CleverOleg

It is one position that seems to cross ideological lines. It’s like literally everyone other than people who are very invested in the stock market (and even then) really want to see this thing crash and crash hard.

As someone who lived through and lost a job during the GFC, I think a bit of this is not realizing how bad an economic crash is even if you don’t think it will affect you much. It will. Some people think the residential real estate market will crash too and they can finally buy a house. But that’s hard to do when either you’ve lost your job or your job feels so precarious that you really don’t feel safe emptying your savings and taking out a mortgage. Or if you have a “safe” job, you think you can weather the storm. But in a depression, there are very few “safe” jobs.

But with that caveat aside, I think things are different now because so many people are struggling and barely getting by with their current employment situation. Life already feels so precarious, might as well throw a spanner into the works and see what happens. And that part feels very different than in the run up to the GFC. It affects everyone, regardless of political ideology.

Of course now I’m convinced that because it’s something everyone is expecting and wants to see happen, it will never actually happen. US will just limp along with high inflation, no job growth, and everyone getting slowly squeezed for years.

Last year the critters ate like all but one of the fruit. This year my tree finally exploded with fruit, I won’t be able to get it all off the tree. I’m gonna freeze a few pounds of arils and throw them into my smoothies all year.

Part of me feels the fact that EVERYONE is saying that there’s a huge AI bubble makes me wonder if there’s actually a possibility there isn’t an AI bubble. Because I was around for the dot com and GFC bubbles and no one (not really) saw those coming. Also, China is pretty much doing everything right these days, and they seem to believe in AI too.

And I’m not against AI in any and all forms. Like, I think there’s huge potential in translating foreign languages. I think it would be cool if people could talk in their native languages but have AI translate things perfectly - which I understand is something AI can do. There are some simple functions in my job (like searching through and summarizing things from our very massive list of policies). But even thinking about the absolute best case scenarios for AI, I can see how the current expectations are even close to what the reality can be.

So what is the argument that we’re not in a bubble, even if we don’t actually believe it?

I just think this is neat. I highly recommend turning on the music and setting it to full screen. Only works for US locations. But they recreated the 90s Weather Channel vibe perfectly.

I’m a fan of Marxist poster C_Plot on Reddit. I’ve gained a lot of good insights from them. Here, they talk about what fascism is/isn’t, but not in a way that excludes other angles on it imo. Link to Reddit in the post but I’m copying & pasting the whole comment here so you don’t have to go there to see it. Overall I agree but would love to hear your takes.

Fascism is not at all an ideology. Fascism is a tactic to maintain tyrannical class-rule. So fascism is not extreme capitalism. However, fascism is a tactic to maintain tyrannical capitalist class rule with a rise in the conscious of the oppressed classes. In feudalism, the ruling class rule by divine right. The bourgeois revolutions shattered that and promoted the view that “all are created equal”.

Republicanism (even in a stunted constitutional monarchy form), along with legislative supremacy, threatens the reign of the capitalist ruling class unless either the working class submits obsequiously to capitalist tyranny OR the franchise of the working class can be diverted into basal hatreds and bigotries through the tactic of fascism. If the working class remains steeped in obsequiousness, the capitalist tyrants can maintain the myth of rule of the People and republicanism. However as consciousness rises, even slightly, and the working class becomes conscious of themselves as an oppressed class, the ruling class panics and promotes hatreds and bigotries toward a cultivated out-group set and promises to smite the members of that out-group.

Those anti-Agápē hatreds and bigotries come to dominate what passes for civic discourse. Instead of government administering our common resources and addressing our common concerns, as civic discourse, the hatreds and bigotries of the out-group members and the hyper oppression of the out-group eclipses all genuine civic discourse. The fascist tactic allows the capitalist ruling class tyrants to maintain their rule while maintaining the semblance of a republic (though recently a return to divine right for tyrants is being promoted too).

Therefore capitalism cannot sustain itself without the docility of oppressed classes or instead the panic and pervasive deployment of the fascist tactic. That is not about societal decay but the decay of the tyrannical reign of the capitalist ruling class itself. So fascism is entirely about the capitalist counterrevolution reaction to the socialist call for advancing the bourgeois revolutions beyond capitalist tyranny.

We have been conditioned, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, to accept fascism as the very water in which we swim. Fascism was the result of the Great Depression, not because of the downturn in the economy itself but because of meager advances in working class consciousness. It’s just that the fascist tyrants demanded we never use the proper moniker to delineate what they had imposed upon us (rampant ridicule of those using the term “fascist” as if it is absurd to use the term when instead it is entirely appropriate).

This is something I have felt for a long time, but with everything going on with that dead fascist, it seems to be really top of mind right now. I am white, for the record.

White society operates on plausible deniability of racism within itself. The number of times in my life when my fellow white people have said something that everyone would agree is definitely racist is actually fairly small, and concentrated into the time I was a teen or so. And not like people were ever afraid of saying it around me, I was very non-confrontational growing up and never really pushed back on anything bad someone said.

