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.

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.”

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.

I hope Russiagate just fires back up in full-swing.

Oh, wow, I haven’t visited r/politics in so many years. This is something else. A real blast of nostalgia.

Seeing these awful, smug people so lost and confused and angry almost makes me feel good. They have no idea what’s going on.

That’s hilarious. Has there ever been a more incompetent politician?

It would be so easy to win a national election against Trump. Watch. “I, your democratic candidate, pledge to fight the supermarket, pharmacological, and healthcare cartels that are artificially inflating consumer prices for their own gain.”

But democrats don’t want to do that.

Thanks!

Was worried for a moment that this post was going to be about Gaben (who I rent all my games from) revealing a hard right shift. Like Gaben really obviously doing a 2018-era Musk slide to the right. “You don’t gotta hand it to them, but some Republicans are alright. Also, I love MAGA and Gordon Freeman would’ve marched at Charlottesville and Chell would’ve defended freedom on Jan 6.”

Every screenshot I see from Bluesky is posters writing in this exact same cadence/style. Unreconstructed cringe posters from 2009. It would be almost incredible if I didn’t find them all so loathsome.

Philippi talked about operational security, including the need for disguises, the use of leather gloves (because latex and nitrile gloves can transfer fingerprints), wearing shoes that are too big, the need to burn their clothes after the attack, and not bringing smartphones on the night of the attack.

On Nov. 2, 2024, Philippi participated in a Nordic ritual, which included reciting a Nordic prayer and discussing the Norse god Odin. Philippi told the UCEs that “this is where the New Age begins” and that it was “time to do something big” that would be remembered “in the annals of history.”

Imagining this guy wearing Groucho Marx glasses with clown shoes, leather gloves on his hands, while reenacting the bear warrior ritual scene from The Northman.