Category: Analysis

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Reflections on Gaza

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas militants broke the latest ceasefire by invading Israel and committing a massacre. They murdered about 1,200 innocent people, explicitly targeting noncombatants for slaughter as opposed to seeking military objectives that incidentally killed civilians.

The largest of the mass murders was at a music festival. They killed the young and the old; men, women, and children alike. They executed the wounded and those running or hiding. They did not accept surrender or spare even infants. They relished the bloodshed, celebrating the deaths of Israelis.

This was not an act of war, although it started one; it was terrorism. To ensure that Israel would be fully enraged by this pogrom, they raped women and took hundreds of hostages, most of whom are still captive and being abused. Moreover, they swore to repeat these massacres in the future.

Why did they do this now? Well, the specific timing is obvious: it successfully ended the efforts of Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and dragged America into a war in an election year. It’s unclear whether it’s just a coincidence that the massacre occurred on Putin’s birthday, but it certainly turned out to be a present for him. Having said this, the goal of retaking Mandatory Palestine by committing genocide against Israel is in their charter; it’s why they exist.

Hamas fully embraces terrorism as a means to that end. They do not want a two-state solution: they want a single state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, built over the corpses of Israelis and populated solely by Arabs. They want to remove the aberration of a democratic, non-Arab nation in a sea of Arab states. And they really, really want to kill Jews.

What did they expect would come of the massacre? War. No military objectives were achieved: they went after civilians. This was the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust and there was never any doubt about whether Israel would retaliate. For Israel, 10/7 was their 9/11, and the threat of repeating the massacre made it absolutely necessary for Israel to remove Hamas’ ability to attack again.

Who did they do this for? Not the Palestinians, certainly. A war between Israel and Hamas would necessarily result in heavy casualties among civilians in Gaza and would not achieve the goal of conquering Israel. Hamas had about 31,000 soldiers at the start of this war and that’s nowhere near enough to take Israel head-on. The only reasonable expectation would be that Gazans would die en masse as a result.

This was fine with Hamas, because even though it’s the semi-elected government of Gaza, it doesn’t care about Gazans. It is a proxy for Iran, and its leaders are millionaires and billionaires who live in safe luxury outside of Gaza, in places like Qatar and Turkey. Moreover, Iran and the Saudis are rivals, so scuttling normalization serves Iran’s political goals. Iran is also behind other proxies, such as the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi in Yemen, all of whom are simultaneously attacking Israel using Iranian weapons. They’re not doing this out of “sympathy” for Palestinians, it’s all part of Iran’s war on Israel.

This is the key point: it is not just a war between Israel and Hamas, it’s an attack on Israel by Iran and its proxies. Iran leads the Axis of Resistance, which opposes Israel, America, and the West. So this isn’t just a war involving America’s ally, it’s a war against America through its allies. That’s why Iran’s Houthi terrorists in Yemen are shooting at American ships in the Red Sea and we’re shooting back. It’s why Iran’s Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon are shooting at American bases and we’re shooting back. It’s all one war and we are already participants in it, whether we like it or not. To abandon Israel is to abandon ourselves.

Gaza is a dense, urban environment. Even in the best of circumstances, a war in that territory would have massive civilian casualties as collateral damage, but Hamas wanted more. It built a network of tunnels that open up into homes, schools, and hospitals, turning them into military installations. Yes, this is a war crime, precisely because it leads to the enemy being forced to attack these places just to defend itself, resulting in increased civilian deaths. Hamas has used these buildings and tunnels to hold soldiers, ammunition, and hostages. It has launched attacks directly from them.

The coldblooded strategy of Hamas is to blur the line between soldiers and civilians so that the former can use the can latter as human shields. If you’re an IDF soldier in Gaza and you see someone who looks like a civilian, you can’t treat them as one, not if you want to survive. After all, Hamas uses suicide bombers, including women and children. The result is many otherwise avoidable deaths, notably even the case of IDF firing upon escaped Israeli hostages due to miscommunication and panic.

When Israeli civilians are massacred, we see them as victims of terrorism, but when Palestinians are killed, they are lauded as shuhada: martyrs who died for the cause of Palestinian freedom. Hamas engineers their deaths and then cynically uses them to attack Israel with false claims of “genocide”. Strangely, but perhaps not unexpectedly, this is immediately recycled into an attack against Biden, as though he’s responsible for the deaths that Hamas chose for the Palestinians at the hands of Israel.

What’s going on here? All war is political, but this one is more so than most. Iran thrived under Trump’s misrule and wants him back. Iran’s ally, Russia, is in a holding pattern in Ukraine, just waiting for Trump to regain power and throw Ukraine under Russia’s tanks. Even Netanyahu wants Trump back, because Trump is antimuslim and welcomes the death of Gazans. The attacks on trade in the Red Sea can be expected to increase inflation globally, hurting incumbent leaders, such as Biden, by weakening the economy.

So the massacre wasn’t just terrorism against Israel, it launched a multipronged attack on normalization with Saudi Arabia, on Biden’s presidency, on global trade, and on the West as a whole. It’s not an incident that can escalate; it is the first, most visible escalation by Iran.

Let’s talk about the “genocide”. First, the entire claim is deeply hypocritical because Hamas openly supports genocide. Their stated goal is to kill the Israelis and take over their land.

Second, there is no “genocide”. Genocide requires targeting civilians, which is something Hamas did in its massacre, but Israel is not doing in its retaliation. Collateral damage, so long as it is proportionate, is not genocide; it is the grim reality of modern urban warfare.

Third, the ratio of civilian-to-soldier deaths in Gaza is about 2 to 1, which compares favorably with similar wars, such as in Iraq. War is hell, but these casualties are proportionate.

Fourth, Hamas’ practice of war crimes that turn civilians into human shields is directly responsible for increasing their death rate, which makes this false claim even more hypocritical. Hamas is also negligent in providing aid for its own civilians, instead confiscating it for the troops.

Netanyahu is Israel’s Trump. He wants to use this war to purge Gaza, but he can’t because we won’t let him. Biden is reining him in, which is why Netanyahu’s apparent strategy is to drag this out long enough for Trump to bail him out. But while Biden is right about Israel needing to narrow its focus to minimize civilian deaths, a ceasefire is not possible at this time.

Remember, Hamas has broken every single ceasefire it has ever agreed to. It uses its safety during these pauses in the violence to prepare for its next attack. Besides the ceasefire it broke on 10/7, it broke the one that Biden arranged to allow exchanging hostages for prisoners. As of the time of this writing, another proposal is in the works to call a month-long ceasefire to allow for the rest of the hostages to be freed. Holding on to the hostages is one of the obvious things Hamas is doing to keep the war going.

What else does Israel need in order for it to agree to a ceasefire? Safety from further massacres, which means that Hamas must go. That’s one of the elements of the ceasefire proposals from Egypt, which Hamas rejected. Hamas can end this war any time it wants by freeing the Gazans from its grip, along with the Israeli hostages, but it doesn’t want to. It wants war, it wants martyrs, it wants fuel for Iran’s PR campaign against Israel and against Biden.

Hamas started this war with the goal of getting Gazans killed and Hamas refuses to stop this war by allowing the Gazans to hold elections. While it’s not a “genocide”, there are many deaths, and they are ultimately caused by Hamas and its Iranian masters. Hamas sacrificed the people it claims to represent for its own gain.

I could stop here, but I’m going to go one step further: we should not mourn the Gazans as innocent victims. The overwhelming majority of them fully support the Oct. 7th attacks. Hamas is a repressive, illiberal, terrorist government, but it continues to enjoy broad support by the people. These are the people who helped hide the hostages and spat on the corpses of massacred Israelis; they want this. It is only just for those who support terrorism to die as a consequence of that terrorism.

We should mourn the innocents among them, though. Some Gazans do not support the massacre, do not support Hamas, and do not deserve to die for Hamas’ crimes. Many are too young to be held accountable for the evil that their parents do. But it’s those Palestinian adults who are responsible for the deaths of the innocents; not Israel, and certainly not Joe Biden.

To quote Golda Meir, “Peace will come to the Middle East only when Arab mothers will love their children more than they hate the Jews.” What we’re seeing in Gaza is Palestinians choosing violence and bringing suffering upon themselves and their families.

There would be no war in Gaza but for Hamas wanting one. All those Gazans, the guilty and innocent alike, would be alive today if those 1,200 or so Israelis were alive today. So if you claim to oppose genocide but want to absolve Hamas, you’re a hypocrite, too. You can’t pave over the massacre by excusing it with some sort of historical context only to ignore context entirely when declaring the retaliatory war a “genocide”.

The war will end when Hamas ends it, likely when it has no choice. And lasting peace will not come until Likud is removed from power, to be replaced by Israeli leaders willing to embrace a two-state solution. Likewise, the UNRWA must go, because it is training children to be terrorists and harboring terrorists itself. None of this will happen if Trump is allowed to take over America, though.

