@memeorandum@universeodon.comThe Clintons and Kamala Harris Descend on a Hamptons Wedding of Liberal Royalty (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/us/politics/huma-abedin-alex-soros-wedding-hillary-clinton-kamala-harris.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p4#a250615p4
@kurtsh@mastodon.social"While a Trump presidency might be bad news for, say, Tesla..."
Uh, I guess that aged well... just not in the way the author thought.
✅ These are the brands that divide America - Sherwood News
https://sherwood.news/business/brands-libera…
@lmc@mastodon.socialThis is one of the best descriptions of Gavin Newsom I’ve seen!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKtDKkixTJQ/?igsh=NjZiM2M3MzIxNA==
@Treppenwitz@sfba.social
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust read through "Sanctuary" by Paola Mendez & Abby Sher, which was electrifying as I read news about ICE kidnappings in local towns, including one in Waltham today where they left a kid alone on the sidewalk:
#ICE #kidnappings
@memeorandum@universeodon.comMaybe We Should Let Liberal Cities Burn (Derek Hunter/Townhall)
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2025/06/10/maybe-we-should-let-liberal-cities-burn-n2658508
http://www.memeorandum.com/250610/p63#a250610p63
@kurtsh@mastodon.social
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsReligion, PLpol
It's about time I elaborated on an earlier thought.
"Non-practicing Catholics" have more liberal worldview than "conservative" Catholics — and often they jeer at them. These qualities make it easy to forget that you're draining with Catholics. But when the push comes to shove, you discover that you can't rely on them. They won't openly oppose the Church, they won't protect the people who are "immoral" according to Catholic morality, and if they are forced to choose a side, they'll side with the Catholics.
The Polish PO/KO party (often perceived as "liberal") is just like that. Their views are more liberal than the conservative right wing, they love portraying themselves as an opposition to it, but in the end they are a right-wing party. When it's convenient to them, they happily present liberal postulates — but they are as fast to withdraw them to please their right-wing electorate.
#PLpol
@brian_gettler@mas.toI find myself thinking about a long-lost friend a lot lately. Sometime in the late 90s, we both accepted that our friendship had run its course. I had come to embrace fairly low-key socialism and he was increasingly angry about the media's "liberal bias." The common ground we had once shared was gone. I imagine him cheering now, even as I recall his father, a deeply conservative Marine colonel, remarking that only authoritarian regimes used the military against their own citize…
@rberger@hachyderm.io"You should know Trump isn’t doing this on his own. The Hoover Institution has been plotting revenge against FDR since 1932. Groups like the Heritage Foundation and Heartland Foundation are generations old. The Federalist Society has been promising to overturn liberal justice since the 1960s. The Religious Right started working to overturn Roe v. Wade the day it was promulgated. All these groups have big money, and they play the long game.
What’s happening today is their platform, backed by their research. The fact it won’t work, that the 20th century won’t be put back into a bottle, that the Amendments put in place after 1865 somehow aren’t part of the “real” Constitution, is yet to be proven by events."
https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/all-in-the-family
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaI still follow so many normal well adjusted people with standard liberal politics
@cdarwin@c.imOn Sunday, voters are casting their ballots in the decisive runoff between
Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal-centrist mayor of Warsaw,
and Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who has helmed a nationalist effort to rewrite Poland’s role in the Holocaust.
The candidates offer starkly different visions for Poland.
Trzaskowski promises cooperation with the European Union and social changes, such as loosening restrictive abortion laws and allowing civil unions for LGBTQ peo…
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.caOn the new BC Ferries being built in China.
Do we all remember the last time the BC NDP went down the road of “building a shipbuilding industry to build ferries”?
It has its own Wiki, of course.
"In addition to major delays and cost overruns, the ferries never fully met their original specifications, and only operated briefly in a reduced capacity, before being auctioned off at a substantial loss by the subsequently elected BC Liberal Party government.”
No, I'm not thrilled that China, an authoritarian state, is going to be building these ferries. But no BC or Canadian firms bid on the contract. And right now, the expertise in ship building is in China and Europe (the Island and Salish class vessels were built in Europe).
I don't blame the NDP for not repeating the same mistake 30 years later.
And the ferries will still be refit and maintained for their full service life within BC.
#BCPoli #BCNDP #FastFerry #Shipbuilding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_ferry_scandal
@arXiv_csHC_bot@mastoxiv.pageThis https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06415 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialUS political contradictions; knowledge systems
As Trump at least partially succeeds in constructing an alternate reality for his most ardent followers, it's tempting to think of his dogma as false, in contrast to some imagined "truth" which his non-followers are smart enough to believe in. But a more nuanced view of knowledge would admit that different groups of people have different shared truths, constituting different knowledge systems which each deviate from what's objectively measurable in different ways, and in fact they each accept different standards of what is objective, so there's not really a single "ground truth" we can even compare to to determine which of these knowledge systems is "more correct" (similar problems arise even if we only care about "more useful").
