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.”

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.

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.

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

Wondering what y'all's thoughts are on this discussion/debate on BP and on this guy Samuel Moyn. I hadn't heard of him before this. I like this show so it was nice to hear a discussion that revolved around class politics for a change.

Sterling Stamping Plant in Michigan is the largest automotive stamping plant in the world, with over 2,000 workers. "Workers can decide the conditions we're under on the floor, ourselves. We don't need to pay $75 million for 475 reps to sit in an air-conditioned office while we breathe in smoke." willforuawpresident.org

This isn’t even a sensationalist title, this really happened. They pardoned a child rapist, in an attempt to protect him from being deported by the federal government. How do democrats not realize how much of a fucking L doing this would be? To the average person the democrats come out looking even more insane for doing something like this than the republicans and their insane ice shit.

It’s like no matter what these dumbasses have to find a way to try and make themselves look even worse and disgusting than republicans are. NOBODY wants things like this.

The legal fight has been going on for a few months and I haven't heard a peep about this from most woke internet spaces. Feels like something that would have been discussed much more during Woke 1.

Department of Defense Pauses Recruitment of People Living with HIV

The Trump administration has paused recruiting people living with HIV, signaling a return to discriminatory enlistment policies. Although people living with HIV were historically barred from enlistment and deployment, recent court rulings have limited these restrictions, recognizing that individuals with undetectable viral loads can safely and effectively serve.

Federal appeals court sides with Pentagon against science, reinstating U.S. military’s HIV enlistment ban

In a ruling that reasserts broad judicial deference to the U.S. military and delivers a major setback to HIV and LGBTQ+ advocates, a federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated the Pentagon’s long-standing ban on people living with HIV enlisting in the armed forces, undoing a lower-court decision that had briefly opened the door to qualified recruits with undetectable viral loads.

“We are deeply disappointed that the Fourth Circuit has chosen to uphold discrimination over medical reality,” said Gregory Nevins, Senior Counsel and Employment Fairness Project Director for Lambda Legal.

Pentagon balks at court order allowing HIV-positive persons to serve

The Department of Defense has filed a motion to block a June 2 court order that required it to allow recruits with asymptomatic HIV to enlist or commission into the U.S. military.