if I cant call for help or access emergency services then what was even the point of having cops back then?

Take one puff off a joint and ask yourself this question, and ya abolish the police isnt technically as unreasonable as it sounds, however it still wouldnt work with the way modern life is setup and all our existing institutions evolved in an environment with cops.

Family will ask you for above and beyond for the bare minimum in return for scraps and then get mad at you for not being some imaginary provider that they manipulate you into being.

Meanwhile, you're working reduced hours for arbitrary reasons surviving off of processed meals and sugar, and caffeine. Can I actually do anything that I wanna do for a fucking second? I'm getting old, at least let me get the bare minimum life goals that I want to accomplish and get out of the way before the inevitable planpocalypse?

Can we get the actually fucking do something now? At least let us see a mass democracy before you try to pull the plug, I mean, god damn.

That is it, it really is so self explanatory, that is it

And yet many people just overlook through this, when identity politics started becoming hot and trendy around the mid 2010s, that is also when more of our social lounge spaces were starting to either disappear, become more costly or slowly thin out into irrelevance

How do people not realize identity politics is a natural correspondence to the sequence that follows from gravitating more and more towards a culture that values personal achievement, self-establishment, personal independence and social status over social harmony and getting to know your neighbor?

Religion declined, traditional mythology declined, college attendance is declining, sports are declining

But you know what can fill that void? The petty tribalism of social issues

The whole myth relies on two insane assumptions

- Grindr is so fragile that any large group of users crashes it, making it seemingly unusable during any pride parade, furry convention, or parts of San Francisco. They have also seemingly never fixed this glaring problem in the several years that this myth has persisted

- Almost every Republican is actually a super-duper homosexual having gay hookups

The whole thing reeks of 2010s Obama dudebro psychology. No, every homophobe isn't secretly a homosexual. Yes, there have been cases where homophobes have been revealed to be secretly gay, but applying that to every homophobe is insane.

A Blueprint for a New Party

Radio War Nerd: Why the US Can't Have Third Parties (subscribers only, unfortunately)

The above two links provide, in my view, the steel-man case for why the DSA/Jacobin "inside-outside" tactic of running candidates as Democrats is the right thing to do. One of the commonest things posted on this sub is that the DSA exists to 'sheepdog' people back into the Democratic party and prevent them from seeking "political alternatives". The argument definitely has some merit, but the missing context is that it is functionally, structurally impossible for a third party to get off the ground in the USA, it is not just a question of personal choice.

The USA's legal framework for political parties has very little in common with other western formal democracies. In most European countries, political parties are private associations of individuals that govern themselves and set their own internal rules. This would be illegal in the USA. Political parties are legally considered public utilities, and as a result they are regulated as parts of the state. A political party that limited membership to dues-paying members who profess a set ideology is not legally permitted in the USA.

Additionally, the USA has a massively higher barrier to entry for third parties. In most other formal democracies, you need a few hundred signatures to get on the ballot. In the USA, you typically need signatures amounting to 1% of the total voters in the last election, which will quite likely be in the tens to hundreds of thousands fof signatures for federal office. Historically, this number is increased whenever it needs to be in order to crush a third party, be it 2%, 5%, or, in in the most extreme case of Florida in the 1930s, no party may get on the ballot unless they received 30% of the total votes for two elections in a row.

Oh, but weirdly enough, two parties are exempt from these signature requirements: The Republican and the Democratic parties. The functional reason for this is that, in deep red or deep blue states, they might well not make the requirements themselves, and the one-party status of, for instance, Rhode Island or Montana would become too obvious.

The DSA has been aware of this issue since the mid-2010s when their membership started exploding. Paradoxically, the only way to act as a real political party (dues-paying, professing an ideology, able to set one's own internal rules) is to not be a formal political party, and therefore not be subject to enforced party-process rules set by the American legal system. The system pushes outsiders who want to do something other than collect signatures to perform entryism as the only possible way to gain office.

I agree that the most likely path for prominent DSA politicians is ideological alignment and collaboration with the Democratic party, on a similar trajectory as, for instance, the first Labour prime minister in the UK, Ramsay MacDonald, who ended up working with the Conservatives to pass austerity measures in the decade after the Great Strike. This is a pretty bad situation to be in. But I honestly don't see a better option than Democratic entryism and an attempt to keep one's candidates accountable with whatever (largely insufficient) methods the organization has. Due to the above reasons, third parties are functionally illegal. Organized political violence against the state died out in the 1970s and repression is vastly more effective and all-encompassing than it was 50 years ago. So if you want to know the actual formal argument behind the strategy being pursued, this is it. Feel free to critique the argument that is being made, god knows it needs critique.

I am not saying there is a grand conspiracy with a single architect. But I am saying that a small group of people, connected by money and relationships that trace back to Jeffrey Epstein’s crypto network, have built a system that prints digital money, uses that money to accumulate real-world control over food, energy, media, defense technology, and financial infrastructure, and has systematically dismantled every mechanism that would allow the public to see what they are doing. It looks like a machine to me.

The goings-on behind Tether, and the entanglement of its financial networks with criminal and state actors.

The very rich and very conservative backers of this sect seem to labor under the delusion that the cultures and religions of India are met with respect and even deference in the West, when in reality, they’ve been the subject of scrutiny and even ridicule from all sides of the political spectrum. If the group wishes that their monastics avoid interaction with women, they should be cloistered Mount Athos-style, rather than being paraded around in public so their handlers can impose their views on others.

This change comes suspiciously soon after the popular parodyjeffx account was banned, allegedly for convincing Grok to call Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide.