There are people desperately trying to amplify Hamas’ self-destructive war into a “genocide” so that they can weaponize this label against Biden. It’s not just hyperbole thrown around by a far left that is hostile to Democrats, isolationist in its foreign policy, and not just a little bit antisemitic. Rather, it is a propaganda operation with the self-evident goal of providing an excuse for the puritan left to sit out the election and allow Trump to regain power.

The irony is that it’s not merely unfair, but exactly wrong. America supports our ally as it’s being attacked, but this has never been unconditional. Privately, and increasingly publicly, Biden has been reining in Netanyahu’s territorial ambitions and apathy about casualties. He’s stood firm on the necessity of a two-state solution and brokered the ceasefire that rescued many of the hostages. He continues to work, behind the scenes and otherwise, through seasoned diplomats such as Blinken, to keep the situation from getting even worse.

However, Joe Biden is not president of Israel, and Netanyahu is neither obedient nor even reasonable. Blaming Biden for the actions of Netanyahu, much less those of Iran and Hamas, requires invoking the tired old trope that assumes Democrats are omnipotent so that any failure to accomplish impossible goals can be blamed on their laziness or malice.

Even if Biden pulled all aid from our ally, this would not stop the violence. If anything, Israel’s enemies would be emboldened and Israel would face an existential threat. At that point, while it might run low on conventional arms due to our withdrawal of aid, it will still have its own nuclear weapons. And Iran doesn’t, not quite yet, so now would be the time to strike. Netanyahu is just crazy enough to do this. So do we really want this to escalate to nuclear war, even regionally? Think this through.

If you’re angry about the bloodshed, that just means that you’re not a sociopath. But if you’re angry at Biden, you’re an idiot who’s been manipulated by our enemies. Anyone throwing around the term “genocide” and trying to attach it to America is carrying water for Trump. And if Trump wins, American democracy dies and the world is plunged further into violence and chaos.

P.S.

Iran is the new “I” in BRICS. This is “an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.” Did you notice that the “S” in BRICS is South Africa? The same South Africa that is spearheading the attempt to paint Israel’s self-defense as “genocide”.

South Africa is not a neutral country which has the moral high ground due to overcoming its Apartheid past. It’s an ally of Iran that is aiding Iran by politically attacking Israel. If you’re swallowing this “genocide” propaganda and spreading the hyperbole, you are a useful idiot for Iran and Russia.

P.P.S.

It looks like there are some recent signs of the Gazans rejecting their Hamas overlords because they don’t want to die. Good for them.

P.P.P.S.

There’s enough here for an entire essay in itself, but here’s a link to a translation of Hamas’ propaganda guidelines. Note, in particular, the falsehoods they insist upon and the truths they wish to obscure. This is a war, and generating material for propaganda is a key objective for Hamas.

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Unrequested tone policing on abortion rhetoric

Framing is important.

The Republicans know this, which is why they frame their attack on women’s rights as “pro-life”. If we tacitly accept this, then it follows that anyone who questions them is automatically “anti-life”, which is a pretty self-evidently bad stance to take.

Democrats sort of know this, which is why we instead frame the issue in terms of being “pro-choice”, correctly relegating the opposition to “anti-choice”.

Some people didn’t get the message, though, so they call the anti-choicers “anti-abortion”. This framing sets pro-choicers up as “pro-abortion”, which is a stance that nobody actually holds.

Nobody wants there to be more abortions. Abortion is sometimes the best available option, but that just makes it the least of evils, not somehow good. This is why we support comprehensive sexual education and access to all forms of birth control (of which abortion is the last resort).

Abortion is akin to amputation: it’s a lifesaving medical procedure that doctors must be allowed to perform, but we’d rather have fewer instances where it’s needed. If people were involuntarily growing additional limbs, we’d want to be able to remove them, but it would be even better if we could prevent this from happening in the first place.

In this sense, pro-choicers are anti-abortion, but our enlightened approach is to lower the demand for it by reducing unwanted pregnancies, as opposed to interfering with the supply. The anti-choicers are supply-side anti-abortionists, which is as cruel and ineffective as supply-side economics.

So, in an ideal world, all pregnancies would be planned and desired, and abortion would only occur in the rare, tragic cases of circumstances interfering. This is the honest framing behind Planned Parenthood: people should have the ability to choose if and when they become parents. Sex should not entail the risk of involuntary parenthood: that would be cruel to parent and child alike.

This is the core issue: People have the right to autonomy over their own bodies, the right to make reproductive decisions for themselves. That means the right to avoid pregnancy, as well as the right to terminate a pregnancy as early as possible instead of carrying it to term.

In the wake of Dobbs, draconian abortion restrictions have sprung up in all the usual places, and much of the pro-choice activism has focused on the horrific (but entirely foreseeable) medical consequences, with infant and maternal mortality sharply on the rise. You might think that focusing on the worst consequences would make the best argument, but that turns out not to be the case. I’ll explain why.

Let’s take a step back and look at some of the unspoken assumptions behind this issue. Anti-choicers like to claim that abortion is murder, but they don’t really mean it, and we can see that through their inaction.

Think for a moment about what you would do if you found out that a nearby clinic was gleefully bashing in the heads of perfectly healthy newborns against the rocks. Right: you’d go in there and stop it, laws be damned. And you wouldn’t go alone. You’d be at the head of a large mob that included all the cops, too. No such baby-killing clinic would survive its opening day and no law allowing infanticide could pass in the first place.

That’s not what happens with abortion, though. It’s still broadly legal, even where it’s restricted, and while there are cases where some lunatic shoots a doctor or bombs a clinic, these are rare enough to be newsworthy. The fact that anti-choicers don’t react to abortion as they would to infanticide shows that the “baby-killer” slur is a lie. But it’s a lie that serves a purpose: more on this later.

The other way we know they don’t mean it is that the majority of anti-choicers are willing to make an exception for rape. While this stance is less extreme, it’s also incompatible with the idea that abortion is somehow comparable to murder. We wouldn’t ever say, “well, yes, you’re murdering an innocent, but we’ll give you a pass because you were a victim of violent crime”.

There is only one way it makes sense: if you recognize that abortion isn’t murder, but see pregnancy as the rightful punishment for choosing to have sex. In that case, those who were forced get a free pass, while the “loose” women don’t. This is the unspoken assumption at the core of anti-choice: women who enjoy sex deserve to suffer for it, deserve all of the negative consequences.

Anti-choice is not rooted in a love of babies, but rather the hatred of women. As strange as it might sound, this applies equally to anti-choice women. They are female misogynists. So how do you get someone to eagerly participate in their own oppression? By teaching them that doing so makes them better than someone else.

Right-wing women are indoctrinated from childhood to accept a Madonna–whore dichotomy in which women are seen as either morally-pure mothers or filthy sluts who want to have sex for pleasure. So when a woman winds up with an unwanted pregnancy, they are victim-blamed and called “baby-killers”, allowing proper women to feel good about themselves.

This is parallel to the strategy of getting poor whites to attack poor Black people instead of seeing them as natural allies against economic oppression. Anti-choice women are akin to racist white trash or pre-Civil War Copperheads.

Since the core of anti-choice is misogyny, we have to keep that front and center. But if we focus on the worst consequences—illness and death—then we allow them to frame the issue. Consider all of the recent articles about the fate of married women who wanted to get pregnant but then had a medical catastrophe, such as an unviable fetus. By primarily talking about these cases, we’re buying into their unstated premise.

We’re essentially saying: “Look at Mrs. Smith here. She’s no slut; she intentionally got pregnant with her husband’s baby. It’s not her fault the baby would be born without a brain. There’s no need to punish this woman; she’s one of the good ones. Punish the others! Punish those whores!!!”

At this point, you might want to insist that this isn’t how you meant it, that it’s not what you intended to say. Sure, but that’s how it’ll be heard. When we retreat to defending only those women who have nonviable or dangerous pregnancies, we are abandoning all the ones whose pregnancy is “just” unwanted. Instead of arguing for choice, we’re conceding that they’re right but begging them to be a little bit more merciful in the way they strip away our autonomy.

And this begging won’t work because it turns out that that the cruelty is the point. Anti-choice laws are supposed to hurt women: being forced to have a baby is harmful in itself and is more dangerous than abortion. The fact that these laws kill a few in the process is just par for the course. That’s why, for example, talking about the harm that comes to women who have unsafe abortions out of desperation doesn’t have any impact.

The anti-choicers want women who try to abort their unwanted pregnancies to suffer and die as punishment for daring to choose for themselves. There’s no benefit to harping on the cruelty when it’s exactly what they were hoping for; you’re just making them happier. You can’t threaten them with a good time.

