I'm a child at heart so my favorite pie will always be a chocolate cream pie. I mean, I like apple pie and rhubarb pie and pumpkin pie just fine, if someone were to serve me one at a dinner I wouldn't just throw my slice on the floor in disgust.

But I'll usually prefer something like a dark, moist chocolate cake or a cheesecake over pie anyway.

"In Japan they have a gun that kills the memory of a man." -some tweet I saw when Abe was killed.

Obviously Alex Jones is an evil man who should be buried in sand with his head exposed and left to die of exposure. But it would be extremely fitting for him to be US Press Secretary. He's already the character of American US Propaganda Chief ripped from the most unsubtle political satire ever written.

Hey, Ridley. Big fan. Don't mind this guy, that's just my friend Gerry the Clown. I'm sorry both your brothers died, one of a tragic suicide that left you grief-stricken. And, I really like the good movies you've made, and even some of the bad ones. I mean, Alien, Blade Runner, the original Gladiator? All fantastic stuff. And some of your later movies are alright too. I mean, I like Prometheus. And The Last Duel was just an all around solid picture. And there's more, too many to list here in a way that would be entertaining to read, that I think range from very good movies to serviceable watches. All around a body of work to be proud of.

But Gerry's going to beat you to death with his big clown hammer now. Shame.gif

Having sex with Destiny is like fucking a dog. Southern should die from shame.

This isn't especially germane to the conversation being had, but I'm going to post it anyway because it's the only remotely relevant thing I have to say about organ donation. But did everyone see this story about the guy who was about to be harvested for his organs when someone realized he was not only still alive but also conscious and stopped the procedure? I first saw the story when it was published a month ago but it happened in 2021 so I don't know if it's been news before and I just missed it.

It's this really fucked up story about how all these people working for this Organ Donor nonprofit were pressured from the top to get these organs as quickly as possible, and if I'm reading the story right once staff had realized this man was still alive but before that fact was medically confirmed higher-ups in the nonprofit tried to find another surgeon who would kill this man and take his organs. It ends up being okay, I guess. The guy survives and recovers, the staff who came within a hairsbreadth of murdering a man mostly resigned, and investigations are underway to determine how this could ever happen.

It's just that the way I remember organ donation being presented to me was as this unambiguous public good and that you didn't have to if you didn't want to but it'd be really shitty of you if you didn't. And maybe that's still mostly true. But the article goes into a bit about how it's managed, nationally, by the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations which oversees the various organ procurement organizations that exist in each state/region. You've got this thing that should be a national Good, an unambiguous Good, and it's got these dozens of corporations attached to it. They might be nonprofits, but still they're corporations. Privatized. Some portion of these nonprofits will be made up of an administrative class that exists to be paid a salary. Like a parasitic mass leeching off the already limited communal goodwill of the American people. And lead to situations like the one from the article, where an addict was almost murdered so a company could harvest his organs.

Organ donation is good, and I still think everyone should do it, but it's a shame that under this economic system, with these incentives, this good thing isn't nearly as good as it could be.

https://xcancel.com/NickTagliaferro/status/1857814774437843046

What do you make of this? Not the entire thing, obviously this is all lib nonsense. But specifically the idea that Harris's platform was, from a lib's point of view, redistributive. I haven't read the campaign's released economic policy position and I would rather gouge my own eyes out than do so, but all the stuff I remember being talked about was like "if you operate a binder clip wholesaler in a low-income rural area for forty years you may qualify for a tax credit. If you are a single mother making less than $20,000 a year in the district of Williamshire, Ohio you may qualify for a tax credit. Collect fifty tax credits to be eligible to win a commemorative IRS plate." I can't imagine an argument where an offer to let working class people pay less on their taxes is meaningfully redistributive in any sense of the word. If you let them keep that money and pay for it by ratcheting up the corporate tax rate, maybe then.

Just started Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis. Only a few pages in but it seems very very good.

After that I’ll probably read Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti.

Then I’ve got Liberalism: A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo. It’ll be my first by him and I’m looking forward to it.

After that I’ve been thinking about buying a copy of the new translation of Capital from Princeton University Press and finally taking a run at that. But I’ve got a copy of The Marx-Engels Reader that I’ve had sitting around for five years, maybe I should crack that open before spending more money.

Or I might read the David McLellan Marx biography first, which I’ve also had sitting around for a while.

Also in the midst a reread of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Friend, look around you, look at where we are. What does your web address bar say? Does it say hexbear.net? If so, I have some very bad news.

I don't have any answers for you, I just want to commiserate by sharing my own story of talking to a lib friend about Ukraine:

This was not terribly long after the invasion first happened, maybe a few months. I make my stance clear that I don't believe the US should be engaging in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. They ask my why I think it's the US fighting a proxy war and not the US aiding Ukraine in defending itself from Russia's unprovoked invasion. I explain that after Ukraine agreed to surrender its nukes in the '90s it bounced back and forth between being basically a Russian satellite state and being a Russian satellite state that'll play ball with the US, which was always a shaky situation, until the US played it's hand with the Maidan coup trying to bring Ukraine firmly into the US's control.

They say that's not true. They ask why the US would want to control Ukraine, sort of incredulously. This from a guy who was opposed to the Iraq War, and the Vietnam War.

I think I came back with something like "Russia has refused to subordinate its economy entirely to the US, so the US seeks to destroy Russia. Controlling Ukraine is part that."

