Silicon Valley turtleneck was just the Mao Suit of its era.

Jeff Bezos saved hundreds of billions of dollars by downsizing his wife.

Wake up, Hustle, and Grind. Ain’t no time for time off. You think Elon Musk became a billionaire while chasing tail or doing drugs or spending all his time playing video games?

The goal post keeps moving. It’s a chronic problem with fascism.

Elon naively trained his algorithm on generally available data, rather than constricting it entirely to Conservapedia and InfoWars. So now every time a news story drops that they haven’t sandbagged with specific responses, they’re forced to hear something they don’t like.

The department is administered and governed by the police commissioner, who is appointed by the mayor to what is, nominally, a five year term.

Can Zohran fire the existing commissioner and replace him? Idk what the bureaucracy around that looks like. Entrenched power structures have a way of slow rolling executives thru don’t like and ignoring rules they don’t want to follow.

A lot of levers of power that worked for a Guliani or an Adams might suddenly stop working assuming Zohran can make it all the way through the general and into office.

“I smell weed” has been a classic for decades.

A long while back, I was harassed by the cops for “acting suspicious” while waiting for some friends at the mall. This quickly escalated to “suspected terrorist activity” for absolutely no reason I could discern or anyone afterwards could explain.

Cops just say shit. The best you can do is say you need to speak to a lawyer and clam up after that.

Just like Netanyahu with the handling of Gaza. Lots of people approve. Some people think he’s not going fascist enough.

More than 17% Those are just the ones who’ll admit to it.

All those Dems clutching their pearls over “Defund ICE” posters are very happy to see Hispanics ethnically cleansed.

It’s an early YA novel and propaganda piece. Very good at what it set out to accomplish. Obviously, not good for a material understanding of the world.

Well, I’m glad Mamdani won in NYC and zionist liberals can finally put to rest the need to vote straight ticket Democrat.

It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn’t all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment… fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn’t feel like a thing that could really happen.

Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence… as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.

As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, “Catcher in the Rye” resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself “Holy shit was I really like this?” only to realize you absolutely were.

Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.

That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units while the economy continues to grow.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity near the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.

At this point? Fucking good. Americans clearly don’t deserve domestic manufacturing capacity.

China Century. Just embrace it already.

Damn, if you posted this six months ago, people would have tried to ban you for it.

they’ve also read 1984 and thought all “adult” books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring

I gotta say, 1984 has a lot wrong with it. But it’s pretty short and punchy as books go. Espionage, sex, torture, murder. Orwell was Tom Clancy before Tom Clancy was cool.

If you’re looking for something that’s endless, dreadful, and boring, you might want a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn’t Harry Potter in their lives.

Nonsense. Some of them have read The Bible.

They’re lining back up behind Eric Adams, which is functionally the same thing.

Feeling more and more like Ukraine/Russia’s future.