Let me get to the conclusion. In medical terminology, abortions can either be therapeutic or elective. Those nightmare cases are all about therapeutic abortion, which occurs because of medical need. But the overwhelming majority of abortions are elective: chosen because the woman doesn’t want to make a baby. We need to fight for both types so that no woman is ever forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

That’s my unrequested bit of tone policing: I’m arguing that we need to keep the focus on the core issue of women’s rights, on their bodily autonomy and freedom to choose parenthood. Obviously, we shouldn’t shy away from mentioning the additional cruelty of doctors being afraid to treat pregnant women, but we must not ignore the fundamental cruelty of forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will, reducing her to the state’s incubator, not a person.

And while I’m giving you the good advice that you don’t want to hear, I need to mention the issue of “women”. In a medical and political context, care is taken to use terms like “pregnant person” to acknowledge that not everyone who gets pregnant identifies as a woman. This inclusive terminology is a good thing, but it’s not particularly helpful in the abortion debate, which is why I haven’t been using it.

The sort of people who oppose a woman’s right to choose whether to be pregnant are not likely to be sympathetic to women who “choose” not to be women. Yes, I do realize that the latter isn’t actually a choice, but they don’t, so using this medically and politically correct terminology just distracts from the core argument.

In practice, anti-choice is focused on women because almost all of the people who get pregnant identify as women. The misogyny that drives this applies just as much to the biologically female who do not identify as women, so the net effect of insisting upon this terminology is to give our opponents something else to attack without strengthening our case.

It is a distinction that makes no difference, and is therefore a hindrance. We need to fight for trans rights in parallel with reproductive rights, but they’re distinct issues despite their common misogynistic basis.

This is all so exhausting. The far right just piles on lie after lie. They say “fetal heartbeat” when there’s no heart or “partial-birth abortion” when there’s no birth or “baby-killer” when there’s no baby. We have to be judicious in which lies we tackle in what order and under what circumstances. And we have to focus on keeping the framing honest, which means fighting for choice, not running away from this by talking only about therapeutic abortion.

So feel free to be angry at me for tone policing you. I don’t care. What matters is that you think this through and follow the winning strategy. What matters is that we restore reproductive rights in America, and this means beating the Republicans.

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Real Red Magic

The reality of magic is a funny thing. Magicians are real but they don’t actually do real magic, just illusions: tricks. Real magic, however, isn’t real and can’t be; it’s impossible. Fake magic, it turns out, is as real as it gets.

Now imagine if someone told you that, sure, magicians only do tricks, but that doesn’t prove magic’s not real. Real magic is totally possible, they insist, it just hasn’t been done. Yet.

When you question that wild statement, they come up with a list of excuses for why real magic hasn’t been demonstrated before. For example, they blame the conspiracy of magicians for removing the market for real magic by selling their cheap tricks so cheaply. The only way we could ever have real magic, they claim, is if we first kill all those fakes who dare call themselves magicians! Real magic requires blood sacrifice.

I would expect that, around this time, you’d be writing off such a person as insane. Fortunately, they are entirely hypothetical. There is, however, a similar form of insanity that you’re much more likely to encounter; more on this later.

The reality of communism is a funny thing. The communism that communist nations have implemented isn’t real, in that it doesn’t live up to Marx’s promises of a workers’ paradise. It’s just murderous totalitarianism justified by far-left rhetoric.

Real communism, which Marx wrote about at great length, isn’t real and can’t be. The reason it can’t is that nobody knows—or has ever known—how to make it. There’s no reason to think that it could ever be made and much to conclude that it can’t.

The truism is that Marx was an excellent diagnostician but a poor clinician. He was great at explaining how capitalism can be bad, but utterly worthless at offering a viable alternative. He characterized how the ideal might appear but offered no workable instructions for how to achieve it. In other words, he provided a description of a delicious dish, without a recipe.

“If you ever run into communism, here’s a vague sketch of what it’ll look like. Good luck finding it, though, because I haven’t a clue, and also, I’m long dead.” – Karl Marx probably

People have tried to cook this dish many times now but the result has always been tragedy. By all evidence, you simply cannot create it with any ingredients, no matter how you try. We know this because no attempt at communism has even come close to succeeding, even on its own terms. And communist states don’t just fail, they fail big, to the point where modern adherents often hide behind “socialism” or “anti-capitalism” to avoid being associated with the tarnished brand.

“Insanity”, quipped Einstein, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” On this basis, modern communists are literally insane, and that insanity manifests through paranoid delusions and rationalizations.

Why did communism fail? Wrong question, comrade! Communism cannot fail; it can only be failed. There must be someone to blame.

So let’s blame the capitalists, who “inexplicably” refused to foster the rise of communism. After all, communism is like a delicate little flower that cannot grow in the presence of more robust economic systems. Like Tinkerbell, everyone has to believe or it will die.

The only way to get real communism is to first murder capitalism, along with any filthy capitalists who stand in our way! If we do that, then this time communism will be totally different; this time, it will actually work somehow. Source: Trust me, comrade.

There was a time when communism wasn’t insane, just idealistic and doomed. People had been trying to create communism even before Marx, such as Robert Owen’s (failed) paternalistic socialist mill in New Lanark, Scotland in 1800, George Rapp’s (failed) utopian community of Harmony, PA in 1804, and John Humphrey Noyes’ (failed) utopian free-sex community in Oneida, NY in 1848. The pattern of successes speaks for itself.

Communism as we understand it today, however, comes from the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1867, and it led directly to bloodshed. Twenty years later, Vladimir Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, tried to assassinate the Tsar in the name of socialism and was executed. A larger revolutionary attempt was made in 1905, but failed. Then, in 1917, Germany decided to sabotage the Russian war effort by helping Lenin come home.

It worked: through a complicated sequence of bloody uprisings, the glorious communist revolution recreated the Russian Empire as the totally-different and much-improved Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Workers of the world, celebrate!

It called itself socialist, not communist, but as Lenin explained, “the goal of socialism is communism”. In other words, he admitted that nobody knew how to make communism, but the USSR was gonna give it the old Russky try. Lenin’s recipe for communism was called Marxism-Leninism, although you might say that it was a bit heavy on the Leninism and light on the Marxism.

It was also heavy on the bloodshed, because that was Lenin’s personal brand: he murdered over 8 million of his own people by starvation, torture, and summary execution. If you want to make a communist omelet, you gotta break millions and millions of eggs, by which I mean people. Lenin’s recipe drowned Russia in a thick, red soup that could not be mistaken for borscht.

Putting aside all this blood, perhaps—at that particular moment in time—people could be forgiven for thinking that this was the culmination of Marxist prophecy, proving that the magic of communism was real. But by 1947, the illusion had worn thin, and American socialists came to understand that Russia was an embarrassing disaster. And in 1991, it mercifully collapsed under its own weight, leaving behind a totalitarian regime that was unburdened by the need to pretend to be true to Marxism, even though it was still beloved by nostalgic commies worldwide.

There were other attempts in other places and all of them ended poorly. Every. Last. One. Right now, we are long past the optimistic days of early-stage socialism, when there was still some reason to hold on to the hope that communism could actually work. We are firmly in the depressing days of late-stage socialism, when we have learned the hard way that communism will always fail, and always do so in the worst possible way, while hurting the most people in the process.

But the delusions of the insane are, by definition, impervious to evidence. Today, online Marxists gleefully post their images of guillotines and are quick to play the No True Communism card, insisting that the forms of communism that have been tried and failed all over the world weren’t the one true communism, so they don’t count. They’re still holding out for the real thing.

Of course, just like magicians, whose fake magic is as real as it gets, the “fake” communism that’s been tried is also as real as it gets. Only, unlike the magician’s scantily-clad assistant, when someone gets cut in half by a guillotine during the gory revolution, it’s no illusion. Real communism requires blood sacrifice. They even sing about it:

The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed its ev’ry fold.

Vladimir Lenin was no magician; he could not make Marx’s vision a reality any more than anyone else could. He was just a butcher in tailcoat and top hat. And, today, another Vladimir who rules Russia is butchering his formerly-Soviet neighbors, all while the desperately-online cosplay socialists make excuses for him.

This naked imperialism is entirely consistent with a rejection of the original Soviet ideal of national socialism and a return to the purer Marxist notion of world revolution, aka domino theory, which claims that communism will only work when it takes over the world bit by bit. Essentially, a system that hasn’t worked anywhere will somehow work everywhere. Einstein would roll over in his grave if he heard this.

Meanwhile, these fucking tankies blame “capitalism” for literally everything. If it rains, that’s “capitalism” for you. If it shines, also “capitalism”! Thing is, economics is called the dismal science for a reason: it describes a world of scarcity and tough decisions. None of this is specific to capitalism, it’s just harsh reality.

To these latter-day communists, the Bad News of economics is always ascribed to “capitalism”, not the cruelty inherent in having only finite resources. “Capitalism”, in other words, has become a generic slur for the undesirable economic facts that dare stand in the way of the inevitable Marxist utopia, and subsequently an excuse to burn it all down so that paradise may come sooner.