The idea is to never say anything openly racist that someone could call you out on. You don't say "I think black people are naturally violent", you say "I only go downtown for sports events, it's to dangerous there". You don't say you don't want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of minorities. You just... naturally end up in the lily-white suburbs. You will say you are open to dating people of other races, but just a coincidence that it's never happened. You agree that slavery was evil but you also get really worked up when your kids learn about slavery in history class.

Maybe these aren't even the best examples. I don't even like citing specific examples because it's an entire ecosystem. It's all about never saying enough that someone - even a fellow white person - could call you out on. I think a lot of the time, it's about lying to yourself as much as it's lying to everyone else. Because white folks have this notion that racism is "bad", and no one thinks they are a bad person... but at the same time we live in a fundamentally white supremacist society where NOT being anti-racist fundamentally says something about you anyway.

And Charlie Kirk was as good at this as any white person. I explained to someone the other day what Kirk said about black pilots. And this person responded with "well that's not racist, he wasn't saying black pilots aren't competent he is saying you can't know because of eeeeevil DEI!" You can take all the comments he ever said about race and pretend like he wasn't racist (according to white society) because he never said the exact words "I believe white people are superior to other races", because according to white people that is literally the only form of racism that can exist. Hell, some will even defend the statement "I just like being around my fellow white people" as not racist but just a form of personal preference.

And once you see all this, it can make you feel crazy. You can see so much racism among all your fellow whiteys, and yet everyone denies it. Everyone has an excuse, everyone has a reason it's not racist. Not looking for sympathy or anything, just describing what it's like.

Ever since he shed this mortal coil, I’ve been looking for one source for a lot of the worst stuff Kirk said. I think Coates does that really well here. It’s mostly a compendium of some of the worst stuff that isn’t getting attention in the media, even the media that’s critical of him (which seems to be focusing on what he said about guns). And he sources all of the quotes. Coates isn’t going full Peter Daou but it feels like he is radicalizing before our eyes.

Sending this to someone in my life who was only vaguely familiar with Kirk but since he got shot has become a bit obsessed with him. They told me “the media is taking what he said out of context” and that they “didn’t agree with everything he said but a lot of what he said made sense”.

I get this is something marginalized folks must live with on a daily basis and none of this is surprising, but I’m a white cishet guy and this stuff is eye opening and (further) radicalizing to me.

The entire social response to Kirk getting merc’d is literally the meme. Down to bone.

White, cishet, male-dominated society (and the mainstream media that extends from it) has decided that, okay, maybe Kirk said some very pointed or occasionally untoward comments. But really, can any of those words compare to being willing to debate in the Marketplace of Ideas? Ok, maybe he was a bit racist. Maybe he didn’t care for trans folks. Sure, that’s all a bit rude. But he was willing to discuss his ideas and be civil about it (ok, maybe not civil, but he didn’t kill anyone over it), and in the end that’s all that really matters, right?

Politicians, the media, and a good chunk of society is basically saying how marginalized people may feel about all this is entirely irrelevant. Any sort of speech that is racist, sexist, or bigoted is excusable so long as the subject serves the broader neoliberal, white supremacist, settler project.

Marg bar Amrika.

I will serve in the PLA and fight and die for the Peoples Republic of China if you do.

I ask because in the US, the media has been obfuscating the Democrats unpopularity and loss in 2024 to things like manosphere influencers to being too “woke” to lack of enthusiasm among voters for ephemeral and unknowable reasons. These are all BS of course, but there’s enough lack of clarity on these issues to confuse people.

But the incredible levels of unpopularity that Labour and Starmer are experiencing seem much more stark. I mean, they just won an election and their popularity has nosedived. The only things the government seems to be doing is loudly proclaiming support for Israel, proscribing PA, destroying everyone’s privacy online, and imposing austerity. I don’t think anyone could possibly accuse Labour of being too far left since the election.

How is the media covering this? Is everyone just trying not to bring it up or ask why Labour has become so unpopular? Are they pinning it on Starmer being an unlikeable twat? I’m assuming the media won’t dare suggest Labour is doing very unpopular things, especially in relation to Gaza… but it feels like at least from my POV the elephant in the room is now just too big to ignore.

Usually discussion of what to name “Your Party” ends up being joke time. So I thought maybe one thread where we make actual suggestions?

I had one idea that came to me in the shower this morning:

Better Way

Here’s my argument. Most folks really hate the status quo. They hate capitalism and they hate neoliberalism, even if they don’t fully understand what it is they hate and much less able to conceptualize what it is they hate and what the solutions are. All that Reform and the Tories can offer is racism, transphobia, and a hollow, farcical nationalism. Labour explicitly says there’s nothing better than this, so tighten those belts and eat your spoonful of austerity (along with racism and transphobia ofc).

“Better Way”, to me, communicates that you don’t have to accept what’s currently on offer: there is something better. And the party can and should articulate what those better things are. “Better Way” acknowledges peoples’ dissatisfaction with the state of things and the current political options. The public is told you have no other choices than shitty ones, but there is something better out there.

But more interested to hear your ideas.