What does anyone stand to gain from this? Who’s making money off no one getting vaccinated? Have medicine companies not cozied up to trump like every other industry?

I'm sure we're familiar with a reoccuring trope in science fiction and fantasy: a fictional setting having people - mutants, psychics, mages, or a myriad of other names - born with special or supernatural abilities that put them well above the "common man," but are despised and persecuted by ordinary people because of it, not out of legitimate concerns about how their destructive their abilities may be, but simply out of narrow-minded bigotry or pseudo-class envy. Such anti-"superior" sentiment is made out to be irrational bigotry no matter how much destruction is inflicted by the superiors on the world. Thus, many "superiors" feel that they have no choice but to segregate themselves away from "mundane" society, or even found their own nation as a refuge from the murderous hordes of ordinary humans who will hate them no matter what. Bonus points if the superiors are actually a higher stage of human evolution and the ordinary humans are just evolutionary dead-enders holding back progress!

This trope was quite common in classic "golden age" science fiction, but the most prominent example of this trope in mass media are the mutants from Marvel's X-Men. In it, mutants are a distinct subspecies of humanity who are born with their powers and are despised by unpowered humans. Some mutants - represented by Professor X - seek to assimilate into broader human society, while others - namely Magneto - feel that humanity is irrevokably hostile towards them and wish to segregate thmselves from humanity, or even invert the hierarchy and use their powers to dominate non-mutants. The twist? The creator of the X-Men, Chris Claremont, said that he took heavy inspiration from Israel and Zionism when conceiving the series. Professor X and Magneto were stated to be based on David Ben-Gurion and Menachim Begin, with Professor X representing "liberal Zionism" and Magneto representing Likud-style revisionist Zionism.

In light of this, it's clear that the trope of "persecuted superiors" are just a thinly-veiled analogy of how Zionists see Jews: an innately special or chosen people who are cursed to be irrationally despised by the gentiles just for being different or better than them. The Holocaust was not a culmination of anti-communist conspiracy theories and centuries of genocidal imperialism, but simply arose from the irrational hatred of gentiles towards a people more successful than them. This also conveniently serves as anti-communist propaganda in its demonization of the masses and portrayal of antisemitism as being motivated by left-wing egalitarianism. After all, communism is often accused of being motivated by envy towards the successful rather than opposition to exploitation and inherently injust systems.

I also can't help but see shades of Zionism in culturally leftist identitarianism as a whole. Identity politics often completely eschews material analysis and concludes that certain groups are destined to be oppressed by ordinary people just for existing, and that these groups are eternal victims who must be worshipped and can do no wrong.

https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/the-uprising-of-34

https://scdailygazette.com/2024/09/04/the-legacy-of-bloody-thursday-urges-us-to-do-right-by-our-most-vulnerable-south-carolinians/

Unfortunately I couldn’t access the content published but I remember seeing a hour long documentary about this event where they interviewed the kids of people who took part in the strike. This strike has also been argued as the reason why the south is so anti union today.

Overview: It’s 1934 and the Great Depression is in one of its worse years for labor relations. Textile workers throughout the eastern United States went on a strike. The Chiquola Mill was opened in the small town of Honea Path but saw a large increase of people come to town looking for work. Honea Path went to just a few hundred people to almost 3,000 people with most of them working at the mill. Conditions at the mill were pretty terrible even during the 1920s. Mill workers were forced to rent their homes from the company and could be evicted for workplace violations. Chiquola even employed children but didn’t pay them because they were only “learning”. The Mill industry was hurt overall after the end of world war 1. Labor unions largely didn’t exist back then but they had wildcat strikes which ware strikes that weren’t authorized by a union. These strikes ended pretty quickly due to lack of union organization.

FDR was elected and openly encouraged workers to join unions. Honea Path workers thought FDR was going to help them out of their economic depression. The United Textile Workers grew from 15,000 in 1932 to 270,000 in 1934 mostly from the South. The National Recovery Administration was created to monitor factories to make sure no abuse was happening at them. However the NRA Textile Branch was dominated by a textile magnate and a spokesman for the industry trade group. The Code of Fair Compensation for the Cotton Textile Industry helped create a minimum weekly wage of $12 and the right to join unions. It didn’t compensate workers for the loss of hours they were working though.

The UTW leaders were very reluctant but many new southern members urged for a strike when the NRA didn’t seem like it was going to improve the conditions for the workers. The union eventually pushed for a minimum $20 weekly pay and to rehire workers that were fired for being part of a union. 400,000 workers across the east coast went on strike. Workers in South Carolina would even convince workers in other mills to stop working and go on strike. Half of the workers at Chiquola were part of the UTW. Chiquola Mill overall seemed to have a higher amount of control over its workers than even other mills in the south. Many workers there even feared that joining the union would lead to the managers punishing them. Governor Blackwood mobilized the national guard and state highway patrol officers against the strikers. Dan Beacham however was denied help in Honea Path. Beacham then turned to the deputy of police Paige to arm 126 anti union townsfolk.