“Why can’t we all have mansions and yachts? Fucking ‘capitalism’ is why! If we burn all the mansions and sink all the yachts, then there’ll be mansions and yachts for everyone, somehow.” – Modern_Marx_Enjoyer_4488 probably

There’s another historical lesson we can learn from the endless failures of communism that’s all too relevant today. In 1931, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which was a Soviet puppet, intentionally enabled the rise of Hitler. Following Stalin’s doctrine of “social fascism“, they claimed that the moderate social democrats were just as bad as—”twins of”—the Nazis because they, too, rejected communism. Both sides!

Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann, the KPD decided that it would be strategically useful to help the Nazis take power, since that would crush the moderates, leaving the way clear for the glorious communist revolution ™. His internal slogan for this was the now-infamous: “After Hitler, our turn”.

The German communists did get their turn, but only in a sense: the Nazis rewarded tens of thousands of them with a one-way trip to the death camps, and Thälmann himself was shot on Hitler’s personal orders, in Buchenwald. Meanwhile, Stalin enabled Hitler further by making a pact with him to divide up Europe, and was betrayed for his trouble. It’s almost like these stupid communists never learn that you can’t trust Nazis and using them towards your own goals is sure to backfire.

The parallels are painfully obvious, and I am far from the first to recognize how Bernie Sanders and his late-stage socialists gave us Trump. Sanders has consistently equated Democrats and Republicans for over 40 years, just as Thälmann did the social democrats and the Nazis. Sanders is a Russophile and a socialist, like Thälmann. Sanders received aid from Putin, much as Thälmann did from Stalin.

Sanders viciously attacked the liberals and sold his followers on a pipe dream of Marxist populist purity. This led to a quarter of his butthurt supporters going bust; half of those by voting for Trump, the rest by throwing their vote away. And it happened in sufficient numbers in the right places to make all the difference.

Sanders was hardly unaware of the historical parallels but this did not deter him. He is, in fact, a student of history. He wrote a book entitled “Our Revolution“, which was a (wink wink, nudge nudge) nod towards Leon Trotsky’s “Our Revolution“, and then used the name again for his PAC, “Our Revolution“. In a typically tone-deaf move, he released the book a week after Trump’s victory, utterly indifferent to his role in it. Meanwhile, his wife tweeted that all that mattered was that you voted, not who you voted for.

Perhaps Sanders thought, “after Trump, our turn”, but his turn will never come. This is small consolation for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died needlessly as Trump bungled the COVID response, much less to the women dying from treatable pregnancy complications today because of Trump’s Supreme Court.

Sanders greased the slide towards fascism and gave us a shove down the chute to hell, all to feed his ambitions of leading the glorious revolution. Real communism requires blood sacrifice, after all, and Sanders has gutted America on the altar of Marxist millennialism. The fact that he got nothing for it, besides another house or two, does not make him any less the villain. All Thälmann got was a bullet in the head, and it was still better than he deserved.

Sanders is an old man. He will die soon enough without any help, but truly bad ideas never go away for good. The fallout of his aborted revolution will linger and cause more harm. Sanders will go down as America’s Thälmann, as surely as Trump is America’s Hitler.

I could go on, but perhaps now you see why I have so little patience with those online socialists and their #anticapitalism and #gullotines-2024 tags, as communism once again ushers in fascism.

History doesn’t have to repeat itself. We don’t have to die in the name of slogans that have proven themselves to be lies. This didn’t have to happen, but it happened, and now all we can do is fight again to break free of the cycle of history before millions more die.

If a vengeful, unrepentant Trump sneaks into the White House again, nobody will be safe. Not even multimillionaire Sanders, in any of his three houses. And this will be the least of the damage caused by Sanders’ betrayal of American democracy.

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In defense of the inevitability of the two-party system.

America is described as having a two-party system, and this is both true and false.

It’s true that there are two major parties–at this time, the Democrats and the Republicans–and that they control almost all federal-level offices. But it’s not true that each party is monolithic. Instead, they are themselves made up of factions that, in other systems, would be considered parties.

This is the key to understanding how the American system differs from other forms of democracy in some ways but is fundamentally equivalent in the ways that count, and is in some ways superior.

Consider the major parties.

The modern Republicans, prior to being taken over by their lunatic fringe, were the party of Movement Conservatism, an alliance among five distinct but compatible groups: the libertarians, traditionalists, anti-communists, neoconservatives, and religious right.

What united them was their opposition to FDR’s New Deal, which they seek to roll back, along with LBJ’s extensions of our civil rights. There are further subdivisions within each group, and some that overlap categories, such as the conservative Catholics. As a whole, they used to be right-wing to far-right and are now far-right to fascist.

The modern Democrats have at least four distinct–and rather unequal–groups, depending how you count them. The dominant group is the center-left liberals, which are under attack by the far-left, socialist-populist “progressives”, and there are also some moderates and even a few (historically Southern) conservatives.

This rough categorization is broken down further into such groups as the union/labor contingent and various parts that are identity-based (such as feminism) or special-interest (such as environmentalism). As a whole, they used to be moderate to left-wing and still are, only with a gentle shift towards the left, despite the far-left wing trying to ungently take over.

The two parties didn’t always represent these particular groups, but the current distribution has been broadly consistent, though not stable, since Nixon’s Southern Strategy got the racist Southerners to come over, turning it into the unambiguous party of white supremacy.

Given this, Trump’s takeover is not an aberration, but rather the predictable culmination of Nixonism. Likewise, the modern Democratic Party was forged under LBJ, who doubled down on FDR’s New Deal and put equal rights front and center with his Civil Rights Acts. Its shift towards supporting LGBTQ rights is just a natural extension of this.

The Republicans like to call themselves the party of Lincoln, but this ignores the historical fact that it went from opposing white supremacy to supporting it, causing Southern white supremacists to go Republican and Black voters to go Democratic. The party that Lincoln was a member of has very little to do with the one Trump leads today. Likewise, the modern Democratic Party has no room for any adherence to its shameful pro-slavery past.

The takeaway here is that both of these major parties are themselves coalitions of factions that work together but constantly jockey for position. They are teams of rivals, and this results in gradual, and sometimes not-so-gradual, change to the very nature of the parties.

The Trumpers, riding on the post-Obama, racist Tea Party wave, sought to displace the Movement Conservatives, with great success. The “progressives” are likewise trying to displace the liberals, with little success. Parties are ever-shifting conglomerations of often-hostile allies somehow held together by their commonalities, including their common enemies.

So while the names are slow to change, the parties themselves still do. According to political theorists, we have gone through one party system after another, with the Nixon/LBJ realignment signaling the start of the 6th system and Trumpism being increasingly viewed as the start of the 7th. For context, Lincoln’s presidency kicked off the 3rd system; party of Lincoln, my ass.

Because voting at the federal level is based on a first-past-the-post system, in which the plurality wins, it is subject to Duverger’s law, which shows that the stable conclusion of such systems is a pair of major parties (although, as shown above, what they’re called and what they represent is far from constant). The two-party system, however, is an inevitable mathematical consequence implicit in our Constitution.

These major parties are banners for factions to band under, not ideologically pure strains. In order to gain power, each tries to run candidates whose positions will garner votes from their local electorate.

This means that candidates have to vary regionally to suit what the people there want. A Democrat in West Virginia, such as Manchin, can be to the right of a Republican in Maine, such as Collins, on at least some issues (although they both wind up voting with their party bloc most of the time, but only after making a lot of noise to impress the locals and ensure re-election). All politics is local because all votes are.

More fundamentally, without techniques such as voter suppression, the parties cannot succeed at the national level while favoring a single faction to the exclusion of all others. They have to cater their platform to broadly appeal to a majority constituency, avoiding any stances so radical as to offend the loosely-affiliated, much less alienate the otherwise-reliable base.

At this point, you might chime in by saying this means that both major parties have to be “the same”. After I finished laughing, I’d point out that anyone who mistakes the fascist Republicans for the liberal Democrats is an idiot or a liar or both. Most likely, they’re an extremist with an axe to grind against democracy, as I’ll explain below.

While the two parties are not the same, they do have to work together to some extent. There has to be enough overlap to allow for compromise and cooperation, as opposed to a scorched-earth approach. When it’s missing, government is dysfunctional.

We saw the beginnings of this under Clinton’s presidency, when Gingrich held the country hostage. We saw it even more clearly when, in rejection of the legitimacy of a Black man in the White House, the RNC shed all resemblance to the loyal opposition and instead embraced obstructionism openly. And it continued under Biden, when McCarthy obstructed the budget, threatening to shut down the government by defaulting on our debts.

