This is really interesting to me but also overwhelming. I’ll try to work through it later and follow up with questions.

I remember this incident.

Words don’t do justice to the depravity.

There is actually a popular book that answers this kind of question: “The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics”

I haven’t read it, but from summaries, my understanding is that the answer to your question is that every high ranking office depends on maintaining support from other people with power. Even if we disregard voters, Trump (and other presidents) need to keep generals, oligarchs, and senators happy, or they can remove him from power. Naked disrespect for the rabble displeases these people, because they’re still sensitive to assassinations, market disruptions, challenges from other power centers like state governments, etc.

I totally understand it. It’s very hard to resist someone who tells you everything you want to hear.

But we should ask what the effect of someone winning is likely to be, not what they say they’re going to do. Gavin Newsom ran on single payer healthcare too. Someone running on it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

In Newsom’s case, it wasn’t going to happen because he was a lying snake. In Steyer’s case, it takes policy expertise and political acumen, and unfortunately, he’s spent the equivalent of 2,000 UCLA bachelors degrees trying to obscure the fact that he’s not actually qualified to do politics.

I wish more people could see this. I’m not just voting against him because I resent him for being rich. It’s because he can’t spend enough to convince me that he’s actually capable of delivering, because the skills it takes to do so are the same skills it takes to get elected without buying elections, which means his money is just proof that he can’t actually get things done.

Also, frankly, I have no reason to trust him too, but that’s not even the biggest problem.

Perhaps I didn’t communicate this well, but that was kind of central to my point: the work they did has grown enough beyond their initial writings that we don’t really need to fixate so much on the original texts.

For instance, I really liked China Mieville’s “A Specter, Haunting”. He kind of summarized The Communist Manifesto, and I thought it was more readable than the original. It was easier for me to engage with, and he placed it in modern context.

To put my point another way, I think we should focus more on the ideas rather than the thinkers.

I want to clarify my point. I’m definitely not dismissing the importance of these figures or the value of reading them.

What I’m saying is that I think people put too much emphasis on what their opinions were rather than just learning from their ideas and synthesizing them with the ideas of their contemporaries and intellectual progenitors.

To go back to my example, there’s a meme among creationists that Charles Darwin recanted his theory of evolution on his deathbed. It’s baseless, but more importantly it’s irrelevant. The value of his ideas are not dependent on what he believed. He’s notable because he contributed to a framework on which we hang a larger understanding.

Similarly, I think Marx et. al. contributed ideas that are still very useful to our collective discourse. But their opinions are not prophesy, and I think people should focus more on the collective wisdom of the fields that they birthed rather than the specific opinions they personally held.

Frankly, I feel like I’m alone in this take, but I think people shouldn’t spend so much attention basing their politics primarily on references to philosophers who died more than a century prior.

These are important figures for historical study, but we don’t base our modern understanding about genetics on the work of Darwin and Mendel: we base these on the work of Watson, and Crick, and Franklin, and Margulis, and Sanger, and hundreds (or thousands) of people who carried the work forward since.

We still teach starting with the early folks to give context. But they aren’t the basis for our beliefs.

This goes for Marxists AND anarchists (and everyone else): sell your ideas in the modern age.

This isn’t a surprise to me, but it is a mistake, imo.

The Sierra Club, imo, has a long history of myopically focusing on conservation through a narrow, neoliberal perspective. I think truly protecting nature and fostering unity between humans and nature requires an ecosocialist approach. Backing people who buy elections is like supporting left-wing authoritarians: the message might be right, but the outcomes are never going to work out of you degrade the democratic systems that hold power accountable.

Pollard was released on parole at the age of 61 from US prison in 2015 after serving 30 years for selling military secrets to Israel for money. He and his wife, Anne Henderson, were arrested in 1985 after Pollard passed a huge volume of classified documents to Israeli intelligence – enough to fill a 10ftx6ftx6ft room, by Pollard’s own calculation. In return he received cash and jewels.