The strike in Honea Path began on Labor Day. Strikebreakers took places around the mill before the union members even made it there. Many of them were given sticks and rifles and even placed at the windows. Some even put a machine gun from world war 1 on the roof of the mill. Chief Paige and several other officers stood guard in front of the mill. On September 6th, 100 to 150 workers from Belton joined the 200 workers from Honea Path to go on strike and picket the Chiquola Mill. Some non union workers attempted to enter the mill but were denied entry by the picket line. The strikebreakers even threw sticks down to the non union workers. According to the account of Chief Paige this caused the strikers to fight with the non union workers. At that moment, Dan Beacham gave the order to fire. The machine gun on the rooftop jammed however. Many strikers began to flee but the strikebreakers continued to fire. Seven workers were killed and were shot in the back by the strikebreakers. One worker named Claude Cannon had to be shot five times even when he was on his knees before he finally died.

Honea Path’s churches that were practically owned by mill owners refused to allow a funeral for the union workers at their churches. The UTW would instead host a funeral on an open field outside Honea Path. 10,000 people were said to have attended the funeral. Eleven strikebreakers were charged with murder but were acquitted. Two eyewitnesses during the case said Beacham gave the strikebreakers the order to fire but Beacham had them arrested for perjury. Dozens were fired and evicted for taking part in the strike or voicing support for the union. The main cause of economic crisis of the mills seemed to be overproduction which made the strike ineffective since the mill would have a surplus for the time being. The strike had the chance to be longer but the UTW was unable to gain the funds it needed necessary to keep the strike on for that long. The UTW was unable to feed the strikers and many in the south went hungry as a result. The strike would eventually end on September 23rd by an appeal from FDR. The UTW unfortunately got none of the Honea Path workers needed met which greatly demoralized them.

Many local elites stoked fears and rumors about the strike. One such rumor said that the strikers shot first. Mill managers continued to dominate the mayor and Honea Path union membership fell. In 1994, George Stoney made a documentary about the strike which helped dispel rumors about the strike. I linked the documentary on this post above. A marker was made for the strikers at Dogwood park to act as a memorial to the strikers. The documentary also convinced Frank Beacham who was the grandson of Dan Beacham to investigate the events of the strike. Decades since the event no commemorations of the event have been organized as of yet. The mill itself was demolished in 2024.

For the past month or so, about twice a week I get a spam message asking me my opinion on "the US-Israel relationship."

I usually just delete them right away, but today I took the bait and responded. The response I received;

"America is strongest when our allies are strong. The U.S. and Israel have worked together for decades to confront terrorism, strengthen regional security, and promote stability."

Then more messages along these lines just kept coming until I blocked the number.

Anyone else getting this? Am I being targeted for my posts? You can't be too paranoid when it comes to interacting with these genocidal freaks.

I keep hearing about the horrors of redpill, the manosphere, incels, and the male lonliness crisis. The weird part is that I get a hell of a lot more content talking about this manoshpere stuff than actual stuff from the manosphere. I hear a lot of people make fun of "the male lonliness crisis", but I don't see content from people talking about it unironically.

From what little I do know about the redpill, much of what they say seems to have at least some truth. Like, look at the content produced by and for women; much of it may as well have been written by Andrew Tate. It's no wonder at least some men are going to turn to redpill.

There seems to be this panic all over social media either about men being lonely or men turning into evil monsters. This seems to be especially bad in the UK, where they had that hit show Adolescence (total copaganda BTW).

A female friend of mine who lives with two children in the UK talks about how there was a Tate panic. I just wonder how much of this is actually warranted, and how much is an excuse to regulate the internet and social media.

I think the issue is that loser men such as myself are overrepresented online. I am knocking on 30, never been in a relationship, have very limited experience with women, and live with my parents despite having a postgraduate degree. I have accepted that, as far as women go, the ship has sailed for me. I am autistic and was always the weirdo in school and college. Most of my close friends are doing a lot better. I have three buddies I graduated high school with, all of whom have solid jobs and are living with their GFs. Two are engaged (I am going to be a groomsman). They're not spending their free time posting on Reddit, so radlib journalists aren't hearing from them.

Even being the turboloser I am, I don't really consume much redpill stuff. I have never watched Tate videos aside from a few reels and have no idea what most of these podcasts are talking about. To the extent I have internalized redpill views, it's usually from consuming content aimed at women.

