Vijay Prashad is legitimately a light in the darkness. I hope we can keep hearing what he has to say for 100 years, they gotta get him the Futurama head tank treatment.

I hope that Nazi porn freak governor from one of the Carolinas wins. The general.

This seems to be old? Headline says Holy Week which is in March or April.

I see you, Keir Starmer.

Unserious. If you don’t see why describing the most illiberal party in America as liberal is stopping us from taking you seriously it’s probably time to pick up a book, I recommend State and Revolution or Blackshirts and Reds.

some feedback: if you’re gonna make a thread about starting a political party, make sure you spend at least 5 minutes informing yourself on what basic terminology like “liberal” means. also read Lenin lol this is embarrassing

Spree shooter’s post-mass-killing moral remaking challenged by new gun acquisitions - and firebombs detonated in daycares and schools

Do you condemn Ashmas?

Big things ahead. Truly great times on the horizon.

Fundamentally, structurally unserious country.

Matthew Lillard’s character in Scream.

This is good for bitcoin.

the immortal science of rejecting creepy weirdos pays off once again

Continuing on with the anti-auteur thought, anyone else have thoughts on Chung Seo-Kyung’s movies with Park Chan-Wook? It kinda jumped out to me how his filmography before collaborating with her was doing far, far worse in terms of the depth of the characters, especially women. His main hit from this period (and arguably the main reason he’s known outside of Korea) is Oldboy, which while still being a stellar movie, has only 1 woman with any agency who is repeatedly assaulted and is shown almost no sympathy, despite the fact she’s the biggest victim of the movie. Even worse, Oh Dae-su attempts to assault her in the first act, and nothing happens! It’s just brushed off! Joint Security Area did a lot better before Oldboy, yet I think the movie failed to really present the complex internal world of the investigator, only slightly touching on her backstory and bringing forth the internal conflict in the third act in a much shallower way than you’d see in his later filmography; instead it mostly dwells on the personal and geopolitical conflict of the Korean troops. That’s not really a fair criticism, just a missed opportunity. I think when Chung Seo-Kyung starts writing his movies, though, they start to come out a lot better in that department, and they all tend to have these incredibly rich, three-dimensional characters with complex characterization. It works particularly well with Park’s style of presenting convoluted plots that can unravel those characters’ layers with flashbacks, back-and-forths, and reveals. Seriously, the presentation is the whole reason a movie like Decision to Leave works, there’s no better way to present these ridiculously layered characters that Chung Seo-Kyung comes up with.

I argue that as much as these directors have their weaknesses and the fans often overly center on the directors as the auteurs and sole driving force behind the success of great films, it’s worth recognizing that when you aren’t an egotistical jerkoff like Coppola, a director can grow across their career and build up a team of other skilled creators. There’s a lot of other examples, Scorsese with Thelma Schoonmaker, Fincher and Brad Pitt (ok, both varying degrees of horrible), Kurosawa and Hashimoto, etc. So if anything, the issue with Coppola is that it appears he’s alienated the people he worked with that were complementing his skills with their best contributions.

IMO you’re wrong to assume that forcing all labor actions to be illegal will unshackle a very powerful labor movement in the US. Surveillance is a hundred times what it was in the apogee of the labor movement. The thing that made the labor movement strong at that time was the material conditions of the time: America was rapidly industrializing and conditions were very poor for workers. Now, while conditions are obviously far from good, the neoliberals seem to have found a compromise for labor aristocracy to get enough shallow pleasures on borrowed money that US labor is nowhere near as radical as before, and offshoring industry has globalized the reserve army of labor (making the entire periphery scabs).

I expect that Teamsters and unions involved in logistics will continue to go hard because they have uniquely loadbearing functions.

Polls were wrong (well, one professor had a pretty accurate poll) so the right won by a very big margin, PIP didn’t gain any significant standing. The margin ended up being more than 5%, but the PPD came third so things are looking up for the left in the next elections.

It’s a great show. Really felt like the ultimate slap in the face to Jeff Bezos that his money was being used to fund the production of a show where a character just directly faces the audience, breaks the fourth wall, and starts explaining Marx to them.

Bonus credit is just a flat bonus to your grade, they just bump up your grade.

Lol, gonna start doing this on all my exams. Can you distribute all the points I get above a passing grade to everyone who didn’t pass?

Right, but when they go to the IMF for assistance, the IMF usually asks them to start privatizing these things if they want any help. In my own country, the Americans’ financial supervision board, that functions as a personalized IMF, twisted our government into privatizing our electric grid. They sold it off to an American energy company because we’re literally an American colony. This case is not too hard to figure out, that’s just plain old corruption.

Yet there’s similar cases all over the Global South, where the institution that gets privatized is not sold off to a multinational, and instead remains in local hands (but private). The IMF’s privatization programs aim to privatize just about anything the state owns; extraction companies, manufacturing, finance, etc.

Yeah, I suppose you’re right. In the same interview I linked Hudson throws his hands up and exclaims basically the same thing, his job as an economist is impossible because the ruling class has blinded itself about its own interests and has now repeatedly failed to act in its own basic material interest. But it just seems like a critical failure of materialism as an analytic framework that you have to just accept that these people care more about ideas than facts.