The corollary to this need for compromise is that each party has to keep its extremist fringe at bay. For example, back when the Republicans were still keeping up appearances, they disinvited the fascist-lite Birchers from events such as CPAC because they were too embarrassing in their obviousness, always saying the quiet part loud. Now, of course, Birchers are not only invited, but find themselves to be relatively moderate compared to the reigning Trumpers. Likewise, the Democrats have their own fringe that must never be allowed to take control because they’d replace democracy with Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism and ban hamburgers and gasoline.

If we look at parliamentary systems, such as in the UK, things are totally different, yet pretty much the same. It’s still first-past-the-post voting, but instead of picking a candidate who represents a faction of the major party, the faction is itself considered a party. So, for example, instead of voting for a Democrat who’s part of the union faction, you’d vote for a member of the Labour Party. Or, instead of an extreme MAGA Republican, you’d vote for UKIP.

In America, the shape of each coalition is finalized during the primaries. In the UK, the coalitions are instead formed after the election. You still get a ruling coalition, which comprises the plurality of winners, and a (hopefully-loyal) opposition made up of most of the losers, plus some stragglers who refuse to unite with either. It’s effectively a two-party system with the two parties created just-in-time, instead of up front. This leads to a more unstable government, though, which is not actually a good thing.

Remember: to have a functioning government, we need compromise. The government has to be balanced somewhere over the political center of gravity in order to remain stable. It has to roughly follow the will of the people, not just the winners. So democratic systems that are too responsive to elections and jerk around in the face of the political wind end up losing the plot by failing to live up to the goals of democracy.

In American democracy, one of the stabilizing factors is that a vote for a fringe candidate– whether it’s a protest vote for a third party or the political suicide of supporting a candidate in the primary who is too extreme to win the general–acts only as a spoiler. It punishes extremism by making it self-limiting.

This is, for the reasons explained above, a good thing. Extremists have to lose because they represent a faction that is hostile towards governance. If they gain power, they will use to it represent only their own interests, not those of the nation. We saw this with Trump, who was president of MAGA-land, not America.

Of course, extremists are not fond of losing, so they grow to deny the legitimacy of democratic outcomes by insisting that the system is “rigged” against them. It is, in the sense that they don’t represent a view that is palatable to the majority, so they’re going to wind up on the losing side most of the time. Democracy is, by design, disempowering to fringe factions. The “rigging” is that everyone gets a vote.

That’s not to say that all election results have been legitimate. In addition to the systemic voter suppression mentioned earlier, we have had recent presidential elections where the candidate with the most votes–the popular choice–was declared the loser. I’m talking about Al Gore and Hillary Clinton here. We’ve also had extremists who lost legitimately but loudly decried their loss as “rigged”. Now I’m talking about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Ever since the travesty of the 2000 election, there has been increasing interest in other forms of democracy, many of which explicitly allow voting non-strategically. In other words, they let you vote for your absolute favorite without this acting as a spoiler. An example of this would be instant-runoff or ranked voting. Parliamentary systems also share this property to a large extent, since your minor party can still join the ruling coalition.

The fringe groups, particularly on the far left, see these more complicated voting systems as a way to increase their power. After all, if there’s no spoiler penalty associated with voting for an extremist, extremists will get more votes. They laud this as a democratic success, when in fact it would simply decrease stability and further polarize our government. We need both major parties to be under the control of boring, sane moderates, not anti-democratic firebrands.

Not that they care: they keep losing elections so they’ve come to reject democracy itself as inconvenient. They see it as inherently unfair towards them (because they’re fringe) and therefore consider manipulating it in their favor to be perfectly fine. For example, political extremists such as Trump, Sanders, and Stein were entirely comfortable accepting aid from hostile foreign powers such as Russia; this would be anathema to a healthy political party. The pattern continues now with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among others.

So when the fringes say that they want to break the two-party system in the name of democracy, they’re full of shit. They want to break it so that they can rule despite democracy. They want to break it so that they can undermine the core goals of democracy.

In conclusion, the de facto two-party system is inevitable given how we count votes, and would not be improved under a radically different accounting method. Even if we went full parliamentary, we’d still wind up with two broad coalitions and a few fringes. We’d lose stability without gaining in representation. We’d be differently democratic, not more democratic, and not better.

If we actually care about democracy, we need to focus first and foremost on opposing the various forms of–to be blunt–cheating that are used to disenfranchise our citizenry through various forms of voter suppression. We also need to restore the democratic ideal of one person, one vote, whereas Citizens United gives us something closer to one dollar, one vote.

Moreover, we need to block foreign election interference, and to restore confidence in the legitimacy of our government by expanding the profoundly undemocratic SCOTUS. Over time, we can can even begin to deal with difficult-to-change aberrations such as the electoral college (as through an interstate compact), two Senators per state, and the not-quite-proportional House.

But to get there, we have to vote out the extremists and keep them out, over and over, again and again, for as long as it takes. The tree of democracy must be refreshed from election to election with the blood of idealists and extremists.

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True Believers and Influencers

This post is inspired by a thread of toots by Daniel Keys Moran, which talks about the connection between oligarchy and fascism.

Political ideology and greed are not independent.

People accept an ideology because they believe it serves their interests. More importantly, people with power push ideologies—which they might not particularly believe—that serve their own interests, not those of the ones being influenced.

Of course, the latter don’t realize they’re being played for suckers. They think they’re clever. They think they’re winners. They’re convinced that they’ve signed on to the winning team and are willing to wear the t-shirt and shout the slogans. Go team!

Traditional politics conceives of interests in a rather sophisticated manner, one that accounts for both personal and societal goals, and the need to balance them.

Populism maximizes its appeal by bypassing all that complexity and instead pandering directly to your basest desires. It promises to shower you with unearned wealth and privilege while depriving your “undeserving” perceived enemies of either. It promises victory in conquest. Go team!

I say all this because, in the case of scum like George Santos, people notice that he’s a grifter and decide that means he’s not really committed to the ideology he sells. This is false.

His commitment is based on grift, and the ideology was always something he sold, not bought. The more committed he is to grift, the more committed he is to being a proponent of the ideology that benefits him. In his case, the benefit comes not so much from the ideology itself as from being a salesman who gets commissions and perks; an influencer.

I’m not saying that the oligarchs who finance fascism are themselves free of bigotry. Not at all. I am saying that the bigotry they sell is meant to be consumed by suckers, and any analysis of whether they’re true believers is a waste of time.

As Mother Teresa showed us, those who harbor serious doubts about their beliefs are the ones who double down on them and act more like true believers than the true true believers do. The cosplay fascists Sieg-Heil all the louder and show their enemies even less mercy, because they have something to prove.

So, did Hitler really hate Jews or was it something he latched onto to enrich himself and attain a position of power? Who the fuck cares? He killed tens of millions! We’re not here to psychoanalyze monsters, just to slay them. Go team.

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On the Division of Pie

No, not this kind of pi division

We speak metaphorically of “getting your piece of the pie” to mean receiving your share of the wealth. The purpose of the economy is to ensure that wealth is both created and distributed so that there’s enough pie to go around and everyone gets enough to eat.

Both of these elements are necessary. If there isn’t enough to go around, then no matter how fair you are in doling out the scraps, people will go hungry. Likewise, even if you have more than enough for everyone, if it’s not distributed well, people will go hungry.

The economic right, meaning libertarianism, brags about its success in motivating the efficient creation of wealth by rewarding those who create it (or at least those who own the means of creation: capital, not labor). The economic left, meaning socialism, brags about its fair distribution of wealth, to each worker according to their need (or at least what the Party decides you need). In this, both are guilty of focusing on their strength while ignoring their weakness.

No matter what free-market fundamentalists claim, laissez-faire capitalism is utterly incapable of ensuring even remotely fair distribution of the wealth it creates. In fact, it’s not even good at creating wealth in the longer term, because without proper regulation, the market becomes mired by collusion.

An economic system that moves too far to the right winds up baking more than enough pies for everyone but handing them out to people who are too full to eat, while others are left to starve. Through the law of diminishing marginal value, the concentration of wealth inherently reduces it. It’s like all those pies piling up and rotting in the pantries of the hoarders. Even this mislaid bounty can’t last, because the workers are too hungry to work.

In addition, wastefully producing wealth requires wasting resources. Under unconstrained capitalism, we get a tragedy of the commons, where the cost is socialized while the profit is privatized. The company profits from the product, but society has to pay for the pollution and depletion.

Of course, no matter what the far left claims, socialism has never worked, either. It’s not even good at fair distribution, because it (unfairly) doesn’t reward the people who create wealth for their efforts so as to motivate them to create enough, and any remaining semblance of fairness goes out the window as soon as scarcity kicks in the front door.

In fact, it’s been so grand a failure each and every time it’s been tried on any significant scale that modern proponents have to euphemistically call it “socialism” just to avoid admitting that it’s communism. Remember the USSR? One of those S’s stood for “Socialist”. That’s what socialism is. To quote Lenin, “the goal of socialism is communism”.