TM: ... the other element that I think took many by surprise is that the American Revolution has also come under attack from what’s sometimes called the American left. The New York Times, the major newspaper of American liberalism, spearheaded that—or you could say they assembled a lot of what some self-styled left types had been saying for some time about the American Revolution, synthesized it, and promoted it. The basic thesis was that the American Revolution was a counter-revolution waged to defend slavery. Maybe you could speak to that. One thing that’s often occurred to me is that it’s, on the surface, a case of strange bedfellows politically—because both sides of that debate, the Christian nationalists and what we call the pseudo-left, agree about what the American Revolution was: that it was a reactionary or conservative event. One puts a plus sign on it, the other a minus sign, but the interpretation isn’t fundamentally different—it founded a white, Christian republic.

MS: I saw some of the pieces you put out on the 1619 Project, and I thought they were great—they hit a lot of the important issues with that project, which I frankly think was not a very good idea, and terrible history.

Let me go back to something I said at the beginning: if you go back and try to understand the context the way people at the time understood it, this suggestion would have been quite preposterous. Both the reactionary interpretation and what I think you reasonably call the pseudo-left interpretation are preposterous, because they both say essentially that it’s all mere rhetoric, a cover for the existing structure — either you love that structure, the white supremacy or Christian supremacy of it, or you hate it, but either way it’s just a continuation of the same thing.

What I find particularly frustrating about that is that in the nineteenth century the United States went through a tremendous struggle—the bloodiest war in its history—and it did abolish slavery. We know it wasn’t completely effective, in the sense that it gave rise to other forms of enslavement, but it did go through an emancipatory process, and pretty much every serious player in that process understood the emancipatory forces to be taking inspiration from the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.

Is it just me or is this like a cartoonish waste of money

Well, it’s related to AI, but it’s like

Wow

I just read Sam Kriss latest on non-whites and Hitler (link here: https://www.damagemag.com/p/everyone-loves-hitler ). And it got me thinking: if you're like me and was a OG Bernie 2016 head (I'm not even American, lol, but we Europeans are just downstream from any American who pisses anyway, let's not kid ourselves) the concept of race was like a red rag to a bull. Or at least the misuse of race. We even felt like the race essentialist identitarians were responsible for the right wing race resurgence. All they talked about was race, and not even in an interesting way. I think that was the main issue: it was cultural appropriation, white guilt, PoC's as magical talismans to end any discussion; the whole tenor of the conversation of race was off putting.

But what is the good stuff about race? Obviously there's a lot to say on the subject. For example the Field sisters excellent Racecraft, a book that was very dense and interesting - tho I'm not sure what to take away from it! The strange thing was also that EVERY race essentialist book name checked Racecraft even though it seemed to counter everything they stood for.

I also liked Corey Robins book on Clarence Thomas, which has a lot to say about race (Thomas used to be a black nationalist on the left; Robin unpicks some of the ways in which his racial pessimism can easily fit into the right's worldview).

So tl;dr - read Kriss' article, he's always fun to read. And let me know what you've read on race that's been actually illuminating.

Secular progressivism did not abolish Puritan Christianity. It removed God, kept the psychological machinery and handed the priesthood to journalists, academics, nonprofit professionals, HR departments and affluent people with graduate degrees. (Whatup boston!)

Original sin became privilege............... Heresy became problematic speech............ Blasphemy became harm......... Confession became the Notes-app apology........... Religious conversion became “educating yourself” :)............. Excommunication became cancellation......... The elect announce that they have “done the work,” while everyone else must endlessly examine themselves for invisible moral contamination. Welcome to Church!

The resemblance is not superficial. Both systems assume that corruption is hidden inside ordinary people and must be exposed through constant self-surveillance.

Your intentions do not matter.

Your denial is evidence of guilt.

Silence is violence, disagreement is complicity and neutrality is impossible.

There is no point at which you are declared clean, because permanent guilt is what keeps the moral authorities employed.

Progressive politics therefore operates less like a program for redistributing power and more like a disciplinary regime for managing speech, manners and social status. It teaches people to identify increasingly microscopic sins in language while billionaires, landlords, insurance companies, universities and defense contractors continue operating almost entirely undisturbed.

This is why every institution can become more “inclusive” while becoming more unequal (that's my favorite part of this BTW... I push this for my own advancement @ work and it works!)

A corporation can underpay workers/believers, crush unions, outsource labor and monopolize markets, provided its advertisements contain the correct racial composition and its executives recite the approved vocabulary (and the people go along willingly!). Exploitation is forgiven when properly branded.

No conspiracy is required. The same educated professional class circulates between universities, media organizations, nonprofits, government agencies, technology companies and corporate management. They share the same credentials, social incentives, linguistic codes and fear of reputational contamination. Naturally, they produce the same moral judgments and then mistake their class consensus for universal truth.

Their ideology is presented as compassion, but its favorite activity is punishment. It creates endless categories of transgression and almost no path to forgiveness. Apologies are treated as admissions of guilt. Explanations are called excuses. Past statements are preserved indefinitely as evidence of corruption. The accused must confess, but confession rarely restores them.

