This you?

“I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

The intentional creation of an underclass, followed by the intentionally enhanced cruelty against that underclass so as to keep the rest of the people in line, is why I think the “reserve army of labour” is one of the most important (and resonant) parts of Marxist analysis. If I could sum up my radicalization in a single sentence it would be Eugene Debs’s “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Hurry, let’s make an unauthorized sequel but base it on this article.

Ha, I came here to post that link. This one has some updates that include how the article was edited:

https://fair.org/home/action-alert-nyt-book-review-in-denial-on-japanese-persecution-in-world-war-ii/

Is this the first time you’ve tried to read a magazine article? Are you not familiar with the genre? You’re making a category error here, like getting angry at a bagel for not tasting like a doughnut. The purpose is not “first and foremost” to provide information in a reverse-pyramid format. In this case it’s to provide pathos and to instill in the reader the realization that “Oh, shit, this could easily happen to me or someone I care about.” John McPhee’s articles - also very long! I guess no one has ever read him! Certainly not anyone normal! - provide a structural model. McPhee often writes about geology or geography or some such, but in the context of an experience. He’ll go on a rafting journey on the Colorado River and will use dialogue with his guide to provide some information, and then zoom out to give a big (big, big) picture account of the geology of the Grand Canyon.

It’s the same thing in Stillman’s articles on the prison system (and other New Yorker articles, like this one about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, which has stuck with me for 16 years), and Mary Casey’s family probably saw one of Stillman’s articles about asset forfeiture or felony murder and decided that she could be the one to tell their mother’s story. Is it liberal Pulitzer bait? Sure. But until leftists get New Yorker money we’re going to rely not only on the stats but also the narratives in these pieces. Sometimes taking a systemic injustice and giving it a particular human face is what connects with people, the way Savita Halappanavar’s story was what led to the legalization of abortion in Ireland.

We can also go with “Matt Yglesias has normal-sized thoughts, find a new slant”

“Yglesias can’t win with these cats.” - Matt Yglesias

Sharing a name, a face, and the life story of someone who was so ignored and dehumanized in her time on earth that the state and its corporate partners let her starve to death as a punishment for a “failure to register her address” is pretty much the only good thing that journalism is capable of doing nowadays. At demonstrations, when people chant “George Floyd! Say his name!”, do you respond with “Get to the point, I only care about him as a statistic”?

The Human-With-Divine-Characteristics Centipede

The crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away except with blood:

Ex-Marxist turned right-winger Mario Vargas Llosa, candidate for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 89.

https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-04-14/muere-mario-vargas-llosa-gigante-de-las-letras-universales.html

And from the north part of them

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” rules. What do I read next? I assume For Marx is the priority?

Damn, Chuck Schumer’s really bad at all of his jobs

The only things that matter to their theory are “China bad” and “white mummies found in China,” everything else is just evidence of a coverup.

This is probably what he’s referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies

A genomic study published in 2021 found that these early mummies (dating from 2,135 to 1,623 BCE) had high levels of Ancient North Eurasian ancestry (ANE, about 72%), with smaller admixture from Ancient Northeast Asians (ANA, about 28%), but no detectable Western Steppe-related ancestry.

Unfortunately for the Reasonable Man the next sentence sez “They formed a genetically isolated local population”

The treasury secretary met with Deputy Prime Minister Ho Duc Phoc of Vietnam today, so maybe we’ll get some answers on that part. Probably ridiculous answers.

Look forward to a bunch of news articles explaining this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_question

Most recently, courts ruled that it was totally okay for Obama to murder innocent people in Yemen, based on a precedent formed when Bill Clinton got away with bombing a pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan. And then there was the case where the Supreme Court said it was fine for border patrol pigs to murder people. And, finally, the case where they said U.S. companies can do child slavery as long as it’s not here.

I am not a lawyer, which is why I’m letting myself get away with saying “totally okay” and “can do child slavery.” The previous decisions are a mixture of “evil shit the president does abroad is a political question that courts can’t interfere with” and “people harmed by U.S. agents while not on U.S. soil have no standing to sue in U.S. courts.” I don’t know what horrible thing they’ll say about this kidnapping, but the above cases are the ones I’d expect to be used to grant it a fig leaf for rules and norms purposes.

I’m still surprised the guy behind the blue-checked “Insulin is free now” tweet never got Donzigered.

Supremes order Trump to STOP! in the name of love