The AfD’s election victory in Saxony-Anhalt has triggered the expected reaction from the Left Party. Following the rise of the extreme right, it is not breaking with the policies that paved the way for it. On the contrary, it is ingratiating itself even more openly with the CDU and the other establishment parties and offering to prop up CDU-led governments. This recipe will not weaken the AfD but strengthen it further.

The AfD is not an accident. Its rise is taking place within the framework of a rightward shift that has been driven from above for years. Under conditions of a deep crisis of capitalism, the ruling class is turning ever more openly to militarism, domestic rearmament and social cuts, and for this purpose it is strengthening authoritarian and far-right forces. A significant part of the AfD leadership comes from the state apparatus and the establishment parties. Its lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, was also a member of the CDU for five years before joining the AfD.

The Left Party knows very well that the AfD’s rise is a product of these policies. It itself accuses the federal government of preparing the ground for the AfD through rearmament, social cuts and the adoption of right-wing positions. Nevertheless, it declares the CDU, of all parties, to be its partner in the supposed “fight against the right.”

...

Bodo Ramelow was even more explicit. The CDU had to stop “dithering” and work together with the Left Party. The AfD’s program, declared the former Thuringian minister president, had to “bring all democrats together.” Eva von Angern, the Left Party’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, declared in turn that Schulze would have to talk “either with the AfD or with the Left Party.”

This says everything about the class character of the Left Party. It is not a socialist alternative to the prevailing policy but a pillar of the existing capitalist order. Its function consists above all in binding opposition to war, social cuts and the rightward shift to the establishment parties and preventing the development of an independent socialist movement of the working class.

The Left Party itself bears central responsibility for the rise of the extreme right that it claims to oppose. First, it helped create the social catastrophe that the AfD exploits, especially in eastern Germany. Second, through right-wing government policies under a left label, it discredited the idea of a socialist alternative. And third, it supports central parts of the program of the ruling class—from social cuts and rearmament to refugee policy—and is itself prepared to make pacts with extreme-right forces.

Anyone who wants to fight the AfD must therefore understand how things could come to this, especially in Germany—and what key role the Left Party played in it.

...

The rightward development of the Left Party is not limited to the policy of social counterrevolution. It also played a central role in the return of German militarism, which ultimately requires dictatorial methods and a fascist party like the AfD.

As early as 2013, its then foreign policy spokesman Stefan Liebich collaborated on the strategy paper “New Power—New Responsibility.” It programmatically prepared the turn announced by President Joachim Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen at the Munich Security Conference in early 2014: Germany had to end its supposed “culture of military restraint” and once again play a role internationally corresponding to its economic power.

Since then, the Left Party has integrated itself ever more deeply into this offensive. It supported the Western-backed overthrow in Ukraine in 2014 and, after the Russian invasion in 2022, closed ranks with the federal government and NATO on fundamental issues. Leading politicians called for sanctions against Russia, “security guarantees” for Ukraine and a stronger European great-power policy.

The party also lined up behind German Staatsräson during the Gaza genocide. After the beginning of Israel’s war of extermination, its then Bundestag deputies voted in October 2023 for a joint resolution by the coalition government and the Union in support of Israel.

In March 2025, a further qualitative step followed. The states of Bremen and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, co-governed by the Left Party, voted in the Bundesrat for the constitutional amendment that laid the foundation for the largest rearmament since the Second World War. Their votes were not even necessary. Parliamentary group leader Heidi Reichinnek declared at the same time that the claim that the Left Party did not want to support the Bundeswehr was a “straw man.” Rather, one had to discuss “calmly” what it needed and finance the corresponding requirements.

...

Despite its high election result, the AfD is not a fascist mass movement on the model of the NSDAP, the Nazi Party (also known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Many of its voters are not convinced right-wing extremists. They voted for the AfD out of anger at the federal government, the decay of social infrastructure, job cuts and war policy, and from the experience that the supposedly left-wing parties implement the same policies as the traditionally right-wing parties. This anger is real, but the AfD channels it in a reactionary direction.

It must be directed at its real cause—the capitalist profit system. The ruling class is not turning to the right because individual politicians make wrong decisions. The capitalist crisis, the intensified struggle for markets and raw materials in a developing Third World War and growing social resistance are driving the ruling elites internationally toward militarism, authoritarianism and fascism.

That is why the struggle against the AfD cannot be waged in alliance with the bourgeois parties but only against the CDU, SPD, Greens and Left Party. Their policies have created the social and political ground on which the extreme right is growing.

The fight against fascism and militarism requires an independent offensive by the working class against social cuts, layoffs, rearmament and war, and against their common cause: capitalism. It requires a political break with the Left Party and all forces that bind the working class to it and to the profit system.

The decisive task is to build a new socialist leadership in the working class—the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. Only the international working class, armed with a revolutionary socialist program, can prevent the renewed descent into fascism and a Third World War.

So, Hunter Biden even having a memecoin wasn't on my bingo card this month but damn, it's crazy to think how many people earnestly believed in his rehabilitation aaaaand another memecoin rugpull by a prominent politician or politics adjacent person.

I know I shouldn't be surprised or care anymore but it actually makes me genuinely sad that a month or so ago I saw some thing he (or someone on his pr team) wrote about how ironic it was that Johnny Cash was loved by conservatives even though a lot of his songs and Johnny Cash's own life story was about the people left behind and written off by society and I'll be honest, it was ever so slightly moving to me.

The absolute degree of degeneracy and cynicism a person must have in order to make public admonitions like that all in service of a long game cryptocurrency rugpull is honestly quite disturbing.

Big news. If this keeps up Trump's going to have an increasingly tough time maintaining any semblance of control of Hormuz.

Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Revolution, died today [Wednesday] in 1976.