Why Neil Young? He literally pulled his music off Spotify because he was so pissed at them platforming Rogan. Dude’s about as anti-Trump as you can get.

Also, basically same deal with Springsteen. Dude is very progressive and definitely not a Trump fan.

You’re think you’re disagreeing with me, but I want to be clear that you’re advocating for exactly the same things I am.

Polls don’t matter, but public opinion absolutely does. You can’t organize a mass movement of resistance without a mass of people to organize. The fact that Trump’s agenda is becoming increasingly unpopular is an opportunity for those organizing resistance to bring in more support.

But we’re not required to evaluate the facts of the case based on what “some people” think. We can objectively examine the content of people’s speech and ask whether it’s intent is to advocate against the basic rights of a group of people or not. Criticising Isreal does not meet that test, despite what the ADL might claim.

Yes, there are grey areas. Yes, there are hard calls that have to be made. But saying “This is hard” and then throwing up your hands and resorting to free speech absolutism because you can’t handle the difficult work of building a society is just childish.

This is good. This is an opportunity to talk to people about the destructive effects of Trump’s agenda, and help them to really understand that he’s not looking out for their interests. The more people get upset about what Trump is doing, the more chance there is to potentially stop it.

Approval always matters, even without democracy.

Democracy is just a managed, fairly agreed upon process for a governed people to exercise their will. But a governed people always have the ability to exercise their will. Authoritarian tactics can make that more difficult, but they cannot ever prevent it.

Remember, if there was nothing people could do to stop them, their propaganda would not be necessary. The fact that they are engaged in information control demonstrates that they do very much care about approval - or, at least, acceptance.

For All Mankind is ridiculously good.

Reacher is thoroughly mid. It survives mostly on the strength of good casting.

Invincible is excellent, no argument there.

It’s not a question of “extremist”. What is or isn’t “extreme” is largely a matter of how far an idea strays from the norm. Some extreme ideas are very good, some extreme ideas are terrible.

The question, rather, is of purpose, not character. Intolerant speech - that is, speech whose purpose is to limit the rights of specific groups of people to exist - is the only kind of speech that we must be prepared to limit, because without limits on intolerant speech, the intolerant will ultimately abuse their freedoms to strip away freedoms from others.

This draws a hard line. It clearly defines and delineates what is and is not acceptable. It is a simple and clear rule that any tolerant society must abide by if it is to continue to be a tolerant society.

For the proof of this, you only need to look at what is happening in the US right now.

The right wing assholes whining about free speech don’t actually want free speech. You can see that in the campaigns to remove books from school libraries all across the country. All across the world the right are demonstrating time and again how little they actually support free speech.

What they want is the freedom to spew hate speech, which is the only kind of speech that a tolerant and free society should not tolerate. All other forms of speech they will gladly and eagerly suppress unless it agrees with them.

As someone doing the hiring, referral hires fucking suck. I want the best candidate, not the most connected candidate, and I don’t want to have to deal with the bullshit company politics when the referral hire doesn’t work out.

No idea why you deleted that comment. You’re right.

The bank bailouts in 2008 didn’t cause the tiniest bit of inflation. Again, Mark Blyth calls this out specifically in his book and many of his lectures. The predominant question plaguing economists in the 2010s was “Where the fuck is the inflation?”

Japan has an incredibly high debt to GDP ratio, and their main economic constraint right now is too little inflation.

Once you start looking for the examples they’re there. This whole idea that government spending = inflation is a total myth.

Get involved with anyone who is organizing acts of resistance, however small. There is a very real danger that your democracy isn’t going to make it to the midterms if no one acts now.

Small acts of resistance build bigger acts of resistance, and getting involved builds networks. You need to get plugged in to the people who are trying to do anything, even the small stuff, because they’re the people who will be calling you up when it comes to the big stuff.

For the record, the reason this matters is because distributing a copyrighted work confers a much higher penalty than simply copying it for yourself. If Meta seeded those books they could be on the hook for a staggeringly large amount of damages. It’s on the order of hundreds or even thousands per download. And that’s across all the thousands of different books Meta grabbed.

There are a lot of excellent examples of governments solving problems by printing money. Most notably, basically every case of hyperinflation ever has been solved by printing money. Noted economist Mark Blyth goes into this extensively in Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

What MMT posits is not that governments can freely print money with no consequences, but rather that we’re looking at the question if printing versus borrowing versus taxation backwards.

