I only take issue with calling them anything other than something like crony capitalism

The fundamental difference between Chinese Socialism and American Capitalism can be summed up in their retirement rates.

In China, white collar men can retire at 63. Blue collar women are out at 55. That upwards of twelve years gap in retirement age is why China has billionaires and America has trillionaires.

If I died right now and was told I was going to be reincarnated but unfortunately I would be born poor and was given a choice of where to go, China would be near the bottom of my list of developed nations.

The real value of a civilization is its infrastructure. And you’re going to find it difficult to name a country more advanced and resilient - particularly to looming climate change.

But if you want to roll the dice on Starmer’s UK or Takaichi’s Japan or Milei’s Argentina? Good luck.

Slovenia - a Yugoslav state - was a major trading partner of the USSR. It’s economy was hollowed out, first after the decline of Russia, and then after a decade of looting, sanctions, and war.

It’s like when China every few years trots out some rich person or powerful politician and nails them for tax evasion or corruption in a show trial then goes back to pretending to be socialist

I think Chinese domestic economic planning goes a few steps beyond the semi-annual show trial.

Their green energy and ev markets illustrate as much

How does a Slovenian model meet an American billionaire?

Through modeling agent Paolo Zampolli. This is well-documented.

Very likely the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, given her father’s shady history.

Epstein was far from the only flesh peddler exploiting the wave of post-Soviet refugees following western Shock Therapy in Eastern Europe. Paolo Zampolli founded the modeling agency in NYC that imported Melania and eventually introduced her to Heir Donald. He did partner with Epstein in 2004 to purchase Elite Model Management. But it could have just as easily been a thousand other creep-o finance tycoons running around NY, Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo from the 90s/00s.

The whole fucking joke of Epstein and The Files is that he gets treated as a unicorn when we’ve had Jack Abramoffs and Lawrence E. King Jrs and Deborah Jeane Palfreys and Andrew Tates for just as long.

Like, doing this to a board member is worse???

Doing this to some random student is gross.

Doing this to another board member is also gross. But it signifies a kind of structural disrespect that undermines the office as well as the individual. It’s symptomatic of a general institutional disgust for student involvement in school affairs.

Like Bush Jr doing the creepy shoulder rub on Angela Merkel or - in a more extreme example - UN staffers who were “approached, accosted and raped” by fellow officials and dignitaries. It isn’t merely a personal transgression. It undermines the entire function of the representative body.

as if he does this all the time to children?

It wasn’t just “a child”, it was a fellow board member. Guy has zero respect for the office, the students, or women generally speaking.

If I had money on where this ended, I’d put it on them abolishing the Student Board Member seat on the grounds that it was too much of a temptation for the rest of the board.

Maybe slide in a rule about students needing to wear full figure coverings to prevent anyone on the board from becoming aroused.

Hey now. The deranged right aren’t all bad.

They gave us AI and vaccine denial and climate change, which I’ve been raised to believe are all good things.

The Life and Times of Reading Toxic Men #14 | George Orwell: The Colonial Cop and the Cynic of Power

Incidentally, Orwell never got to see his books truly take off. He died of tuberculosis at age 46. However, his more explicitly anti-communist works were picked up by Allen Dulles, at the CIA and turned into children’s cartoons.

In 1950, after Orwell’s death, the CIA arranged for an animated film to be made based on the book. However, it pushed several changes. It transformed Orwell’s generally positive depiction of Snowball (Leon Trotsky), emphasized that the animals on some neighboring farms were perfectly content with their treatment by the human farmers, and changed the ending to show the other animals rising up to overthrow the pigs. The adaptation was unpopular in theaters, but it was widely shown in US and UK classrooms and was translated and distributed in other countries.

In an ironic twist, the books about state manufactured propaganda and national indoctrination became tools of state manufactured propaganda and national indoctrination.

Real “Don’t Build The Torment Nexus” moment.

deleted by creator

Broke: Using an AI to arbitrarily blacklist books based on a black box algorithm

Woke: Banning 1984 because it’s capitalist propaganda written and published by war criminals.