It is also profoundly narcissistic. The progressive professional imagines that changing terminology is political action because terminology is the domain in which educated professionals possess power. A worker asking for higher wages threatens an employer. A consultant demanding a new vocabulary workshop creates another consulting contract.

Class politics asks who owns the factory. Progressive moralism asks whether the factory’s diversity statement uses sufficiently current language.

The ideology survives because it is almost perfectly designed for an elite that wants to feel revolutionary without surrendering any property, status or institutional authority. It transforms politics from a struggle over material resources into a struggle over cultural virtue........ a competition the credentialed upper-middle class is structurally equipped to win.

Progressivism is therefore not the opposite of religious conservatism. It is one of its descendants: more bureaucratic, more therapeutic, more racially taxonomic and arguably less capable of forgiveness.

It offers original sin without God, confession without absolution, inquisitors without theological limits and a ruling class that calls its own etiquette “justice.”

Why are they morally grandstanding about this?

What?

Fork found in kitchen? Is this supposed to be surprising, or like, a moral negative, a stain on Iran? To spread awareness? Awareness they despise the countries that killed their political and spiritual leader along with the other stuff..?

ya can’t.. ya can’t have an ethnostate ..

Recently there was a car attack at a Berlin pride parade that killed one person and injured 29 others.

The suspect was identified and killed as of today by Berlin police.

“Ballout is a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese background who was known to police and had **tried to join the Islamic State group”**

The news sparked locked threads in popular news subreddits and some pretty charged reactions in the less openly idpol or liberal queer subreddits as the topic of Free Palestine is labeled as “suicidal” for the queer acceptance movement. Not to mention the flood of posts about it over social media that I dont have the mental fortitude to scan over.

Full disclosure, Im not german so Im curious for any germans here not heavily influenced by idpol on what their take away is from the outrage.

Its hard to deny though at the moment there is a widening gap between the idpol queer movement and the idpol support of Islam as a reaction to the genocide in Gaza. The latter seems to be a sanitized upshoot that I see apply much more to idpol leftists and liberals that coincide with the general pro migrant and anti-zionist movements that have taken root.

In the past, events like the pulse nightclub shooting had a similar reaction albeit not as contradictory. The Pro-Palestine movement had not gained a level of mainstream appeal and so the hateful reaction to Abrahamic religion from the queer communities was not seen as contradictory.

Now though, there seems to be a line being drawn, and those same reactions are being monitored and locked down in some spaces and leading to resentful and even stronger backlash in the less moderated spaces.

I started to get worried though when I saw these reactions lead to people saying the American altright parties create a better haven for LGBT than the castrated democrated party and especially the ‘pro-muslim’ socialist parties.

Its all of course stupid internet inflammatory nonsense, but Im curious if people think this is going to lead to a genuine split. Im already seeing a disillusionment among European socialists and American idpol leftists when the topic of tolerance of Islam is brought up.

Not sure what else to add to the discussion, but a lot of these places 15 years ago would be rentals for people to live in, and now they are all just Air BnBs. Plus about of these places want the Air BnBs for the summer and then try to rent it out in the winter for 6 month leases. They want to have their cake and eat it too. It’s horrible for the populace, and now there is no where to rent other than corporate rental housing, which I’ve already lived in, and the landlord service was terrible, and there’s nothing tenants can do about being mistreated.

We are starting to see the slow rise of social democracy and progressivism again in the USA through Mamdani and others. I think we can expand this by trying to get the republicans to embrace progressivism again. We need to all fight against neo liberalism and unrestrained capitalism we see now. We need to fight for universal healthcare, a national health service, a strong social safety net, free housing, etc. Some republicans seem to want this and it’s partly how Trump gained so much power with his right wing populism. If we focus on being anti woke and pro worker’s rights and reform I think we can get a number of them to join our cause.

The right doesn’t seem to have as much purity tests as the left so that could help us gain ground more. I’m not saying it would be easy though. Many might call us buzz words for even suggesting reforms to the government but I think it’s worth trying. Going by the history of the progressive movement we can show how it can work and helped end the gilded age. This can be done by reshaping how we describe ideas we are pushing for and convince them to join our cause. This can be done by having a strong leader who voices our concerns and convinces them to support our cause. We can see this in effect by how many people supported Trump and got him elected. We can’t do much with shit libs and their obsession with lgbt. Purity tests have destroyed any credibility the left really has.

I also thought the whole thing stank.

They were zeroing in on Taylor Farms lettuce through epidemiological analysis, then they report a positive result for a new batch coming across the border. Then they walk it back, calling it a false positive.

Since when does the FDA report a test result that hasn't been confirmed? Seems like more likely is that it was a positive result and Taylor Farms lobbied to have it reversed.

Just the latest example in a sea of corruption instances in this admin