Socialism is not Sweden. The Nordic states have well-regulated capitalist economies and explicitly deny being socialist. Socialism is the USSR or Cuba. This flawed economic system invariably leads to a corrupt political system; a totalitarian regime that is generally impoverished despite the wealth of natural resources, but for the Communist Party officials who horde what little is created. The reality of communism is waiting in line for hours just to get toilet paper, then giving up and buying it on the black market.

The reason that the USSR’s economy was a mess is handily explained by a Soviet-era Russian saying: “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work”. Without free enterprise, there is no reward for productivity. You can try to squeeze it out of people with patriotic propaganda and harsh incentives, but it just doesn’t work as well as a system that is fair in rewarding those who do more than they absolutely have to.

Also, where the economic right rejects the role of government in regulating the economy, the economic left believes in the opposite extreme: central control. For practical reasons, this can’t work, and it’s what leads to the corruption and violation of civil and human rights by those who have too much power over who gets the wealth.

The Nordic states show that, in contrast, capitalism can be compelled to work towards the goals of society, not those of oligarchy. Capitalism tends towards evil but can be made good; socialism is hopeless.

Ultimately, by overly favoring either capital or labor, by overly focusing either on productivity or fairness, and by demanding either too little government control or too much, these two economic extremes not only fail to deliver what the other promises, but even what they themselves promise. Extremism in economics is no more viable than it is in politics.

P.S.

Economics is the science of managed scarcity. Everything is finite, so there is always a loss when you make one choice over another. But what if this wasn’t so? What if we lived in a post-scarcity world where labor came in the form of machine intelligences? What if capital no longer required people as labor?

This has been explored more by science fiction than economics, but the scariest part is the transition. When workers no longer add to the wealth of the wealthy, why should they be kept around? Or kept alive?

When everyone is rich, how do you create poverty so that people are desperate enough to let you do what you want to them? What’s the point of being rich if you can’t be richer than someone else?

I don’t have all the answers. Just leaving these questions here so that this essay is not obsolete the moment it was written.

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Goodbye, Twitter.

Nothing lasts forever, so it’s best to move on before the stench gets bad

Twitter is a hellsite at the best of times, and I have no interest in Musk’s version.

The failure of all the “free speech” (meaning fascist) Twitter alternatives is that there’s no fun in being an unrepentant asshole if you can’t be an asshole towards people who disagree with you. Liberals and other sane people stayed away from Gab, Getter, and Truth Social in droves, so the bullies got lonely and bored. Those sites flopped.

Musk thinks he can solve this by taking over a place already packed with victims to bully, like fish in a barrel. What he doesn’t understand is that Twitter is not a company, it’s a community, and you can’t buy a community. He can take over the site, but he can’t make us stay to get bullied. Moreover, he can’t force us to legitimize the bigotry and other extremism by allowing ourselves to be targeted.

Musk is like the new landlord who raises the rent, stops doing maintenance, and eyes conversion into a condo. Overnight, the place we called home is no more. Thing is, we can move out at the drop of a hat. And that’s what I’m doing: I’m leaving.

Where am I going? Possibly nowhere. If a viable alternative to Twitter springs up and a critical mass settles, I’ll join. For now, I’m /u/TruthSandwichBlog on Reddit and For now, I’m @TruthSandwich on CounterSocial, and I don’t intend to shut down this blog, either, so subscribing is one way to stay in touch.

You should be able to see an image of what my Twitter profile looked like on 2022/04/25. It shows that I posted over 180k tweets over the course of 3 years, most of them RTs of things I found interesting and thought others might benefit from. I’ve engaged with the famous and the not so famous. I’ve made friends and enemies.

Overall, I’m proud of what I’ve done and I’m happy with what I learned and the people I connected with, but I’m leaving Twitter, and so should you.

So long, and thanks for all the tweets.

P.S.

As a public service, I’m going to try to leave this post open for comment, so that anyone who wishes to can use it as a community blackboard to tell each other where they went. Good luck out there.

P.P.S.

I tried Reddit. It didn’t work out. So now I’m trying CounterSocial.

P.P.P.S.

On 11/19/22, Musk opened the floodgates of hell by reinstating Trump’s Twitter account. I took this as a hint that it was time to leave, so I’ve deactivated my account. I can be found on CounterSocial as @TruthSandwich and on Mastodon as @truthsandwich@masto.ai @truthsandwich@qoto.org @truthsandwich@toad.social.

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Know Thy Enemy

one of these things is not like the others

There are candidates who run as Democrats but are not Democrats. They’re socialist populists, not liberals, and they don’t even consider themselves to be Democrats. They explicitly admit that their goal is to take over the party by getting rid of the real Democrats.

I’m talking about the so-called Justice Democrats, of course, but also their entire Green Hydra of associated organizations; many heads snaking out from a single bloated body. They might try to pass themselves off as blue but they’re entirely green, and that means they’re as bad as red.

The purpose of this rant is to help you identify these people. After all, their greatest weapon is stealth. By passing themselves off as purer leftists, they get gain from our ignorance, turning us into useful idiots for their cause.

The rotten green apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so a good starting point is to know about the organizations and individuals who are guilty of socialist populism. I’ll name names, with links all around so you can dive deeper.

This list will never be complete, but anyone who willingly associates with such people is raising a red flag. The closer the association, the bigger the flag. In particular, endorsing, accepting the endorsement of, or working for or with them are all strong indicators of guilt.

None of this is fixed in stone, so I plan to update it as needed. Please let me know if anything in this list is outdated or just plain wrong, or if there’s someone who’s been omitted but is particularly deserving.

Guilty Associations and Associates

The innocent do not surround themselves with the guilty.
  • Bernie Sanders (BS) – Figurehead of the socialist-populist “progressive” movement and lifelong Marxist. Note that his web site lists people and orgs he endorses.
  • Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – Not a party, but a 501c4 nonprofit “dark money” political org, this is is conceptually the center of the movement. Their emoji is 🌹.
  • Justice Democrats (JD) – A hybrid PAC (a Carey Committee that is both a PAC and a super PAC) founded by Zack Exley, Saikat Chakrabarti, Kyle Kulinski, Cenk Uygur. Run by Alexandra Rojas. Note how it has the word “Democrats” in it, even though they’re not.
  • Warrenites – Members of Congress strongly or loosely associated with Elizabeth Warren, including Katie Porter, Jamie Raskin, Mondaire Jones, Mike Levin, Ted Lieu, Julian Castro. Some of these are Warren-adjacent as opposed to true disciples, but none are real D’s.
  • Brand New Congress (BNC) – A super PAC founded by Zack Exley, Alexandra Rojas, Corbin Trent. Essentially the JD’s, only stealthier and less DNC-focused. Associated with Malcolm Kenyatta and Lindsey Boylan. Note how BNC sounds a lot like DNC, even though it’s in opposition to it.
  • Sunrise Movement (🔗) – This super PAC and 501c4 “dark money” org is an arm of the JD; note how even their logo matches.
  • Working Families Party (WFP) – Unlike most of the others, this is a party, not a PAC and sometimes endorses actual Democrats in order to get on the ballot. Letitia (Tish) James, who took down Cuomo, is one of them.
  • Green Party (GPUS) – The spoiler party that brought us Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, Howie Hawkins. Republican-funded and not really associated with European Greens.
  • Our Revolution (OR) – Another 501c4 nonprofit “dark money” org formed as a remnant of Bernie 2016 and using a Trotskyist slogan.
  • The Young Turks (TYT) – Aided by faux-stupid sidekick Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur‘s goal is to form a red-brown alliance by getting the far left to join the far right in a populist gang.
  • Occupy Wall Street (OWS) – This (along with its Republican counterpart, the Tea Party Movement) was the tip of the populist wedge in America, fueled by Russia, naturally. Direct remnants include Occupy Democrats, which spurts propaganda memes.
  • Secular Talk (🔗) – Kyle Kulinski‘s home turf. Aggressive atheism as a gateway to populism.
  • Chapo Trap House (🔗) – Home of the dirtbag left, including Virgil Texas.
  • The Gravel Institute (🔗) – Some stupid, vulgar kids who took a dead man’s name.
  • Indivisible (🔗) – Pushes a voting guide that endorses only socialist populists.
  • IfNotNow (🔗)- Socialist Jewish antisemites, such as Max Berger, hiding behind antizionism.
  • Sanders Institute (🔗) – Bernie’s cash pit lists “Fellows” who are loyal.
  • Data For Progress (DFP) – Fake polls to provide talking points for the greens.
  • Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC, aka BoldProgressives.org) – This Warren-centered “economic populist” org also endorses JD’s. Note how its name is CCCP (USSR) in reverse; in Soviet Russia, joke gets you.
  • Democracy For America (DFA) – Much like PCCC, endorses JD and Warrenite candidates. Also occasionally endorses Democrats.
  • The Intercept (🔗) – Propaganda outlet. Everyone who touches this is toxic.
  • Jacobin (🔗) – Extremist propaganda outlet. Everyone who touches this is even more toxic.
  • Russia Today (RT) – Literally Russian propaganda. Everyone who touches this is tainted with treason.
  • MintPress News (🔗) – One little boy sitting on the other one’s shoulders, covered by a trench coat, and holding a copy of RT. Yep, it’s just RT in an unconvincing disguise.
  • MSNBC – Not all socialist-populist operatives, but many are, including Chris Hayes, Chuck Todd, Mehdi Hasan, Chris Cillizza, David Weigel.
  • Wikileaks (🔗) – Julian Assange is mentioned in more detail below, but the org itself is a blatant Russian cutout.
  • Gen-Z for Change (🔗) This is the org behind Olivia Julianna. Claim to fame is its “Gen-Z for Choice Abortion Fund” and her petty feud with Matt Gaetz. Her track record and its policy list makes it clear what it is, though.
  • CPC Letter for Diplomacy on Russia/Ukraine Conflict (🔗) – This is the letter that 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) signed, demanding that we appease Putin. The full list of signatories is: Pramila Jayapal, Earl Blumenauer, Cori Bush, Jesús G. “Chuy” García, Raúl M. Grijalva, Sara Jacobs (“would not sign today”), Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Sheila Jackson Lee, Mark Pocan, Nydia M. Velázquez, Gwen S. Moore, Yvette D. Clarke, Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr., Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mondaire Jones, Peter A. DeFazio, Jamaal Bowman, Marie Newman, Alma S. Adams, Chellie Pingree, Jamie Raskin, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Mark Takano, André Carson, Donald M. Payne, Jr., Mark DeSaulnier,
  • Operatives:  Briahna (BrieBrie) Joy Gray, Glenn Greenwald,  Matt Taibbi, Nina Turner, Cornel West, Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Katie Halper, Tara Reade, John Fetterman, Jimmy Dore, Aaron Maté, Anthony Zenkus, Zerlina Maxwell, Jess McIntosh, Elie Mystal and many, many more.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
The guilty confess all the time, if you just listen for it.