Marion Bowman, a Pentagon lawyer who assessed the damage to US national security by Pollard’s espionage, told NBC News in 2014 the spy had been motivated by money as much as allegiance to Israel, and alleged he had provided highly classified materials to two other countries.

This guy is propogating antisemitic tropes by fulfilling them. Truly fuck this guy very much.

The courage it takes to sail into that hell is inspiring, but also I worry so greatly for them.

I would like to see this information break out further.

This is a great read!

While I love Superman TV shows I am declining to spend the calories necessary to tell you if an AI fanfic you don’t like accurately represents Clark Kent’s personality.

I will, however, tell you that if you’re letting an AI fan fic live rent-free in your head, you’re got a mind virus. I advise that you cease consumption of AI fanfic crossovers that you disagree with immediately. I recommend giving yourself an orgasm to reset your hormones and then going to your nearest library and browsing their comics section until dinner time. You’re welcome.

What’s LMBO?

Again, I don’t want this to be a fight, but this isn’t really true. Again, our media presents a certain picture of boomers that isn’t actually reflective of what the average boomer looks like.

Most boomers aren’t country club Republicans. In 2024, most baby boomers did not vote for Donald Trump.

In 2025, about 37% of baby boomers voted Republican. Just like most years.

You read that right: 25% didn’t vote, and of those who did, Trump won 49%. That was enough to win.

Maybe you’re asking, though, 'Why didn’t they vote Democrat more! They should’ve elected Gore! And lots of Democratic congresspersons and senators! To which I would say that we live in a very damaged democracy in which the Democratic party has been running on most of the same economic policies as Republicans since the 1970s. Most boomers didn’t have a say.

Most boomers are poor and have been fucked over by the government just like the rest of us.

The 1% (regardless of any age) are the bad guys.

Respectfully, whenever I hear this I have to push back.

‘The boomers fucked us over’ trope is largely a myth like ‘first world consumers are responsible for climate change’: it’s a cultural narrative that exists to divert blame to a huge group to obscure that it’s mostly a small group of investors and their corporations who (in both of these cases) fucked over the other 99% of the civilisation.

It’s true that most of the worst people are boomers: but as a group, most boomers are not these people. Most boomers are poor and have lived their whole lives in a fake democracy where they never really had serious political power.

The elderly greeters at Walmart who can never retire; the old woman at the bus stop wearing chipped glasses with a prescription 10 years out of date; the guy at the VA home dying of cancer he got from being drafted into Vietnam; these aren’t the people who fucked the rest of us over. They’re just us, older.

I’m curious what people make of the broader allegations of a history of child endangerment and irresponsible behavior with kids beyond the lurid sexual accusations.

For instance, do you consider the claims that he held his new born over the railing of a balcony credible? Is that part of a broader rumor mill? What do you make of that?

I’m saying that considering the availability of credible accusors, I think you’re defining who counts as a credible accusors in a selective way to maintain your prior assumptions.

I’m not saying this to be snide or disrespectful. I’m just asking if it’s possible you’re letting a bias go unnoticed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Neverland

Safechuck allege that Jackson sexually abused them when they were children–Safechuck from 1988 to 1992 and Robson from 1990 to 1996. They give graphic descriptions of Jackson’s alleged sex acts, including masturbation, oral sex and anal sex, which they say took place at his home, Neverland Ranch, and other locations.

Robson and Safechuck claim that Jackson said these acts were “romantic,” and that they did not realize they were inappropriate until adulthood.

Do you know the “no true Scotsman” fallacy? Because I regret to inform you that I believe you’re falling prey to it.

This is a topic that doesn’t get discussed much, but if you stop and think about it for a moment you might realize that we’re all aware of it, we just basically have a cultural taboo against thinking about it.

Have you ever noticed that sleepovers are almost always gender-segregated? Why do you thick that is?