Wrestle with a pig and you’ll both get muddy, but only the pig will enjoy it.

Christian Nationalists long ago mastered parsing out the bits and pieces of the Bible they agree with and butchering anyone who disagreed with them. This is a tradition going back millennia. You’re not going to beat anyone in the Westburo Baptist Church at a game where the rules boil down to “Fuck You Heretic, I win”.

Except it’s not just some guy vandalizing a car

It’s not just one guy serial killing, drug running, or human trafficking either.

Meeting everyone’s basic needs isn’t even far left.

When saying “Please stop bombing Palestinian children” is the most ultra-Tankie Iranian Revolutionary Guard propaganda printed in modern history, it does appear that public amenities are outside even the farthest fringes of left-wing ideology.

Far left would be state owned and controlled everything

I remember Elon Musk calling himself a socialist. And now that I’m looking at how he and Trump are running the country, I guess this does fit the above definition of Far-Left.

Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?

Flipping through my big book titled “Victims of Communism” and it says here that the German Nazis and Italian and Spanish Fascists were both Far-Left and Victims of the Far-Left. Also, I see hear that every unborn child out to the latest generation resulting from famines common to the 1930s through the 1960s is a Victim of Communism. Nothing in the fine print about lives saved through the universalization of health care, housing, groceries, and pensions, though. Neither can I find anything about the Peace Dividend reaped by the industrialized Soviet world following the end of WW2… weird.

Also, absolutely nothing in here about the Bengal Famine, its causes or the millions of tons of relief the USSR sent to end it. So strange. Michael Parenti, do you have anything to say about this?

“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

-Michael Parenti Blackshirts and the reds

Dictatorships are dictatorships, regardless of the political ideology.

A dictatorship of the bourgeois is radically different from a dictatorship of the proletariat, both in form and in function.

Both sides did horrible things

Guys with their “Ask me about the War of Northern Aggression” baseball caps are constantly saying this

purging intellectuals and anyone seen as a potential threat, mass murder of entire social groups, maintaining informant networks to instil fear etc.

DSA: “We should open up the Medicare rolls to anyone who wants it and grant everyone in the country universal basic income through Social Security”

Libertarian: “This gives the government way too much power. If you can give someone health care or a basic income, you can control who gains access to very fundamental basic human needs. And that will lead to tyranny.”

Also Libertarian: “I love the DHS. I love the DHS so much. Strong borders! Private prisons! Deportations without a court hearing! This is the network state I always dreamed of! Can’t wait until Trump starts issuing EOs to form charter cities and America is just 1000 Singapores in a trench coat. Also, everything Javier Milei is doing in Argentina is fucking based. I love how MBS is running Saudi Arabia. And I can’t wait to join the private mercenary army that reclaims Greenland from those weak-kneed namby pamby socialists in Denmark.”

“Have you tried rebranding?”

Brilliant.

But this is another case where they chose not to openly defy the courts.

I suspect this is more likely a backlash from Republicans internal to the administration who are carrying student loan debt, benefiting from Pell Grants, or otherwise finding themselves directly impacted by the program.

Very routine for Trump to announce a thing, have someone in his admin whisper in his ear, reverse his decision, have a different person whisper in his ear, double down, have a third person whisper in his ear, get distracted and let his cabinet secretaries do as they please.

Don’t get excited. You can still guarantee the money entrusted to the DoEd is going to get embezzled, while people who aren’t friendly with the administration will be targeted for harassment and hardship.

Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.

Now we’re stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.

Crazy to talk about “cheap housing” and look to the suburbs in the year 2025. That ship sailed decades ago.

That’s before you start pricing in the time-value of an hour or more a workday trapped in traffic.

“The problem with the American economy is too many pocket computers”, I say while sitting on the toilet in the Bigger Bombs factory at Raytheon.

Trying to imagine a universe in which Patrick Stewart won’t talk your ear off about his favorite musical, and the only ones that come to mind involve him wearing a tiny goatee.

I’m not saying we have state-mandated couples

The need to make this clarification should be grounds for divorce.

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source

That’s not how the game is played. You absorb the public losses. But they privatize the gains. Otherwise, there’s no deal.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US.

That’s the goal, yes.

There’s a squishy American centrist block that just gets mad any time there’s any degree of adversity (or just negative news media on their screens) and decides to vote the most reactionary candidate on the ticket in response.

Conveniently, Democrats have been marching to the right in order to sweep up those votes. Expect a lot of “Republicans are turning American into SOVIET RUSSIA! and we need the free market to fight back!” liberal campaigning in 2026.

One bright spot of a big American economic crash would be the correlated plunge in carbon emissions. Those first few months of COVID were fantastic for emissions rates.

I’m seeing quite a bit of “You deserved it” right now. Lots of “Actually, I just avoid buying things, so now the higher prices don’t bother me” cope all over /r/conservative and like-minded reactionary media.