Of course, no list can be complete and not everyone outs themselves by advertising their association plainly. For example, Malcolm Kenyatta managed to hide his BNC link for a long time. So how do we detect these green pod people? It’s easy: they tell us. All we have to do is listen, and never forget what we hear.

Every group needs ways of identifying its own members, which leads to secret handshakes and other silly shibboleths. The trick is that, in this case, they have to act as dog whistles; understood by those who need to understand, but vague and deniable to everyone else.

Here’s a glossary of terms and phrases that give socialist populists away. It works for political operatives of all kinds, whether they’re politicians, journalists, or Twitter randos.

  • Socialist populism – Sometimes they say the quiet part loud by actually admitting that they’re socialists or populists or both. This is about as clear as it gets. Of the two, socialism is much more likely to be mentioned because it makes them seem edgy and pure; and association with it hurts real Democrats.
  • Progressive – This one is, quite intentionally, ambiguous. It used to refer to liberals, and sometimes it still does, but it’s also the preferred label of the pod people, who especially like it as a noun, not just an adjective. While not everyone who calls themselves progressive, or even characterizes themselves as being a progressive, is one of them, socialist populists almost always identify themselves with this term.
  • No corporate donations – Anyone who brags about refusing “corporate” donations is suspicious because it’s a meaningless purity pledge that socialist populists almost always make. In reality, they’re fine taking money from their own PAC’s and from questionable “small” donations (see below). Again, not everyone who says this is one of them, but every one of them says this.
  • Medicare for All (M4A) – Support for this slogan is pretty much a requirement for socialist populists. The key is that they don’t just want Universal Healthcare (UHC) or a Public Option (PO), they want to shut down all private insurance and replace it. Click on this incredibly useful list of “Real Progressives“, which is based on the requirement of endorsing M4A while rejecting “corporate” money.
    While not all of them are socialist populists, here are the co-sponsors of the bill: Alma S. Adams Ph.D., Nanette Diaz Barragán, Karen Bass, Don Beyer, Earl Blumenauer, Suzanne Bonamici, Jamaal Bowman, Brendan F. Boyle, Anthony Brown, Cori Bush, Salud Carbajal, Tony Cárdenas, André Carson, Matt Cartwright, Judy Chu, David Cicilline, Katherine Clark, Yvette D. Clarke, Emanuel Cleaver, II, Steve Cohen, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Danny K. Davis, Peter DeFazio, Diana DeGette, Mark DeSaulnier, Debbie Dingell, Lloyd Doggett, Mike Doyle, Ted Deutch, Veronica Escobar, Adriano Espaillat, Teresa Leger Fernandez, Lois Frankel, Ruben Gallego, Jesús G. “Chuy” García, Jimmy Gomez, Al Green, Raúl M. Grijalva, Josh Harder, Alcee L. Hastings, Jahana Hayes, Brian Higgins, Jared Huffman, Sara Jacobs, Pramila Jayapal, Hakeem Jeffries, Hank Johnson, Mondaire Jones, Kaiali’i Kahele, William R. Keating, Robin L. Kelly, Ro Khanna, Daniel T. Kildee, Ann Kirkpatrick, James R. Langevin, Brenda L. Lawrence, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Andy Levin, Mike Levin, Ted W. Lieu, Alan Lowenthal, Carolyn B. Maloney, James P. McGovern, Jerry McNerney, Gregory W. Meeks, Grace Meng, Jerrold Nadler, Grace F. Napolitano, Joe Neguse, Marie Newman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Frank Pallone Jr., Jimmy Panetta, Donald Payne Jr., Ed Perlmutter, Chellie Pingree, Mark Pocan, Katie Porter, Ayanna Pressley, David Price, Jamie Raskin, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Bobby L. Rush, Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, Linda Sanchez, John Sarbanes, Jan Schakowsky, Adam Schiff, Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, Brad Sherman, Adam Smith, Jackie Speier, Eric Swalwell, Mark Takano, Bennie G. Thompson, Mike Thompson, Dina Titus, Rashida Tlaib, Paul Tonko, Ritchie Torres, Lori Trahan, Juan Vargas, Marc Veasey, Nydia M. Velázquez, Maxine Waters, Peter Welch, Susan Wild, Nikema Williams, Frederica Wilson, and John Yarmuth.
  • Small donations – Bernie bragged about an average of $27 per donation, but he never said how many donations were being made by each person. It’s a grift; by breaking large donations up into chunks smaller than $200, they avoid the need to report who donated, allowing them to hide their shady benefactors, both foreign and domestic.
  • Establishment – Along with terms such as “neoliberal”, “elite”, “rigged”, this is a standard slur used by socialist populists. The more terms they use and the more they use them, the bigger and redder the flag.
  • Green New Deal (GND) – Much like M4A, support for this slogan is pretty much required, and is a strong indicator of guilt. Endorsing the nonsensical Green New Deal for Public Schools (GND4PS) is especially clear.
  • Defund the Police (DTP) – Another slogan that you’re not going to hear from real D’s, this one is particularly toxic in elections.
  • Cancel Student Loans (CSL) – A recent addition to the required slogans, this bit of blatant pandering has become popular because it goes along with the claim that Biden should violate the Constitution by issuing an executive order. While it’s a very strong signal in general, one notable exception is Chuck Schumer, whose Twitter account routinely spouts this as a shield against being primaried by JD’s.
  • Black Lives Matter (BLM) – This one’s tricky, because it’s something real liberals are quite likely to support, especially when it’s the entirely reasonable concept and not the more questionable organization. Socialist populists routinely add this to their self-description, though, as protective coloring. The trick is that, for them, it’s only skin deep. It’s the “but I have a Black friend” of the Internet; an excuse for being otherwise anti-anti-racist or even racist.
  • Identity politics – Socialist populists are Marxist economic reductionists, so they don’t believe that racism and other forms of bigotry need to be addressed. As such, they dismiss anyone who does want to fight bigotry as engaging in “identity politics”. In a related way, they cynically put out skinfolk candidates and even more cynically accuse any legitimate criticism of being motivated by bigotry.
  • Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) – Also a bit tricky, because even though the far left hides its antisemitism behind antizionism, there are liberals who are legitimately critical of Israeli policy. So “BDS” or “Free Palestine” aren’t sure signs, but they’re significant.
  • Bold – This is the preferred positive adjective of the Bold Progressives (PCCC, see above). The implication is that real Democrats are cowardly because they won’t pander enough.
  • Justice – This is the preferred positive adjective of the Justice Democrats (naturally). The implication is that real Democrats don’t care about (purely economic) justice because they’re not Marxist.
  • Free Assange – As mentioned above, Assange such a blatant Russkiy that anyone embracing him at this point isn’t even hiding what they are.
  • Communism – If cosplay socialism isn’t edgy enough for you, there’s always communism. Online edgelords love the old hammer and sickle emoji (☭), so it’s a sure sign. Note that, while there’s plenty of support for Putin from the right, none of it is based on the contrafactual notion that Russia is still communist.
  • Soviet imagery – The socialist populists love this stuff, whether it’s the JD’s using a modified hammer and sickle for their logo or the PCCC/CCCP “joke”. Naturally, when pressed, they’ll deny it as coincidental or claim it was ironic.

