularly useful, but i do consider myself marxism-inspired so i'm going to try to explain what i mean by that:

gonna start a liquor store where if you want to buy a six pack of beer you have to walk up to the front desk and have an employee who is almost certainly drunk lecture you on the difference between an IPA and a pilsner

yeah he definitely doesn’t have a problem with their politics. i think he does get annoyed by how stupid they are though, with the tragic element being that it’s his own racism that makes him unable to recognize that their racism is what makes them all so stupid

the tragedy of scott is basically that he’s a soft racist who doesn’t think the racism is worth overthrowing liberal democracy for and so can’t understand why his audience full of hard racists think racism is worth destroying society for (or even how he cultivated that audience in the first place)

literally never been more hyped by a sporting event than when i would watch that team force the third shot clock violation of a quarter and you could see the opposing team's will break in real time

i mean the way this works mechanically is the u.s. navy captain says don’t cross this line or we’ll shoot you and then the oil captain is the one who has to decide if risking his and all his men’s lives is worth making a point about the political feasibility of a blockade

is there a protocol for if they pop the hatch and it’s full of space zombies?

yeah it’s so cool. unrelatedly, i am going to kill myself

the real question is what happens next time there’s a major financial crisis. action from the us fed and treasury+flight to safety dynamics in 08/20 were when us leadership actually showed up as underpinning the global system. the fed will act as long as jpow is there but once he’s gone who knows

i think this is more a story about the increased power/proliferation of relatively small/cheap/close range missiles and drones that the us cant suppress from standoff range, its (very very) bad for us power and prestige but doesn’t fundamentally undermine the logic of globalization

and idt the freedom of navigation stuff will have huge 2nd order effects. it’s possible this status quo is temporary, plus everyone else still wants to keep ocean shipping viable, iran/hormuz the houthis/red sea are the only places where there’s the will+ability to shut down an important waterway

It’s a national humiliation either way but idt it’s a break point vs the steady decline of u.s. leadership since 2016 (accelerating in trump 2 ofc). ie the greenland stuff was worse for our relationship w europe, and the “liberation day“ tariffs were a shot across the bow for all of asia

political problems get a lot less tractable when you can’t give everyone a bigger piece of the pie than they got last year. i don’t think it’s clear liberal democracy can survive in the long run without economic growth

i‘m just gonna keep banging on on this theme but so much of modern centrism is nothing but negative polarization against ‘extremists on both sides.‘ It’s a fine enough starting point but utterly insufficient for actually addressing the problems that have given those ‘extremists’ so much prominence

ofc this ignores that the 25th doesn’t actually bypass congress, though that’s a big part of why i put ”serious”/“unserious” in quotes, this style of politics is far more about the performance of seriousness (that is, cynicism), than actually eg trying to solve problems by addressing their causes

chris murphy is calling for the 25th instead of impeachment because anyone “serious” knows that republicans in congress will never act so impeachment is automatically an “unserious” solution

the reason everything is broken is because of congress and congress is broken because republicans are too scared of their own base to ever do anything, but imo democrats should act like they understood that‘s the problem that needs to be fixed and not an unchangeable fact of our political system

I solved the Saturday 4/04/2026 New York Times Daily Crossword in 16:13!

one reason i’m skeptical of the nyt haters is that they regularly blow their lids off in response to articles like this that no reasonable person (though i concede that is apparently an extremely high bar these days) could read as anything but denigrating towards its subject

we just need to properly price the externalities of the degradation of culture and moral standards that bad art causes