To make this more concrete, we can see that e.g., competing quantum physics theories, or likewise competing religious beliefs, have no reasonable basis on which to judge between them, either in terms of "truth" or "utility." So the Trump-dogma knowledge system, although bad, morally repugnant, etc., can't so easily be dismissed as "false" in my view. "Distorted" or "malignant" or "evil" or "contradictory" are better monikers, in my opinion.
But what I'm even more interested in thinking about is: in what ways does the current American liberal "common sense" knowledge system already bear the scars of past fascist lies & contradictions? I can think of a few:
"Columbus was an explorer."
This is "factually accurate" in the same way some of Trump's propaganda is, but it's also a cruel distortion of "Columbus was a child murderer," and it's a misrepresentation that serves an evil purpose, yet which is widely taught in elementary schools today.
Another: "dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan was necessary to end WWII."
Perhaps in the future we'll have "family separation & the 2025 ICE crackdowns were necessary to end the immigration crisis," although I dearly hope not.
"Reparations for slavery aren't reasonable," is yet another...
I'll close this rambling with a question: what other fascist lies have you noticed that are normalized in America right now from past Trump-like leaders (or even from less overtly fascist institutions)?
@arXiv_physicsoptics_bot@mastoxiv.pageSynthetic crystal rotation with spacetime metamaterials
I\~nigo Liberal, Alejandro Manjavacas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02495 https://
@lilmikesf@c.im @memeorandum@universeodon.comDoes the Working Class Vote Against Its Interests? (Justin Vassallo/The Liberal Patriot)
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/does-the-working-class-vote-against
http://www.memeorandum.com/250602/p151#a250602p151
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzexcellent analysis of covid state of play
From Julia Doubleday.
"Each time a new wave crops up, the media scrambles to let the public know that COVID is spreading “again” ... But each time, it fails to inform the public that nearly half of COVID cases are asymptomatic, that COVID looks different in different patients, that vaccines do not prevent infections, that rapid tests have high false negative rates, and that COVID is fully airborne.
"Taken together, the virus I’m describing is much more difficult to control than the one the press presents. The press frames the virus as something that can be halted by familiarizing yourself with the symptoms, staying home once you feel sick and test positive, and avoided altogether by simply getting vaccinated or keeping ones’ distance from sick people. ...
"The misinformation that reigns in liberal spaces is not the result of accidental miscommunication. People don’t know that the virus is asymptomatic 40% of the time because there is simply no universe where that virus is controllable without an elimination strategy, or a day-to-day mitigation strategy."
#covid #misinformation #denial #CovidIsAirborne
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished reading Dream State by Eric Puchner, and it kind of pissed me off. I think I can see exactly why it might be popular with a certain WASPy liberal "literati" type that probably includes a lot of influential reviewers, but to me, it's points about love & life, despite being much more complex, ring just about as hollow (and harmful) as a Disney movie.
I've got a lot of quibbles, but I think most galling to me was a throwaway line near the beginning about why platonic relationships get so much less glory in media than romantic ones, when so much of the plot proceeds to revolve around a stale agency-free romantic attraction model that's certainly more complex on its face than a Disney romance but which is ultimately just as misleading.
Go read Loveless or really any YA #OwnVoices romance (especially queer) and you'll be learning more & better lessons about the human condition.
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.caCanadians: Replace Ardern with Trudeau and use other Canadian touchstones in place of #nzpol and you have an accurate article for Canada.
Which should speak to what Progressives actually need to do here, and everywhere.
"Ardern’s leadership has often been described as emotionally intelligent, compassionate, and people-centred. But compassion is not liberation. Empathy alone does not redistribute wealth, dismantle police power, or decommodify housing. What Ardern perfected was a mode of governance that couched neoliberalism in progressive language. A style of leadership that appeared anti-fascist, anti-racist, and feminist, while presiding over deepening inequality, mass incarceration of Māori, ongoing colonisation, environmental destruction, and a housing system that serves landlords and property speculators.
Ardern’s “politics of kindness” masked a status quo commitment to capitalism and state power. Her government’s housing policies floundered under the weight of market logic. Despite the crisis of homelessness and unaffordability, the Labour government never seriously considered nationalising housing, implementing rent controls, or seizing vacant properties from land-bankers. Instead, they protected the interests of property investors, many of whom were MPs themselves."
#canpoli #cdnpoli #trudeau #Liberal #Ardern
https://www.anarchistfederation.net/the-cult-of-kindness-the-reality-of-jacinda-arderns-leadership/
