Just saw an article a few days ago about capital investment and hedge funds buying up as much property as possible, which raises the price of real estate. The worst part of the article was that it said this is a good bubble unlike the 2008 housing bubble because homeowners in 2008 dumbly took out mortgages they couldn’t pay, but now smart finance people are investing so nothing will go wrong.

Rest up Mike Duncan. You are a king.

I agree, but she’s slowly being disabused of that notion by reality. A highly ideological third party that only takes small donations and mirrors Cuba’s direct democracy in it’s primaries will still have to negotiate with power structures hell bent on destroying it, and negotiate with an oppositional party wholly entrenched with capital.

Having a mechanism outside the political process with real power that can grind to a halt the things that give the duopoly power ($$) is far more important. And I think she’s kind of realizing that.

The guy who wrote this is a dyed in the wool lib, he retweeted Centrism Fan Account.

Libs are capitalists to their bones, their ideology is the exact same as conservatives but replace race hierarchy with meritocratic hierarchy. Both require an underclass to subjugate.

I listen to try and understand the mindset of someone slowly realizing electoralism won’t do much of anything. They’ve spent a good amount of time debating DSA vs SA, the Sawant piece and the effectiveness of any of this.

Anyone who has power because of a system will not seek to tear down that system. AOC is still useful but she’s a politician, you can’t expect ideological coherence from these people. There has to be a mechanism for pushing her left, and a mechanism to push left the mechanism pushing AOC left.

All this comes down to power. The left has no power, no way of holding AOC or Sanders accountable, let alone grinding the economy to a halt.

How, then, should the Indonesian left proceed in its pursuit of genuine, radical social change? There are obviously no easy answers to this question. As a rough sketch, however, there is a need to formulate novel strategies tailor-made for the present trajectory.

Protests are spectacle, easily ignored by those in power. They’re useful as a first step, but if there is no second step striking at power then the movement will just dissipate.

Perlstein in Nixonland wrote this about Adlai Stevenson, but it still rings true. “It marked a certain structural weakness of liberalism: seeing honor as an end in itself.”

Might makes right. There’s still this unwillingness to talk about power, how to get it, and how to use it

Just don’t read it right before bed or you’ll lay awake staring at the ceiling. Great book.

First as tragedy, then as farce. Instead of jet fuel, the Iranians will fill the plane with silly string.

Oh it’s no doubt possible, just not within Biden’s first term or the near future. Asking the US public to green light a huge war after fucking up wars for two decades is a hard sell. NATSEC burned through all it’s political capital, and it’ll take a while to restock it up.

A Cold War and a decade or two of gaslighting and agitation will restock the political capital cupboard. Defense profits are through the roof since 2000. Regulatory capture is in full effect and I’m sure there are plans to embroil the US in another Cold War with proxy fights against China.