A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Pluralistic: Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (22 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Trump is the head of a cult that has figured out how to turn fear, precarity and pain into the top of a sales funnel that destroys anyone who gets caught in it.
A fine diagnosis, through and through. The challenge now is, how to mass deprogram the members of the cult.
LECTURE NOTES: Lash, Cash, & Cotton in the Imperial-Commercial & Early SteamPower Age
”It is crucial to remember, though, that the principal beneficiaries of this system were not the plantation owners. The principal beneficiaries were the middle-class consumers at the heart of the industrial and commercial economies. Their cheap sugar, cotton, and tobacco were made possible by the brutal labor of enslaved people on distant plantations. This is the uncomfortable arithmetic of global capitalism: prosperity in one place, purchased at the cost of suffering in another.”
"I'm the Problem; It's Me": On the Confession the Mainstream Media Won't Make
Rebecca Solnit’s article is yet another reason to support independent journalism unfettered by craven “news” corporations.