The basic theory of inflation is that too much money chasing the same quantity of goods and services pushes up the prices of those goods and services in an effect rather like a bidding war.

What MMT points out is that from a government finance perspective, this implies that the chief concern is the amount of money in circulation. If money is removed from circulation, via taxation, that becomes a control on inflation. This allows a radical rethinking of government spending, since your chief concern is no longer the balance of the budget, it is only the balance of the economy.

This also gives you new tools with which to combat inflation. Right now, in contemporary liberal economics, the only control we have for inflation is interest rates, which disproportionately harm the least affluent. But by considering taxation as an inflation control we can shift the greatest burden of combating inflation onto the wealthiest instead.

Cory Doctorow gets into a really good and approachable explanation of this in one of his more recent articles, when pondering the question of whether it is beneficial or even possible to eliminate the national debt:

There is only one source of US dollars: the US Treasury (you can try and make your own dollars, but they’ll put you in prison for a long-ass time if they catch you.).

If dollars can only originate with the US government, then it follows that:

a) The US government doesn’t need our taxes to get US dollars (for the same reason Apple doesn’t need us to redeem our iTunes cards to get more iTunes gift codes);

b) All the dollars in circulation start with spending by the US government (taxes can’t be paid until dollars are first spent by their issuer, the US government); and

c) That spending must happen before anyone has been taxed, because the way dollars enter circulation is through spending.

You’ve probably heard people say, “Government spending isn’t like household spending.” That is obviously true: households are currency users while governments are currency issuers.

But the implications of this are very interesting.

First, the total dollars in circulation are:

a) All the dollars the government has ever spent into existence funding programs, transferring to the states, and paying its own employees, minus

b) All the dollars that the government has taxed away from us, and subsequently annihilated.

(Because governments spend money into existence and tax money out of existence.)

The net of dollars the government spends in a given year minus the dollars the government taxes out of existence that year is called “the national deficit.” The total of all those national deficits is called “the national debt.” All the dollars in circulation today are the result of this national debt. If the US government didn’t have a debt, there would be no dollars in circulation.

The only way to eliminate the national debt is to tax every dollar in circulation out of existence. Because the national debt is “all the dollars the government has ever spent,” minus “all the dollars the government has ever taxed.” In accounting terms, “The US deficit is the public’s credit.”

https://doctorow.medium.com/retiring-the-us-debt-would-retire-the-us-dollar-30f366e0bc40

I’m citing Doctorow here rather than academic sources because he’s very good at explaining this stuff in comprehensible ways. For a more extensive breakdown The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton is regarded as an excellent resource. Kelton, BTW, was formerly Chief Economist on The US Budgetary Committee; she absolutely knows her stuff when it comes to government level finance.

They’re describing modern monetary theory, which is very much the opposite of a libertarian position. MMT is a strong argument for more government spending., not less.

All your personal info, assuming you didn’t fake any of it.

How thoroughly are they going to check that stuff?

Gig economy businesses rely on disposable work force. The deal they’re offering is horrible for their “employees,” but because they only pay for the work that actually gets done they can afford to just hire every applicant and let them fight among themselves for a limited amount of available work.

Stringent application controls and serious background checks are anathema to that business model.

Brilliant, just the thing I need to protect me from all the disgusting poors that I’ve fucked over to become obscenely wealthy; gig workers with no job security!

I’d consider “being on” a social media platform as “actively using it” for the purposes I’m describing. I didn’t delete my account either, but I haven’t logged into it in ages.

Genuinely, at this point if you’re still on Twitter I consider that a red flag. I cannot comprehend why anyone would willingly use that platform unless they’re real fucking cozy with fascists.

Well, yes and no. The guys rolling coal in their pickups have no ability to financially ride out the effects of climate change. The people in Florida whose homes are falling into the sea aren’t better off.

What’s happening is that a substantial segment of voters have tied their identity to the idea of “not being leftists” and that means that anything leftists care about is automatically bad. They obsessively perform these displays of anti-environmentalism because being against the left is so tied up in all these deeply held core beliefs about their identity, to a point where they no longer know how to disentangle any of it.

And yes, this behaviour is being actively encouraged by wealthy accelerationists, because it benefits them.