I could go on, but I’m going to stop here for now. More so than my other rants, which only get changed to fix typos or broken links, this one is intended to be kept up to date, so I once again suggest that you contact me if, likely by Twitter, you have suggestions or corrections.

Always remember that you have to use your brain and not jump to conclusions; life is more complicated than fiction.

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Meat: Steal my story idea.

Meat!

In the not so distant future, meat isn’t really a thing anymore, at least not meat from animals.

Cultured meat is grown in a vat and never involves creating anything that could be mistaken for a brain. Even edible plant parts are routinely produced by cellular culture, simply because it’s cheaper, easier, and more flexible. After all, why grow a banana tree when all you need is the banana? The feedstock for these cultures consists largely of single-celled algae powered by the sun.

The DNA of these cells is, of course, directly engineered, making them streamlined and more efficient, to the point that they could not live as an independent organism anyhow. Your beef not only never had a brain, but doesn’t even have the DNA to code for one.

Meat from animals isn’t strictly illegal, but is nearly so. Its production and consumption is culturally unacceptable among all but the most conservative or deviant. The required farming and slaughter is considered cruel and barbaric, even more so than, say, hunting deer is seen by many today. Animal-welfare laws quite intentionally make it prohibitively expensive or just plain impossible (think foie gras) to produce meat from animals. Like I said, not really a thing anymore.

With this as the background, the sort of people who are vegans today still exist, but in the form of no-cell advocates. True to their name, they refuse to eat anything made up of once-living cells, instead subsisting on fully-synthetic food created by nanotech-assisted chemistry, lacking DNA or even cell walls. It’s organic material, of course, which is all we really need to live.

The reasons given for no-cell are all over the place, including stated concerns about the ability of cells to suffer, the evils of genetic engineering, and of course, alleged health benefits. Since it’s somewhat more difficult and expensive to maintain this lifestyle, it has become a status symbol; a mark of wealth and culture, of both physical and ideological purity. The President of North America, for example, does not lower herself to consume cells.

No-cell food is referred to by many labels, including no-cell, but the standard marketing is to call it inorganic.

There’s not enough here for a story, but it looks like good background material. Since I’m not making any use of it, and since you can’t copyright ideas (especially those as obvious as this one), I’m making it freely available for you to steal.

Attribution welcome but not required.

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Colonialism and consequences.

Simple, easy, wrong.

Once upon a time, there was a group of Europeans who left Europe. They didn’t really want to, but felt they had no choice. By leaving, they escaped religious persecution and were able to found a new nation that they could run along the lines of their own enlightened principles. It would be a place where they could be safe from oppression and have unlimited economic opportunity.

In this, they had some support from European powers and were granted a territory to call their own. Of course, as is so often the way of things, the land that they were to build their colony upon was not entirely unoccupied. There were a few people, of a sort, already living there. Not many, and not the kind who mattered, just non-European infidels.

Besides, they were poor, backward, and weak. In the end, they were unable to militarily defend themselves, which turns out to be relevant because many of the locals were inexplicably violent—as though they resented having their land taken from them by outsiders—and had to be beaten down. Things got messy.

Now, I don’t want to say that the colonists committed genocide, as such, but the aboriginal population had to make room for them. And whenever people are forcibly relocated en masse, there are going to be some causalities. The natives weren’t killed off entirely, just pushed aside and relegated to inferior status, where they remain.

Decades passed. More immigrants flooded in to settle this new land, crowding out the locals further. History happened. There were wars and independence and more wars. All along, there was colonial oppression and what we would call terrorism. And there was, despite the latter and because of the former, growing prosperity. At least for the people who mattered: the colonizers.

Flash forward to the present. This new nation, conceived in liberty, was wealthier and more advanced than its neighbors, but its success had been built upon a foundation of colonialism and injustice, and much of the latter was ongoing, albeit somewhat evolved. Now its special position is maintained by military power, exceptionalism, and a disregard for international norms.

That’s how we got here. The question that remains is what can we do do about it today? Or, more simply, now what?

Well, the obvious answer is to reverse history. Send the Europeans back to Europe, where they (presumably) belong, at gunpoint if need be. Confiscate their wealth and leave everything behind to the natives; or to their descendants, anyhow. Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong: this is it.

But before we move on to better alternatives, we should probably resolve some ambiguity: what nation are we even talking about? There’s an obvious answer, and it fits, but it’s not the only one. Yes, this could be the history of the United States of America, but it could also be the history of the State of Israel. In key ways, this would even fit the history of the Republic of South Africa. Colonialism happens all over and all the time, and is all much the same.

Let’s focus on Israel. The idea that it ought to exist is called Zionism, and it is not entirely uncontroversial. This controversy existed even before the country did, even among Jews. These days, there are many critics of Israeli policy, particularly regarding the civil rights of its aboriginal people; the Palestinians. Some of these critics would go so far as to call themselves anti-Zionist, but what does this really mean? Well, by definition, it is a rejection of the idea that Israel, as the Jewish state, should exist.

There are people for whom this entails a great expulsion, sending the Jews back to Europe, where they (presumably) belong. For others, the Jews would simply be deported six feet under, much as in a certain Final Solution. Really, these two plans are pretty much the same in the end: forced relocation at gunpoint means a lot of guns going off, and genocide means a lot of people fleeing to avoid being massacred by their former neighbors.

The people supporting these ideas are, to put it bluntly, crazy and evil. We are no more going to kill off or expel the European colonizers from Israel than from America or South Africa. As horrible and bloody as the history of colonization is, decolonization cannot entail genocide. What needs to be expelled is the colonialism, and the inequity it generates.

It could be argued that the Jews did not and do not deserve a state of their own, particularly one created on top of an existing state and its people, and Israel should never have been reinvented in the 20th century. It could be, but that would be a moot point. Israel exists and can either continue its current path, be destroyed, or be improved. That last option is a saner sort of anti-Zionism.

This form is defined as the opposition to the notion that the Jews deserve an ethnostate of their own; a country where Jews are first-class citizens and non-Jews are second-class, and not necessarily even citizens. In other words, it is an opposition to Israeli Apartheid, which is called Hafrada (literally the same word, only in Hebrew instead of Afrikaans).

What this means is that Israel should continue to exist as a state, but not an ethnostate. It should not have the Jews (or anyone else) installed as the permanently-dominant ethnic group. It should not have a backdoor for Jews, and only Jews, to emigrate. It should separate church and state fully, instead of giving the Jewish religion power over secular matters, including marriage and immigration.

This anti-Hafrada stance is anti-Zionism for those who are not sociopaths or antisemites, but that antisemitism is the elephant conspicuously in the middle of the anti-Zionist room. Antisemites, particularly among the populists on the far left, use criticism of Israel as a cover for their hatred of Jews.

As liberals, this puts us in the odd position where nothing we say is acceptable. When we criticize Israel for its apartheid, we are grouped together with the antisemites and their bigotry against Jews. When we criticize antisemitism, we are grouped together with the Zionists and their bigotry against Palestinians. Both of these extremes are wrong and there is a sane middle ground for liberals to occupy that consistently rejects bigotry instead of siding with one form over another.

These extremes map partially to the left/right continuum. Knee-jerk support for Israel, with a concomitant demonization of Palestinians, is endemic to the far right, even among overt antisemites, but also to the older generations of American Jews. Knee-jerk opposition to Israel, with a concomitant demonization of Jews, is endemic to the far left, even though they are nominally opposed to bigotry. It is only the moderate, liberal left that avoids these two traps by rejecting bigotry without engaging in it.

I could go on about the problem of Israel providing fuel for antisemitism by claiming to be the Jewish homeland and therefore the global representation of an ethnic group, or into the details of the many forms of anti-Zionism, some of which preceded the creation of modern Israel, or into single-state vs. two-state solutions. I could, but I won’t, because these are just details.

Instead, I will end by saying that bigotry—all bigotry, always—is wrong. No matter your political leanings, if you find yourself supporting bigotry, you have gone beyond the pale. If you love or hate a nation beyond the limits of what it earns, you are a nationalist. If you side with extremists, you become an extremist. There is a sane middle ground, and we should all stay in it, even though it means offending those extremists.

Now I’ll leave you with a recommendation: watch this video to understand why people seem to care so much about what’s happening in Israel: Why the world is obsessed with Israel and Palestine.

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