Traditionally, these pilot programs operate as a marketing program rather than an educational program.

You’re going to see a class of students enter the system with enormous supplemental aid and resources. The AI will be included but largely incidental. The students will be cherry-picked for media optics, rather than randomly selected from within the school district. Tons of paid professionals will write long-winded hagiographies about the affordability and effectiveness of the program. Some Ivy League University or Fortune 500 business will make a big show of admitting the most charismatic and saleable student graduates.

Then the program will be rolled out to the rest of the country as quickly and sloppily as possible. AI will be jammed down people’s throats. You’ll get an earful about stupid idiot parents hysterically complaining about their dumb baby children, because they’re afraid of The Terminator movies. This will be book-ended with Steven Pinker and Bill Gates calmly explaining how AI turns dumbies into geniuses. A string of movies and TV shows will be released about kids getting AI education and becoming too smart (and time traveling or getting magic powers or some other silly bullshit).

The YIMBY coalition of very informed TV nerds will be assembled to scream at anyone who doesn’t like AI. If you don’t like AI you’re Ableist or a Bigot or Not Serious About Education. Meanwhile, we’ll get an earful about how certain migrants and POCs are incapable of learning from AI because of their inferior genes. School districts will be told to either adopt AI or lose their funding / get taken over by the state / federal agencies. National media will be saturated with “AI is normal” media content until people stop resisting.

And all of this will culminate in more school privatization, more public education defunding, and more militant policing of young people. Because that’s always been the real end goal.

No. They learned that distance learning was an excellent tool for busting unions and commoditizing education.

Unf*ck America Tour

The Official Tour Countering Turning Point USA.

Well, there you go.

Paid For By National Ground Game PAC.

Team

Zee Cohen-Sanchez: How Influencer Drama Derailed a Progressive Movement

Zee Cohen-Sanchez, a Bernie Sanders campaign veteran, launched “Un**** America” (we’re going with Unfudge America) to counter Charlie Kirk’s influence on college campuses. But internal drama and performative purity politics quickly sabotaged the project. She recounts how influencer apologies empowered whiny critics and fractured the left’s ability to wield electoral power.

Curious story.

Also…

Yehaw

Love when your Lead Creator’s team membership page is blank.

I think I was a little early for them.

Went to a speech by Bill Clinton and the Dalai Llama. By my (very distant) memory, both were dildo free.

I didn’t have time to fuck with the Riechwing trolls who came around campus starting in 2005, cause I was already a super-senior and just needed to wrap up a couple credits to graduate and get on with my life. Anne Coulter and her successors were already in my rear view mirror.

warp freedom of expression right back around to include freedom of hate

Reactionaries have been playing this game since I was in grade school. The Young Conservatives of Texas, notably on the UT college campus, had all sorts of immigrant hate events they’d run every year or two. And when someone would inevitably object or try to intervene, they engaged in a collective scream of martyrdom over their First Amendment Liberties.

None of this seemed to apply to the LGBTQ organizations, the anti-war demonstrators, Muslims, or the union organizers for staff and faculty, of course. You have the right to be a Nazi and nothing else.

“Tolerance of intolerance is intolerance” applies here

I’ve always preferred the Inglorious Bastards approach to fascists.

You’re invited to make your views known. And the rest of us are entitled to brand you with them.

The Totenkoph is popular among fascists the world over.

From Mussolini’s Black Brigades and the British Royal Air Force to both the Azov Battalions and the Wagner Group to the Punisher Logo that American fascists love so much.

Liberals love to pretend the law is self-enforcing and refuse to ask what role the state’s deeply racist and violent state bureaucrats, or the police and sheriff’s offices (nevermind any ICE agents operating in the state) will play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Eye_(United_States)

Incidentally, Supreme Court Justice William Renquist started his career as a poll-watcher in Arizona, screening out any who looked too Democrat.