And from there the conversation devolved. Putin the madman vs. Putin the guy with explainable motivations and historical reasons for his actions. Me explaining why I think NATO is bad. I know I said at some point that prior to the invasion western media had been pretty clear that Ukraine was a barely legitimate gangster state, and that the Ukrainian state and the United States were prolonging the war at the expense of Ukrainian people. Pandora Papers.

And I guess what I've realized, not just about this guy but all the libs I know—hell not just the libs but the people I know from all over the spectrum—is that their politics are highly individualistic. When I was a baby leftist I'd see people make analyses like that and I've realized I didn't fully understand what they meant. But I think I see now that individualistic in this sense doesn't just mean "self-centered" or "antisocial" or "opposed to community" but that they literally think of politics in the terms of individual actors. So this lib I was talking to hates Putin, and Trump, and Netanyahu, and George W. Bush—and therefore hates the politic projects these men engaged in when they had power—but he doesn't recognize that the long-term aims of US foreign policy, which both predates and outlasts any individual president, are a force for destruction and evil across the world.

I don't want to belittle my friend here, but I suspect his opposition to the Iraq War was almost entirely because it was a thing George Bush wanted, and not because he was opposed to the US destroying a stable-if-hostile state in the Middle East and remaking it as a neocolonial project.

Normally I just refuse to argue politics like this with friends and family, though. If someone asks what my opinion is I'll tell them, or if they're saying something homophobic or transphobic I will push back there, but otherwise I don't think fighting about Donald Trump with my MAGA uncle or Obama/Biden/Harris/Clinton with my lib aunt or Tulsi Gabbard with my father who claims to be politically nonaligned but libertarian curious is going to do anyone any good. And I'm certainly not going to try and convince any of these people that the American project is evil, or that capitalism is bad. If they asked me about these things I would tell them my opinion, but mostly this shit isn't worth burning bridges over. Except for the lib mentioned in this post, I will argue with him because he invites it. But he enjoys arguing politics anyway.

This is why Brace Belden should rebrand to a MAGA communist. Rule 2 of the Belden Program is literally "Always get the interior ministry post."

Why does everyone view Adam Friedland with contempt and disgust?

I ask this as someone who never listened to Cumtown. The only podcasts in the Chapo orbit I've listened to are Chapo itself and Trueanon. Never heard an episode of Cumtown, or E1, or Street Fight or whatever its called, or Red Scare. So my impressions of the Cumtown hosts are cobbled together from appearances on Chapo and also Twitter posts.

This is my impression of each Cumtown host. Nick Mullen: a violently racist and misogynistic neonazi, would kill a child. Stavros Halkias: friend to all children, dated Rachel Sennott, the only actual funny person in the chapo orbit but probably not funny enough to hack it long term as a professional stand-up comic. Adam Friedland: literally nothing except that he has an interview show where Finkelstein ranted in his direction for an hour.

I don't know anything about boxing so maybe I'm way off, but there's no way that this fight isn't just the most pathetic spectacle anyone's ever seen. Tyson's not going to magically be 24 again and kill Paul.

Do you suspect that your girlfriend has the ability to make herself fifty feet tall? Could this ability manifest itself in a bizarre display of magical realism at a narratively convenient moment?

Reminds me of this

CW for fictional depictions of an unconscious kid and gun violence. And spoilers for one of the endings of the 2010 video game Heavy Rain.

I recently picked up the 1986 book Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis because someone posted the first page on twitter. Haven't read that much of it but based on what I have read it seems like a very approachable book for leftists looking to get into the reading.

Also on Hexbear's literature comm there's a post (https://hexbear.net/post/109424) directing one on how to access the 'Socialist Theory Reading Group' on the education site Perusall. The weekly reading group portion of that has fallen into disuse but the library has a bunch of archived PDFs that are all readily accessible and can be easily downloaded. For instance there's three titles I can see from Parenti, two from Chomsky, and The Jarkarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

The Perusall might not be the most user-friendly thing out there for a newbie looking for a beginner's reading list, but I just wanted to mention it.

Where else is there to go?

This site is a great mix of shitposting, news and general events analysis, and serious history and theory effortposting. If you’re a leftist, where else is there on the internet that’s like this?

Without this place at best my connection to the left at all would be like a Monthly Review subscription, a Jacobin subscription, slowly working my way through marxists.org, and maybe occasionally reading whatever new releases from Verso looked interesting.

I'm always getting indigo confused with purple. If you walked up to me on the street and showed me a swatch painted indigo and asked me what color it was I'd confidently say "purple." Then, if you showed me actual purple I'd go "Oh, how strange, a much better purple. Why are there two purples?"

unironic make-Main-the-only-comm posters but specifically for this site's various megathreads is very funny to me.

Just a few months ago I saw so many people salivating online that once Trump was defeated and then dies or else is too old and senile to run by 2028 that the Republican party would collapse, that Trump voters are all going to either go third party or else just not vote, and then the Republican party won't be competitive with the dems anymore in national politics.

How's that working out? Completely insane cope. Yeah, man, I bet the bottom will just magically fall out of the Republican party and then Dems will seize on the opportunity to finally make good on the dream of the Great Society and build a welfare state, because the only thing holding them back from that goal was the Republicans.

Not that the GOP is in a healthy state right now, and I'm sure when they eventually lose Trump it will hurt them. But they probably won't collapse into nothing and scatter away on the wind like Sauron. Instead it'll probably look a lot like the Dems post-Obama: rudderless, struggling to find a new center.