Poverty fetishism, cottage-core influencing, a proliferation of reactionaries in DIY spaces, and always a healthy supply of “we just didn’t go far enough” revanchism has been trending for a while, but its seeing a new renaissance with the looming recession.

Blowback

After WWII, Japan became the first country in Asia to undergo an industrial revolution

After WW2? Industrialization during the 20s/30s was the whole reason they attempted to conqueror the Oceanic island states and the Chinese/Korean/Indochinese mainland.

They then suffered an economic collapse due to unchecked growth and speculative markets and decided to never again speculate on the future and just stick to tried and true methods.

The Japanese Economy was undone by The Plaza Accord and The Louvre Accord, which western nations used to devalue their currency and undermine Japanese export prices. The downturn, followed by a financialized corporate consolidation and expropriation of revenues through foreign investment, permanently crippled the Japanese economy in the aftermath of the 90s Asian recession.

What sets countries like Japan, Korea, and the Philippines apart from China is the domestic control of their industries. Their markets are dominated by private equity and fixated on steady profit margins rather than long term public investments. Consequently, the capital cities are flooded with cash and industrial development while the rural areas are devoid of commerce. There’s no shortage of speculation, but its rooted in the private equity markets and focused largely on fictitious capital - debt instruments and their derivatives - rather than real capital or technology.

Chinese investment in the periphery and its rising tide of middle class wage earners is what propels them into the 21st century. They’re the ones building out new transit lines, new public housing projects, new universities, and blue sky research. The Xi Government is openly hostile to speculative investment, doesn’t bother to bail out failing financial institutions, and focuses primarily on expansion of utilities, trade corridors, and mixed us developments.

I saw so many people play that game with the take-away “Communism in Eastern Europe / Socialist Latin America / China & North Korea was awful! I’m so glad I live in a liberal democracy where I’ve got rights and freedoms, here in <Insert English-speaking Western Country Here>”. Guys with Ron Paul rEVOLution bumper stickers would explain how we need to keep our guns close and never surrender to those liberty-hating leftists, so Papers Please! couldn’t happen here.

And as the years dragged on, the thing I heard over and over again was that liberty was under attack by Secret Communists who were infiltrating our newspapers and TVs and online forums, our college campuses, our office spaces, and our government bureaucracies. And the vector they were using to do it was… illegal immigration. First it was Al Qaeda slipping over the border to do more 9/11s. Then it was the Insidious Chinese with their America-Hating Confucius Centers, doing brainwashing and kidnapping and god knows what else. And at last it was the mobs of Venezuelan biker gangs, Cuban double-agents, and Che Guevera loving Nicaraguan/El Salvadorian/Mexican Ultra-Left Communists, breaking into the US to steal our welfare and ruin our public schools and take over our suburban neighborhoods.

The only way to keep us from living in Papers, Please! was to find these people and root them out. No more Iranian ISIS infiltrators teaching anti-semitism classes at Columbia. No more Woke DEI transgender employees at the State Department. No more speaking Spanish! Or surrender-monkey French! Or the vile tongue of the thieving, cheating, lazy, stupid Han People!

By god, if there was only some way we could find out who was evil and who was good. Some kind of document that only the righteous, God-Fearing, red-blooded American could carry (because if we caught you being a dirtbag leftist we could take it away). We need some kind of identifying document, some permanent record we could use to track the dissidents. Some kind of papers, please!

Touch grass, work on your mental health, get a hobby, start participating in society in a constructive manner and start showering.

All good advice on its face. But they do call it “Getting Lucky” for a reason. You can be the perfect specimen and still strike out (with people you’re attracted to in kind). Past that, celibacy and the resulting depression/insecurity has an impact on your mental health even if you’re getting all the other boxes checked. “Don’t be a fucking sad sack if you want to get laid!” is easy advice to give and hard advice to live. Doubly so when you’re a moody anxious teenager, already.

And it is this hyper-individualist “fuck you, I’ve got mine” attitude is a big part of what drives people off the deep end. The Mean Girls tier prejudice stretching to naked hostility that single people experience - particularly as they get older - is just the other side to the incel coin.

One of the things that gets to me is how often they mock the advice that actually helps.

There’s a degree of selection bias. The loudest, proud-boy-est incels are inevitably the ones that have made a brand of the identity and are trying to sell PUA bullshit. There are plenty of people who struggle with “good advice” in silence. And plenty more who take it, improve, start meeting people, and stop being incels.

But the Self-Help industrialization of dating is often flooded with the same simple “Why can’t you just be normal?” tips and tricks that seem ignore how many perfectly normal people are still incredibly lonely. Meeting new people can be scary, putting yourself out on an emotional line is emotionally taxing, finding the time and money to date is often a luxury, and plenty of people who initially fall for one another discover - sometimes painfully - that they aren’t compatible.

When you trivialize love, you aren’t being helpful. Your cavalier attitude towards other people’s pain can even be abusive. Is it any surprise that a person who feels mocked and insulted isn’t fun to be around?