I believe this means Argentina gets the Falkland Islands now

It’s the “sensible nuance” equivalent of “I’m just joking bro can’t you take a joke?” They expect everyone to just genuflect to their thought-terminating cliche and when they get pushback they fall back on “I can’t believe you’re too dumb to understand the subtext.”

What I AM saying: Black candidates/ politicians are disproportionately described as “establishment”

As I suspected, painting any critique of Jeffries, Booker, etc as racism.

Yeah it’s definitely suffered from semantic generalization

Enshittification is the term for a particular process products/services go through that degrades their quality. Not sure what’s “cope” about that.

I think “zombified” is more appropriate than dead. A truly dead medium would be the telegraph. What you’re talking about is analogous to a zombie, that which takes the form of a living person and is animated as such, but without a soul, desires no meaningful interaction and no one wants meaningful interaction with it. All consuming; “braaaaains,” “prooooooofits.” Much as those in zombie media typically only interact with zombies out of necessity, people increasingly interact with these zombie media out of a sense of “having to”; Facebook is the only way my kid’s school’s PTA posts updates, it’s the only way aunt Mildred lets us know what’s going on with her family.

The one exception that proves the rule I can think of with media that people get excited for is Taylor Swift. Swifties get genuinely excited for her new releases. However, her long term success speaks less to her talent or personality and more to the risk adverse nature of the music industry. Take fewer chances on up and coming artists, milk the established artists and their fanbases for all they’re worth. The way they do it also shows how the pop music industry isn’t trying to appeal to a broad, popular base. Swift sells a ton of albums, but a lot of that is due to there being 4-5 different versions of her albums (the “regular” version, the Target-exclusive version, the Amazon-exclusive version, etc) and the hardcore Swifties will buy every version. It doesn’t need to sell well with the broad market, just maximize profits off the diehards.

You see this with zombified media all the time. Microtransaction slop games just need a handful of whales to turn a good profit, reality TV gets poor ratings but the production costs are so low that the few viewers that tune in are enough, the film industry gets by on capeshit primarily consumed by ge 14-30 year old male demo. So we get this dynamic where a small handful of people enjoy the media content while most people just taste the enshittification.

You gotta go by the evergreen dudeism: “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” So some rando doesn’t like Linux and likes porn. They’re just a rando, you’re not obligated to give their opinions weight. They’re not more important than you, their opinions don’t matter more than yours, so don’t treat them like they are.

So lazy they couldn’t score a goal against Spain

I, for one, support this; NYC suffers from a lack of accessible public toilets.

Communists and socialists, infamous for their distaste of small worker coops.

Interesting that the poverty and discrimination the early Italian immigrants suffered gets discussed and highlighted, but the padroni system got completely memoryholed.

Still working my way through the first one. Nice to see the Ironclad is just as useless in the sequel as he is in the original.

Single greatest concentration of people whose faces will be eaten by leopards

They shouldn’t, and it’s not even a question of AOC’s policies/tactics. As much as they get a lot of press attention these days, the DSA is still small fry in the world of national politics in terms of resources and cash. Burning that on another long-shot presidential campaign, especially as only one politician has ever successfully made the jump straight from the house of representatives to the White House, instead of building more local successes that can act as a broad foundation would be shortsighted.

IMO, nationalism can be leveraged for left wing goals. If a nation has achieved a socialist takeover of the state, then a message of “our great national character has allowed the working class movement to seize power, the rest of the world should emulate that” can be positive. Or, as others have pointed out, invoking nationalism in the “global south” as a way to stir up popular support against incursions, economic or militaristic, from the imperial core.

However, at some point nationalism does need to wither and die. If the whole idea is a global political economy wherein the interests of the working class is front and center, nationalism will just drag that political economy into the same problem that plagues social democracy where the working class thinks, via nationalism, that it’s entitled to more largesse than the working class of a “lesser” nation. So as socialism becomes ascendant and capitalism wanes, nationalism needs to wane with it.

get Iran sorted out

Literally

Norwegian cuisine

Norwegian cuisine without lutefisk

By David Brooks

Oh boy, I’m sure no secrets about his personal life are gonna come out now that he’s dead.

Meanwhile, back in reality:

The two leading citywide job-performance polls conducted around his first 100 days placed the Mamdani Approval Rating between 43% and 48%, with disapproval ranging from 27% to 30% and net approval between +16 and +18 percentage points.